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The Wokeness and postmodernism have come for Christianity

The conservative Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution allowing the use of Intersectionality and Critical Race Theory as tools for theology. So how did we get here? Two words:

Emergent Church

A thread/

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The Emergent Church movement gained popularity in the late 90's early 2000's. They were young, cool, and artsy. But they were also proudly, and openly postmodern. The movement began to go mainstream when this book on Postmodern Ministry by Brian Mclaren came out in 1998.

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While Mclaren eventually proved to be the leader of the movement, he wasn't the first to bring postmodernism in to the Church. The first one to do that was very likely John Caputo in 1987. With a book on DECONSTRUCTION in Hermeneutics (fancy term for biblical interpretation)

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In "The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida" from 1997, Caputo attempts to bring deconstruction further into Christianity. Those who saw my thread on deconstruction (I'll link below) will recognize the importance deconstruction to postmodernism.

https://twitter.com/wokal_distance/status/1283646877699731456?s=20

5/ In 1996 Christian Theologian Stanley Grenz saw all this tried sounding the alarm with his book "A Primer on Postmodernism," in which he predicts the coming of postmodernism and says Christians need to be ready for it. (turns out he was right, and 20 years ahead of his time)

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Now, because Grenz saw postmodernism coming He worked with John R. Franke to build a framework that would allow Christianity to survive in a postmodern world without being completely deconstructed. Grenz wanted to deconstruct-proof Christianity. Unfortunately it didn't work.

7/ Why did it fail? Because Brian McLaren and John Caputo worked tirelessly to bring postmodernism into Christianity. Remember WWJD? What Would Jesus Do? Here's the postmodern version from a book by Caputo (forward by Mclaren):

What Would Jesus DECONSTRUCT?

Read the description

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McLaren wrote many books, including "The Secret Message of Jesus," where he deconstructed traditional Christianity while substituting postmodern Christianity in it's place.

Here @RaviZacharias exposes McLaren's nonsense as only Ravi could. It's beautiful.

I miss you Ravi.

9/ That @RaviZacharias clip from is from 2007 when the deconstruction was the sort that attacks meaning and questions truth. But the Emergent church switched their focus from Meaning to Power. Martin Van Steenwyk explains the shift he helped facilitate in this interview from 2009

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Where deconstruction comes from Jacques Derrida, post-colonial theory gets its main ideas from Michael Foucault. Deconstruction attacks truth by blurring the MEANING of texts and ideas.
Post-colonialism attacks truth by saying claims of truth are thinly veiled claims to power

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I'll explain postcolonialism another time, but the 3 main ideas are
1. people only claim things are true when it suits them
2. people are so biased no objective assessment of truth is possible
3. The winners of the "what is true" game are determined by who has the most power

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Add post-colonialism to deconstruction and you get a scenario in which anytime anyone says something is true either:
A. Their claim gets deconstructed, or,
B. They get accused of trying to make their ideas dominant in society so they can get power.

Sound familiar?

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In 2011 the first academic book on evangelical Christian postcolonialism came out. It has some familiar names. That's right, both Brian McLaren and John Franke (the man Stanley Grenz thought would help him protect Christianity from postmodernism) went full on postcolonial.

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McLaren actually very clearly explains why it is that he blends his deconstructive postmodernism with postcolonial theory. It's because the deconstruction is used to dismantle the ideas of colonialism

Again, does any of this sound familiar?

(link: https://cep.anglican.ca/postcolonial_theology_by_brian/)

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Also, notice that John Franke writes his postcolonial article with Megan Defranza. well, who is she? She's a former board member for Q-Christian. What's that you ask? it's an organization that fully embraces postmodern gender theory in the name of Jesus

Deconstruction indeed

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Now, You'll remember we began with the Southern Baptist Convention adopting Critical Race Theory and intersectionality. Wouldn't it be nice if we could tie the intersectionality to the postmodernism of the Emergent church? Wouldn't that wrap things up nicely?

Well....

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Kimberlee Crenshaw inented intersectionality in her essay "Mapping the Margins." In that essay she says intersectionality was created to link politics and Postmodern theory.

Intersectionality is a Trojan horse for Postmodernism And the Southern Baptist Convention adopted it

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Who else likes intersectionality? The Emergent Church!
Rachel Held Evans, who joined the "Emergent Conversation," tried bringing intersectionality into Christianity before her unfortunate passing. Note she mentions Brian McLaren

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So as you can see, the Emergent Church of the late 90's and early 2000's has it's fingerprints all over the Social Justice Christianity that we see today. This is no surprise those are both fruit of the same poisonous tree of postmodernism.

What do we do now?

Fight.

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1.Get the word out.
2.Tell you pastors, remind them of the Emergent Church then show how Social Justice Christianity connects to both postmodernism and the Emergent Church
3. Push back. Don't let them take over.
4. Be informed and warn the other members of the congregation

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This is a fight for the soul of your churches. If you won't take a stand here, where will you draw the line?

Time to fight. Let's go!

/fin

@NeilShenvi
@socjustarch