Before I stepped behind the podium for the first time in Fall 2021, I made a conscious decision that I would not hide that I pray from my students. My particular combination of anxiety and devoutness more often than not means that I pray for the strength, wisdom, clarity, and patience to reach each and every one of my students before I dive into any given day’s materials. As a cradle Catholic, ending a private prayer even in public with the sign of the cross is a highly visible reflex. That first time I prayed in front of my class, I hesitated. Not because I’m ashamed of my faith. But because I worried what my students might think I was praying for, given the significant and enduring problems with American Catholicism and the institutional Church.
In time, as I’ve gotten my sea legs as a law professor, many of the things about the job have become easier. But it is only quite recently that I’ve seen fully that my lifelong commitment to a faith and Church that promises everything but regularly falls woefully short is compatible with teaching Constitutional law day-in and day-out. Some days, the only thing that keeps me going in a broken and flawed Church and country is faith. Faith that, despite all the failures, self-inflicted injuries, horrific and at-times seemingly unspeakable truths, redemption and salvation is just around the corner.
This is precisely why Christians put so much emphasis upon Jesus’ liberatory teaching in John 8:32, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Truth and freedom are inextricably intertwined. The same can be said about the United States. As Frederick Douglass so astutely observed in his speech, What To the Slave Is the Fourth of July, true American liberation was impossible without reckoning with Black slavery. To wit, he urged “The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.”
This brings me to Professor Anthony Paul Farley’s latest article, Critical Race Theory & the Gospels, which hits home for me for at least one obvious reason as a devout Catholic. Farley’s stunning prose beautifully illustrates and elevates the parallels between how enslaved Black folks who were Christian came to understand slavery, liberation, and emancipation as an ordeal that mapped directly onto the suffering, sacrifice, death, and resurrection of Christ. Farley’s at-times masterfully lyrical writing is, to be sure, reason enough to read this article and share it widely. As one example, “Slavery is death, death only, and that continually. This death, far from being an escape ‘devoutly to be wish’d’, is a perpetual calamity…Slavery is crucifixion. Death, calamitous death, is forever” (P. 724). And yet, that is not why I picked this piece to feature in this Jot.
What makes Farley’s contribution so unique and powerful is his careful articulation of how Critical Race Theory (CRT) is not just compatible with, but is a flower in the midst of the ruins of, American Christianity and the American experiment more broadly. This is a daring and heavy lift at a time when the far right has so aligned itself with American Christianity and simultaneously declared literal war on Critical Race Theory.
Let me say this outright: Farley’s article is not evangelical. He does not write to convert readers to Christianity. Nor does his approach portend that Christian theology, culture, or logics have a rightful place, let alone a special place, in secular American law and politics. Farley writes for American Christians who, as a matter of faith and orientation, observe a blurred line between the secular and religious in public life. He also dials into a key strength of Christian thought in the present moment—that, at its core, our shared faith requires us to confront human suffering of the most barbaric and cruel kind, and through that meditation we learn the power of grace and love for all humanity. (Easier said than done, obviously.)
I agree wholeheartedly with my non-Christian friends that American Christianity—the institutional Catholic Church included—has repeatedly failed to reckon with our nation’s original sins, including first and foremost Black slavery, genocide, racial apartheid, colonialism, and the lingering effects of rampant racism in our laws, institutions, and systems. And yet the irony, as Farley so deftly uplifts, is that Christians should be the best primed to recognize these atrocities and root them out because that is what our faith quite literally teaches. As Farley explains:
“[t]he promise of ‘good tidings of great joy…to all people’ is possible only if great joy is ‘the miracle of liberation’. The miracle of liberation is key to any theory of transition to a classless society, which is another way of saying that the classless society itself is our vehicle and instrument of transition, and we have seen it already, we have seen the promised land.” (Pp. 732–33.)
Why there has been no coherent and robust trans-denominational Christian leadership helming the cause of anti-racism in the United States is a question Farley’s article asks—and begins to answer. Our nation has to date failed to live up to its promised deliverance from tyranny, and it still falls miserably short of reckoning with the legal, material, and social inequities that the Framers built this nation on top of at the founding. Each and every American today still finds herself awaiting liberation from the sins of our forebearers. Yes, we’re a nation that spilled the blood of hundreds of thousands of our citizens over generations in attempts to atone for Black slavery. But even those staggering sacrifices made generation after generation again have left us woefully forsaken. The scourge of American racism continues to demand blood and psychic sacrifices today as it always has and seemingly always will.
Underneath the bigotry that still freely flows in so many parts of American society even today is a helplessness shared by all of us irrespective of race or our ancestral connections to our nation’s founding sins. So many Americans today wish desperately to turn a page on our past. I do not blame folks who longingly dream that maybe a national forgetting of the brutal realities of our history and the enduring deficiencies of our constitutional order might bring us the deliverance we’ve strived so hard to win, but failed to obtain, despite considerable attempts at ridding our society of racism.
I do not think it is lost on most anyone who teaches constitutional law today that we, as a nation, have tried so hard, for so many centuries at this point, to redeem ourselves and our nation. I think it only natural to at times wonder what more we as Americans can offer up if a Civil War, Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement, and hard-won seemingly racism-defying achievements of the likes of Thurgood Marshall and Barack Obama were not enough to move the needle.
In this particular moment—amidst what my colleague Michael Dorf has aptly termed “the pit of despair”—Farley’s intervention is a breath of fresh air. It has a particular and much needed resonance for American Christians in and outside of the legal academe.
Invoking the rich imagery and metaphors of Christianity, Farley taps into a way of knowing fundamental and difficult truths based on faith alone. Though he does not label it as such, Farley’s prose clearly embraces a complex theological concept Christians term “mystery of faith.” In my Catholic tradition, a mystery of faith is something that transcends and by design lies beyond human understanding and reason. These mysteries are hidden in God and can never be known to humans unless God reveals them. Logic alone cannot explain one’s backing of a particular article or doctrine of faith. There is beauty, grace, and deliverance all in its purest form on offer. The catch is that humans can never truly know a mystery on our own. It’s not that we Catholics revel in the irrationality of the truth claims of our religion. But rather that we appreciate there are things that cannot and will never be known through anything short of faith alone.
Appreciation of the way mysteries of faith resonate with Christians across denominations even today is, I think, what makes Farley’s intervention—linking Critical Race Theory with Christ’s death and resurrection and God’s ultimate sacrifice for all humankind—so astoundingly profound and powerful. As Farley so powerfully illustrates:
Slavery is death. It is time to abolish prison and replace it with nothing. It is time to free Dred and Harriet Scott. It is time to free ourselves and everyone. It is time to leave the tomb.
The conceits of the modern era are all around us written in ruin and in spectres of future ruin…Critical Race Theory is a flower in the midst of ruin. Critical Race Theory is said to be radical? Critical Race Theory is radical. Critical Race Theory, the stone that the builders refused, is as radical as the Gospels, as avante garde as philosophy, as American as the abolition of slavery, and as necessary as tomorrow” (P. 737).
Devout Christians of every denomination see the mysteries emanating from and through Christ’s life, death, and resurrection as central to everything that has been or ever will be. (The literal Alpha and Omega of everything.) That teaching is, to the most devout amongst us, a radical message that is just as true and salient today as it was two millennia ago. That is why Christians today still preach the Gospels—the literal “good word” brought to us by and through Christ.
Masterfully, Farley threads the needle here for Christians who may be weary of CRT today by embracing its brazen call to radically reorder and reconceive what it means to be American and how we relate to our forebearers, warts, abhorrent and unrelating racism, and all. That Farley chooses to make the case for CRT through Christian tongues is a strategic move in a nation that for better and worse is still deeply Christian in outlook and worldview.
Rather than shy away from the baggage that even the most progressive of Christian perspectives—including, as he names directly, a progressive but still marginalized movement called liberation theology—Farley embraces CRT as complementary to, and an expression of, Christian salvation. As Farley explains, CRT offers legal theory the promise of a flower breaking through ruins of the past. Yes, to many Americans CRT is radical in the sense that it forces us to engage with disturbing truths about our past and present. It also, similarly, makes demands of adherents that seem to ask too much, including an overarching commitment to deliverance that experiences on the ground suggest is impossible in our lifetimes—a day where racism in all its manifestations is ended.
And yet, as Farley so beautifully illustrates for faithful Christian eyes and ears that we should properly understand the possible futures that CRT promises us as sign of the coming Resurrection from this hellscape our forebearers foisted on us. As Farley explains, “Critical Race Theory is radical” to us now, which is why it is in part feared. (P. 737.) It is dangerous to those who do not have faith or, worse still, choose to reject faith despite being schooled in the greatest and most profound truths humans can know. In this way, the radical demands of CRT are not denied because they are earth-shattering and disturb the status quo. Instead, the breakthrough point is made that, just as we Christians can believe and teach things that seem beyond human understanding let alone possibility, so too can we have faith that CRT can set us all free.
There is without a doubt a war on CRT in our country right now. The realities of our current predicament and the treacherous journey of reckoning ahead are understandably enough to scare many Americans. And yet, perhaps to the Christians amongst us there is some sense of comfort to be had in recognizing that the precise features that make CRT radical today closely parallel what devout Christians have long celebrated about our faith in Christ. Despite our many differences as Americans, in parallel to the deep divides amongst Christians today, at our core faith in its purest sense has always been and remains today a radical invitation to deliver all of humanity for all times to a better tomorrow.