several years ago I wrote an essay on Justice in the New Testament for a volume edited by @drantbradley and Greg Forster that contrasted Rawls' theory of justice with conception of the NT. 1/ https://www.amazon.com/John-Rawls-Christian-Social-Engagement/dp/1498504949

I mention the essay because of some obvious confusion displayed by many evangelicals about the basic idea of justice. I think the conception of justice that many are hand-wringing about isn't really that of marxism or CRT, but of Rawls.

any 'success' the recent spate of CRT books have been achieved is due primarily (imo) to the broad, multi-decade theoretical groundwork laid by Rawls' political liberalism.

Rawls gets much wrong. But I want to underscore something: it makes no sense--and is frankly rather ignorant--to deny that injustices exist in the material or structural features of society and are instead located *only* in personal disposition or prejudice.

justice in the NT has principally to do with *right order.* That order of course has to do with individual attitudes, but it also has to do with the ordering of communities to good ends, that is, with the material conditions within which human beings associate.

I wrote an accessible intellectual bio of Rawls for @ERLC, if interested: https://erlc.com/resource-library/articles/the-guy-who-you-didnt-know-made-all-this-possible-part-1/

Let me be clear: I’m not a critical racist theorist, nor am I an apologist for CRT. But before the evangelical crusade advances further and the purges begin, could I plead that we get the theory & principles right first?

My fear is that the current Perturbation is attributable in part to a breakdown of the liberal order Rawls outlines, an order that evangelicals (perhaps unwittingly) benefitted from to point but with the loss of an ‘overlapping consensus’ retreated to familiar battle lines.

I’d just like to suggest that our beef isn’t really with CRT but with Rawls and the failures and misadventures of late 20thC liberalism. Our moment was in some ways inevitable.

to blame ‘CRT’ or notions of ‘systemic racism’ as some sort of monocausal Instigator is like blaming birth control for sexual liberation and feminism. Everything is much much more complicated.