The manufactured belief that CRT is merely a continuation of civil rights–era efforts to ensure equality of opportunity provides valuable cover for those pushing race-conscious policies and practices that prioritize equity in outcomes.

On a recent episode of his cable television program, Bill Maher asked Bernie Sanders to explain the difference between equality and equity, and the long-winded senator was at an unusual loss for words.
“I don’t know what the answer to that is,” Sanders mumbled after an awkward pause. Pressed to clarify his position, Sanders composed himself and offered only that he supports “equality of opportunity” over equal outcomes. He does?
If this answer is sincere, it would put Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, substantially to the right of the “equity”-obsessed Biden administration and today’s public education establishment. If, on the other hand, Sanders was merely being politically adroit, his answer demonstrates how quickly the Left’s language game breaks down when basic definitions are required.
Sanders isn’t dumb. He knows what the legacy media are loath to admit, particularly on the issue of racial inequality: most Americans, including most Democrats, strongly favor equality of opportunity over government’s assurance of equitable results.
One reason the Left doesn’t want this debate can be seen in the fight over teaching critical race theory in American schools. Recall that CRT bills itself as an academic theory that emphasizes how race intersects with societal institutions to reproduce and sustain unequal outcomes observed across racial groups today. Focusing only on whether CRT is formally being taught in K–12 lesson plans, however, is a distraction. The Left prefers to keep the dispute focused on this point of contention, which boils down to precise definitions, because it obscures a larger fight: a clash between politically popular principles of color blindness and nondiscrimination, on the one hand, and deeply unpopular schooling policies and practices that emphasize race-consciousness and equitable outcomes, on the other.
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There’s nothing wrong with United Methodists wanting to have good interfaith relations, whether it’s with Pagans, Jews, Muslims, atheists,  or adherents of other religions. There’s also no problem with studying other philosophies and theologies that are non-Christian, but doing so from a distinctively Christian standpoint. Yet, given that Iliff has an admissions counselor who is pagan, multiple student-elected leaders who are pagan, a web page highlighting one of their pagan students and a class dedicated to pagan spirituality, the situation seems go beyond just seeking good interreligious relations.

One might assume that the official seminaries established and still heavily funded by the United Methodist Church would have a core commitment to the Christian faith, broadly understood. More informed United Methodists would at least expect that even the progressivism in our seminaries would remain Christian liberalism. But our denomination’s Iliff School of Theology in Denver has actually progressed so far to be oddly atheism-friendly and actually promote completely different religions – Unitarian Universalism and outright Paganism. And Iliff’s pagan connections run deeper than many realize.
Iliff, as a United Methodist seminary, receives funding from the church’s Ministerial Education Fund (MEF). The MEF is a large chunk of the apportionment payments demanded of local United Methodist congregations. According to official data compiled by Joe Kilpatrick, between 2009-2016, Iliff was supported by an average contribution of $806,763 per year from the fund. But with all of that money, they only educated an annual average of a mere 11 people ordained into American United Methodist ministry (out of a yearly average of 516 total ordinands). Iliff is not merely generously subsidized by United Methodist apportionments, but it is disproportionately supported, receiving an average of $71,712 per ordinand, well above the $48,942-per-ordinand average for all 13 official U.S. United Methodist seminaries. (Attempts to seek updated statistics from the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry, the General Council on Finance and Administration, and Iliff itself were unsuccessful.)
Given this amount of support, it may surprise the average United Methodist that Iliff intentionally trains clergy to promote Unitarian Universalism and that outright Paganism is openly practiced by people who study and work at Iliff.
Iliff’s extensive statement of its many “Core Values” makes clear the United Methodist seminary’s commitment to intersectional, progressive social justice, but says nothing directly about God, Jesus Christ, or the Bible. This official statement does not even have anything particularly Christian beyond passing references to the school’s “United Methodist heritage.” Another official statement declares, “Support of the LGBTQIA+ community is a core value at Iliff” and reports, “Since we began tracking the metrics in 2015, 35% of our student body has consistently identified as LGBTQIA+.” In deference to this constituency, the seminary has offered an entire course devoted to “Queer Spirituality in the Visual Arts,” in which students can explore such topics as “Queer Tarot.”
Iliff School of Theology: where commitment to the LGBTQIA+ cause is a core value, but following Jesus Christ is not.
This sidelining of Christianity seems to deliberately reflect the school’s commitment to a pluralist religious ethos. One current staffer and alumna has publicly said, “The Iliff School of Theology is a United Methodist school of higher education but its alumni and students are Hindus, Universalists, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics….” An alumni profiles section of the website—the sort of place where schools brag about select alumni of whom they are particularly proud and with whom they want to publicly identify the institution’s reputation—includes a glowing profile of a minister of a “social justice-oriented” United Methodist congregation in Iowa in which “people identify as Catholic, Methodist, Buddhists, Unitarians, agnostics and spiritual seekers.”
Apparently, even something as basic as belief in God is not a boundary for Iliff. The alumni profiles section also celebrates a chaplain who is part of the atheistic American Humanist Society. And a faculty profile highlights an Iliff professor who “now describes himself as a ‘lapsed Buddhist,’ and a current atheist.”
Iliff’s influences from neo-paganism and Unitarian Universalism are especially noteworthy. The former is a loose movement of Westerners rejecting mainstream religion to re-adopt various religious beliefs and practices from pre-Christian Europe. The latter is a liberal, post-Christian religion known for its belief in the relativistic equality of different religions. Unitarian Universalists often call themselves “UUs” for short.
Even when students first apply to Iliff, they may interact with an admissions representative who is a self-described member of the “LGBTIQ+ community” and pagan priestess, or as her official bio puts it, she “is ordained with a Norse pagan organization called Forn Sidr of America and serves as their Gudellri/head clergy.” Shouldn’t official ambassadors for a school so heavily funded by the UMC be Methodist, or at least some sort of Christian?
Such pagan influence is seen in the culture of Iliff’s student body. The seminary’s student government is “an elected representative body” called the student Senate. An official seminary email sent in November to alumni celebrated the election of five student leaders to this body. Two stand out in particular: Kyndyl Greyland and David Dashifen Kees.
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Things aren’t exactly as they were during those heady days when that first T4G conference took place. We were a happy bunch then, but we are a divided bunch now—roiled over some of the issues I outlined in my concerns, with brawls over social justice and complementarianism chief among them. Collin Hansen proved prescient in his breakout session at the 2018 T4G conference assessing YRR 10 years after his book. Sadly, T4G is no more after this year for a number of reasons, including the divisions that have occurred among Reformed brothers.

Augustine famously wrote in his classic testimony, Confessions, that the human heart is restless till it finds rest in God. Indeed, the best of us can suffer from restlessness at times.
Yet, there remains a restlessness for some within this movement that leaves me concerned. We’re not as young as we used to be, many of us are still Reformed, but too many remain restless in terms of how their theology and ethics land on the ground. In what follows, I will offer six reflections on those concerns.
(If you haven’t read my positive reflections in Part 1, now would be a good time to hear those before reading on.)
1. A Loss of the Complementarity of Law and Gospel.
The Westminster divines and the framers of the Second London Confession gave robust expression to Reformed Theology out of a clear-headed understanding of the complementarity between law and gospel. Yes, the law says “do” and the gospel says “done,” but you cannot understand the holiness of God, man’s need, and the fulsome glory of what Christ did at Calvary without the law.
As Robert Haldane said in his classic commentary on Romans, “Men perceive themselves to be sinners in proportion as they have previously discovered the holiness of God and his law.”[1]
My generation struggled with legalism. In church we talked a lot about which movies were off-limits for believers, whether rock or country music was from God or the Devil, and whether it was a sin for women to wear shorts during summer.
I fear this generation risks over-correcting the previous generation’s error and is slouching toward antinomianism. There seems to be skepticism when it comes to proclaiming the imperatives of Scripture, with such preaching often dismissed as legalism or old-school fundamentalism.
Christian liberty seems to be more in vogue among younger Reformed evangelicals today. This has led to numerous ugly moral failures of several well-known leaders and a generation that is becoming intimately acquainted with the phrase “deconstructing my faith.” Legalism and antinomianism are equally deadly ditches; we need to recover the biblical equilibrium.
2. An Imbalanced Preference of the Mind over a Commitment to Godliness.
Mark Noll’s important 1995 book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind awakened evangelicals of the need to recover a Christian mind, which was one of the great entailments of the Protestant Reformation. I couldn’t agree more. However, I often hear people lauded for their brilliant mind but seem to hear less about their godliness or humility.
Without question, Reformed Theology is a sublime and deeply satisfying exercise of the mind. But we need to recover the balance of our Puritan forefathers such as Jonathan Edwards and John Owen who were among the most luminous intellectual lights in church history and men of profound humility and holiness. Sound doctrine should lead to sound living.
3. A Tendency to Bracket Off Same-Sex Attraction into a Special, Protected Species of Sin.
I have been deeply concerned by the number of writers, pastors, and teachers over the past few years who have openly and rather matter-of-factly identified as same-sex attracted (SSA). Some who struggle with SSA have written on it helpfully and hopefully, but a few seem fixated on SSA and at least insinuate that it is part of their fundamental identity. The Revoice conference comes particularly to mind here.
Same-sex attraction is a bonafide struggle for some and the church should compassionately and patiently apply the healing balm of the gospel to that struggle. But we should never make a particular sin a part of our identity and wallow in it as if to signal to our LGBTQ+-sympathizing neighbors, “See, we’re not such narrow-minded bigots after all.” I fear flirtation may lead to celebration. It is one of the few sins today that receives such kid gloves treatment with an almost protected status. But as John Owen famously said, we must be killing sin, or it will kill us—no matter what form that sin takes, no matter how culturally relevant that sin struggle is.
The term “gay Christian” is dangerous and grossly unbiblical. Can you imagine adopting the descriptor “adulterer Christian” or “homicidally angry Christian” or “covetous Christian”? And even in the church we are attacking the binaries of male and female when God has filled creation with binaries.
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