Even Christianity Today Can See That the Trojan Horse Era of Left-Coded Racial Justice Is Over. Will Conservative Evangelicals Finally Wake Up Now, Too?
The United States has seen massive changes in the past three months, particularly in racial discourse.
Whereas two or three years ago, it seemed that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs would take over every public institution, now these departments face sudden closures almost as quickly as complaints get raised to leaders in the corporate, civic, and education worlds.
In the same way, once-ascendant DEI programs for the evangelical Christian world have fallen out of favor, though much more quietly. Just check the interactions on Be the Bridge’s MLK Day posts in 2021 vs. 2025, and you’ll see a 95% drop in engagement. The Gospel Coalition (TGC) has run a mere four articles tagged with topics relating to race and diversity since July 2023. Several social justice-centric churches that I have clipped in the past few years had to shut down.
If you’re feeling the “vibe shift,” you aren’t the only one. Christianity Today ran an article in January from Justin Giboney, President of The AND Campaign, also noting the change. “The once-popular racial-reconciliation project is now passé in many spaces,” he marvels. “In the flash of an eye, old terms, narratives, and frameworks lost their power.”
Only in his telling, this development is a tragedy that should be undone. But is that correct?
Revisionist History
“Racial Unity Is Out Of Style,” the title blares, giving you a clear hint at the tenor of the essay. Giboney, a longtime Democrat operative, does his usual schtick of “both sides are bad, I’m above it all, and the proper Christian response is to move further left.”
He blames the failures of the “racial reconciliation” movement on extremism from both sides of the issue. On the one hand, “a bitter reprisal from some on the church’s far right” that “squeezed all compassion out of their tribe. To even mourn for George Floyd or Breonna Taylor, in their telling, was to be brainwashed by wokeness.”
On the other hand, he vaguely critiques his own allies: “Too many of us simply mimicked popular secular thinkers. Christian racial-justice efforts… religiously regurgitated their language without sufficient critique, even self-righteously berating fellow Christians who hadn’t memorized the vocabulary.”
Giboney concludes: “The race debate in much of the church increasingly became a battle between those who were blind to the sin of racism and those who believed racism and sexism were the only sins.”
That sounds like a sober-minded evaluation of the discourse, right? But it’s revisionist, misleading, and manipulative in several ways.
A key slip-up from Giboney is that he gives a specific example of what he considered a positive example of “racial reconciliation” among evangelical publishing industry elites: “Events like MLK50 in 2018 offered hope that we could head in the right direction by bringing together diverse leaders with credibility in their respective communities.”
MLK50, the conference put on by TGC and the Russell Moore-led Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), went far beyond overzealous veneration of Martin Luther King, Jr. and has become infamous as a mask-slip moment for subversives in the American church.
Its biggest viral moment came from pastor Matt Chandler declaring he would hire an “African-American 7” over an “Anglo 8” to increase the diversity of his church without looking like he’s engaging in tokenism.
But Chandler’s speech wasn’t an outlier; it was relatively tame compared to the rest of the conference:
- Thabiti Anyabwile kicked off the conference with a TGC blog post demanding white evangelicals denounce “their parents and grandparents” as complicit in King’s murder.
- Pastor Eric Mason smeared black conservatives as “black on the outside and Angloid on the inside.”
- Charlie Dates howled “Shame on you!” at TGC’s leadership and demanded “more non-white presidents and professors” in seminaries plus the elimination of economic disparities.
- Russell Moore muddied the waters on King’s liberal theology, claiming an unspecified “development” from his Crozier days and a “very high view of scripture” (the panel, titled “Complex aspects of King,” did not even mention his serial adultery).
- Preston Perry performed a poem asking Mike Brown to “forgive your country” for the discourse surrounding his death, with lines like: “I wonder if Fox News considers you human.”
- Giboney himself alleged: “I don’t believe that white evangelicals’ leaders… have ever truly divested themselves from the Southern Strategy” and that white Christians would not respond to hurting minorities the same way they would respond to their own children with a “broken leg.”
Here, we see the problem with Giboney’s lazy “both sides” maneuver. On the one hand, the “far right” had no compassion and freaked out merely about people who wanted to mourn over George Floyd. On the other hand, the “racial justice” faction only crossed the line when they began incorporating Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. And neither side stuck to the pattern set by the “wondrous” MLK50 conference.
The actual data does not bear out his reading of the current milieu. While I wasn’t involved in the evangelical race/social justice discourse when Ferguson first put it front and center, I’ve been monitoring and researching this debate since its undeniable peak in 2020. I’ve been able to cut through the noise to expose the actual points of disagreement so we can have some honest conversations.
The Real Issues
I’ve distilled three primary objections to Giboney’s program that have been clearly and repeatedly articulated by his opponents. None of this is about rhetoric or wanting to talk about Breonna Taylor. We’re getting into the actual demands of the Christian “racial justice” movement.
The first demand was for Christians to practice DEI in hiring and promotions. More minorities had to take leadership positions in churches and evangelical institutions (that is, minorities who aren’t “angloid on the inside”), or else there would be no racial harmony in the church.
The second demand was for Christians to pay ethnos-wide restitution. Evangelicals needed to take part in systematic wealth transfer from one human phenotype to another based on historical grievances, or else there would be no racial harmony in the church.
The third demand was progressive political activism. Evangelicals had to support the policy preferences of “marginalized” interest groups, which in many ways amounted to expanding a pagan-run welfare state.
Giboney and his allies refuse to address these specific arguments, instead painting a simplistic narrative for his own ends.
If it’s not self-evident why this agenda is wrong, here are five reasons why.
First, the “Racial Justice” Demands of 2014-2024 Were Unbiblical
Ethnic quotas for church leadership are exercising what the Bible calls partiality. Scripture’s warnings against injustice say not to show favoritism toward wealthy and influential people who can help you back (James 2:1-7, Luke 14:12-14), but they also say not to show favoritism to the “poor” and the “small” (Leviticus 19:15, Deuteronomy 1:17).
The “racial justice” agitators regularly employ an equivocation fallacy with the concept of “color-blindness.” Of course, Christians are not called to treat people of different ethnicities all exactly alike in every way, denying their cultural particularities and sensitivities.
However, when it comes to discerning whether a person has transgressed God’s commands, whether a person meets the qualifications for an elder or deacon, or whether someone is performing his duties competently, ethnic identity should not weigh on our judgment one way or the other.
To require minority leadership in every church where minorities are present is favoritism, full stop.
To appoint someone who does not meet the Bible’s qualifications on integrity and character because of their immutable physical traits inevitably means denying and discriminating against a qualified candidate because of their immutable physical traits.
Second, the “Racial Justice” Demands of 2014-2024 Were Untenable
Every local church is going to have an ethnic majority that sets its cultural norms. It just is, and that’s not a sin. At least, no white person thinks that’s the case in a majority-black, majority-Korean, etc. church, even if they feel some discomfort or unfamiliarity with the cultural practices of that gathering. However, many thought leaders presented this fact as a grievous injustice in majority-white churches.
To deny goodwill toward majority-white churches that would be extended to other ethnic majorities is, again, partiality. Yes, in the past, when black Americans were prohibited from worship or segregated from the rest of the congregation, that was a sin on the part of white shepherds. But a lack of commercial gospel music is not a sin. A lot of white people aren’t the biggest fans of their church’s style of music, either, but they don’t demand change and call it a “gospel issue”!
I think a lot of well-meaning churches tried to impose the cultural norms of small minorities in their gatherings, but pandering to the agitators just made everyone miserable. The demands for more inclusion and leadership quickly became a tightrope act, with leaders facing complaints about exclusion and oppression in one moment, then tokenism and microaggressions the next.
It became clear that nothing would satisfy the complainers, aside from total control of their church’s decision-making. This approach only “worked” in places where white members were especially self-loathing (and affluent enough to be so).
Third, the “Racial Justice” Demands of 2014-2024 Were Covetous Rent-Seeking
The clearest biblical objection to this movement comes directly from the Ten Commandments: “You shall not covet,” the final entry in the Decalogue (Exodus 20:17). Even if the “racial justice” narrative were true, scripture says to be content with what you have (1 Timothy 6:6-10) and not to envy the wealth of the wicked (Psalm 37:16).
Yet reparations activists demanded equality, even redistribution, not just in wealth but in prominence, authority, land, “glory,” and even mental peace. (Yes, Pastor Eric Mason demanded “psychological reparations” by name.)
One pastor even went so far as to say unequal wealth in the aggregate has put up a “brick wall” between white and black Christians, in direct contradiction to Ephesians 2:14, which states that Christ has torn down the “dividing wall of hostility” between Jew and Gentile. At the time Paul was writing, those ethnic groups had plenty of bad blood thanks to historical atrocities. Instead of settling those scores to the satisfaction of the victims’ friends and progeny, he declared the cross sufficient to unify them.
Try as they might, no one made a compelling scriptural case that wealth disparities prove acts of theft or fraud that demand open-ended, intergenerational restitution from one racial group to another. Restitution in the law of Israel requires a specific plaintiff and defendant, and payments are not perpetual (all debts are canceled every seven years, per Deuteronomy 15:1).
Yet the reparations activists engaged in ever-more convoluted arguments to hang an unending debt on their brothers in Christ. Giboney himself got in on the action.
Needless to say, this approach has backfired considerably. No one was going to submit to moral browbeating for the sins of other people (in different time zones and different centuries) forever. They came to realize that no amount of money or honor would be enough propitiation for the anger and bitterness of the MLK50 roster.
Fourth, Many of the “Racial Justice” Demands of 2014-2024 Were Political and Partisan
One repeated mantra from the movement, particularly in 2020, was: “This isn’t political.” Time has shown that line was a lie.
This was most obviously seen in Jemar Tisby’s The Color Of Compromise, a purported history book that topped the NYT bestseller list and was recommended by thousands of churches. After recounting real stories of grotesque violence against black Americans, Tisby essentially argued that voting for Ronald Reagan was as racist as planting a bomb to kill little black girls, and voting for Donald Trump was even MORE racist. Racism hasn’t gone away; it’s only shifted its form, and the way you avoid being a racist today is by keeping Republicans out of office. Quite transparent.
The rest of the crew pushed a litany of policy issues as part of the “antiracist” cause: gun control, blocking voter ID, blocking deportations, abolishing the death penalty (and prisons and all punitive criminal justice), climate doomsaying, elective abortion, and more. One professor even inserted school funding disparities into Jesus’s “the least of these” discourse in Matthew 25.
Per that last item, the general ask from the “racial justice” crowd is to care for the poor and vulnerable by expanding the pagan welfare state: housing, education, medical insurance, etc. And they were willing to get that, no matter the collateral damage, by voting in politicians who were profoundly hostile to Christian convictions on life and sexuality.
At the beginning of President Joe Biden’s term, Giboney vowed to vigilantly criticize Democrats if they pursued “elite progressive culture war issues” instead of the economic “disparity issues” that he and other black Christians voted for.
It turns out Biden would relentlessly pursue those elite progressive issues in ways that directly persecuted Christians, such as jailing abortion mill protesters and barring foster parenthood for those who did not affirm transgender self-identification.
It also turns out Giboney did little to oppose the Biden regime, even as it failed to deliver on its economic promises and crushed the working poor with runaway inflation.
The “racial justice” influencers didn’t seem to learn any lessons by 2024, with many of my recurring clip subjects joining the “Evangelicals For Harris” (Jemar Tisby, Ekemini Uwan, Sandra Van Opstal, and Lisa Sharon Harper) or “Christians For Kamala” (Jacqui Lewis, Dante Stewart, Brandan Robertson) campaign hype groups. The MLK50 speakers refused to prophetically rebuke “Christians For Kamala” for promoting all sorts of gross blasphemies, like transing kids.
The conclusion was hard to avoid: promises of more wealth for their preferred ethnic tribe outweighed any countervailing issues, up to and including the inevitable appointment of more judges who would side with the state taking away believers’ children for holding to the Bible’s view of sexual identity. Talk about idolatry!
Fifth, the “Racial Justice” Movement Has Undeniably Born Bad Fruit
The most damning evidence against Giboney and co. is the pattern of evangelical DEI proponents corrupting a church or organization’s doctrine, either through liberation theology or queer affirmation (both of which are landmarks on the slippery slope toward New Age paganism).
Examples of this are legion.
Pastor Eugene Cho has publicly acknowledged that he made bad hires at Quest, his own church plant in Seattle, for the sake of diversity. After his departure, the remaining leaders became queer-affirming and left the Evangelical Covenant Church denomination.
The “Truth’s Table” Podcast, infamous for co-host Ekemini Uwan’s “Whiteness is wicked” speech at a women’s conference, had to drop one of its three founding members, Michelle Higgins, after she went affirming, even blaspheming the Lord himself with a sermon discussing the “queerness of the Trinity.” Uwan and Christina Edmondson (an MLK50 speaker) dumped her without rebuking her heresy. In the statement announcing her exit, they still called her a “sister” in the faith and a “poetic prophetess.” The trio went on to promote a book together.
Dr. Frank Glover, a regent at Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS), delivered a chapel speech lionizing Donatus, an incontrovertible heretic, in order to create a narrative of significant historical theological contributions by Africans. In the same talk, Glover touted the story of Kimpa Vita, a Congolese woman who claimed to be possessed by “Saint Anthony,” who she claimed was equal to God in Heaven. She claimed to die each weekend and travel to Heaven, sharing extrabiblical, direct revelations. She commanded celibacy from her cult members but fornicated with a follower and successfully aborted two of the three resulting pregnancies. When I highlighted this promotion of heterodox figures, DTS scrubbed the chapel from its archives but made no public statement. Glover remains on its Board Of Regents today.
Another theologian who touted a whitewashed biography of Kimpa Vita as though she were an orthodox reformer is Vince Bantu, who was recently fired from Fuller Seminary for alleged sexual immorality. He reportedly argued that Christians discourage polygamy based on Eurocentric norms, not solid biblical arguments.
Shane Claiborne’s “Red-Letter Christians” jumped fully on board the “racial justice” train and has appointed black women to its governing board who embrace transgenderism and “the Divine Feminine.”
Dhati Lewis, during his time leading SEND Network (part of the Southern Baptist Convention’s North American Mission Board, NAMB), taught that the gospel is incomplete without “social and economic restoration” in this life (those things are, of course, restored in the eschaton, but he made sure to clarify he was not talking about the afterlife). Not only that, but Lewis put this false gospel in SEND Network training materials and doubled down when challenged on the error, as exposed by pastor Kyle Whitt. Just like with Truth’s Table, Lewis left SEND soon after Whitt’s exposé, but he was not publicly rebuked for false teaching and instead praised by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Lewis’s brother, hip-hop artist Sho Baraka, now works for Christianity Today.
Greg Thompson, a former PCA teaching elder and co-author of a book on reparations with Duke Kwon, told Thabiti Anyabwile that Reformed Christians have a deficient Christology that has kept them from embracing intergenerational, phenotype-to-phenotype restitution. Therefore, he argued, they must adopt the Christology of Howard Thurman, a perennialist mystic who mentored Martin Luther King, Jr. and denied that Jesus was God in the flesh.
Finally, let us consider James Cone’s pernicious influence on the “racial justice” movement. Cone is indisputably a liberal preaching another gospel, yet he has been cited and defended by influential figures such as Léonce Crump, a former Acts 29 executive board member; Danielle Strickland, a Major in the Salvation Army and podcast host for World Vision; and Jemar Tisby, founder of The Witness BCC.
Tisby and his associates have not only taken up the false gospel of Coneism; The Witness BCC now has a transgender-affirming Vice President, Ally Henny. And in his quest to reshape the church, Tisby has platformed Jacqui Lewis, a pagan universalist who denies that there will be a second coming of Jesus Christ, on his personal podcast. After Lewis repeatedly called for the church to become queer-affirming, Tisby praised her as though a legitimate preacher with “wisdom” from God.
A Path Forward for Real Reconciliation
Having gone through my archives to prepare this article, it’s staggering how divisive and heterodox the racial historical grievance cottage industry truly is.
And in his essay, Giboney previews another wave of “racial reconciliation” activism. He warns that any preaching on Christian love or grace and mercy will be undercut by “hypocrisy” and “the stench of insincerity” without it.
Here, we have another case of equivocation. “Racial unity” is a good thing, but that comes with a caveat from former pastor John Onwuchekwa:
“Reconciliation, or unity, in a sense, is a byproduct of something that we’re after…In some ways, unity, in and of itself, is not a vice or a virtue; it’s a vehicle…The people that built the Tower of Babel were unified. The Los Angeles Lakers and the Patriots are unified, and nobody likes them. We all look and, say no no no, they’re unified towards a goal that really don’t help me…So, what I want more than unity is solidarity or justice. Unity can serve great ends. Unity can serve nefarious ends.”
He’s right (on this point). Everyone wants to be unified. The real question is, toward what goal are we unified?
Are we unified in the goal of making disciples, living righteous lives, and glorifying God? Or are we unified in the goal of ethnic favoritism to placate a liberal-leaning faction’s perennial bitterness?
If Giboney and company really want unity and reconciliation, they can take the first step with repentance. They spent years browbeating their brothers in the faith with demands to repent (and pay up), not for their own actions but for the actions of “people like me.” But the “racial justice” influencers personally coveted, personally taught error, and personally stirred up division.
Recall the words of Titus 3:10: “As for a person who stirs up division, after warning him once and then twice, have nothing more to do with him.”
Let’s call the clips of Giboney and his cohort a first warning and this article a second.
If the zeitgeist shifts again and the “racial justice” movement resumes its moral racketeering, it will be past time for faithful Christians to have nothing to do with it.
