SBC 1st VP Marshal Ausberry affirms Critical Race Theory, Resolution 9
Claims anyone rejecting Resolution 9 also rejects African American personhood!
The Southern Baptist Convention must accept Critical Race Theory, or it invalidates the lived experience of African Americans and rejects African American personhood claimed SBC First Vice President Marshal Ausberry.
In an incendiary tweet Ausberry said, “Res 9 carves out safe space to utilize the beneficial aspects of CRT; not as a worldview or ideology. It respects the AA journey enduring the worst of systemic racism; to reject Res 9 rejects the AA life experience and AA personhood.”
So, to doubt the usefulness of Critical Race Theory makes one disrespectful to oppressed communities. Also, it means you reject African Americans are persons.
Talk about rhetorical blackmail. This is troubling.
But there is more than just an attempt at bullying opponents. He has adopted the full secular worldview and his language proves it.
The secular, feminist origin of Lived Experience
Notice how the presuppositions of the secular culture’s focused on the oppressed permeates his statement. Lived Experience is one such example—that entered popular culture via feminism.
As the great Political Scientist Francis Fukuyama noted, the idea of special experience began with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. “Rousseau’s sentiment of existence would one day morph into what is now called lived experience, which lies at the root of contemporary identity politics,”[1] he wrote. And again later, “This line of thought ultimately traces back, we should recall, to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose emphasis on the ‘sentiment of existence’ valorized subjective inner feeling over the shared norms and understandings of the surrounding society.”[2]
Fukuyama also noted the relationship with feminist thinking. According to Fukuyama, “But from the beginning an important strand of feminist thought argued that the consciousness and life experiences of women were fundamentally different from those of men.”[3] He writes, the term lived experience “entered the English language via Simone de Beauvoir: the second volume of The Second Sex was entitled L’expérience vécue, or ‘lived experience.’ The lived experience of women was not the lived experience of men, she argued.”[4]
So, Mr. Vice President Ausberry, must we affirm feminism too? And by your own logic, if we reject it as an “Analytical Tool” do we invalidate the personhood of women?
And what of other “oppressed” groups? If we pass on Queer Theory does that mean, we reject the personhood of LGBTQ people?
Where does this stop?
The rhetoric is not Christian. It is evil.
It is an attempt to bully conservatives into silence.
No thanks. There is a better way. We must all reject this type of crass manipulation.
Let us as Christians focus on actual experience instead of the subjective “lived experience.”
If we do this, then we have no need of secular “Analytical Tools” but can instead apply remedies to actual cases of racism.
[1] Fukuyama, Identity, p. 32
[2] Ibid, pp. 109-110.
[3] Ibid, p. 108.
[4] Ibid, p. 110.
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How about we just apply the Scriptures?