A new fundamentalism rising: The Southern Baptist Battle against the CRT “worldview”

The American political Right's coalescence in the late 2010s and early 2020s around opposition to "wokeness"—especially in the form of what it understands as "intersectionality" and "critical race theory" (CRT/I)—is well known. Less well known is the story of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) aligning with the political Right in late 2020, turning away from its more measured response to CRT/I the year prior. This article will explore theological–traditional sources for anti-CRT/I activism in the SBC's Right wing, focusing particularly on how "Evangelical Worldview Theory" (EWT) provides a rhetorical structure that delegitimates critical theories that rely on the historical analysis of structural aspects of social phenomena such as race. Since the late 2010s, the political Right in the United States has been forecasting apocalypse if CRT/I are allowed to form the "worldview" of public-school children. Parts of this story are well documented. In 2020, protests erupted over George Floyd's death at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis, the latest of several similar fatalities across America. These focused popular attention on critical questions of race and state authority. In response, many institutions, public and ecclesial, offered or required antiracism training as part of initiatives to increase awareness of diversity, equity, and inclusion or DEI. Parts of the training that were designed to interrogate "Whiteness," in particular, left some participants feeling alienated. The COVID-necessitated online modality of this training allowed those alienated to extract charged sound bites that were then exhibited in the Right-wing mediasphere as evidence of the nefarious anti-White true agenda of DEI training. Right-wing political activist Christopher Rufo was the most effective promulgator of DEI disinformation. He used Freedom of Information Act requests and an online tip line to gather this kind of decontextualized "evidence" and distributed his "findings" in sensationalized online news articles (Wallace-Wells, 2021). He appeared on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show in September 2020, calling on then-President Trump to end race-conscious training within federal agencies. By month's end, Rufo was consulting on executive orders shutting down DEI training in federal agencies (2020a, Executive Order 13950) and commissioning a group to respond to "revisionist" versions of American history that had foregrounded evidence of pervasive and longstanding systemic racism in American society (2020b, Executive Order 13958). That fall, Google searches for CRT spiked for the first time.1 In a 2021 interview, Rufo described the phrase's rhetorical power: "Its connotations are all negative to most middle-class Americans, including racial minorities, who see the world as 'creative' rather than 'critical,' 'individual' rather than 'racial,' 'practical' rather than 'theoretical.' Strung together, the phrase 'critical race theory' connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American" (qtd. in Wallace-Wells, 2021). As such, Rufo considers CRT to be a better foil than "political correctness," "cancel culture," or "woke" in the "culture war [that conservatives] had been fighting against the same progressive racial ideology since late in the Obama years." Rufo has extended his campaign against CRT through a visiting fellowship with The Heritage Foundation and his bestselling book, America's Cultural Revolution (2023), which claims to expose the Radical Left's influence campaign to re-engineer human nature through social institutions such as public schools. Though the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) had adopted a relatively thoughtful and measured response to CRT/I in 2019, after the Rufo-led conservative panic around CRT/I in 2020, it renounced its earlier position and came out against CRT/I and DEI initiatives. Much of this, I argue, has to do with SBC members' widespread reliance on Evangelical "Worldview Theory" (EWT), a "biblical" perspective that militates against the recognition and critical analysis of social problems that are embedded in historical and structural causality. In my discussion of EWT, I review pertinent 20th-century developments that illuminate the American Fundamentalist tradition of reacting against critical theories and position the SBC's rejection of CRT/I (and earlier cognates) as a kind of new Fundamentalism that is continuous with earlier forms both in terms of the underlying theology and the rhetorical expression that are naturalized within EWT. I argue that the SBC repudiation of CRT/I is less grounded in rigorous argumentation than in an extrapolation of EWT's totalizing worldview, a worldview that has led to some deeply disturbing conclusions in the past. Finally, I demonstrate how the debates around CRT/I provide a rhetorical model for Right-wing Christian discourse around "religious freedom" in public schools. Over the last 80 years, worldview language has become quite popular in American evangelical circles, especially in Christian higher education and in the training of youth for cultural engagement.2 The worldview concept's appeal is plain enough. Worldviews are presented as the cognitive frameworks that shape the way people understand, interpret, and respond emotionally and morally to life's most important questions: Who am I? Where am I? What is wrong? What is the remedy? (Walsh & Middleton, 1984, 35). Evangelical worldview theorists argue for the fundamental difference between an all-encompassing moral world and life view that is grounded in scripture versus one that is grounded in a set of secular assumptions. In this sense, EWT channels critical-thinking energies, providing tools to investigate and evaluate others' life-organizing theoretical systems. In The Universe Next Door Christian apologist James Sire catalogs "prominent worldviews that have shaped the Western world," including deism, naturalism, Marxism, postmodernism, and Islam among others (2020). He offers both immanent and comparative critiques of these views from a "Christian"—that is a particular evangelical Christian—perspective. Though such analyses customarily gesture toward epistemic humility, the insider's confidence is unmistakable, as in David Naugle's assertion that "The objectivist implications associated with 'Christian' and 'biblical' make a tremendous difference when they are used as adjectives before the noun 'worldview.' The expression 'Christian or biblical worldview,' therefore, does not imply a mere religious possibility or philosophical option, but suggests an absolutist perspective on life that is real, true, and good" (Naugle, 2002, 266). This promise of absolute epistemic authority seems only to have increased EWT's allure as American evangelicalism's social environment has grown more pluralist, offering a bulwark against the growing awareness of human difference in a densely connected, highly diverse world. Yet EWT is not particularly critical if that means (a) observing texture in the real-world data of worldviewing opponents' lives or (b) allowing critical reflection on evangelicals' own theological assumptions and traditions. Some have labored to advance worldview theory with more academic rigor (e.g., Bavinck, 1928; Naugle, 2002), but even these sources give way to constructive accounts, and more popular evangelical discourse, such as Sire's, tends toward simpler worldview naming and comparing in which the evangelical critic identifies others' worldviews as discrete wholes and then presents the evangelical (or biblical or Christian) worldview as better, more capacious, and truer. EWT's validity for understanding the world and its people goes unquestioned because of its claim to be grounded in scripture, understood via the "plain-sense" hermeneutics that predominate in American evangelical history, as a stable and transparent record of God's revelation. A review of early Protestant worldview theory's historical contexts and key luminaries' personal worldviews—Abraham Kuyper, J. Gresham Machen, and Harold John Ockenga—illuminates later developments in this tradition.3 For these thinkers, worldview theory was a strategy to resist the seeming totalism of other, nameable, "Godless" worldviews that had developed by the late 1800s. In that period, scientific analyses—from Charles Darwin's evolutionary biology to Sigmund Freud's experimental psychological theories to W. E. B. Du Bois's empirical sociological reports on race in America—which were methodologically independent of idealist theology came to predominate in Western intellectual culture and these, in turn, became critical frameworks for interrogating traditional doctrines, the sacred sources these drew upon, and the social and cultural practices they enabled. With its absolutist assurance and counter-cultural orientation, Protestant worldview theorizing quickly predominated among self-identified "evangelicals." It allowed them, like their fundamentalist forebearers, to resist engaging emerging ways of understanding in the name of eternal "scriptural truth," while thus delegitimizing social and political explanations of that very resistance. Early worldview theory was explicitly reactionary, calling Christians to project a biblical worldview "against this deadly danger [namely, Modernism]" (Kuyper, 1899, 261). Given the world's fallenness, Kuyper said to psychologists in the 1890s, "You may excel in all these studies and not know the least thing about your own soul" and thus "risk… falsifying the object of your science" (Kuyper, 1898, 97). Kuyper helped negotiate a Dutch school system in which each of his society's major worldviews (social-democratic, Protestant, Catholic, and liberal/neutral) received legal recognition and public funding. Presbyterian theologian J. Gresham Machen adopted worldview theory to posit a totalizing epistemological opposition between Christianity and "Liberalism" (a category in which he included both secularists and progressive Protestants). Machen defended traditional "treaties of inviolability," like the Bible's presupposed reliability and authority in "the sphere of human life" (1923, 4). He panned 1920s sociology and psychology as "pseudo-scientific" compared to biblical worldview theorizing (Machen, 1923, 13). He criticized public school curricula that were determined solely by state-appointed experts, arguing that indoctrination into a godless worldview was "a soul-killing system" in which "the higher aspirations of humanity" were "crushed out" of American children (1923, 13–14). Machen's student, Harold Ockenga promoted the idea of a Christian college where scholars pursue all disciplines under a singular "governing ideology"—EWT—that would provide the boundary for academic freedom (Ockenga, 1972, 50–56). He encouraged evangelicals to "learn something from the Soviets and the Nazis" (1942, 25)—and to embrace worldview theory as a shield and weapon in a modern world riven by clashes of militant ideologies. For Ockenga only Christian education, bounded by a Christian worldview, could counter the "materialistic monism" of Communist education (1972, 48–49). Each of these worldview theoreticians framed EWT as "biblical" and grounded in the universe's rational nature, making it the only viewpoint capable of accurately recognizing and criticizing deviations from essential truth, but its emergence within the siege mentality of 20th-century fundamentalism and conservative evangelicalism militated against its own critical self-reflection. Armed with their Bibles and eschewing critical methods from the social sciences, all three figures' racial justice records are troubled. For example, Kuyper maintained colonial-era theories of race, arguing that racial distinctions and divisions were both insurmountable given Noah's curse of Ham (Genesis 9:24–27) and part of God's election (Cook, 2021, 49–52). Machen avoided commenting on race, but his personal letters (1913a, 1913b)4 reveal deep currents of racial prejudice. Westminster Theological Seminary, which he founded after leaving the integrated Princeton Theological Seminary, admitted no Black students until after his death. Ockenga disparaged attempts to abolish racial distinctions as "folly" and "impossible" (1948, 232). Three years after Brown v. Board of Education, Ockenga complained that integration "is not wise, that is all, for expediency's sake because it is selfish" (qtd. in Strachan, 2015, 62). Neo-Evangelical thought leaders, such as Ockenga, were uniformly heterosexual, White, affluent, male Republicans who shared a "classic American, rugged individualist outlook" (Marsden, 1987, 29). EWT, which seemed to be induced directly, clearly, and transparently from God's word itself, allowed them to understand their traditional views—which ratified their own social privilege—as biblically grounded and aligned with God's will, while allowing them to rebuff criticism—however, well supported by sociological or historical analysis—as "unbiblical." Ideas, interests, or practices naturalized within their cultural imaginaries could be justified scripturally and could thus be presented as emanations of "the biblical worldview." Concerns about social justice could be attributed to non-Christian worldviews such as Modernism, Liberalism, or Communism and thus rejected a priori without EWT thinkers actually having to engage the substance of the critiques or to oppose "justice" or "rights" as such. In the early 1930s, the Southern Baptist Convention was relatively insulated from the forces of change that were affecting Northern denominations. While Fundamentalists had by then already lost their battles to control major denominations (including the Northern Baptist Convention),5 Southern Baptists remained largely unaffected by the Higher Criticism in biblical studies and the broader impacts of Modernist liberal theology. This meant that both Fundamentalism and the New Evangelicalism arrived late to the SBC because, as sociologist Nancy Ammerman explains "Fundamentalism [understood as understood as a militant, reactionary form of religiosity] only exists where there is conscious opposition to the forces of change, and conscious opposition can only exist where there are forces of change" (Ammerman, 1990, 155). While many Southern Baptists have shared the Neo-Evangelical spirit of public engagement, their social and political commitments only began to align when both social and economic change did significantly impact Southern society, in the 1950s and 1960s and manifested in the new forms of fundamentalism associated with the Christian Right, led by Southern Baptists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. SBC leadership declined to join the National Association of Evangelicals, and the convention remains unaffiliated, though the two institutions now enjoy formal connections, like joint research on "evangelicalism" (via Lifeway Research) and shared identity and interests among the SBC rank and file (see Earls, 2010). Despite vocal support for the Christian Right by some Southern Baptists, the SBC itself remained relatively moderate through the 1970s, until (beginning in 1979) control of the SBC was seized by a well-organized group of Right-wing activists. The history of the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC has been well covered,6 but it bears mentioning that the activists' authority was grounded in appeals to something like EWT. Their idealist theology allowed them to emphasize tenets such as biblical inerrancy that they held were its logical theological entailments, while letting them attack moderate and progressive social-ethical convictions as "unbiblical." Since then, many Southern Baptists have emphasized new "fundamentals" such as gender complementarianism in reaction to social trends and, at times, issued calls to live in ways more withdrawn from "worldly" society. SBC representatives have increasingly identified as "evangelicals" and have grounded their positions—including, most recently, opposition to CRT/I—in appeals to "the biblical worldview" or "the gospel." not because they agreed with or even understood the matter at hand, but because they trusted the Committee on Resolutions. It also passed because a black professor from the flagship seminary in the SBC stood there and defended the resolution using hot-button language like "the Gospel of Jesus Christ" and "the sufficiency of Scripture" in order to obscure the fact that the resolution he helped write compromised both. (Baucham, 2021, 148) After Resolution 9 passed, Ascol's Florida-based organization Founders' Ministries produced By What Standard? A two-hour film lambasting CRT/I and defending moral claims consistent with the Dallas Statement. Released in June 2020, the film was quickly followed by an edited volume under the same title. But Resolution 9's nuanced policy approach was short-lived in the SBC not because of the internal efforts of neo-fudamentalists such as Ascol or Baucham but because Rufo and "anti-woke" Republican political activism shifted the conversation within the SBC faster and more successfully than Baucham or Ascol could have hoped. Like other members of the 2019 Resolutions Committee, Curtis Woods, the Black pastor-scholar castigated by Baucham, understood EWT to allow nuance around critical-theoretical analysis, but the intensifying political context activated the fundamentalist logic of EWT that had historically been used to delegitimize any "extra-biblical" critical-theoretical reasoning. By November 2020, all six Southern Baptist seminary presidents closed ranks, issuing a joint statement denouncing "affirmation of Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality, and any version of Critical Theory" as "incompatible with the Baptist Faith and Message" (qtd. in Schroeder, 2020). Some Black pastors led their churches to break with the convention over the ensuing months (Bailey & Boorstein, 2020). Woods had included critical-theoretical perspectives in his teaching at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, but in the aftermath of the backlash to Resolution 9, Woods quietly vacated his seminary office and his church pulpit citing a battle with depression (D'Alessio, 2022). We are members either of a dominant group or of a marginalized group with respect to a given identity marker. As such, we either need to divest ourselves of power and seek to liberate others, or we need to acquire power and liberate ourselves by dismantling all structures and institutions that subjugate and oppress. (Shenvi & Sawyer, 2019a) The core principles they identify in CRT/I—identity, access to truth, and liberation—inform the characterization of CRT/I produced by SBC neo-fundamentalists Ascol, Baucham, and Owen Strachan. For them, "the CRT/I worldview" reifies the oppressor-oppressed power dynamic in all social identities, especially class, race, gender, and sexual orientation. This leads to several ways, they argue, that CRT/I reveals itself as illegitimate from a "biblical," that is, EWT-informed, perspective. First, CRT/I displaces the question of individual moral culpability—essential to EWT's understanding of sin and salvation—into historical structural positionality. "The Critical Social Justice view," Baucham argues, "assumes that the world is divided between the oppressors and the oppressed (white, heterosexual males are generally viewed as the oppressor)" (2021, 6; see also Ascol, 2020a, 12). This "division" means not merely categorization but assigned moral status, with virtue accruing to those with the most oppressed statuses and vice inversely to the multi-privileged—regardless of individuals' beliefs, intentions, or actions (Baucham Baucham, 2021, 111; see also Strachan, 2021, xix). "In wokeness," Strachan intones, "some are fundamentally good and beautiful and right just as they are, but others are definitively not. Those who participate in 'whiteness'… are in no way right as they are. Wokeness is thus a new unbiblical Manichaeism" (2021, 142). Whiteness, as it is explicated by theologians such as J. Kameron Carter (2008) and Willie James Jennings (2010) in terms of its function as an unmarked term that organizes asymmetrical power arrangements that emerge historically from the operation of colonial economies, are nowhere engaged in these works. Instead, "Whiteness" is treated as a simple racial category (e.g., Strachan, 2021, 11, 60, 70). Strachan reports, "In general terms 'white' people are racist, the historic oppressors of others, and thus as a collective unit, 'white' people are guilty" (2021, 2, et passim). Allergic to the notion of collective sin and structural overdeterminations, Right-wing evangelicals using EWT understand injustice and guilt in terms of individual moral choice. Even though immoral action can sometimes be conducted as part of a group, it is always the individual who has the free choice and responsibility to avoid sin, including the sin of "racism." Racism is shifted, in this understanding, from a power dynamic inherent to a social and economic structure to an individual choice. People cannot be "racist" simply because of who they are (White), but only if they choose, individually, to act in a racist way. A second point of contention for adherents of EWT is the assumption that access to truth is shaped by one's historically overdetermined social position, such that the oppressed gain understandings obscured to those who do not suffer similar oppression. Ascol claims this "standpoint epistemology" spites reason and hard data, which are presumably on his—and the bible's—side (Ascol, 2020a, 13–14). Baucham, invoking an early heresy about special knowledge effectively saving people, coined the term "Ethnic Gnosticism" (2020b, 2021, ch. 5) to describe the way standpoint epistemology, in his view, gives "People … special knowledge based solely on their ethnicity" (2021, 92). Strachan agrees, arguing that CRT/I amounts to a kind of relativism in which "social location and possession of privilege will shape our handling of truth" (2021, 105). From the perspective of EWT this is a foundational error: "Our personal experiences factor into our theological work," he writes, "but never in such a way as to affect a [biblical] text's meaning; instead, they help us appreciate the depth of biblical truth, and they open our eyes to ways to apply (not interpret) the Word" (Strachan, 2021, 108). Though the applications of scripture change over time and from culture to culture, in other words, the situation of the interpreter cannot affect biblical truth, which is presumed to stand above its hermeneutic context, transcending both history and culture, eternally and universally singular and coherent in its meaning. The broader project of "social justice" thus advances the "rights" of minorities of many kinds to remove inequality – or even difference itself – from our world. Men must be removed from positions of authority, and boys must be trained to see strong manhood as akin to "toxic masculinity." Income must be taken and redistributed. Capitalism should be strenuously resisted, for it was built on the back of racism. (Strachan, 2021, 18). With regard to "intersectionality," instead of data-backed descriptive statements about the way injustice compounds for those who occupy multiple socially marginal positions in American society, the SBC neo-fundamentalists hear only normative claims to elevate all who claim disadvantaged status (Strachan, 2021, 16). Summarizing their opponents' arguments, they collapse the difference critical theorists make between describing things and promoting normative pathways to freedom. The New Fundamentalists follow Machen's example of casting their opponents as priests of a new religion—including "Utopian Judicial Paganism" in Strachan (2021, 126–127) and "Critical Social Justice" in Baucham—"which is only the more destructive of the Christian faith because it makes use of traditional Christian terminology" (Machen, 1923, 2). But their use of EWT moves away from earlier Fundamentalists' preoccupation with a defense of the supernatural—biblical miracles broadly as well as specific miracles, such as the virgin birth and bodily resurrection. Instead, they use EWT to support the insistence that Christians can know God's detailed, original–creational will for ordering the natural–material world (Shenvi & Sawyer, 2019b, 15–16; Strachan, 2021, 77). They use it to support the postulates of gender complementarity, which states that God created two discrete and complementary (cis)genders determined at conception to be naturally designed for heterosexuals (The Dallas Statement, articles X and XI; Ascol, 2020b; Shenvi & Sawyer, 2019b, 18; Strachan, 2021, 34, 73, 139), and they use it to endorse a colorblind approach to race, understood as a social construct that Jesus demolished (The Dallas Statement, article XII; Shenvi & Sawyer, 2019b, 18; Baucham, 2021, 70). Evangelical Worldview Theory functions as an alternative to critical theories, providing a logic to make one's "biblical" worldview impervious to outside criticism while granting a platform from which others' thoughts can be criticized. This provides EWT with considerable rhetorical utility with Christian audiences, claiming that it does to articulate scriptural truth while simultaneously placing opponents outside of that truth. The New Fundamentalists rightly sense that opening the door even a crack to social-scientific criticism could dramatically impact how people hold the Bible and read it for moral formation and, thus, the utility of EWT. But EWT rests on the postulate that there is a singular biblical worldview that emerges directly, eternally, transparently, and transculturally from scripture, a postulate that, of course, has been consistently demonstrated to be false since at least the late 18th century. "We obtain knowledge," Shenvi and Sawyer explain, "by using reason to understand God's revelation in nature and in Scripture" (2019b, 15–16; see also Strachan, 2021, 77). But, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer argued, since "original creation" has no revealed content of its own, to present something as "revealed in nature" one is obscuring—or ignorant of—the reliance upon one's own authority (Bonhoeffer, 2012, 363). EWT has consistently functioned, as noted above, in this way: as a way of ratifying as "scriptural" the "authority"—the social and cultural biases—of those who ground their analyses in EWT's claims to scriptural truth. To spell out God's original–creational intentions, one must rely on a combination of biblical–traditional and natural–theological sources, with human reasoning to connect the dots. When unresolvable moral-interpretive problems spill from religious communities into public spaces with reactionary energy and urgency, those communities are susceptible to authoritarian cooptation. EWT is also a very poor tool for the critique of social-scientific knowledge, in the sense that categories that make sense within its own theological tradition often lead to rhetorical and logical fallacies when they are mobilized in the critical engagement of analyses grounded in social-scientific methodologies. For example, as Robert Chao Romero and Jeff Liou rightly recognize, comparing CRT's analysis of the legal system to an orthodox doctrine of sin as if the two competed is a category error (2023, 74). What CRT/I proponents present as data, claims, and arguments at descriptive and interpretive levels, the New Fundamentalists collapse into normative claims. The "transcendent ideological framework" projectively attributed by EWT theoreticians to social-scientific disciplines fundamentally misrepresents the latter's frameworks of inquiry, which—unlike EWT—are methodologically defined, self-aware of their own epistemological limitations, and explicitly committed to being held accountable to the ideological frameworks that attend to their social and historical situation of the knowledge they generate. They are not grounded in any revealed knowledge that is itself presumed to be both self-evident and beyond critique. However, the projective attribution of an "enemy" worldview that lurks behind all data used to form historical and structural analyses of social phenomena is essential to the rhetorical function of EWT. Often called "Cultural (or neo-) Marxism" in EWT discourse, this enemy worldview is conceptualized as a comprehensive, totalizing ideology with metaphysically and morally opposite assumptions to EWT. As such it supplies a rationale for opposing and writing off without substantively engaging insights that may offer challenge or critique. Many of the New Fundamentalists draw liberally from this rhetoric and its imaginary.7 In a foreword to Strachan's book, John MacArthur says, "CRT is basically neo-Marxism on postmodernist steroids – a deeply congenial point of view cynically weaponized for the deconstruction and dismantling of social structures" (Strachan, 2021, xix; see also Smith, 2019). It is, of course, a rhetorical fallacy, a straw man. Political scientist Jérôme Jamin distinguishes the historical intellectual tradition of interdisciplinary social criticism "trying to understand the cultural dynamics of capitalism" (i.e., the Frankfurt School under Horkheimer) from "Cultural Marxism" as bombast about "a dangerous ideology that has sought 'to destroy Western traditions and values'" (Jamin, 2018, 1).8 While they claim to attack CRT/I on intellectual grounds, their case relies upon Rufo's having invented a straw man version of CRT/I for culture war purposes and upon earlier Right-wing rhetoricians having invented and weaponized similar straw-men demonizations—"Cultural Marxism," "political correctness," "postmodernism," etc.—of existing analytical methods or concepts. The New Fundamentalists' analyses are constructed to look scientific to nonscientists, but their analyses are so flawed that they would be re