Book Review: Voddie Baucham's Fault Lines

Baucham’s book, Fault Lines, is an indispensable guide to how the modern Social Justice movement is affecting the otherwise orthodox Christian Church in America. Heavily footnoted with plenty of primary sources, Baucham makes the case that America’s preoccupation with “antiracism” is not simply a social movement but an inherently religious movement, and that evangelicals are jumping on the bandwagon without perhaps realizing the origins, goals, and theology of the movement they are supporting.

Frankly, in our current climate this is a book only a black man could write. As it is, Baucham is having to endure much criticism from all points of the compass for standing up and exposing the lies, the fallacies, the media exaggerations, the duplicitous statistics, and the religious nature and hidden agendas of Critical Race Theory and BLM. For example, Baucham walks through the latest examples of the shootings of black people by police, and using documented facts that are beyond dispute, eviscerates the narrative promoted by the media and BLM.

He’s not shy about naming names and organizations of evangelicals who have capitulated to the modern cultural current, and he demonstrates that biblical truth is the real victim. In all cases, Baucham critiques by using the individual’s or organization’s own explicit, public statements. The Southern Baptist Convention in particular takes it right on the nose, as well as a number of popular preachers.

The seduction of the antiracism movement is located in the fact that many of their particular concerns are indeed legitimate. There is a measure of racism in America (as there is everywhere). There are benefits that accrue automatically to the majority culture. Black people in America have suffered historically and have experienced oppression. These statements are true, but the conclusions and solutions which the Social Justice movement elicits from these observations are neither true nor helpful.

The Social Justice Warriors are engaged in an argumentation involving major premise, minor premise, conclusion. A sample of their logic looks something like this: major premise: all white people are racist; minor premise: you are white; conclusion: therefore you are a racist. As constructed it is a logically valid argument. However it is a true argument only if both premises are true. But the major premise is false, and from a biblical perspective, slanderous.

What Baucham shows is that if you accept the assumptions that begin the Social Justice contentions (i.e., the major premise), you will inevitably lose the argument. But in truth, those assumptions are terribly flawed (and unbiblical). There’s also a compression of history in the Social Justice thinking, as though it was only yesterday that slavery existed in America. There’s a willing blindness to the fact that that equality before the law for all races and ethnic groups has long been established in America.

If you’ve been struggling with (a) knowing that there are forms of oppression in our society, but (b) sensing that the Social Justice Warriors have grossly overstated the problem and seem to be following a hidden agenda, then Voddie Baucham’s Fault Lines is the book you need to read. It is irenic in tone, accessible and well-documented. Five stars, highly recommended.