Presiding Bishop Ray Sutton Denounces CRT and Hyphenated Christianity

I just saw this today on Anglican Ink. It may be of interest to some of y'all. Apparently, Archbishop Foley Beach of the ACNA has commended Bishop Sutton's statement. The full statement can be read on the link I have provided. Hopefully, the rest of the Bishops in the ACNA will get on board!

https://anglican.ink/2021/06/13/rec...ty-in-address-to-the-churchs-general-council/

 

The bishop makes a strong case for Critical Race Theory being contrary to the Gospel and the Anglican tradition.

There was a recent ACNA aspirant who published a letter called “Dear Gay Anglicans”. This letter raised huge waves on the Internet, because it contradicted the House of Bishops recent teaching that terms like “gay Christian” are incorrect and should not be used. The only valid term is “Christian” simply. One’s pelvic proclivities are not, or should not, be a part of your core Christian identity.

Well in his “Dear Gay Anglicans” letter, the aspirant contradicted the House of Bishops teaching, and even apologized for it to the gay community.

He was immediately ordered by his bishop to take down the letter, and from what I know is no longer an aspirant in the ACNA.

That’s what his Grace Bishop Sutton is addressing in his guidance here. He rebukes hyphenated Christianity, and more widely, condemns Critical Race Theory which is eating up large portions of our culture.

And our Primate, Foley Beach himself, endorses this letter.

 

Should the Church of Jesus christ not have any interest in such matters, but just concentrate on its prayers to Jesus to govern the world for us justly?

"Critical race theory (CRT) examines social, cultural and legal issues as they relate to race and racism.[1][2] It is an academic discipline composed of civil-rights scholars in the United States who seek to critically examine the law to show, first, that it maintains white supremacy, white power, and enforces societal or structural racism;[3] and, second, that transforming the relationship between law and racial power, and also achieving racial emancipation and anti-subordination more broadly, is possible.[4] Critical race theory examines how the law intersects with issues of race, and challenges mainstream liberal approaches to racial justice.[5]" (Wicipedia article leading paragraph on the subject).
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This is a biased article, which is why you should never quote from Wikipedia on contested subjects like this.

What you posted is an extremely pasteurized description which omits everything that’s different about CRT compared to other social movements. Kind of like defining Marxism as “a movement to give workers more rights”, rather than as “an secular messianic ersatz religion constructed on the Master Slave Dialectic”.

Most of the things listed in your CRT snippet were already around before it came up in the 1990s. What’s new or different about it? Why are people so alarmed about this specific movement, despite many prior decades of successful racial inclusion, including Brown v. Board of Education, and the 1964 Civil Rights Movement?

Maybe this is why. From one of their own foundational texts, “ Critical Race Theory: An Introduction”

Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law. (p. 3)

And the same can be found in all current CRT exponents such as Robin DiAngelo, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Nicole Hannah Jones.

DiAngelo recently wrote a book saying that being white means being automatically racist, wicked, and inferior. The simple act of born with lighter skin according to her imbues one with those demerits.

Jones recently authored “The 1619 Project” which argues that the US history properly begins not in 1776 but in 1619 with the arrival of the slaves, and the US as a country, it’s very purpose for being founded, was as a means to continue to maintain and keep down the slaves. Thus according to CRT proponents, if that’s the nature of the US, the most just thing to do is to abolish the US as it currently is, and to chop up the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation (all “slave” documents you see, designed to promote slavery). According to them, the country known as the United States should be erased, and a new started again upon Critical Race Theory principles.

What are those “CRT principles”? As their own textbook says above, they will be principles which deny “equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law”

 

And this is why the “old school” progressives are now Public Enemy #1 in their telling. Of course, they never explain how their own approach was so immaculately conceived, rather than being yet another alternative narrative of oppression itself.

 

I am not one who would ever want to read racist literature so I can't quote from any of it, however I dare say there are plenty of KKK style White Supremacist authors who have said equally disparaging things about blacks, and going back generations of it.

It's wrong whichever color group that seeks to denegrate the other and promote their own. Extremists exist on both sides of the race divide and we can't stop them from spewing their bile, because of the bill of rights, and freedom of speech, no less.

One can expect this kind of overreaction from an oppressed race. If whites had been enslaved by blacks since 1619 there would be just as much extremism generated in order to obtain white 'rights'. What is actually essential is EQUAL RIGHTS not rights for one class of people and only allowances for another. These things go deeper into society than just changing laws, but ending the segregating of blacks at the back of busses by law was at least an essential start.

I'm not sure they deny Equality Theory per se. They just deny it's working. Like Trickle Down theory doesn't work. Legal Reasoning can only go so far to making a fair and equitable society. Enlightenment rationalism sounds nice but does not permeate far into the whole American society and constitutional law was never that good at protecting the interests of blacks or even the poor effectively. Many of the Founding Fathers were slave owners themselves, so they were hardly thinking in terms of 'Freedom of ALL' only freedom of whites, and perhaps a very select group of tolerated blacks.
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Oh, yes, they do oppose equality and favor their particular brand of so-called equity in its place.

Equality never meant equal everything for everyone. Equality here has always meant 'an equal opportunity' to make as much of oneself as one can, based upon one's relative merits (some have more or less IQ, are more or less physically strong, are more or less wise, are more or less motivated, are more or less honest, etc.). But CRT completely discards this fair concept and would push onto us an 'equity' that would allow anyone belonging to any allegedly 'historically oppressed' group to take whatever they desire from members of whatever 'historical oppressor' group as reparation for perceived long-past oppression. Under CRT, for example, a dark-skinned person has every right to walk into a store owned by light-skinned people and take the goods off the shelf for himself, and throw a torch to the store as he walks out, because this levels the scales of racial justice. Another example: the dark skinned person would have every right to walk into the house of a light-skinned family, demand their checkbook and the title deed to their property, and march the (former) homeowners into the street.

As one can see, at its root CRT appeals to the sins of greed, jealousy, and envy. It is contrary to the laws of God.

Marx postulated in his writings that a new society should be created by means of dividing and conquering the people of the old society. That division, back then, was to be accomplished by stirring up the common workers (proletariat) against the royalty, the wealthy, and the owners of productive property (the bourgeoisie). Lenin took this to heart and capitalized on it, and the 1917 revolution in Russia resulted in a system of governance that has murdered millions upon millions.

The Communist Party USA strove vainly for decades to produce a similar division in this country, but they never got much traction because of the huge middle class and because a mostly-Christian population recognized such divisiveness for the evil rot it was. But today, Christianity and true wisdom are on the wane in the US, and the Marxists have discovered new grounds for stirring up division by encouraging people to think of us all in terms of oppressed and oppressors of all sorts: by skin color, by sex, by sexual preference, by political group, you name it.

CRT has already infiltrated our educational curricula in many (most?) parts of the country. For example, in a small rural town in Tennessee, Caucasian first graders are being taught and forced by their teachers to confess their racial guilt in front of their Black classmates. Little kids whose parents taught them to be racially color-blind, who once played innocently together with kids of all sorts without any thought of racial differences, are now made to feel ashamed of themselves and acutely conscious of skin color. This, despite Rev. Martin Luther King's dream that one day no one would be judged by the color of his skin but would instead be evaluated by the content of his character.

CRT is one of the greatest threats to our nation's existence that we now face.

 

It is yet another illiberal attempt to craft punishments for individuals based purely on their group identity, without any regard for their words and actions as responsible individuals, and to punish descendants unto the fourth generation for the sins of their ancestors. They want it to appear cutting edge but it’s about as backward as it gets. Such ideologies have always had a tendency to turn against their own adherents. A far simpler approach to our present discontent is: be kind one to another, and love your neighbor as yourself.

 

But didn't these actual things happen on a national and even international scale under the Nazis in Germany and in the nations they later 'conquered' from 1930-45. Up until the Pearl Harbour attack in 1942 they had quite a lot of support for it from some sections of the American public I understand. In those cases it was mostly Jews and blacks that had their stores torched and houses plundered, and not just thrown into the street, but rounded up and murdered in their millions throughout Europe.

I think we can all agree that such criminally deplorable philosphies are to be condemned and opposed by Christians, in any age, in any Nation.

 

Sowing division is the most effective way for any enemy of freedom and seeker of dominion over others to gain their nefarious ends. Unfortunately since Trump came to power such division only increased in the USA and was even encouraged as a deliberate policy, eventually resulting in an invasion of Capitol Hill and some deaths.
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Yes of course, those things are abhorrent. And Christian social principles are the answer. In a very real way, the modern liberal (small L) order of equality and toleration is just a secularised version of what Christianity has developed within its ranks centuries prior. It is quasi Christian. Whereas CRT is pure atheist materialism. They don’t believe in equality, they believe in equity. They don’t believe in racial harmony, they believe in racial supremacy. They don’t believe in evidence, they believe in one’s “feelings”. They don’t believe in the rule of law and due process, they believe in tribal warfare.

I regret to inform you, that Critical Race Theory was here long before Trump entered politics. Please don’t politicize this. This is a moral and historical question.

Here is the young Barrack Obama, celebrating the founder of Critical Race Theory, Derrick Bell, back in 1990:
https://youtu.be/1_XphrCKvKE

 

Division and those who promote it, for their own political and factional ends, has been around since before the trial and execusion of Jesus Christ. It was ultimately responsible for the type of death he suffered and is endemic in the whole of mankind. It goes right back to the Garden of Eden.

Pointing the finger at one politician or another, as if that identifies the perpetrator, only masks the issue and exacerbates the problem. The church's only weapon against it is martyrdom, just like Christ.

To some extent at least, criticism of Critical Race Theory is just a 'push back' by White Supremacism, which is seeing its ramparts being undermined, ready for an assault upon its strongholds.
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Whenever I have failed or done something wrong/incorrectly, I first try and determine what I could have done better or avoided. In modern culture, people's first inclination is not towards self-introspection, rather, their inclinations seem to rush towards blaming others for their own mistakes or lack of success. My failure in school isn't due to my own apathy towards education, it is the result of a massive plot by WASP elites to purposefully deprive me of an education tailored to my own desires. CRT has gotten to the point of claiming that expecting people to be on time for events is an aspect of systematic WASP racism. That is the main danger of CRT: The death of individual responsibility. (Personal Anecdote Alert) Recently, a neighbor informed me that the KKK is forcing African-Americans to kill and rob each other in inner-city America. Claims like these make it impossible to hold anyone accountable for their actions if they are forced to do something either through direct Klan intervention or indirect systematic racism.

 

...said the person who pointed the finger at a (blond-haired) politician...

You're agreeing with Stalwart yet again. Must be some sort of record being set this month!

 

The implication embedded in this comment is that Stalwart, Invictus, Carolinian, and I, when we criticize CRT, are guilty of White Supremacist 'push back.' While I do not believe Tiffy meant it in this way, it must be pointed out that parroting this CRT narrative is inherently damaging.

One of the hallmarks of CRT, BLM, and some similar contemporary movements is their propensity to demonize and bully their opponents. Their message is, 'A person cannot be regarded as "good" unless he is one of us; if he is not one of us, he is part of the problem.' In this way they strive to shut down normal, rational discourse, stigmatize the opposition, and 'shame' people into agreeing. For example, in the BLM context anyone who (very sensibly) believes or says that all lives are of equal value ("all lives matter") is automatically labeled 'a racist,' and the only way to remove the stigma is to admit and act upon the driving principle that Black Lives matter more than the lives of others.

 

When "Black lives matter", is just a sentence, it is just a truism. In just the same way when "White lives matter", is just a sentence, it is also just a truism. But when Black Lives Matter became a slogan, which led later to a movement, which is now becoming (in some people's minds), an organisation, which targets and can be targeted by other 'organisations', and 'movements' and 'factions' etc. THEN we have internecine strife. Human beings are driven by fear and greed, fear of losing what they have or greed for what others have and they do not. Christ's disciples should be ridding themselves, (or rather be allowing Christ, through the Holy Spirit to rid them), of such base instincts.
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According to an Epoch Times article, clinical psychologist and professor Jordan Peterson believes CRT is a sort of 'modern replacement' for religion with strong appeal to today's young adults. Here's his rationale:

In an “intact culture” a person is “inculturated” by the age of about 18 into “a religious belief that saturates the entire culture,” he said.
“It’s granted to you, it gives you an identity, and that’s what your identity is.”
Western culture has become in this sense fragmented, he argued, as it now lacks such a comprehensive unifying ethos.
Students still come to universities with a “messianic” urge, craving an initiation of this sort, but what they’re offered instead is an ideology, which he described as “a parasite on an underlying religious structure.”
“A proper religious structure gives you a balanced view of the world, there’s characters for that negative part of nature, there’s characters for the positive part of nature, for the negative part of culture, for the positive part of culture. [It] gives you a view that enables you to look at the world and it’s existential permanences, I guess, in a manner that allows you to live a balanced life.”
Ideology, he said, doesn’t serve this purpose.
“You get indoctrinated into an ideology and you find where Satan is, you know, it’s not in you, it’s out there in the patriarchal oppressor, let’s say. And the thing about that is that it rings true mythologically and it is also true because every culture is oppressive to some degree and we’re all crushed as individuals by the dictates of arbitrary society. And kids get into the university and they’re taught this one-sided, lopsided doctrine with a utopian end and it matches their developmental needs perfectly,” he said.
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The main thrust of the article, actually, was to discuss a recent documentary called, Better Left Unsaid, which compares the current CRT (also known as 'Woke' Theory) worldview to those of the Russian Communists, the German Nazis, the Chinese Communists, and the instigators and participants in the Rwandan genocide. The documentary sets forth 4 principles upon which CRT operates:

1. “the world is best viewed through a group oppression narrative lens.”
2. “evidence of oppression is the inequality between groups.” If the designated “oppressed” group does, on average, worse in some regard than the designated “oppressor” group, that is taken as virtually unassailable proof of “oppression.”
3. “peaceful dialog and understanding between the groups is impossible since the dominant group’s strategy is to retain its power” and because the "oppressed" group members possess a uniquely valuable perspective on reality which the "oppressors" inherently lack.
   
4. “because of the above, violence is justified to eradicate the inequities.”

 

I mean no offense, but to promote what I hope might be a more balanced perspective than what I could glean from this thread, I would suggest reading (at a minimum) the following three pieces:

https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/05/27/what-is-critical-race-theory/

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/...ng-policing/a-lesson-on-critical-race-theory/

https://faithfullymagazine.com/critical-race-theory-christians/

Ideally, if we care enough to form an opinion about it, then I think that we (myself included) should probably be reading the entirety of some foundational texts on CRT. Those who don’t want to feel they are supporting CRT by purchasing such a book might visit a library. I don’t know enough about CRT to have an informed opinion either for or against it. However, I do believe that systemic racism exists, and is an important problem in the US, and that we should be trying to better understand and address it.

In fairness to previous comments, someone did quote from p. 3 of one foundational CRT text, but then went on to say:

What are those “CRT principles”? As their own textbook says above, they will be principles which deny “equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law”

This is not what the book said. Questioning and denying are two very different things. And, even if we overlook the change of wording from questioning to denying, isn’t this line of reasoning somewhat akin to someone pulling any particular Bible verse and saying it defines the scope of Christianity?

Regarding the following:

DiAngelo recently wrote a book saying that being white means being automatically racist, wicked, and inferior

In which book, and on what page, does DiAngelo say this? In any case, I think that CRT is not so formalized or institutionalized that we can take the opinion of any one proponent (or even a few propenents) and infer that it is CRT ‘orthodoxy.’ On similar grounds I object to the following mischaracterization:

Thus according to CRT proponents, if that’s the nature of the US, the most just thing to do is to abolish the US as it currently is, and to chop up the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation (all “slave” documents you see, designed to promote slavery). According to them, the country known as the United States should be erased, and a new started again upon Critical Race Theory principles.

I found the following quote interesting, because I have frequently heard very similar arguments made about Christianity:

One of the hallmarks of CRT, BLM, and some similar contemporary movements is their propensity to demonize and bully their opponents. Their message is, 'A person cannot be regarded as "good" unless he is one of us; if he is not one of us, he is part of the problem.'

Finally, regarding the link in the original post, are they really claiming same-sex attraction and/or homosexuality is a disorder? I really want to understand whether I am reading the latter part of this passage correctly:

The ACNA College of Bishops statement, Sexuality and Identity: A Pastoral Statement from the College of Bishops, “concludes for a number of reasons why sexually hyphenated designations of Christians struggling with same-sex attraction is neither Biblical, historical, nor pastoral. The statement also reassured these misguided believers of our commitment to love, help and care for those Christians wrestling with this disorder.”

Again, I hope my comments don’t offend anyone here…that is not my intent. I just wanted to chime in because reading this discussion thread had left me feeling quite depressed and misunderstood. Wishing you all the best.

 

I will leave someone else to handle most of your questions on this topic. However, I would like to think that you can judge a theory by its fruits. I have attached a chart of a bunch of euphemisms and their true meanings that were put together by a few doctors. It has always been interesting to me that theorists who view race and gender as just social constructs that aren't real, use both "social constructs" to sow a lot of discord amongst those in our society today. We need to progress more towards individual responsibility versus collective guilt culture. When someone dies and goes to heaven, they can't tell God that they killed a bunch of people because the evil white race made them do it by refusing to do x. I can make an assumption on how you view sexual deviancy, but let's just say that we would probably disagree.

Question: Do you believe that systematic racism is unique to the white race (that technically is just a social construct and thus isn't technically real) or that any society could become systematically racist under any race (even though race is just a social construct and thus isn't technically real)? Do you think that South Africa could be systematically racist towards Afrikaners for instance? I am just asking your opinion.

 

I didn’t mean to come off as indifferent to racial divisions. There is real pain out there, so don’t take my dismissals of CRT as being flippant.

I just urge you to recognize the rhetorical move by CRT proponents, painting it as just the next continuation of trying to fix racial divides, along the lines of the civil rights movement. Or indeed being itself a manifestation of the civil rights movement. Nothing could be further from the truth. Derrick Bell and Kimberle Crenshaw criticized the civil rights movement as Whites strategy to confuse the Blacks and enchain them in an even greater slavery. Bell and Crenshaw, founders of CRT, repeatedly called for the abolition of the civil rights movement.

But the attempt we hear today, to tie CRT to civil rights, is just a chess move made to deflect all criticisms of CRT, and paint opponents of it as people who would undo Brown v Board of Ed, people who would want to bring back segregation, indeed people who associate with the pro-slavery side of the Civil War. Meanwhile the CRT proponents are squeaky clean idealists just trying to fix racial divides.

Critical Race Theorists no more “just want to fix racial divides” than the old Marxists “just wanted to improve workers conditions”. Yes they wanted to do that but as a pretext for a much darker agenda. So it’s not what the CRT advocates say to the public that you want to pay attention to, but what they say to each other, in their academic literature.

You haven’t quoted any CRT academic literature, and what was quoted by me (and I have much more from them if you wish), you dismissed as dubious and improbable given the noble aims they present to the public about themselves.

“Racism is recognized as being embedded in all aspects of society and the socialization process; no one who is born into and raised in Western culture can escape being socialized to participate in these relations”
-Matlock, S. & DiAngelo, R. (2015). “We put it in terms of “not-nice”: White anti-racist parenting. Journal of Progressive Human Services, 26(2).

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“most of us have very strong feelings and opinions about the topics examined in social justice courses. These opinions often surface through claims such as:
-“People should be judged by what they do, not the color of their skin”
-“I see people as individuals”
-“My parents taught me that all people are equal”
-“I have friends from all races and we are all fine with each other”
While these opinions are deeply held and appear to be “common sense” truth (and not mere opinion at all), they are predictable, simplistic, and misinformed, given the large body of research examining social relations. Yet, the relentless repetition of these ideas in the mainstream makes them seem true”
-DiAngelo, R. & Sensoy, Ö. (2014). Leaning in: A student’s guide to engaging constructively in social justice content. Radical Pedagogy, 11(1).

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“White norms of rationality should not be the standard for which change is measured, for as we have argued, the current state of White emo-cognition and rationality are incompatible and produces the White neurosis we are so concerned about. Rather, as CRT posits, the emo-cognitions of People of Color are a legitimate starting point for measuring progressive changes to White emo-cognitions. This is precisely because People of Color’s experiential knowledge of race, racism, and White supremacy give them a nuanced understanding of the intricacies of racial oppression”
-Cheryl E. Matias and Robin DiAngelo, “Beyond the Face of Race: Emo-Cognitive Explorations of White Neurosis and Racial Cray-Cray,” Journal of Educational Foundations, 2(1), 2013.

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There are hundreds more pages of this stuff from her pen, over the course of many, many years.