Summary of White Guilt

In White Guilt, Shelby Steele ties together two journeys: one, his drive up the California coastline on a beautiful autumn day, and two, his socio-political evolution from radical leftist to “conservative black man.” Long drives often give us time to reflect on important matters, and one can’t help but feel transported along the winding roads beside the sea with Steele as he uses the occasion of Bill Clinton’s impeachment to ponder how much America has changed in his lifetime. He grew up in the age of blatant, public racism, lived through the Civil Rights Movement, and then came of age in the years after Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed. The difference between his childhood and his young adult years is stark, being characterized by white calls “white guilt,” which he defines as “the vacuum of moral authority that comes from simply knowing that one’s race is associated with racism.” (24)

Moral authority, particularly its absence among and the search for it by whites, is one of three important themes in White Guilt. The racism found throughout America’s history, once finally acknowledged by whites, has emptied white America (and American institutions) of moral authority, not just in matters of race, but in everything. The quest to regain moral authority by whites must now run through matters of race. “Whites (and American institutions) must acknowledge historical racism to show themselves redeemed of it, but once they acknowledge it, they lose moral authority over everything having to do with race, equality, social justice, poverty, and so on.” (24) Moral authority is contingent upon proving that you aren’t racist. The inheritance of historical guilt by whites means that they are obligated to blacks because only blacks can give whites their moral authority back. Much of the virtue signaling that we see among the Woke, therefore, is at least in part the effort of Woke whites to regain the moral authority forfeited by their racist ancestors.

Summary of Kingdom Race Theology

Kingdom Race Theology is Tony Evans’ biblical response to the secular, and Marxist, doctrine commonly known as Critical Race Theory. Evans is a “kingdomologist,” which means that his understanding of the Christian faith is centered on the biblical concept of the kingdom of God, which he defines as “the visible manifestation of the comprehensive rule of God.” (11) This little book is a primer on a kingdom approach to race, justice, and the unity of the Church. While he does not unilaterally reject Critical Race Theory, Evans is quick to point out that is both insufficient and divisive, and more importantly, that it is unbiblical. Even so, the Critical Race Theorists may have some good points worth considering, even if the solutions of people like Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo fall short of God’s kingdom standard. The answers of CRT will never work, because “the solutions to the issues we face today are found only by applying a biblical and divine standard as answers to the questions before us.” (7)

Evans is careful to provide clear definitions for terms like racism, systemic racism, biblical justice, and other concepts that tend to get obfuscated in the broader cultural discussion around race. He defines his most important term, Kingdom Race Theology, this way: “The reconciled recognition, affirmation, and celebration of the divinely created ethnic differences through which God displays his multifaceted glory and advances his rule in history. God displays his glory through us while his people justly, righteously, and responsibly function in personal and corporate unity under the lordship of Jesus Christ.” (45) Ephesians 1:10 tells us that God’s will is “to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ.” This unity brings glory to God, and like everything God does on earth, is primarily accomplished through human beings. Human beings are created by God with ethnic difference, and therefore God’s will is to work through the variety of human ethnic groups to bring this unity into being, which is for the praise of his glory.

What They Way Up Is Down Is About

I suppose there are many people who, in their writing, suppose themselves to be following in the footsteps of Eugene Peterson. They think that they are turning things around and looking at them from a fresh angle, and in this way are helping their readers to become their truest and best selves. They may be thinking deeply about God and Scripture, but that doesn’t mean that they are thinking well. After all, one doesn’t wind up on best-seller lists by trying to think well about the subject of one’s book. Too much for what passes as Christian literature these days is alarmingly devoid of the mind of Christ.

In her book The Way Up Is Down, Marlena Graves stands firmly in the line and legacy of Eugene Peterson. Her book reads like a deep reflection on this great line from Peterson’s The Jesus Way: “To follow Jesus means that we can’t separate what Jesus is saying from what Jesus is doing and the way that he is doing it.” Graves, in other words, is pointing us in the direction of true discipleship. The way of Jesus — the way of resurrection and glory — is the way of self-emptying, of lowliness, of humility.

Steeped in the Church mothers and fathers of both East and West, Graves offers us a vision for the journey of discipleship that is connected to those who have gone before us. We are not trailblazers. We are not forging a new path like the pioneers of the past who headed out over the Appalachian mountains in search of new land. The Way Up is a journey with others, and as Graves so beautifully attests through the stories of her own life, those others are not always precious to the world. But they are precious to God. And invaluable to us, their travelling companions.

What The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is About

Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is a book about a single question: How and why did the statement “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” come to be regarded as coherent and meaningful? This statement, which in my own lifetime was once regarded as both fodder for comedy and a clear sign of insanity, has now ascended to the rank of the most courageous and truthful thing that a person could say. Those who make this good confession (or the parallel, “I’m a man trapped in a woman’s body”) are lauded as heroes, and their cause has been championed by institutions of all stripes — churches, corporations, schools, universities, and governments. How and why has such a radical inversion come about in so short an amount of time? And how has it been so quickly and thoroughly adopted by average people, not just those who travel in niche academic circles?

Trueman’s book is not a lament that such a thing has happened, nor is it a sustained argument against the logic or morality of this statement. It really is an honest and objective exploration of the question of how we have arrived at such a time and place where the question of transgenderism has come to dominate the cultural imagination. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is an intellectual history of the sexual revolution, which he makes clear “is simply one manifestation of the larger revolution of the self that has taken place in the West.” (20)

The Social Imaginary

Trueman begins by framing the current situation in the language of philosophers Charles Taylor, Philip Reiff, and Alisdair MacIntyre. Three crucial concepts immediately reveal themselves when we deeply examine the culture that we find ourselves in. The first concept is the social imaginary, which is a term coined by Charles Taylor. The social imaginary is how the people of a specific culture tend to think about themselves, the world, and how they should act in it. It is a mass, unspoken intuition about reality, the things that we all (or almost all of us) just assume to be true. Trueman puts it succinctly: “the social imaginary is a matter of intuitive social taste.” (38) The average person doesn’t think the statement “I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body” makes sense because he is committed to radical gender theories; he thinks it makes sense because it seems right to affirm someone in their chosen identities and hurtful not to.

What Live Not By Lies Is About

The coming soft totalitarianism of woke progressivism will release a wave of persecution against Christians (and other dissidents) that the West hasn’t seen since the days of communism. This is the fundamental claim of Rod Dreher’s latest book, Live Not By Lies. Granted, this persecution may not be as overtly harsh, physically torturous, or psychologically cruel as the horrors meted out in the gulags of the Soviet system, but it is coming nonetheless. Already, the Wokesheviks (my term, not Dreher’s) are making lists of those who should not be allowed to work, and therefore live, in the post-Trump United States. Today’s Left has a totalitarian impulse that is unchecked by any religious sentiment, like the necessity for forgiveness or the foundation of agape love, because the Left’s politics are its religion. Therefore, we can expect the areligious Left of today to do what the areligious Left has already done, particularly under communist rule.

The memory of the evil of communism is lost on those under 30 because they never experienced it (just 57% of millennials believe that the Declaration of Independence better guarantees “freedom and equality” than the Communist Manifesto), but there are many alive today who bore the weight of these oppressive regimes and lived to tell about it. Live Not By Lies reads like a long, well-researched, and engaging newspaper article or magazine feature, as Dreher frequently relies on the first hand testimony of those who stood up to communism and were persecuted for it. Many of the communist survivors Dreher interviewed for the book express grave concern for the West, because they hear in our culture the echoes of the totalitarian lies that claimed tens of millions of lives in the twentieth century. They offer us invaluable lessons in perseverance and faithfulness, but we must also hear their calls to wake up and get prepared for what is coming.

Live Not By Lies takes its title from an essay of the same name by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and in many ways the book is a less gut-wrenching, less horror-inducing version of Solzhenitsyn’s vital work, The Gulag Archipelago. To live by lies, Solzhenitsyn wrote, meant “accepting without protest all the falsehoods and propaganda that the state compelled its citizens to affirm…. Everybody says that they have no choice but to conform…and to accept powerlessness. But that is the lie that gives all the other lies their malign force. The ordinary man may not be able to overturn the kingdom of lies, but he can at least say that he is not going to be its loyal subject.” (17) Dreher warns that we are being taught to practice a form of ketman, which is “the Persian word for the practice of maintaining an outward appearance of Islamic orthodoxy while inwardly dissenting.” (16) Ketman is a sort of hypocrisy where one outwardly assents to wokeness but inwardly rejects it. This is dishonest, and ultimately corrupts the individual as he attempts to conform to the system while maintaining traditional or biblical convictions. Ketman is the fiction practiced by those cowardly souls who, under Soviet totalitarianism, turned in their neighbors to save their own skin.