One ugly paragraph, and the whole shelf comes down. That is how many Christians reason when an admired teacher’s racism comes to light: if he could be that wrong about Black people, how can I trust anything he said about God? You do not have to throw everything out. You also cannot defend what he wrote or quietly skip past it. The work is to test whether the teacher’s true insight actually depends on the prejudice, to name the prejudice as sin in plain words, and to stop asking any human teacher to carry the trust that belongs to Christ alone.
That answer is easy to state and hard to live, especially when the teacher is the one who first made your faith make sense. So it helps to look at how the all-or-nothing verdict forms, at one case worked through in detail, and at where the real dividing line falls.
The all-or-nothing verdict grows out of how admiration works
Lisa Fields, founder of Jude 3 Project and author of When Heroes Fall, traces the problem to a pattern psychologists call the halo effect. A powerful first encounter with someone’s work leads us to assume the rest of their life matches that encounter. She is careful not to treat this as a strange failing: “it’s a normal human experience to do that.” Its mirror image is the horn effect, where one negative discovery colors everything. Fields compares the pair to celebrity culture and cancel culture. You want to know everything about the person you admire, and then one revelation and the file is deleted.
The two effects look like opposites, but they share an assumption. Both treat a person as all of one thing. The halo says this person is safe everywhere. The horn says this person is poison everywhere. Neither leaves room for the ordinary truth that a person can be deeply right in one area and badly wrong in another. As Fields puts it, “I think if we’re not healthy, we throw everything away and we can’t parse through the things.”
Dr. Vincent Bacote, professor of theology at Wheaton College, where he directs the Center for Applied Christian Ethics, adds a reason the halo forms so easily among Christians. Recommendations do quiet work. A trusted friend says you have to read this author, and somewhere in the handoff the endorsement swells into a guarantee. The reader comes away believing, in Bacote’s words, “they’re great and 100% safe.” Church history books can do the same thing. Bacote remembers meeting the man his textbook called the founder of modern missions, along with other celebrated figures, presented as emblems, with the unspoken suggestion that each was “not exactly a messiah, but maybe a little messiah.” That presentation, he says, is a setup. The closer you get to the person, the closer you get to the day the halo slips.
One theologian’s encounter with Abraham Kuyper
Bacote’s own story makes the question concrete. In seminary he was searching for a biblical case that Christians should engage culture, politics and work, not only Sunday worship. He had the instinct but not the argument: “I was looking for theological language for what was only a theological intuition for me.” He found it in Lectures on Calvinism by the Dutch Calvinist Abraham Kuyper, especially in Kuyper’s doctrine of common grace. As Bacote summarizes it, God gave humanity responsibility for the world in Genesis 1, never revoked that charge, and keeps preserving the world so that the work can go on.
The same chapter held a warning sign. Describing how history unfolds, Kuyper sorted humanity by the sons of Noah and wrote that no impulse toward higher life had ever come from the line of Ham. Bacote decided to let that pass as a familiar piece of old nonsense. Then, six pages from the end of the book, he reached a passage contrasting election and evolution. Kuyper said that if you were a plant you would rather be a rose than a mushroom, if a bird an eagle rather than an owl, and then carried the same ranking into humanity, placing “Aryans” above Black South African peoples, whom he named with terms that are slurs. Bacote’s reaction was immediate: “you gotta be kidding me. He did not say that.”
He has since heard the defense that Kuyper was only making a comparison. Bacote rejects it with one sentence: “you have choices when you make a comparison.” That reply matters for every reader facing a similar passage. A comparison is not an accident of grammar. An author who reaches across all of creation for an image and lands on a racial hierarchy has revealed what he already believed.
Bacote also faced a social cost. He wanted Kuyper as his dissertation figure and wondered whether people would condemn him for building his work on a man who wrote such things. That worry is itself a sign that faithful people respond differently here. Some readers would set Kuyper aside entirely. Bacote, who had found no one else giving him a theological rationale for public engagement, chose to keep working with him, but only after a hard test.
Kuyper is not an isolated case. Bacote lists others he met in his own study: John Wesley’s troubled marriage, and George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards, whom he names as slaveholders. For Black Christians in particular, this is not abstract. The same tradition that handed down great hymns, sermons and theology also handed down the record of its heroes’ complicity in racial harm. A reader cannot honestly inherit one without reckoning with the other.
Scripture does not hide this pattern among its own leaders. When Cornelius fell at Peter’s feet, Peter refused the honor: “Stand up; I myself also am a man” (Acts 10:26). Later, when Peter pulled back from eating with Gentile believers, Paul confronted him publicly: “I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed” (Galatians 2:11). That is an apostle correcting an apostle over a failure to treat believers of another people as equals at the table. The New Testament records the failure and keeps Peter’s witness. It neither covers for him nor erases him.
Bacote makes the point from Paul’s own language about pressing toward the mark. Paul wrote, “Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect: but I follow after” (Philippians 3:12). Anyone who reads the Bible closely, Bacote says, should know that “unless they’re Jesus, they’re all on the way.”
The dividing line falls between the teaching and the prejudice
Here is where Bacote’s method becomes useful. Sitting in what he calls vexation and distress, he moved from a loyalty question to a critical thinking question. He had two things in front of him: the doctrine of common grace, which gave him permission for public engagement, and Kuyper’s racism. He asked, “Is there an inescapable relationship between those two things?” Does affirming one mean affirming the other?
He went back to the biblical claims underneath the doctrine. In Genesis 1:28 God tells humanity to “have dominion over the fish of the sea,” which Bacote reads as stewardship, a charge to manage creation, not wreck it. Psalm 8:6 speaks of that charge as still standing: “Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands.” After the flood, God promises Noah that never again shall “all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood” (Genesis 9:11). The world is preserved, history goes on, and the human calling goes on with it. Then Bacote asked the decisive question: “Does that entail being a racist? And to me, the answer was clearly no.”
That is the test, and it is more demanding than either defending or canceling. It asks whether the prejudice holds up the argument or rides along with it. In Kuyper’s case, Bacote concludes the racism came from somewhere other than the theology he valued. Kuyper “didn’t go where his theology should have taken him on race,” Bacote says, because he was pulled down by “the gravity of his cultural assumptions.”
The biblical text supports that diagnosis. If God gives the whole human race one shared calling, a ranking of races sits uneasily on top of it. Paul told the Athenians that God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26). And the old reading that hung a curse on Ham’s descendants, which Bacote recognized in Kuyper’s first chapter, does not survive a plain reading of its source. The narrative in Genesis 9:25 has Noah say, “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.” The text names Canaan, not Ham, and says nothing about Africa or skin. It describes what Noah said in a narrative; it does not command anyone to enslave anyone. Readers who turned it into a charter for racial hierarchy brought their conclusion to the verse.
The test has a hard edge, though. Bacote grants that one might argue that, for Kuyper himself, the theology and the racism were part of one larger whole. That is the strongest objection, and it deserves a straight answer. A teacher’s own mind may weave a true doctrine and a false prejudice together. The reader’s job is to ask whether the doctrine, read from Scripture, requires the prejudice. Sometimes it does not, as Bacote found with common grace. Sometimes the teaching itself is the prejudice dressed in theological language, as with the curse reading. That part goes, completely. The test does not rescue everything. It sorts.
Naming the wrong is not the same as canceling the teacher
There is a quieter temptation than throwing a teacher out: keeping the teacher and never mentioning the racism again. Fields will not allow that either. Her standard holds both convictions at once: “there’s not a perfect hero,” and “We shouldn’t put anybody on a pedestal.”
She offers an example from her own life. A man she admired taught her to make sure her private life and public life matched. His did not. Does his duplicity make the advice false? It does not. She still needs her public and private life to match. “So it’s not that we throw away everything they taught us, but we live in the tension that they couldn’t be everything they preached.”
That tension requires honesty in both directions. You can say Kuyper wrote racist things, and say it in those words, without pretending he contributed nothing. Bacote calls Kuyper great in a specific sense: enormous capacity, a genius-level intellect, a gifted organizer, and an articulation of Christian public life that, in Bacote’s view, nobody else has matched. He recalls a man from the Netherlands, from a church tradition Kuyper had split, who groaned at Kuyper’s name and then admitted you had to be a great man to do what he did. Respect and dislike lived side by side in the same person. Bacote also refuses to stop at the racism, noting that Kuyper treated even his allies poorly and pushed away the men he had raised up once they matured. Greatness and serious sin are both on the record. Bacote’s summary is the line to carry: “he’s helpful, but you will see that he needed help.”
Fields draws one boundary that belongs here. A leader’s ordinary struggle with sin is one thing, she says. “Now abuse is something different.” Keeping a true insight from someone’s book never obliges you to give an abusive leader access to people, a platform or your trust. If a leader’s wrong involves harm to you or someone you know, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 1-800-799-7233.
What changes once the halo comes off
The deepest issue is not a single teacher. It is the job we assign teachers. Fields locates the reason Christians are so prone to it: “because we can’t see the triune God, we want somebody we can see.” Scripture does give us human examples. Paul wrote, “Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1). The clause at the end is the safeguard. The example points past himself.
Bacote pictures the halo for his students: the admired figure floats above everyone else, who walk in the stream of tradition below. Then comes the correction. In truth, “they are also with us in the stream.” Fields adds that people are simply not “designed as humans to carry that kind of worship.” A halo is not a reward to the person wearing it. It is a weight that eventually crushes them and disappoints us.
Two practical habits follow. First, introduce teachers by their lane. Fields suggests saying what someone is good for and also what they cannot help with, because “they have a narrow specialty that is helpful,” and naming the limits helps “strip the halo from them” before it forms. Bacote is useful on theology and the public square. He jokes that long division of fractions stopped him cold. On subjects outside a teacher’s lane, Bacote says, a person may be “Harmful, ignorant, or just not skill set.”
Second, watch what the public actually holds against Christians. Fields observes, “people aren’t mad that Christians make a mistake. They get mad because Christians pretend like they don’t make the mistake.” She calls it plainly: “It’s the acting of perfection.” A church that hides its heroes’ racism repeats that performance. A church that names it honestly shows the watching world, and its own Black members, that the faith is not staked on the moral perfection of its teachers.
That honesty also turns back on the reader. Bacote warns of an intoxication that can come with being gifted, a slow belief that your gifts make you different from others. His counsel: “you’ve got to have somebody in your life who can tell you you’re crazy.” And the more people treat you as an example, he says, “the more that we ought to be becoming the person that’s humble.”
Quick answers
Can I still read a theologian who said racist things?
Yes, with your eyes open. Ask whether the teaching you value depends on the racism. Bacote asked that of Kuyper’s doctrine of common grace and concluded it did not.
Is it disloyal to say a respected teacher was wrong?
No. Paul confronted Peter to his face over how Peter treated Gentile believers (Galatians 2:11). Naming the wrong is the biblical pattern.
Isn’t calling it only a comparison a fair defense?
Bacote’s answer is that a writer chooses his comparisons. Choosing a racial ranking reveals a belief, not an accident.
What if the racism is built into the teaching itself?
Then that teaching goes. The curse reading of Genesis 9 is an example: the text names Canaan, not Ham, and gives no warrant for ranking races.
Should I stop having Christian heroes?
Have examples, not pedestals. Paul invites imitation only as he follows Christ (1 Corinthians 11:1).
The teacher who lets you down was never supposed to be the foundation. Bacote kept working with a man who wrote racist things because the truth he valued came from Scripture, not from Kuyper’s goodness. That is the freedom on the far side of a fallen hero: you can receive what is true, reject what is false, and say both out loud, because the trust underneath it all rests on the one person in the stream who never needed the help.
This article draws on a Jude 3 Project conversation with Lisa Fields and Dr. Vincent Bacote. Hear it in full on the Watch page.
