Introduction
This was initially all one post regarding Christianity and racism under the Sunday Stories section of my blog, The Fantasy Nook, before I chose to separate them. That post was quite long, so I have chosen to split the post between the discussion on why we need to discuss this in the church and in the home and the discussion on what the prevailing liberal explanation (and conservative one too at times) is for why racism is wrong versus what the Biblical explanation is for the same.
To answer the questions I am about to discuss thoroughly, I will have to request that you to take the time to read the whole thing. I split it up to make it easier to do that, but to understand the entirety of the argument, you need both posts and need to be willing to dedicate time to following the train of logic.
The argument I am going to present in these two posts takes some set up, and so I hope you will stay with me as I go through the necessary background information to get to the argument and the answer to the questions I am about to present.
Where I Stand
Let me be clear up front that I do not support racism in any way, shape, or form. I am going to go through why in this two-part series because though we often claim this, we rarely give any reason for why we ought to believe so. The rational being should not accept something that requires them to sacrifice reason for not thinking and irrationality. For me to tell someone that racism is wrong, particularly if we come from two different premises, I must also have reasoned through the why for it does no one any good if I say something is wrong but cannot give the proof of it.
I do not feel that anyone, after reading through this, should be able to rationally come to the conclusion that I believe it is acceptable in any form, but I also know that in the past, many have immediately jumped to declare me a racist because I did not affirm their opinions on how to be an ally to the black community.
Let me also be clear that I am in no way an ally with anyone, of any color, who is utterly irrational, worse than an animal in their behavior, disrespectful of the sanctity of other lives no matter the color, or disrespectful of personal property. Looters do not and never will have my support. I will call them as they are, and I will give them no quarter to believe that they will gain my help for themselves except by the point of a gun, real or philosophical.
With that said, I am hoping that you too will take the journey with me on this one. I ask you to put logic above emotions here, not because emotions are invalid but because they cloud your judgment and your perception of the facts in this area, whether you are in support of all of the things going on in our world in the name of racial justice or not.
A Systematic Approach
I am about to go through the moral, historical, and ideological grounds that lead to racism. I have spoken to various liberals about why they believe what they do regarding racism, and I often hear good reasons with very, very inconsistent and bad logic. It is entirely possible to be right and be completely inconsistent and contradictory in your viewpoints, and that is where most liberals I have spoken to are at on this issue. We will dive into why in the next article, but please read with an open mind.
I genuinely believe that the ideologies that most of our culture has bought into from a moral standpoint and from a worldview standpoint have led to the problems we are seeing today. If you look at history and where other countries who have adopted America’s current philosophies as pushed by the radical far left movement, the end result has always been the breakdown of all three areas of authority that God put into place: State (human government), church, and family. It happened in Russia, Nazi Germany, Italy under Mussolini, Cuba, Venezuela, China, North Korea, Prussia, and many other places in both geographical and historical locations. That’s why a systematic approach is necessary.
Why We Need to Discuss This in the Church and the Home
Right now, our country’s liberals are praising those like Stalin and Mussolini, if not openly as is the case with many professors then in the ideologies they hold up as virtuous. Mussolini’s reign of terror was short-lived compared to some dictators, but in twenty-one years of power, he killed two-thousand political opponents and an estimated 430,000 people total died under his regime. Stalin was responsible for killing an estimated twenty million or more, according to many historians.
Stanford historian, Norman Naimark, considers Stalin’s mass murders to be genocide and states that Stalin and Hitler have more in common than many of us in modern day culture seem to believe. These are the men we are seeing the Democrat party and the media praising or aspiring to be like. They want the same system of government that these men wanted and used. They are repeating the same trends that past dictators did. Arguably, so are some of the far right radicals in office as well. Both are incredibly dangerous.
But if we do not educate ourselves on history, we do not see the trends. We ignore those who lived for many years in countries who have done all the same things we are now doing thanks to the liberal, progressive agenda, and even though they express the fear they feel over seeing us doing what their governments did on the intentional path to dictatorships and communism, we scoff as if somehow they are insane.
What We Stand to Lose
If we do not know what those who believed what we are now espousing and hailing as forward thinking had to say about their goals with their philosophies, the things that were inseparable in their minds from their theories, and the ways in which those who followed after their founders chose to apply them, we are going to be very easily led astray. Our young people are already being misled and taught lies. They are swallowing it because we are not teaching them any differently. They are swallowing it, and we are playing into the hands of our enemies.
Outright communists in our country have the confidence to tell those of us who fight back: “Good job finding all of the links between communism and what we’re doing here. You’ve done your research. But it won’t matter. We’re going to win because we have your children.”
This is not something out of a off-the-rails conspiracy novel. I wish it were! If it were, I could laugh it off and roll my eyes at the insane people who believe this. But when you examine the history, the evidence, and what is going on right now in our country, you can no longer dismiss what is happening. There is a very real battle going on. And while it is tempting to look at the rioting and looting around us and say that is the battle, the battle goes far beyond that. It is a battle of ideologies, and right now, those who are prevailing hold a distinctly anti-God, anti-American, and anti-liberty perspective.
Who Is This Mainly Geared Towards?
I would be remiss, at this point, if I did not say something about who this is geared towards. To some of you in my audience, you are already yawning and rolling your eyes or becoming extremely incensed, if you have even made it this far. Some might be considering saying a few nasty things because they think I am reaching the pinnacle of insanity at this point. That is a risk I knew I would be taking if I chose to speak out on this issue. But I am going to do it anyway because this is so incredibly important for the Church to consider and understand.
To some of you, it might sound like a wonderful thing to destroy every principle our country stands on. You either have bought into the Democratic, liberal party line that America is a horrible place whose every founding principles is evil or you know exactly what you are doing and wish for the highest of evils anyway. I am not naive enough to believe that every liberal individual out there is simply unaware of what is going on, the agenda that the Democrat platform is truly pushing behind the scenes, or the implications of what they believe. I have to give those in the liberal camp credit: not all of them are being misled. Some of them are doing the misleading.
If you have not figured it out by now, my main focus here is on Christians no matter what side of the fence they are on politically. Those who are believers, who have given their lives to Christ, and who have chosen to–in some way, at least–live for Him.
Those who are non-religious, only believe when it is convenient, or who are merely religious as opposed to living out the natural results of a heart fully surrendered to its Creator and King? You are all welcome. It is not my intent to tell you not to read on or to tell you that you aren’t welcome to read what I have to say here. But my focus is on my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ because the trends I see in the Church today both horrify and devastate me.
At times, it can feel as if I’m on an island and am the only one in the Church who is seeing the horrific direction that Christ’s Bride, who is to be unspotted by the world, has taken. I know I am not, but I also know that fewer and fewer Christians, regardless of what they think politically, are really redeemed sinners who are living in the Spirit of God and are walking with God in a relationship with Him once they are redeemed. We have conformed to the world around us instead of being transformed into the likeness of Christ through the renewing of our minds in the Word of God.
Stepping on Toes
I am likely already making some people very angry right now, but since I will make people angry no matter what I say so long as I choose to stand for truth, I have long since ceased to feel guilt or concern over doing so.
The reality is that those of us on the conservative side have historically chosen to give up, not stand up, and to just stand aside as those who hate our country’s founding principles keep taking ground from us. We have chosen to be Atlas bearing the cruel weight of the whole world instead of standing up and saying “No more.” In particular, many conservative Christians have done this, and we are standing aside and handing our country over to those who want to destroy it. We have the truth, and we have chosen to stay silent instead of speaking it.
If no one is willing to tell the truth, we will become a country living in deceit, lies, and misdirection (more so than we already are). Some who have been misguided will someday wake up and see what has happened. They will wonder how everything good they truly thought they were fighting for could have been destroyed. I pity those individuals, and I pray we never end up there.
But what happens if the Church and those who know the end result of the philosophies taught by a society bent on destruction do not choose to stand up? We will end up where every other country doing what we are has ended up: ruined, without the equality for all that the radicals claimed they wanted, and wondering how we lost our freedoms so quickly.
The General Liberal Attitude to Facts on This Matter
Most people on the opposite side of the political spectrum from me will boo even literal quotes that reveal uncomfortable truths, even when they come from people they hail as heroes. I have watched it happen. I have watched as various conservative blacks around the country have tried to warn their community about the facts. I have watched as those people, who have a heart for their communities and want to end the Democratic party’s manipulation of their communities, have been silenced, booed even before they have done anything but give statistics, and told they are not “truly Black” if their opinion does not fit the Democrat party’s narrative. Could this behavior be any more childish and willfully blind?
And lest you think I somehow believe just the Black liberals do this, it has been done to me by white liberals who presume they can speak for the whole Black community because they are “allies”. I am the enemy because I listed stats or because I dared to ask them to provide proof on any specific area that there is a real instance of racism going on. I am the enemy because I do not support the same subset of Blacks as they do but choose instead to support the ones who want change that is beneficial to everyone and who do not seek policies that will destroy us from the inside out.
Further than that, I do not even have to say these individuals are wrong or try to start an argument. Expressing an opinion or asking a question is enough to get the name-calling, booing, and hate flowing. I ask a legitimate question in an attempt to understand what another community I am not part of is going through, and what I get from other white people (who also are outside the community I am trying to understand) is, “You are a racist because you bothered asking and do not just automatically assume they are right on everything.”
Sometimes those from the community jump on the bandwagon with the white individual who already started the name calling, mockery, and disrespect. Those who do often complain that I cannot understand because I do not know what I do not know, but they do. The complaints boil down to, you’re a racist, and I know that because I’m a minority. You are not, and as such, I have special knowledge you don’t.
This is not to say that no one outside the minority community is racist and rightfully called out on it, of course. There are definitely instances where an individual from a minority rightfully calls out racist behavior as it is. But these days, simply asking a question is racist, and the individuals I am referring to above are the sorts who propose to judge the motive behind the question even when none is actually given. How they can do that is beyond me. I know I do not have that particular superpower, but apparently they do.
Now, granted that is not everyone’s attitude. But the vast majority of people making a lot of noise and fuss and pulling the race card on things that have become increasingly more ridiculous think this way. Those of you who are non-Christians may or may not do not see the big deal. But while I do hope that this article will be a good learning point for you guys in seeing why the Biblical worldview will always take the strongest possible stance against an attitude of racism possible, my goal in writing this article is mainly to address my fellow Christians: liberal or conservative.
A Wake-Up Call
It is time we woke up and went back to the God of the Bible and what He has to say. If we do not do this, we are going to keep losing our children to a socialist/communist agenda that seeks to destroy any belief in God, seeks to destroy God’s people, and seeks to destroy liberty. That is why this is important.
Right now, the church is not meeting the culture with a strong Biblical stance on the issue of racism. We are instead pandering to the culture by refusing to talk about it at all or by being noncommittal on our view of it. If we do any of those three things in response to this, we are giving the culture the opportunity to inform our children’s viewpoints on because we have not first shown them the Biblical point of view. We will lose them to a culture that says racism is wrong with no legitimate, logically dictated reason, from a non-Biblical, evolutionary point of view, to say that it is.
Nothing in evolution requires that we think that somehow we are the only race that has escaped the evolutionary hierarchy. Saying otherwise is to contradict everything in the theory, as it has changed remarkably little since Darwin and his immediate predecessors first developed it.
This is fine if we want our children to believe in something that has no inherent reason to respect the sanctity of human life, no foundation for any sound or consistent morals beyond whatever society or the individual chooses for themselves, and zero reason for any concern for those around them.
If we want our children to walk away from God because we have given them a view of Him that is so utterly decrepit and unholy, so utterly without answers to the issues they are seeing around them every day, then going silent on the issues around us and on what God has to say is the way to do it.
Using Our Liberty to Defend the Liberty of Future Generations
I do not yet have kids to train up in the way they should go. But someday I will, and I do not want to live in a country where I have no liberty to do what God has called me to do without fear. America’s greatest strength has been in its promise of liberty and the protection of rights for everyone without the violation of the rights of others in the exercise of those rights. Granted, there have been times where we as a nation did not uphold those ideals like we should have. But we have always had groups who stood up and fought rightfully through our legal system, peaceful protests, and petitions to make a difference and to stop injustice.
That is an amazing thing, but it falls apart if we do not have the framework of virtue that the early defenders of liberty and justice had. If we want to ensure a society that has those virtues, we must start in the home by teaching our children a Christ-centered viewpoint that respects even those who as individuals have proven undeserving of it, that loves even the most unloveable, and that speaks truth even when it is unpopular to do so. When we do so, we are going to start seeing a return to the values in our Constitution. We are going to lose fewer of our children to the world’s lies, and we are going to raise adults who are able to change the world around them for the better because they have a God-sized vision for change and for reaching the hearts of men for their King.
While I do not have kids to raise yet, if I want to be able to raise them safely and in freedom without the fear of the government taking them away, refusing me the right to raise them in the fear and admonish of the Lord, or trying to brainwash them while silencing me as the parent, I need to be doing my part to defend those liberties now before it is too late.
Right now, I might not have kids, but I do have a voice, and I can use it to try to reach even just one or two others who can catch the vision for a church and, yes, a country, that is once again God-centered, God-focused, and multi-generational in its view toward the future. It is not too late for us, especially for those of us in my age range who do not have kids yet and do not have to lose them to a world that will destroy them and everything truly morally good and upright in them.
So let us start by addressing the issues in today’s culture from a Biblical worldview. I am starting here with the issue most in our faces right now: race and the issue of racism. The second part of this series will discuss the prevailing arguments from the worldly perspective for why racism is wrong and what the Biblical worldview’s reason for the same is.
