Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe by Dr. Voddie T. Baucham, Jr., is the number one bestseller in its category in Amazon as of this writing in early August, 2021. The book was released in April, and yet it already has five thousand customer reviews, 94% of which award the book five-stars. Given that Fault Lines is not receiving the kind of major-media, saturation coverage that a bestseller might expect, many of those thousands of reviews are fueled by enthusiastic word-of-mouth.
Fault Lines deserves its phenomenal success. Don’t let its “Evangelical” subtitle fool you. I’m no Evangelical, but I will happily join my five-star review to the thousands of others. Baucham’s presentation of the history and current profile of critical theory is accessible to all readers. Even non-Christians can benefit from understanding how the majority faith of Americans is being corrupted. Finally, as a Christian, Baucham offers hope for the future. Even non-Christians can apply some of Baucham’s recommendations.
Fault Lines is one of many recent books struggling to take readers by the hand and guide them through our current cultural moment, of pupils suddenly being asked to inform their teachers of their “preferred pronouns,” of toppling statues, burning cities, and careers ruined by one suspect utterance. Fault Lines belongs on the same bookshelf as James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose’s Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity – And Why This Harms Everybody, as well as Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity. Cynical Theories goes into greater detail on the roots of today’s hysteria, and its authors are Christophobic atheists who hold up a vague and unhistorical notion of “The Enlightenment” as our salvation. Douglas Murray, a former Christian and current atheist, appears to despair of any hope; rather, he’s given to dire prognostications: “The US is on the brink of Civil War;” Murray has said; the Western world is “standing on the precipice” of cultural annihilation.
Voddie T. Baucham has one up on Lindsey, Pluckrose, and Murray. Yes, Baucham recognizes how bad things are. “The United States is on the verge of a race war, if not a complete cultural meltdown,” Baucham predicts. But Baucham offers hope, and he offers healing. He finds both in Christian faith. Again, though, you don’t have to be a Christian to benefit from reading Fault Lines.
Fault Lines is very reader-friendly. Lindsey and Pluckrose offer much more detailed and academic surveys of how Marxism’s twisted evolution lead to the concept of “microaggressions” and social media videos in which obese women insist that if you aren’t sexually attracted to them you are a bigot. Like those authors, Baucham also introduces his reader to influential progenitors of Woke like Antonio Gramsci, Derrick Bell, Kimberle Crenshaw, and Peggy McIntosh, but more briefly. Clearly, Baucham exhibits the Evangelical’s zeal to reach the maximum audience with the deepest truths, while never allowing academic jargon to get in the way. This is a book you could understand even if you were reading it in a noisy and crowded subway car. Its ease of reading in no way diminishes its profundity.