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What is the biblical approach to things like racism and the social justice movement? Can education be morally neutral? Should we trust the government to educate our children?

Pastor Voddie Baucham joins us all the way from Zambia to discuss these questions and more. Want to dig deeper into some of the questions discussed in this episode? Check out Voddie’s book Fault Lines.

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode.

Marlin Detweiler:

Good day! Today on Veritas Vox, we have a very special guest, Voddie Baucham. Voddie has been a dear friend of the Detweilers and of Veritas for many years, maybe as many as 20. I don't even remember anymore. Welcome, Voddie. Tell us from where you are making your appearance.

Voddie Baucham:

Yeah, I'm in Lusaka, Zambia, the capital city here in Zambia. We've been here for the last seven years, serving with the Reformed Baptist Churches of Zambia to help start the African Christian University. So I'm serving as the Dean of the School of Divinity here.

Marlin Detweiler:

That is wonderful. Well, since you've given a little bit of personal background, let's go back further. Tell us about your family, your background, and how you came to Christ.

Voddie Baucham:

I was raised by a single teenage Buddhist mother in Los Angeles, California, and I never heard the gospel until my first year in university. And it was there that I really came face to face with the person and work of Christ and had a gentleman come and share Christ with me. We spent a couple of weeks really answering questions that I had, which was really interesting because...

Marlin Detweiler:

This was at Rice?

Voddie Baucham:

Actually, this is before that– this was in New Mexico at New Mexico State University, which is a whole nother story.

Marlin Detweiler:

I never heard that story.

Voddie Baucham:

No, I was headed to the Air Force Academy. I had made a commitment to go to the Air Force Academy. And then my uncle, who had served 22 years in the Marine Corps, talked me out of that. And anyway, by that time, it was really late in the game. I had visited New Mexico State because of one particular strength coach who was there. Ended up just saying, “Okay, fine I'll go there.” And when I–

Marlin Detweiler:

You haven’t said, so I'm going to make sure that everybody listening knows that you played football in college. So we need this strength coach, because football?

Voddie Baucham:

Yeah, absolutely. And so I decided to go there really just to spend a year there because it was too late for some of the other schools that I was interested in. And interestingly enough, that strength coach was no longer there. And that's where I ended up hearing the gospel. I hear the gospel, I come to faith, and then a semester later, I'm gone. I’m off to Rice University. So it was just this jaunt over to Las Cruces, New Mexico, really, so that I could hear the gospel. And so that's where I came to faith. That's where my faith journey started. I started preaching about a year and a half after that, which was a very interesting time for me.

But I got married my sophomore year, somewhere between my sophomore and junior year. I married Bridget, and ten months later, our first child was born. And here we are, nearly 33 years later, nine children later, and still going strong.

Marlin Detweiler:

Something else I remember about you from your first visit to Lancaster, where we met in person; we hadn’t talked before that, was that you are very much a foodie. You love finding great restaurants. Is that still an interest?

Voddie Baucham:

It really is. And really, it's not just finding restaurants. I love to cook, and that's really a passion of mine. And I do love a great restaurant, but I go to a great restaurant, and then I'll spend the next month or so trying to recreate that great meal that I had.

Marlin Detweiler:

That's great.

Voddie Baucham:

Yeah, I am very much a foodie. Yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:

What took you to Zambia? To Africa?

Voddie Baucham:

Really it was this opportunity with the African Christian University. The Reformed Baptist Churches of Zambia were working toward starting a classical Christian, liberal arts, biblical worldview, university, and a very unique opportunity. And it was something that I was just perfectly suited for. And I had been coming to Zambia for about eight years, almost every year, for about eight years and I fell in love with the place.

I remember the first time I came, I went home, and Bridget asked me how it went, and I said, I think I might want to be buried there. So when this opportunity arose, it just became obvious. And we made a family trip in 2014 in August, and during that trip, Bridget looked at me and said, “You need to be here.”

Marlin Detweiler:

Wow!

Voddie Baucham:

Well, we went back and put it before our elders and our church in Houston. And they were not surprised at all. They knew that for eight years, I'd been thinking about this. And so our elders said, “Yeah, we agree.” And so, the following August, we were on the ground in Lusaka. So within one year of that last visit, Bridget and I and our seven youngest children were here on the ground. And that was seven years ago, August.

Marlin Detweiler:

That's incredible. It caught me by surprise when I heard about it. I think you've probably been there a couple of years before I even realized you were gone from Houston. Interesting!

You wrote a book, I don’t know the year came out, called Faultlines. Many people listening will almost certainly know about it. I'm sure many will have read it. What prompted you to write the book?

Voddie Baucham:

Yeah, that came out in 2021. Came out last year.

Marlin Detweiler:

It is that. It really was timely. I think I know what prompted that, but you tell us.

Voddie Baucham:

Yeah. These are things that I've been thinking about and speaking about for a long time. But really, with the death of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and really the explosion of the critical social justice movement, and especially among and within evangelical circles, it was sort of this perfect storm that just led me to feel like I needed to do something. I needed to say something, and I needed to write something. And it was difficult to find a publisher even willing to publish that book.

Marlin Detweiler:

Is that right?

Voddie Baucham:

Oh, yeah! I mean, very few Christian publishers– in fact, I'm not aware of a single major Christian publisher that has published an anti-social justice book other than Salem. And Salem is not a major Christian publication. Salem's a rather new kid on the block. They're an imprint of Regnery, and Salem has published several anti-critical social justice, anti-woke, if you will, anti-CRT kind of books. But I don't think any of the major Christian publishers have published a single anti-social justice book. Not that I'm aware of. If they have, then I've just. Just missed it. And nobody wanted to touch mine either.

Marlin Detweiler:

Talk to us about the premise in the book and the way that you want to cause people to think about these things.

Voddie Baucham:

I'm arguing that the critical social justice movement is rooted in a worldview that is alien to biblical Christianity. It's antithetical to biblical Christianity and it's antagonistic to biblical Christianity. And that this alien worldview is, in fact, a religion of sorts. It is cultic in its nature, and we need to stand against it. Ultimately, I come back to 2 Corinthians 10 and argue that we need to follow Paul's admonition to take every thought captive. Right? But also to destroy arguments of lofty opinions raised against the knowledge of God. That we need to have that twofold perspective and approach to this particular issue, that we need to be exposing these things and destroying these things, and that we need to be thinking biblically about issues of justice and culture, and so on and so forth. So in a lot of ways, I'm doing what I've done for a long time. I'm just focusing on this contemporary issue that I believe is a poison pill for the church.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, I've seen some churches really swallow the pill. And it did produce the effect of a poison. It was really something divisive and problematic. So here I am–

Voddie Baucham:

And it's really divisive and problematic because it sounds– it's just like Satan, right? He's masquerading as an angel of light. Justice. What Christian’s not for justice? And then we hear social justice, and we hear racial justice and anti-racism. Well, I mean, I'm not pro-racism. So certainly, anti-racism sounds good.

But all of these ideas, are really cloaked, and they're masquerading as angels of light. And when you sort of pull back the veil, you see that these things don't mean what they sound like they mean and that they are actually enemies of Christ.

Marlin Detweiler:

Well, I'm going to I want to give you two questions related to that. The first one, I'll give them both to you at the same time because you might want to put them together in how you answer.

The first one is I am– our audience is generally the WASP, the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. In the little town I grew up in, I had no blacks living in it. I didn't I didn't grow up around blacks and didn't have black friends in the neighborhood. The high school I went to had no blacks graduate from it. In retrospect, I think there was there were some racists that caused that to be the case. It's not the case anymore. But I didn't grow up in a racist family. I didn't grow up thinking racist thoughts. But I get pigeonholed. And yet I believe what you say. I want to say what you said, but I can't. What's going on there? What do we do about it?

Voddie Baucham:

Yeah, that was another real motivator for me in writing this book. I have so many friends, brothers, and sisters in ministry who will say to me almost exactly what you said. Right? They'll say, “I've got issues. I've got questions, but I can't say that, or I can't address that. Or the minute that I address that, there are assumptions made. There are accusations made.” And so because of that, a lot of these things weren't really being dealt with. They weren't really being discussed. And so I sort of felt an obligation to say things that others, in a very real way, couldn't say in order to move this conversation further. And it's ironic. Everybody's talking about “We need to have a conversation about race!” But then they say that “White people need to sit down, shut up, and elevate black voices.”

So how are we having a conversation if white people have to sit down, shut up, elevate black voices and be and be called racist? If and when they say anything. So really, that was part of my motivation for writing this book, and for putting this book out there is to force the conversation. And it's really ironic because everybody– a lot of the people out there are talking about, “We need to have the conversation. We need to have a conversation!” They don't want a conversation. They want a monologue. And the minute anybody pushes back, then all of a sudden, things get shut down. So, those were kind of motivating factors for me.

So I identify with that circumstance that you shared because I've seen it so many times, and I believe we've got to get beyond it. I also believe that issue really reminded us that we weren't as unified as we thought we were because if you can't say certain things to me for fear of being shut down, then we don't have the relationship that we were pretending to have.

Marlin Detweiler:

Very, very good point. Very good point. So the book really addresses this problem of woke CRT monologue approach to where we are in a way that's very unfortunate. I'm not interested in a political conversation here, although to the extent that it needs to be, so be it. I'm far more interested in the biblical conversation.

What is the status of racism in America? Tell me what you do believe is for real. And then what should we do? Let's have a biblical approach to real solutions rather than just worrying about the fight there. I love the idea of ignoring an irrational voice while doing rational things.

Voddie Baucham:

Yeah, absolutely. What's ironic about this whole anti-racist movement is that it moves us away from real answers to real problems. Racism is a real problem. Racism is real. But what the critical social justice movement and the anti-racist movement says is that racism is not a matter of the individual heart. Racism is a matter of structures and systems that create inequities. So when the anti-racist movement talks about racism, they're talking about systems and structures, not individuals and not the human heart. The great irony, of course, is that for us as Christians, we know that the answer– racism is real. We know that. But we also know that the answer to racism is a real answer. It's the person and work of Christ applied to the individual human heart. It is calling sin, sin. And calling sinners to repent. But in the anti-racist movement, you have, and this is a direct quote, “Racism without racists.” So what they're doing is they're moving away from the real problem.

Here's the other problem. The other problem is that America is one of the least racist, multiethnic countries in the world.

Period. Full stop.

America is one of the least racist, multi-ethnic countries in the world. I mean, if you want to see real racism, you need to spend some time in some Asian countries and hear how some Asian groups address, talk about and think about other Asian groups, for example. Even where I am, on the African continent, you have that same issue here.

One of the things I write about in the book is how I have a friend here– he was born and raised here in Zambia, but his parents are from India. His parents immigrated from India. He was born and raised here. He's not considered a Zambian because he's not black. Like, that's the reality on the ground here, is that you don't really consider people Zambian unless they're black. Well. Well, that's racist!

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, that is!

Voddie Baucham:

But in America, anyone can come and be in America. I love watching the Olympics. One of the things I love about the Olympics is how you watch whatever sports you want to watch. And America has people who look like the people from every other country in the Olympics, right?

Marlin Detweiler:

That's right! That never dawned on me, but you're absolutely right.

Voddie Baucham:

All these other countries– everybody looks exactly the same. And then here's America, or some place like Great Britain and the United Kingdom, whatever, there's very few places in the world that have the kind of melting pot that exists in the United States and the kind of camaraderie that exists. And the kind of history that we have of actually confronting and dealing with racism.

People talk about racism today in America like there was no Civil War. And like and like there were no 13th, 14th, 15th amendment. Like there was no Civil Rights Act. Like there was no Voting Rights Act. I mean, we changed our Constitution!

Here's another thing. Right. So the US Constitution came with ten amendments.

Marlin Detweiler:

Right.

Voddie Baucham:

So here we are with our original constitution, and we have ten amendments. We end slavery within the lifetime of people who founded America. We're talking about people who are in their seventies. You know what I'm saying? And so we end slavery. And it's the 13th Amendment, which means there were only two other times in the history of America that the Constitution had been amended.

And the third time we amend it was to end slavery. And yet we talk like all America has ever been, all America has ever done, is rooted in grounded in slavery. No. No, absolutely not. When you look at the founding of the country, when you look at the establishment of our republic and our Constitution, and you look at that relatively short period of history.

The other thing is that racism and slavery exist everywhere in the world. Only in the West, only in the Christian West, for the first time do you have a moral argument against slavery being made. And the West had to use its power in order to force the rest of the world to end slavery.

One more thing. There are more slaves in the world today than there were at the height of American slavery.

Marlin Detweiler:

Wow. We live, as they say, in interesting times. And, of course, that's an understatement. I am so glad to hear your voice. We could go on for a long time on this, but I want to cover some other things. I'm sorry I got you wound up! You got me wound up! The audience is probably wound up, but we're going to move on.

You also have very passionately communicated idea you've championed that people need to leave the public or government schools. Tell us why.

Voddie Baucham:

Yeah, I think for a number of reasons. I think one thing is sphere of sovereignty. That God gives us these three spheres, these three jurisdictions. He gives us the family and the church and the state. Education was never put under the jurisdiction of the state. Talking about the US Constitution, you don't find education in the US Constitution. You don't have mandatory education until the very late 1800s.

By 1900 still, two-thirds of all students were being educated at home or at church. The American Educational system was founded by radical Unitarians, who had as one of their primary goals what they called the elimination of religious superstition. They wanted to get education out of the hands of the church and the family, and they wanted to inculcate students in secular humanism.

Also, it has Marxist roots. Public education, government education – that's the 10th pillar in the Communist Manifesto. So this is not what we're called to. People talk about reforming government education. To reform something needs to take it back to its original intended purpose, and the original intended purpose of mandatory government education in the United States is anti-Christian.

And now our schools are anti-Christian by federal mandate. It is against the law for our schools, for government schools in the United States to be pro-Christ; that's illegal. So we need to recognize that education is discipleship between kindergarten and 12th-grade students. It's 14,000 instructional hours in school. 14,000 instructional hours. And the Bible tells us that a pupil is not above his teacher, but everyone, when he is fully trained, will be like his teacher.

And in the government education system, the teacher is the curriculum, and that curriculum is anti-Christian by federal mandate.

Marlin Detweiler:

I’ve said this before, and it might have even been in the context of another episode of Veritas Vox's podcast, but I've Googled the top ten events in history, and I have not found a single list. I think I went eight or ten pages deep and didn't find a single list that included the birth of Christ, the incarnation, the resurrection, whatever you want to say of the events surrounding Christ coming to Earth, and God becoming man. Not one of them had that on there. And I don't care how radical an atheist you are, no one can deny the significance of Jesus Christ in history. And yet we're so afraid of it as secular people that we won't even put it on the list.

Voddie Baucham:

Yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:

I couldn't agree more with you. It matters who writes history. It matters the perspective of the teacher. And I was there. I didn't understand that education is not simply something to which you add flavor to. It is necessarily born out of some form of religious philosophy, even if that is atheism or agnosticism. It can't be morally neutral and have no kind of flavor.

Voddie Baucham:

No, it really can't be. And it never has been, and it never will be. And so we need to recognize that we have a duty, a responsibility, and an obligation to our children.

Marlin Detweiler:

And know you to be a bit entrepreneurial. Do you have a sense of trajectory of how people like me and our opportunity to provide some level of influence at Veritas and others, how we help get that message into the hands of Christian parents?

Voddie Baucham:

Boy, it's tough because the overwhelming majority of Christian parents send their children to government schools. We just have to not grow weary in doing well. We have to continue to contend for this. We have to continue to speak the truth and love. We have to continue to try to open people's eyes, educate them. And I think that I think Covid was really helpful in that regard because a lot of people had to bring their kids home.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yes.

Voddie Baucham:

And several things happened as a result of that.

Number one, a lot of people, a lot of Christians, saw their children for the first time in a long time. And when I say “saw them”, I mean they recognized their children's character and worldview, and they recognized it as something foreign because their kids just go off to school every day. They have no idea what's happening at school every day. Now the kid is at home, and you're forced to work with them and be with them in ways that you haven’t. And a lot of parents just recognized, “I don't know who this child is, I don't know what this worldview is.”

The second thing that happened is a lot of people got to see the work that their children were doing and recognized that there wasn't much there.

And then a third thing is a lot of people got to experience the great challenge, but the great benefit of discipling their children like that. and so I think, all of these things together– I've talked to a number of people who've decided not to go back, and who've decided to do things differently. And that's been very encouraging.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, I hope it sticks. As we humans have short memories. And we need to be diligent. You're absolutely right. We should not tire in doing what we know we need to do. Thanks.

One last question. What appeals to you about classical Christian education? What was it that caused you to be interested?

Voddie Baucham:

Wow. We started homeschooling. Our oldest two children went to Christian school, the traditional Christian school. And my wife was a schoolteacher. She taught in the public school. So that was never an option for us because we knew what was there, right? By the way, public school teachers are twice as likely as the rest of the population to have their children in private school.

Marlin Detweiler:

Really?

Voddie Baucham:

Yes. Twice as likely

Marlin Detweiler:

I've never heard that!

Voddie Baucham:

Yeah! It says it says a lot when you're willing to pay money, not to use your own product for free. Right?! And so we ended up deciding to homeschool. And almost immediately, I had this feeling that a lot of new homeschoolers have. I just realized that I had more degrees than a thermometer, but I was not well-educated. I was schooled but not well-educated.

And the things that the children were learning and the things that we were teaching our children. And then we started thinking more about the philosophy of education. And that's when the investigation sort of opened up to classical education. And it was like a light went off. There's a reason that classical education has stood the test of time.

There's a reason for the idea of holding on to and preserving the highest and best and then passing that on to the next generation to give them a foundation upon which they can build. There's a reason that has stood the test of time. There's a reason that the classics are understood to be classics.

And so, I do all of that just sort of led us through this process where bit by bit, we moved into the world of classical education. And now, again, African Christian University is a classical university. We're here in the heart of sub-Saharan Africa when all of our students take Latin their whole freshman year. So, I mean, we're a full-on classical liberal arts university and excited about the fruit.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, that is wonderful. Yeah, when we first got started in classical education was 1992. I did a fair amount of public speaking, talking about what could be in this education. Now, 30 years later, I look back, and I see the product, and I see the results, and boy I was right. And it is important.

Voddie Baucham:

Amen.

Marlin Detweiler:

Well, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much for joining me and sharing your heart.

Voddie Baucham:

You're most welcome. It’s been a pleasure.

Marlin Detweiler:

I hope the next time you're in Lancaster– I know you were there, and you didn't tell me because I had a guy working for me that was at your talk at a church there. And I know you're a lot of things, but next time you're there, you come to Lancaster. We'll get out of the apps that you use, find the restaurant you want to go to, and I'm buying.

Voddie Baucham:

All right, that sounds good! And there's some good places around there.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, there are. We can go to Philadelphia too, which is even better!

Voddie Baucham:

Yeah!

Marlin Detweiler:

Thank you so much. This is Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. We've had Voddie Baucham: with us today. He has a lot to say, and I hope you're listening. Thank you so much.