What can Christianity learn from Critical Race Theory? – ABC Religion & Ethics
—
I write this as both a Christian and a scholar working within Critical Race Theory. That combination is, for some, already enough to raise questions. Critical Race Theory is often received in Christian contexts as relativist, as politically loaded and fundamentally at odds with any robust commitment to truth. Christianity, on this account, affirms truth, while Critical Race Theory dissolves it.
That is not a position I recognise from within either tradition.
What Critical Race Theory offers is not a denial of truth, but a claim about how truth is known. As developed by scholars such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, it insists that knowledge is situated: that our social position shapes what we are able to see, and that perspectives formed at the margins can disclose aspects of reality that dominant accounts overlook.
The argument is not that truth is relative. It is that our access to truth is partial and structured by perspective. That is a claim Christianity is better placed to understand than it sometimes admits.
A faith I inherited, and one I married into
I was raised in the Congregational tradition, the son of an ordained minister. This was a context in which faith was thoughtful, careful and — if I am honest — suspicious of anything that appeared too certain about the mechanics of divine action. Theology was philosophical and while God was present; God was not present in ways that demanded immediate explanation.
In contrast, my mother-in-law is a pastor in a Nigerian church shaped by Pentecostal and charismatic traditions, albeit one that would describe itself as non-denominational. Here, Christianity speaks in a different register. Prayer is not simply reflective, it is expectant. The spiritual is not distant, but a real and active dimension of everyday life. God does things and is understood to do them now.
It would be flattering to present myself as an appreciative observer of these differences, but the reality is less flattering. My instinct is to read aspects of this unfamiliar expression of faith as superstitious or overly deterministic. I find myself wanting to translate what I encounter into categories that make it more familiar, and therefore more manageable.
That reaction is not neutral. It is an expression of my own standpoint, of what I have been formed to recognise as serious, credible and theologically sound.
Christianity as a tradition of situated truth
This is where the connection with Critical Race Theory becomes more than abstract. Christianity is not a tradition that speaks from a single, unmediated perspective. It is constituted through multiple voices, each situated, each partial. The four Gospels do not collapse into one another. They present overlapping, sometimes uncomfortable, accounts of the same Christ, shaped by different communities and concerns.
This plurality is not treated as a threat to truth, but as part of how truth is given. What we receive is not a view from nowhere, but a collection of testimonies that together resist reduction.
The structure of Christian revelation repeatedly privileges voices that would not otherwise be found at the centre of discourse. The first witnesses to the resurrection were not those whose testimony would carry the greatest cultural authority. The early church is forced, time and again, to recognise that its initial assumptions are insufficient when confronted with new contexts.
Christianity has always operated with an implicit recognition that truth is encountered through perspective.
What Critical Race Theory clarifies
Critical Race Theory makes that implicit recognition explicit, and more difficult to ignore. As Patricia Hill Collins argues, knowledge is shaped by social location. What appears as neutral or universal is often the product of a particular standpoint that has become dominant. Perspectives formed under conditions of marginalisation are not simply additional; they can be diagnostically significant, revealing what dominant perspectives obscure.
To take this seriously is not to abandon truth, but to refuse the assumption that any one perspective has exhausted it.
Want the best of Religion & Ethics delivered to your mailbox?
Sign up for our weekly newsletter.
This is, in part, what I am forced to confront in my own experience. My instinct to categorise African charismatic Christianity as superstitious may tell me less about its theological inadequacy than about the limits of my own frame of reference. What I am inclined to dismiss may, in fact, be attending to dimensions of Christian life that my own tradition has learned to understate.
That does not mean that all claims are equally valid. It does mean that discernment requires more than the confirmation of what already feels familiar.
The real point of tension
The difficulty is not that Christianity affirms truth while Critical Race Theory denies it. It is that both recognise, in different ways, that truth is encountered from somewhere — and that this “somewhere” matters.
The tension arises when Christianity forgets this about itself. When one cultural expression of faith comes to stand in for Christianity, alternative perspectives are easily recast as deviations rather than as contributions. The effect is not the preservation of truth, but its narrowing.
Critical Race Theory names this dynamic with some precision. It asks whose voices are heard, whose are discounted and how patterns of authority are established and maintained. Those are not foreign questions. They are ones Christianity has, at its best, asked of itself.
What might be learned
What, then, might Christianity learn here? Not that truth is relative, but that our apprehension of it is limited. Not that doctrine is dispensable, but that its articulation is always situated. Not that all perspectives are equal, but that some have been too readily dismissed.
More uncomfortably, it might learn that the experience of dissonance, of encountering forms of faith that do not fit our expectations, is not necessarily a signal of error. It may instead be an indication that we are being asked to see differently.
A more demanding humility
It is easier to defend truth in the abstract than to recognise the limits of our own perspective in practice. It is easier to identify error elsewhere than to ask what we might be failing to see.
If Christianity has something to gain from engaging Critical Race Theory, it is not a new doctrine of truth, but a renewed attentiveness to how truth is encountered. A willingness to listen more carefully, particularly where we are least inclined to do so.
That is not relativism. It is, perhaps, a more demanding form of faith.
Nick Cartwright is Associate Professor and Director of Student Success in the School of Law at the University of Leeds.
Posted 27 Apr 2026Mon 27 Apr 2026 at 4:02pm, updated 23 hours agoThu 30 Apr 2026 at 3:53am
