Wake Up: The New York Times Doesn't Care About Racial Reconciliation In The Church (Or Anywhere Else)

The New York Times ran an editorial today about blacks leaving majority white evangelical churches, A Quiet Exodus: Why Blacks Are Leaving White Evangelical Churches. This is a topic that I have addressed before (see for example Are We In A New Paradigm Of Race Relations, Are Reformed Christians Influenced By White Supremacy? and A Response To Lecrae, Jemar Tisby, Thabiti Anyabwile And Anyone Else Who Cares To Listen ).

This article finds a sympathetic figure, Charmaine Pruitt, who left her former church, Gateway Church headed by Robert Morris because as she describes it after a pretty overtly political sermon she felt uncomfortable.

Ms. Pruitt sent messages to several white couples she had befriended at the church, telling them she was going to take some time off. She had become uneasy at a church, she told them, that speaks of overcoming racism on one Sunday “and then turns around later and asks me to support” Trump, who she believed was “a racist candidate.”

She then recounts that a couple had her over to talk about it and the experience was sufficient for her to never go back.

The essay is full of the usual stuff that accompanies these articles, like the reference to Trayvon Martin but as usual fails to note that the man that shot him was Hispanic, a Democrat and that he shot Martin in self-defense. Like Michael Brown in Ferguson, Trayvon Martin is invoked as a talisman of racial injustice and you are supposed to take for granted that his shooting was unjust. I feel badly that Martin and Brown were both shot but I also recognize that in both cases the overwhelming fault for their shooting falls on themselves. George Zimmerman was being a jerk but Trayvon Martin was slamming his head into a concrete sidewalk which can cause serious injury or death. And still years later we are supposed to assume that simply invoking the Trayvon Martin case is proof of racial injustice.

There is a reference to Lecrae of course and the ubiquitous Dwight McKissic and his risible anti-alt-right resolution stunt. There is also something that I am seeing more and more of and it goes beyond a "failure" to be on the "right" side of the NFL player kneeling dispute. In reference to white evangelicals overwhelming support for Trump, the editorial quotes "Chanequa Walker-Barnes, a professor of practical theology at the McAfee School of Theology at Mercer University in Atlanta". Ms. Walker-Barnes left her position at a white church after the election where she was employed, which of course is her prerogative as an employee, but what she is quoted as saying in the editorial is far more troubling. The support of white evangelicals was a sign of a systemic problem in white churches:

“It said, to me, that something is profoundly wrong at the heart of the white church,” said Chanequa Walker-Barnes

Wow. This reminds me of the rhetoric of Anthony Bradley who claims that evangelicals, i.e. white Christians, have "never had the Gospel. Ever.". To make a sweeping condemnation of "the white church" because 4 of 5 white evangelicals made an informed choice to support one candidate over another is frankly obscene. I wonder if the good professor would agree with Anthony Bradley that we as white evangelicals have never even had the Gospel in the first place.

Something interesting to note. In 2008 black religious voters supported Obama overwhelmingly. From a Pew recap, emphasis mine:

Let’s just look at some of the key groups in 2008. Toward the top of the chart, virtually all of the strong Obama groups have this character of being minorities in one form or another. Of course, the first group, black Protestants, has been a strong Democratic group for a long time. In these data they voted nearly 100 percent for Obama.

So when black Protestants show up in 2008 to vote essentially unanimously for a far left candidate that supported the legalized infanticide that murders far more black kids in a day than cops do wrongly in shootings in years, a man that used to attend the church of racist "pastor" Jeremiah Wright, that is just an interesting electoral factoid. It is OK that one segment of the religious population, black Protestants, vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. It is not OK that a different segment, white evangelicals, vote overwhelmingly (81%) for Republicans. Do you see the problem here? Black Christians can be a monolithic voting bloc for Democrats and no one says a word, white Christians do the same thing for Republicans and it is blamed for black Christians leaving majority white churches. Later in the essay there is mention that Ms. Pruitt tried out Mt. Olive and that "But for two young white men, all the worshipers were African-American.". Many majority black churches are not only monolithic in voting for Democrats, they are also overwhelmingly monoracial but you will wait in vain for a scathing editorial from the New York Times about black churches not "looking like the Kingdom".

If we are going to have a "real conversation about race" in the church, it can't be marked by one-sided lectures and double-standards. I am willing to talk to anyone, anywhere, anytime about race, what the Bible teaches, how we can try to overcome historic differences and suspicions and so on. I am glad to. If you want me to sit mutely while you scold me about things that I have never done and have no guilt for? Not interested. The Bible calls for me to love my brothers but that doesn't require me to sit still while someone bears false witness about me.

The essay isn't really about blacks leaving white churches. It is about Trump and the New York Times' endless war to see Trump impeached on trumped up charges (trumped up, get it?) or defeated for re-election in 2020. Trump is mentioned a dozen times in the essay and it is clearly suggested that the reason for racial division in the church today is that white folk voted for Trump. The messaging is clumsy and obvious: if you care about "racial reconciliation" you can't vote for Trump. I will be the first to admit that white evangelicals are often pawns for the Republican party that promises us the moon and delivers potholes but the same is true for black Christians and the Democrats. In other words this is not first and foremost or even primarily an editorial about religion. It is an editorial about politics. If you don't recognize that at the outset you probably come away from this essay with a far different viewpoint than if you go into it with your eyes wide open to the inherent political bias you are going to get from the opinion section of the New York Times.

We have a lot of issues in the church that we need to work through, and race is one of the big ones. What is not helpful is when we allow people who don't really care about the church to define the terms of the conversation for us.

Are Reformed Christians Influenced By White Supremacy?

Desiring God, the online ministry of John Piper, is one of my "go to" sources on many topics. Some of the material published there is among the highest quality material for the Reformed Christian available on the net. For example, last Sunday they published Before You Believed, You Belonged which is one of the best things I have read ever. But then the very next day they publish something that I remarked to a friend was "terrible" and "counter-productive". The offending essay comes with the click-bait title: Providence Is No Excuse: Exposing a Reformed White Supremacist by Daniel Kleven, who is the director of admissions for Bethlehem College and Seminary where John Piper is chancellor.

In the pantheon of terms that are a) way overused and applied and b) are completely misunderstood, "white supremacy" is near the top of the list. I am not sure I can name an actual white supremacist today. Even well known people like David Duke and Richard Spencer are more properly considered white nationalists than they are white supremacists, in the same way that someone like Louis Farrakhan is a black nationalist advocating in part for distinct, racially homogeneous nations. People like Richard Spencer don't want to rule over non-whites, i.e. white supremacy, they want to live apart from non-whites. A subtle difference perhaps but an important one to understand in a climate where the term "white supremacy" is used to label almost anyone that doesn't completely adhere to the edicts of the racism-industrial complex.

Who was this White Supremacist that Daniel Kleven "exposed"? His name is Robert Lewis Dabney, a 19th century Southern American pastor and theologian. He was also a chaplain in the Confederate Army, a biographer of Stonewall Jackson and was a supporter of slavery even after the end of the Civil War. In addition to his biography of General Jackson, in 1867 he wrote a book with a lengthy title characteristic of that time, A Defense of Virginia, and Through Her, of the South, in Recent and Pending Contests Against the Sectional Party, as well as a number of theological tomes. You can be forgiven if in 2018 you haven't heard of Dabney or if you have, you have heard of him only in passing or via a one line quote in the writing of someone else. After all the man lived and died in the 19th century.

Why did Daniel Kleven choose to bring up Dabney? Is Dabney a particularly influential Reformed thinker? As someone who has been engaged in Reformed theology for many years, I know the name but he isn't someone I consider influential or even someone that I ever recall reading anything from. I have seen his name crop up here and there from time to time.

At Monergism, the gold standard for Reformed theology, there is a section where you can look up articles by the author. Some are obviously huge, John Calvin has almost 400 results. What about Dabney? He shows up 24 times. Compare that to someone like Francis Turretin, a fairly obscure reformed theologian with over 60 results, not to mention men like Charles Hodge with 90 results and Charles Spurgeon with over 1,200 results. Compared to modern Reformed writers like John Piper and R.C. Sproul, Dabney is barely a blip on the radar. If you were to poll people at a Reformed conference like Together for the Gospel and ask how many of them knew who Dabney was, I think few would know much more than his name. Asked how many had read anything of his and I am confident you would get a much, much smaller positive response. He just isn't a top-tier or even mid-tier theologian among the contemporary Reformed.

Even Doug Wilson, who endlessly finds himself forced to defend against (unwarranted) accusations of racism and being a slavery apologist and is one of the few people to regularly quote Dabney, describes Dabney as an "irascible slave owner". No one who knows much about him fails to understand that Dabney was a man of the 19th century with all that entails.

Yet he is referred to in this article as a champion of Reformed theology: "It’s hard to look racism in the face, especially when that face is one of a champion of Reformed orthodoxy". A champion?

Notice this introduction from Kleven's article and please note my emphasis:

In his time, Robert Lewis Dabney (1820–1898) was considered one of the greatest teachers of theology in the United States. Revered theologians such as Hodge, Shedd, Warfield, Bavinck, and Barth viewed him with appreciation and respect.

In the 19th century, he was considered one of the greatest teachers of theology. Other more widely known Reformed theologians, now long dead, "appreciated" and "respected" Dabney. So he had some influence over other theologians 100 years ago.

So I ask again, why did Daniel Kleven choose Robert Dabney to make the case that somehow contemporary Reformed types have a White supremacist skeleton in their collective closet? My only conclusion can be that Daniel wanted to write an article on this topic and went searching for someone, however obscure, to fit the bill. Unlike Hodge or Warfield, Edwards or Spurgeon, Dabney wrote some stuff that makes good fodder for this sort of article. It is an editorial form of eisegesis, predeterming that there are "Echoes in Our Day" of White supremacy. Of course the church has already condemned pro-slavery positions and the institution itself in unequivocal terms. For example, the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) has a historically valuable e-book on their historical website written by Thomas Cary Johnson that has this caveat:

Please note that this history is posted solely for its value as a historical document. Any statements in Johnson's book in support of the institution of slavery or in support of racial supremacy should be clearly and obviously understood to be rejected by the Presbyterian Church in America, by the PCA Historical Center, and by the Center's director. The book is posted here that we might learn from it as history, and that we might learn too from its errors, as well as its truths. It should continue to amaze us that highly valued leaders in the Church can be so very wrong about some matters while still holding to vital truths about the Christian faith. May God grant us the ability to see and repent from the sins we ourselves are blinded to by our own culture today.

It is pretty clear to anyone paying attention that the issue of slavery and "racial supremacy" has been condemned by the church, including the Reformed church. I don't know of any even semi-serious Reformed writers that promote racial supremacy or hold a pro-slavery view.

Dabney was a product of his times and while it is easy to cluck our tongues disapprovingly at what he wrote 150 years ago, it is not very useful. I am sure without bothering to look that there were men all across the religious (and non-religious) spectrum in the era leading up to and immediately after the Civil War that used language similar to, if not worse, than what Dabney did. Slavery was the law of the land and slavery, as we see in the Bible and elsewhere, has been practiced by humanity for thousands of years, by whites and blacks, Christians and Muslims. Men like Dabney can be brilliant theologians and still be terribly wrong on some issues and it doesn't diminish their value. Calvin made a horrendous error in his complicity with the execution of the heretical Servetus. Martin Luther made statements considered by some to be anti-semitic. Men are flawed, something that Reformed Christians understand perhaps better than others, and it certainly isn't necessary to put an addendum next to any quote from Calvin that he was complicit in the state execution of Servetus.

Mr. Kleven concludes his essay with the obligatory homage to Martin Luther King, Jr.

A true understanding of providence should lead us to act the miracle of change in pursuing justice.

Martin Luther King came closer to this in regard to racial justice than did Robert Lewis Dabney.

As impolite as it may be to point out, King was in many ways a deeply heterodox religious figure, someone who held positions that if they were held by someone other than a slain Civil Rights icon would be condemned by most orthodox Christians. Not to mention that King's personal life, including very credible evidence of serial adultery, brings into question whether he knew Christ at all.

What exactly was Kleven's point? Slavery and support for slavery was bad? Did we really need another essay about that? Or was this just an obligatory essay to mark MLK day?

So why was this essay terrible and counter-productive? It was terrible in that it presents a fairly esoteric figure in Reformed theology as a means to taint all Reformed Christians with the guilt of white supremacy and it fails to recognize the very real lack of white supremacist thought in contemporary times anywhere in America, much less in evangelicalism, even less so in Reformed circles. It is counter-productive because the essay itself is an exercise in virtue signaling, a term I recognize is overused but appropriate I believe in this case. The comments on Facebook that accompanied the original posting from Desiring God, including mine, exhibited that most people were not buying into this idea of white supremacy lurking just below the surface of Reformed Christianity based on one example of a man who live and died in the 19th century South. As someone who thinks and writes and tries to take seriously the question of race in the church and America in general, I found the essay far from enlightening and more accurately simply another example of clumsy guilt-tripping that accomplishes little but to make the author feel that he has somehow struck a blow for racial justice.

Self-flagellation over alleged racial guilt is the neo-Reformed version of the #MeToo farce, just in reverse. Instead of feeling left out because you weren't a victim, many feel left out that they have never actually oppressed anyone so they create some linkage from themselves to oppression, no matter how tenuous.

Those into racial guilt virtue signaling BDSM don't want to really have to ask hard questions and get into uncomfortable conversations. They simply want a sharp rap on the bum with a riding crop from Mr. Grey, leaving no lasting impact but giving that sense of feeling like you have been duly chastised for your latent racism and are now cleansed and in a position to scold others.

Essays like Daniel Kleven's are theological cotton candy, brightly colored but empty of any substance. It is a throwaway piece, generating a little heat but no light and just as quickly forgotten as it was read. Worse it deflects serious questions about race relations and even issues like the providence of God as it pertains to slavery in favor of vacuous references to relatively obscure figures in the church and breathless warnings about "white supremacy". Desiring God is a resource that often provides deep, meaningful, thought-provoking materials and it could do the same on questions of race. Instead we got a Huffington Post religion page level discourse. No topic in the church today is in greater need of clarity and soberness than race but all too often what we get instead are essays like Daniel Kleven's. I have come to expect better from Desiring God and I was deeply disappointed. Serious topics demand serious scholarship.

Are We In A New Paradigm Of Race Relations?

Shelby Steele suggests we are in a brilliant new essay at the Wall Street Journal, Black Protest Has Lost Its Power. It is behind a paywall so you might not be able to see it but if you use your incognito/private browser setting you should be able to pull it up. 

Steele's basic premise is that the fizzle of the NFL anthem protests is heralding a change in race relationships. The NFL players are trying to recapture the bygone era of protest when there was actually something to protest about but are doing so in an era when blacks are free or as he writes: "The oppression of black people is over with.". In doing so they have seen an enormous backlash in the form of public anger and financial hits to the league that pays them millions to play a children's game. What we might be seeing is what Steele calls a new "fearlessness" from whites. No longer cowed by the threat of being labeled "racist", conversations are starting to happen that were once forbidden but are long overdue. I hope this is true. If you want to know why groups like the alt-right have suddenly burst on the scene, it is largely because conversations in this country have been submerged under political correctness for decades and people are sick to death of it. Anyone who speaks honestly and unapologetically is going to get a hearing in this atmosphere. If you don't like what the alt-right is saying, you better (to borrow a nonsensical phrase) "create some space" for honest and open conversations about race. Otherwise you are simply abandoning the rhetorical battlefield to the meme warriors.

One place where I see the old paradigm of endlessly staring back at the past, where race relations are always stuck in the pre-Civil Rights era, is in the church. The amount of navel-gazing, hand-wringing and guilt-tripping is unhelpful and unhealthy. In spite of the magnitude of apologizing for racial wrongs from people that really have never significantly wronged others, I see a disturbing trend of black evangelicals that were once solidly orthodox moving quickly away from the Gospel and embracing the "gospel" of racial antipathy. We are in desperate need of honest conversation in the church about race but what we mostly get is an endless rehashing of past grievances and an similarly limitless litany of platitudes and nonsensical phrases. The sheer fragility of so many people in the church when it comes to this topic is embarrassing.

I thought Steele's essay was magnificent, just about the perfect combination of honesty, bluntness and awareness. If there is one thing he seemed to overlook a little, it is the power of the racism-industrial complex to perpetuate the cult of victimhood. I wrote on Facebook in response to the person that originally posted this:

While I mostly agree, the other problem is that perpetuating the cult of victimhood is big business and it is why race relations conversations so often are endlessly rehashing the past instead of truly examining the present and exploring the future. Slavery, Jim Crow, sharecropping, back of the bus, all of these inform where we are but they are not the deciding or even significant factors in the current ills of the black population in America.

I stand by that. There is a lot of money and power and influence to be exploited by perpetuating the cult of victimhood. That is precisely why voices like Shelby Steele are given little attention in topics on race relations and why Detroit is trying to find a way to change the name of the Dr. Benjamin Carson High School of Science and Medicine because although Dr. Carson is a magnificent role-model for any young black man, his refusal to embrace the cult of victimhood makes him a threat to those who profit from racial animus.

In case you can't get past the paywall, I selected a few key quotes here for your perusal but make an effort to read the whole essay because it is one of the best things I have read in a long while.

Watch out that you get what you ask for, the saying goes. Freedom came to blacks with an overlay of cruelty because it meant we had to look at ourselves without the excuse of oppression. Four centuries of dehumanization had left us underdeveloped in many ways, and within the world’s most highly developed society. When freedom expanded, we became more accountable for that underdevelopment. So freedom put blacks at risk of being judged inferior, the very libel that had always been used against us.

That’s why, in the face of freedom’s unsparing judgmentalism, we reflexively claim that freedom is a lie. We conjure elaborate narratives that give white racism new life in the present: “systemic” and “structural” racism, racist “microaggressions,” “white privilege,” and so on. All these narratives insist that blacks are still victims of racism, and that freedom’s accountability is an injustice.

We end up giving victimization the charisma of black authenticity. Suffering, poverty and underdevelopment are the things that make you “truly black.” Success and achievement throw your authenticity into question.

For any formerly oppressed group, there will be an expectation that the past will somehow be an excuse for difficulties in the present. This is the expectation behind the NFL protests and the many protests of groups like Black Lives Matter. The near-hysteria around the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray and others is also a hunger for the excuse of racial victimization, a determination to keep it alive. To a degree, black America’s self-esteem is invested in the illusion that we live under a cloud of continuing injustice.

When you don’t know how to go forward, you never just sit there; you go backward into what you know, into what is familiar and comfortable and, most of all, exonerating. You rebuild in your own mind the oppression that is fading from the world. And you feel this abstract, fabricated oppression as if it were your personal truth, the truth around which your character is formed. Watching the antics of Black Lives Matter is like watching people literally aspiring to black victimization, longing for it as for a consummation.

A Response To Lecrae, Jemar Tisby, Thabiti Anyabwile And Anyone Else Who Cares To Listen

As pretty much everyone knows, evangelicalism and especially conservative evangelicalism is a mostly White thing. Apparently that is a negative.

According to this fairly baffling post from John Piper, 116 Been Real, Lecare Moore, who simply goes by Lecrae, kind of like Cher and Madonna, is distancing himself from "white evangelicalism". I don't know much about Lecrae and I don't listen to his stuff but he has a fairly large following among white evangelicals, especially of the Reformed type.

Based what Piper is saying, he listened to the interview and I just don't have the time, Lecrae is distancing himself in part based on three "experiences", as listed below from Piper's article.

- First, Lecrae’s friend, Tyree Boyd-Pates, the Curator of History for the California African American Museum, told him, “You have said some things that were poignant and provocative for black people, but the phenotype of your music was not black . . . sonically it wasn’t resonating with our soul. . . . It’s like [the] ‘I have a dream’ speech over a rock record.”

- Second, the Washington Post called him an “evangelical mascot.”

- Third, he went public with his dismay over the Michael Brown shooting, and woke up to the reality that this “white evangelical” world did not feel what he felt. “The visceral attacks that came my way were like a shock to my system. That did some identity work.”

Based on this, Mr. Moore is going to "turn (his) back on white evangelicalism"

If I turn my back on white evangelicalism, who am I? If we disagree on . . . Black Lives and social justice, and I’m not getting pats on the back from John Piper, then who am I now? . . . For years that had been what was shaping my identity. . . . If I’m not the evangelical darling, who is Lecrae? . . . 

Getting  a pat on the back from John Piper? How patronizing and insulting. Maybe Piper helped expand Mr. Moore's audience because he appreciated his music and what he had to say but to then reduce it to Piper humoring Lecrae and giving him a "pat on the back" is nothing less than spitting in Piper's face. Then Piper goes on to say this:

Do you see yet why I respond to Lecrae’s “identity development work” with thankfulness? I know young men whose disillusionment with “white evangelicalism” was not as painful as Lecrae’s, and yet they threw the brown baby of Bethlehem out with the white bathwater. They’re done with Christianity. Done with the Bible. Done with Jesus — except the one they create to fit their present political mood. That could have been Lecrae. It could be you. 

Um, so I guess we are supposed to be glad Lecrae has embraced his black identity, something Piper would no doubt condemn in a white person publicly embracing their white identity, because at least he didn't leave the faith totally. Would Piper say the same about a white singer who espoused kinism after the shooting up of a church by a black man in Tennessee a few weeks ago? Piper doesn't seem excited about a lot of what Lecrae says in his interview but he also seems overly focused on "White evangelicalism" being synonymous with support of Trump and opposition to the neo-Marxist Black Lives Matter movement. I sort of don't think Piper understands the subject he is talking about here, either Lecrae and his dismissal and distancing himself from white evangelicalism or what exactly it is that white evangelicals care about or why we do what we do. I might go further and say that Piper seems a lot more concerned with "creating space" and "extending grace" to Lecrae than he is to his fellow white evangelicals and that to me is problematic.

The main problem I have though are with Lecrae's three "experiences" and why those are leading him to distance himself and create barriers between himself and white evangelicals.

Like a fine Beretta double gun I am going to let loose with both barrels.

Disclaimer: I don't listen to rap of any sort and haven't since a brief flirtation with Ice-T and N.W.A. back in high school in the 80's and I generally don't listen to "Christian" music at all so you might think I don't have a dog in this fight, with apologies to Michael Vick. However I do like John Piper and I also happen to be one of those lame, awful White evangelicals (although not one that voted for Trump) and it turns out I am sorta tired of being hectored, harangued, scolded, finger-wagged. I am endlessly told I need to feel guilty, that I need to apologize for my phantom "White privilege" and that I am a part of the group that somehow is collectively to blame for every ill, even the obviously self-inflicted ills, of an entire race of people that I have had very little interaction with of any kind in my life. So yeah, this article was like a matador waving a cape in front of me and I freely admit it made me pretty grumpy.

On the first "experience"... 

Lecrae being told his music isn't "black": "You have said some things that were poignant and provocative for black people, but the phenotype of your music was not black". So I guess his rap was too white? And that makes it therefore illegitimate?

Lecrae seems to have fallen victim to the cult of “authentic blackness” where some blacks get to determine for all other blacks what they are allowed to think, say, sing, wear and believe in order to qualify as authentic. I am not black so I don't understand it but it seems unaccountably powerful. Step outside of orthodoxy and the cult leaders rain down on you like the wrath of God, you become an Uncle Tom, are accused of trying to be white, etc. Like I said, I don't get this. No one says to me that if I don't like Polka music that I am not authentically Polish and I have never heard anyone say that the phenotype of any Polish musician, whatever that means, was not white. It is a very strange cultural phenomenon and if I may be so bold it seems to be a control mechanism for those who want to keep blacks from straying from black racial orthodoxy.

On the second "experience"....

The far left Amazon.com/Washington Post which hates all things Christian called him an "evangelical mascot".

That is a pretty cheap and clumsy and obvious shot and Lecrae seems to have swallowed it hook, line and sinker. If I may be super un-PC, if you are a prominent black man and you are going to leave the PC plantation, you better expect to get some backlash. Nothing is less permitted by our culture overlords than a black man who doesn't parrot leftist orthodoxy (see: Thomas, Clarence).

Pardon my French but how much of a fool do you have to be to get so easily sucked in by such an obvious and blatant cheap shot? I don't know much about Lecrae but I would think he would have more wisdom and discernment than to be led around by the nose by the WaPo. Standing for the truth means some slings and arrows and if you aren't wise enough and man enough to stand up to that, well that says a great deal about your character I am afraid.

On the third "experience"....

Lecrae expressed his opinion on the Michael Brown shooting, an unfortunate event but a justifiable shooting, but was apparently shocked when not everyone and especially not his white audience agreed with him. Wow, I hate it when I say something and not everyone agrees with me. According to the interview this caused "some identity work". So let me get this straight. A fairly complex case that got a lot of attention but it was a pretty clear case of justifiable use of force, caused Lecrae to do some "identity work", a phrase that smacks of some pretty heavy racial identitarianism. Even Jonathan Capehart, a member of the leftist Washington Post editorial board and a contributor for similarly left-wing MSNBC wrote: "(The Justice Department report) also forced me to deal with two uncomfortable truths: Brown never surrendered with his hands up, and Wilson was justified in shooting Brown." (emphasis mine).

I don't get why the Michael Brown case has become the bellwether for alleged police brutality. What exactly is it about a huge, probably very strong guy attacking a cop and getting shot for it that is a racially dividing issue? As I recall, Michael Brown was 6' 4" tall and weighed around 292 pounds. That is about the size of a college or even pro football offensive or defensive lineman. During my year of college at Ohio State, my roommate had a class with a center for the football team and one day his classmate stopped by our dorm room. He was enormous but he was probably not quite as big as Michael Brown. Sure Brown was not "armed" but believe me a 6'4", almost 300 pound adult (he was 18) is plenty dangerous especially when he apparently is attacking a cop and going for his gun.

As a relative nobody that has made a career out of going against the grain, you kind of have to have a little spine and thick skin. If people don't agree with you, taking your ball and going home is not going to do a darn thing to change anything and done on a large scale in this context it simply increases racial polarization. If that is the goal, and while I don't think it is for Lecrae it certainly is for many in BLM and similar groups, then at least be open about it.

That raises a question and comment for me. Why is it OK for Lecrae to self-identify within the church based on his race and openly choose to identify himself with that racial subset and reject or at least “distance” himself from people of other races but if I do the same thing I would be labeled a bigot and racist? Or do we operate under two sets of rules in the church when it comes to race, whites have to reach out and seek to be more "diverse" but blacks can self-segregate and that is OK?

If you think this is OK from Lecrae but the Alt-Right and White nationalism is a problem you are either naive or ignorant or both.

That is why the post from Piper seems so confused and schizophrenic and I don't understand it so I am chalking it up to the general disconnect when we talk about race. I don't think Piper would tolerate this coming from a white evangelical but he seems to sort of tolerate it coming from a black evangelical. Piper seems sincere and he has a track record to back up what he is saying. I just hope he doesn't stumble down the Russell Moore path where virtue signaling engulfs his public ministry because Piper has an important voice and I would hate to see it lost in political correctness like Moore.

We are seemingly as far away from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream of a nation where men are judged by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin as we were in August of 1963 when he gave his speech but ironically many people who claim the contemporary mantle of King are the ones who judge others on their skin color. This is only exacerbated by the Trump Presidency. Jemar Tisby, Thabiti Anyabwile and others seem bent on flogging white evangelicals for the sins of Trump in a way that I don't recall anyone doing the reverse of during the Obama presidency. Thabiti openly expressed that he supported Hillary Clinton over Trump and no one is more a fan of seeing dead black babies than Hillary. Many black evangelicals seem to be doing what so many accuse white evangelicals of, putting their racial self-interest, misplaced though I think it is, over their Kingdom allegiance.

There has never been a time when black Christians are more in need of the words of Paul in his second letter to the church in Corinth where he wrote:

Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, “I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Therefore go out from their midst, and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing; then I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty.” (2 Corinthians 6:14-18)

Black Lives Matter is a pagan, ungodly, anti-Christian organization that thrives on causing racial discord. Those who choose to associate with and show affinity toward it rather than "white evangelicalism" are absolutely no different from those who espouse kinism and white separatism in the church. If white evangelicals making common cause with the GOP and Trump is unequal yoking, how much more so is it when black evangelicals make common cause with BLM?

If you want to associate with me in the church because of our shared redemption in Christ, then cool. I welcome that. If you don't want to associate with me in spite of our shared redemption in Christ because of my skin color and my affiliation with "White evangelicalism" and you prefer to elevate your racial identity above your Kingdom identity, then I can't help that and if I am being totally honest I really don't care or have any interest in working up much concern. Just don't act like your racial separatism is somehow noble and principled while that of Richard Spencer or Jared Taylor is evil.

On Taking A Knee, SOBs And White Supremacists Hiding Under Your Bed

Everyone else is weighing in on the kneeling for the anthem thing, it even trended on Twitter with dueling hashtags, #TakeTheKnee and #TakeAStandNotAKnee, so I might as well too.

I am going to "get real" as the hep cats say these days when cutting a rug at the sockhop so hold onto your hats.

Let me state at the outset that I believe anyone can speak their mind on any topic at any time. If you want to kneel during the National Anthem, that is your right as a citizen of the United States. I don't put my hand over my heart when it is sung for the same reason I don't say the Pledge, my loyalty is to my King, not a specific country, but I do remove my hat out of respect for this nation.

Also, Trump weighing in on this controversy in his normal brash New York style is unhelpful but that is what we expect from him. If you taunt a bull, he is going to charge and a lot of people in America are the political equivalent of rodeo clowns, on several levels.

On the other hand, NFL players are employees representing their employers who pay them millions to entertain fans. The NFL has a compelling interest in protecting their brand which is one of the most valuable in the world. When I worked for a place like Fidelity Investments back in the day and was on business, or wearing their logo on my shirt, I kept controversial opinions to myself. A business lunch is not the place to discuss controversial topics. I was on my employer's dime and was representing them to clients with tens or hundreds of millions invested in that organization, so I didn't have any First Amendment right to endanger that relationship. I used to quietly pray before meals at business lunches but I didn't try to proselytize my clients. The NFL would be well within their rights to fine or otherwise punish players that are clearly doing damage to the relationship between the NFL and their customers, i.e. the fans and the advertising sponsors.

Also on a different other hand, while it is not required, it would be nice if the NFL players kneeling had a clue what it is they are protesting other than vague references to "racism" and "police brutality" and of course "White supremacy". The last is my favorite. "White supremacy" has entered the meaningless and counter-productive word lexicon. Everything is White supremacy. Trump winning? White supremacy. People who are understandably upset at players seeming to disrespect the flag and the police that they expect to protect them while playing? White supremacy. I put together a handy infographic about this over the weekend....

Perhaps an exaggeration but not a huge one. Colin Kapernick, who is an utter idiot and mediocre quarterback by the way, at least has clumsily tried to explain why he was kneeling (hint, it had something to do with cops like the ones depicted as pigs on his socks. Classy!). The rest of these guys I think are just doing it to virtue signal or as a more polite middle finger to Trump, which I can't really blame them for.

A particular scene stood out for me yesterday from the Detroit Lions game against the Atlanta Falcons. Rico Lavelle, who I have never heard of,  the guy who sang the national anthem which is a great honor for any singer, took the opportunity to kneel at the end and toss up the black power fist salute.

WOW. Rico Lavelle, who sang the national anthem ahead of Detroit & Atlanta, kneels after the anthem. pic.twitter.com/z0qPfem8kh

— Harry (@HarryCFC_) September 24, 2017

Let me be clear. The black power fist symbolizes a lot of things to me and none of them are very positive. It brings to mind things like the Black Panthers, black nationalism, the violence of the radical movements of civil rights era. To me and many White Americans, right or wrong, the black power salute is a tacit threat. In a way it is a gesture symbolic of racial animus like a skinhead giving the Nazi salute. Think that is an exaggeration? The black man who allegedly murdered one and shot multiple other White churchgoers in Antioch, Tennessee yesterday, Emanuel Kidega Samson, is a Sudanese immigrant who has on his (not taken down yet but soon to be) Facebook profile this picture that was once his cover photo:

I pulled the above screenshot from his page myself lest you think this is some conspiracy theory or photoshopping. I don't think everyone throwing up a black power salute is a potential mass shooter but I also don't think that anyone who is a White nationalist is one step away from tossing Jews in an oven. So don't tell me there isn't a more sinister meaning behind the black power salute, even if most people don't realize it.

What I found even worse is that there are four little black boys in the picture, all looking at Mr. Lavelle, while he kneels and throws up the black power salute. The little boy on the right especially is looking at that raised fist. I wonder what they were thinking? Here is the harsh reality of life for young black boys that live in Detroit....

Detroit has long been one of the most murder prone cities in the country. The raw number of murders might not be as high as Chicago but that is thanks only to the plummeting population of Detroit. The per capita rate of murder in Detroit is often at the top and this year is in second place thanks to the ongoing slaughter in St. Louis, ironically home to the most recent racial unrest. Check out this chart:

What do the top five cities on this list, with widely outsized murder rates, have in common? In 2010 Detroit's population was 82.7% black. St. Louis was 49.2% black, the largest racial group. New Orleans was over 60% black. Baltimore is around 63% black. Newark is over 52% black.

You want to know who is getting murdered in Detroit?

Young black men.

You want to know who is murdering them?

Young black men.

This is the truth that everyone knows but no one wants to say speak out loud. Let me be even more uncharacteristically blunt. When those four black boys in that photo grow up, there are statistically at far greater risk of harm from each other than they are from any White person or any cop for that matter. Cops killing black men without cause is an issue but compared to black men killing other black men it is way down on the list.

While people like Ta-neshi Coates get wealthy selling books and essays about the "White supremacist" bogeyman, and the number of actual White supremacists as distinguished from the more common White nationalists is tiny, the real threat to the lives of black men is primarily and almost exclusively from other black men.

I hope someone sits down with those four young boys and explains to them that killing each other over drug turf and personal insults is a certain way to end up in jail, dead or eventually both and that perpetuating this cycle of violence is destroying any future for blacks in America. It is easier, more politically expedient and more personally enriching to blame all of your community's problems on the "other" of "White supremacy" but the overriding problem in the black community is a lack of personal responsibility. You are free to dismiss that assertion but I stand by it nonetheless. Playing the perpetual victim card has led us to where we are today and the black community desperately needs voices to stand up and say "Stop blaming other people for your problems and for crying out loud stop shooting each other!". Saying stuff like that won't get you published in the elite newspapers and magazines and probably won't get you book deals but if enough black men start to speak up and say to each other that enough is enough it might be what their community needs to pull back from the abyss.

See That Bend Over There? Russell Moore Just Went Around It

'Bout a half-mile back on this river is where Russ Moore left
behind reasonable Biblical exegesis.

Alternate Post Title: Adventures In Eisegesis With Russell Moore.

In case you missed it, Russell Moore doesn't much care for "White supremacy". At all. In fact he dislikes it even more than he dislikes people that supported Donald Trump, and that is saying something, although it is becoming commonplace in our cultural narrative to assume that everyone that supported and/or voted for Trump is a de facto "White supremacist". For purposes of the remainder of this post, please assume scare quotes around the words "White supremacy" because I don't think most people, including and especially Dr. Moore, understand what it is and why it is different from White nationalism or ethnonationalism or just plain old nationalism.

Well Dr. Moore took to the pages of the Washington Post (Democracy Dies In Darkness! Plus Free Two Day Shipping For Amazon Prime Members!) to explain why he doesn't like White supremacy. He usually goes to the Washington Post when he has Something Serious To Say™ because what is the point of virtue signaling if the people you are trying to signal don't see it and no one Serious reads his blog. So anyway, Moore's post at the WaPo, Russell Moore: White supremacy angers Jesus, but does it anger his church?, skips over the actual issues and leaps right into histrionics. Dr. Moore says: "White supremacy makes Jesus angry.".

OK, maybe it does. But why? Well prepare to put on your eisegesis goggles cuz here we go! Dr. Moore implies that Jesus is OK with sinners, but what He really disliked is White supremacy:

The Scriptures show us two things that make Jesus visibly angry: religious hypocrisy and racial supremacist ideology.

OK on the first one, that actually shows up in the New Testament. Jesus was not angry with the Pharisees because they were too devout but because they focused on the externals and not the heart. But what about "racial supremacist ideology"? That seems a little odd since Jesus really never discussed racial supremacist ideology or even "racism" itself. So where does the good Doctor go to support His assertion that of all the sins in the world, Jesus is really only angry with hypocrisy and racial supremacy? Why to the cleansing of the temple of course!

Yeah, I don't get it either. The cleansing of the temple is a pretty well known event because it is the one time that Jesus seems to get really angry. That doesn't mean that He is soft on sin, His language about the consequences of sin at Judgment are pretty stark and frightening. But in His earthly ministry He generally didn't "raise His voice" except on this occasion. Why was He angry? Were the moneychangers wearing Klan hoods or throwing up Nazi salutes? Nope...

And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you make it a den of robbers.” (Matthew 21:12-13)

And they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold and those who bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. And he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. And he was teaching them and saying to them, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.” (Mark 11:15-17)

And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold, saying to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be a house of prayer,’ but you have made it a den of robbers.” (Luke 19:45-46)

The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers sitting there. And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. And he told those who sold the pigeons, “Take these things away; do not make my Father's house a house of trade.” His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.” (John 2:13-17)

What Jesus was angry about was the making of the temple into a "house of commerce", people profiting from the exchanging of money. It was supposed to be a place of worship and here were people making it a house of trade for robbers. It was not even commerce itself that He objected to, it was the location. But according to Dr. Moore, what He was really mad about was the exclusion of foreigners.

In some way, those who clamored for space in the temple courts were blocking the way of those God had welcomed into his house of prayer. Jesus reclaimed the space for the God who desires all tongues and tribes and nations to worship him through Jesus Christ.

Yeah, except that is not at all what the Bible was talking about. While it was an usual event, it was a pretty clear event. The three synoptic Gospel record it almost exactly the same, with one exception where Mark mentions "...for all the nations". This is what Moore clings to as his "evidence" that the temple cleansing was a blow against "racial supremacy". Jesus is making an important point here about the perversion of the Hebraic practices in Phariseeism and in the mockery of the temple but He was not making a point about "racial supremacist ideology". He just wasn't and if He had intended to it would have at least warranted a mention in one of the four Gospels.

Moore continues down this path...

The religious leaders and those keeping the worship of God from the nations had something in common: Both were seeking to keep people away from the kingdom of God, people they didn’t feel were worthy of it. Jesus plowed through their barriers, and kept plowing, even after his resurrection from the dead. Immediately upon his enthronement in heaven, Jesus poured out his Spirit on those from nations all over the world. Seeing the multiethnic, multinational reality of these Spirit-bearing people, many were “amazed and perplexed,” asking, “What does this mean?”

According to Moore, what people were perplexed by was the "multiethnic, multinational reality" on display (the article links to Acts 2, the day of Pentecost). Was the rainbow coalition what had people "perplexed"?

No. 

What perplexed them is that the hearers were from all over the place but they heard these uneducated Galilieans speaking to them in their own tongue. They were amazed at that, not that there was a "multiethnic, multinational reality". It is absolutely dishonest to suggest that the amazement came from the diversity when the amazement is clearly stated as coming from the speaking of tongues (actual language, not gibberish) from uneducated men. It was a miracle and like many miracles in the New Testament, especially post-Resurrection, the intent was to grab attention so the apostles could preach the Gospel. In fact they were not even "multiethnic", they were all Jews:

Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. (Acts 2:5)

Some were non-ethnic Jew proselytes or some appear to be Jewish exiles from the diaspora but all were Jews. That wasn't the point. The point was the miracle of the apostles speaking in a manner that men from around the world who spoke a multitude of languages hearing men speak to them in their native tongues, men who would have had no way of knowing those languages apart from a work of the Spirit. This is basic, Bible Exegesis 101, first year seminary level stuff but Dr. Moore, who should know better, plunges ahead and makes points that anyone should see don't fit, anyone except perhaps the average reader of the WaPo/Amazon.

Dr. Moore is trying to address a contemporary issue that he doesn't seem all that well-versed in and doing so not by taking broad themes from Scripture, by going to Acts 17:26 for example (although even that verse taken in context doesn't override ethno-nationalism at all, kind of the opposite), but instead by making a point from a completely unrelated passage that might seem convincing to the average Scripturally illiterate reader of the Washington Post but that ought to be completely unconvincing to someone with even a cursory understanding of the Scriptures.

Then just to make sure that you realize that White supremacy is bad, Dr. Moore goes to the hyperbole machine and it spits out this:

“Blood and soil” ethnic nationalism is not just a deviant social movement. It is the same old idolatry of the flesh, the human being seeking to deify his own flesh and blood as God. The Scripture defines this attempt at human self-exaltation with a number: 666. White supremacy does not merely attack our society (though it does) and the ideals of our nation (though it does); white supremacy attacks the image of Jesus Christ himself. White supremacy exalts the creature over the Creator, and the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against it.

So, is ethnic nationalism the mark of the beast or something? I would point out that the "ideals of our nation" include stuff like only White men being able to vote, only Whites being allowed to emigrate to America and chattel slavery being the law for the first century of our existence. Pretending that the United States was founded as a multi-racial utopia is historically ignorant. It is also worth pointing out that Russell Moore is both a member and employee of the Southern Baptist Convention. If the SBC is for anything, it is for the state of Israel. But what is the modern state of Israel? It is a modern enthnostate, a land granted to the Jews as part of the partition of Palestine to be a specific, self-governing Jewish state. Why was this place, already occupied by other people at the time of the founding of the modern state, given to the Jews instead of somewhere in Europe or North America? Because of the sacred nature of the soil and the historic ties. The Jews shed blood over the soil of Israel to protect their ethnic homeland as a home for Jews. Isn't that the very definition of "blood and soil" ethnic nationalism? Yet you won't hear Dr. Moore criticizing Jews for wanting an independent Jewish ethno-state. You can criticize White supremacy and White nationalism, which are not the same thing, but no one keeps their job in an SBC agency if they criticize Israel thanks to the goofy theology of dispensationalism that dominates the SBC and the "Israel is our closest ally and friend" nonsense. I don't begrudge the Jews for wanting an ethnic homeland but I do think it somewhat disingenuous to accuse Whites who want the same thing, rightly or wrongly, of bearing the mark of the beast.

What you end up with yet another example of Dr. Moore virtue signaling to the Important People that read the Washington Post and scolding his less enlightened fellow Southern Baptists for being insufficiently woke about White supremacy. Wrapping it all together is a criminal misuse of the Scriptures. God created His Old Covenant community as an ethnic nation-state where the most egregious violations came from intermixing (whoring after) other ethnicities. In the New Covenant Jesus Himself tore down the dividing wall between the Jew and the Gentile in the church but nowhere does it appear that He destroyed the ethnic and national distinctions between people. I am not arguing in favor of entho-nationalism, or kinism or White nationalism or anything of the kind in this post. I am just trying to make the case that if you are opposed to those things as a Christian, it is incumbent on you to show from Scripture why you are opposed and to not try to shoehorn contemporary events into historical Biblical accounts like Pentecost and the cleansing of the Temple. His case would have been better served with actual exegesis instead of frothing at the mouth invectives.

Dr. Moore heads up the Southern Baptist Convention Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. He seems awfully concerned about "racial reconcilliation" and the Trump presidency and "immigration reform", a topic I wrote about here as it relates to the ERLC, but he seems strangely silent when it comes to leftist agitators like the "antifa" and Black Lives Matter. I can say with a great deal of confidence that the organizers of the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally pose no threat to the religious liberty of Americans, of Christians and of Southern Baptists but that the antifa and others on the radical Left certainly do. As I have pointed out to others, when the Left runs out of monuments to be offended by, where do you think their attention will turn next? If you don't think that faithful Gospel preaching is in their cross-hairs, you are being willfully ignorant. Russell Moore would be serving his employers in SBC churches better by speaking out against the encroaching secular Leftist threat instead of haranguing his fellow Christians over their vote last November or a handful of White nationalists at a rally. Ever since taking over the ERLC, Dr. Moore has been veering off course and with each passing year the ERLC looks less like a ministry concerned with ethics and religious liberty and more like a way for Russ Moore to showcase himself.

I don't think editorials like this one from Dr. Moore do anyone any good. They are not going to convince any secular readers of the WaPo to consider the Gospel message or that Christians are not all wearing hoods to our worship meetings. I doubt they do much to sway Southern Baptists or Christians in general, especially for anyone who digs past the assertions of Moore and into the text. I don't see any White nationalists rending their garments in repentance because of Moore's slapdash reasoning, rather it likely reinforces their already low opinion of him. So what exactly was the point here? I don't honestly know apart from assuming it is just virtue signaling but I wish Dr. Moore would spend more time on actual threats to religious liberty instead of trying to show off how woke he is. The church faces a whole myriad of threats in this day and age but a handful of "alt-right" types marching around Confederate monuments is pretty far down the list.

Charlottesville Didn't Happen In A Vacuum

If you somehow missed it, there was an enormous pre-planned and legal rally yesterday in Charlottesville, Virginia organized by a loose coalition of groups that would fall under the various banners of White nationalism, the alt-right, Southern heritage, etc. There were even some random KKK members and a few neo-Nazis on hand (as well as some counter-protesters waving Soviet flags but those pics didn't make the mainstream media). It was a huge event and it drew a lot of rally participants and as always a lot of counter-protesters from the so-called "antifa", many of whom went openly declaring their intent to cause mayhem via violence. To make matter worse, the local governments tried very hard to stop this rally at the last moment and only court orders (supported I believe by the ACLU) forced the local governments to honor the legally obtained permits and many, many reports from the ground indicated that the police did very little to keep the counter-protesters away from the main rally. There have been a lot of rallies like this in other places and they went off peacefully but the mayor of Charlottesville and the governor of Virginia seem far more overtly partisan.

What you ended up with was a combustible mix and it went about as badly as it could. One person who has been arrested drove his car late in the day at high speed into a crowd, killing one person and injuring many others. While the police have released his name and photo, we don't have much other information about him. That didn't stop people from instantly ascribing motivations to him, often the same people who seem baffled as to the motives of someone yelling "Allah Akbar" while attacking people. In an unrelated event that somehow has been pinned on the rally, a police helicopter crashed and two cops were killed. Even "right-wing" Fox News ran this headline:

I am not sure how the rally can be blamed for a chopper crashing unless someone from the rally shot it down and no one is making that claim as far as I know. So three people dead, dozens injured, a number arrested, passions inflamed all around.

President Trump came out right away and said the right thing for a change.

We ALL must be united & condemn all that hate stands for. There is no place for this kind of violence in America. Lets come together as one!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 12, 2017

Of course that didn't placate the Left because nothing he said would have stopped them from trying to score political points. People on the Left were screaming because he didn't specifically call out "White supremacists" even though there was plenty of violence coming from  the antifa. Meanwhile Terry McAuliffe, the Democrat Governor of Virginia, called out "White supremacists" by name but was silent about the violence from the leftist antifa. The bottom line is that the rally organizers had permits and a Constitutional right to assemble whether or not you like what they have to say, just as Black Lives Matter rallies have the same right. The government has an obligation to protect the free expression of speech, especially political speech. President Trump was absolutely correct to condemn the violence without exception yesterday.

The events yesterday confirmed two things I have been saying for a while.

First, sooner or later something bad was going to happen and someone was going to get killed in one of these clashes. Leading up to the election and ever since there has been a great deal political violence and in spite of what the media tells us it was almost exclusively one way. In event after event, leftist agitators attacked people peacefully minding their own business. People going to Trump rallies were attacked, had their hats snatched from their heads, were chased by crowds of thugs in parking garages. Controversial speakers from actual muckrakers like Milo to serious academics like Charles Murray caused enormous conflagrations on campuses from Berkeley to Middlebury with enormous property damage and people getting injured. Antifa hit people with bicycle locks, something that could easily kill someone, sprayed mace in the eyes of women simply talking to reporters, sucker punched alt-right leader Richard Spencer, throw bags of urine and often seek to find protesters separated from the larger crowd for attacks. There has not been this much overt political violence in my lifetime that I can recall. I have been warning that someone was going to get killed in one of these clashes. I sort of expected to see someone either get hit and have their skull caved in or someone getting attacked pull a gun to defend themselves but something was bound to happen. You can't have inflamed emotions plus people bent on disruption and violence ("By Any Means Necessary") coming together without something going tragically wrong.

The second thing I have been saying for a while is that we cannot continue down this road as one politically united people. I wrote back in February that it was time to consider dissolving the union in my post Is It Time To Once Again Dissolve The Political Bands That Connect Us?. I made the argument that for the first time since the 1860's what divides us is more powerful than what unites us.

My proposal is pretty simple but it is also incredibly complex. We should have a serious conversation about a political division of the United States into smaller, more manageable sovereign nations. I am not sure what that looks like in practice. Four countries, a Southern States of America, a Western States of America, a Northeastern States of America and a Northern States of America (the current Midwest)? How would trade and commerce and the free movement of people work? What would we do about the military, who gets the nukes and the aircraft carriers?

Obviously there is a lot to think about but if we cannot find common ground as a people and if violence continues to spiral, is there any other choice? An amiable separation would certainly be better than a violent civil war. The United States has stood for more than 200 years, surviving a terrible civil war once. I don't think we could survive another.

The events that followed my post in February only reinforce my belief that the union cannot be saved and that we will come apart, either violently or by negotiations but it will happen. I am going to be writing more about this on my other blog in the days to come.

One more thought on the reaction of the church.

This will not be popular but it is true. There is a great deal of blame to lay at the foot of the church at large in America for what went on yesterday but it has little to do with the church spending an insufficient amount of time talking about race.

We have largely ceded the conversation on race to a single narrow viewpoint that largely reinforces the guilt-victim narrative. Minorities are all victims, Whites are all guilty. Those may not be the exact words used but that is functionally how it comes across. Even "conservative" groups are talking about "privilege". That might resonate among the rarefied air of academia but it doesn't among the average Joe working his butt off to support his family. Tell the white guy working at a working class wage who is struggling with bills, watching his health insurance rates skyrocket and college tuition spiking that he is the unjust beneficiary of "White privilege" and you are not likely to get an affirming response. There is little appetite for real conversations about race in the church and this has left an enormous vacuum in the narrative. There is an old saying that nature abhors a vacuum so don't be surprised when you don't like what fills it.

The conversation about race in the church is a close parallel to the conversation about race in America as a whole. The center where the hard conversations take place is empty and all that is left are the two extremes, the social justice warrior, "white privilege" Left on one side and the White nationalist alt-right on the other. With nothing but the extremes on either end, is it any wonder that people are gravitating toward the extreme Right end of the spectrum? Not wishing to sound arrogant but not a lot of average Christian men are inclined to take the time to think through the complex issues of race and the Kingdom. They are too busy making ends meet and caring for their family. When faced with a simplistic dichotomy of "people like you are the problem" and "people like you are the solution", which do you suppose is more appealing?

My meandering point is this. If you abandon the field of discourse to the extremes, you shouldn't be surprised when people adopt extremist positions. If the church continues to fearfully avoid having the tough conversations about race and refuses to abandon the guilt-victim narrative that pits people of different races against one another, then the church is complicit in the continuing extremism on both sides of the conversation. We are past the point where hokey and empty platitudes and out of context verses are sufficient for the task. If we can't move past a VBS level discussion of one of the most divisive topics we face, we have no one to blame but ourselves for what the results are.

What happened yesterday is only the beginning. Both sides, the "antifa" and By Any Means Necessary crowds on one side and the alt-right and White nationalist groups on the other are united by one common belief: yesterday was a success. I expect to see the rallies continue and the pace to accelerate. Those who thrive off of this are not going to see someone getting killed as a reason to back off, just the opposite. Where will the church be? If the answer is on the sidelines where it has been for a decade then the results will be the same.

The Future of the S(JW)BC?

In a recent post just a couple of days ago, So It Starts, Southern Baptist Edition, I said that the assault on the Southern Baptist Convention was just getting started both from within and without. The latest I came across was from "moderate" SBC Voices, where the original "anti-alt-right" resolution was posted. This one is more subtle but contains that most silly beast known as the "open letter": An Open Letter to Steve Gaines Regarding Evangelism Taskforce Diversity.

Oh there is that "D" word again. Here is the gist of the "open letter" from "Voices for a New Baptist Future", a venture that seeks to increase "racial reconciliation" and representation from smaller churches. I get the second one, the SBC is obviously dominated by the big churches but I am not sure how in a democratic group you increase their representation when a pastor from a church of 5000 is going to always have more exposure than one from a church of 50. Anyway, in summary....

Great job! We  💓 evangelism! Go Great Commission! But....

We did, however, notice that only two of the people chosen to serve on this taskforce are non-Anglo. This is at a time when approximately 20% of SBC churches are majority non-Anglo and 50% of NAMB church plants are ethnic minorities. The 2015 Executive Committee report on the SBC’s progress on racial reconciliation noted the great strides that have been made, but it also called on our leaders to make an even more concerted effort to include more minorities on future convention boards and committees. This kind of broad representation is especially needed with regard to evangelism. As the complexion of America continues to darken, we must increase our effectiveness at reaching people who look different than we do.

There are other voices we feel were left out as well. The announced taskforce does not include any women. It also does not include any smaller church pastors or laypeople who are not denominational employees. We believe that Southern Baptists are at our best when we hear from a diversity of people who represent the diversity of the SBC.

With this in mind, we ask that you would broaden representation on the newly created taskforce by adding members from these other viewpoints. We commit ourselves to pray for you in this endeavor and for the work of the taskforce as it moves forward. Again, we are thankful for your leadership and trust that God will guide you in this matter.

"As the complexion of America continues to darken...."? Too much time in the sun or something? So much for content of character instead of color of skin. Also so much for race being just a social construct I guess.

The second gripe first. While the New Testament does make note of the accomplishment of women, it is also pretty clear that the leadership in the church is exclusively male. That is not simply a result of the times they lived in but is by design. Grumbling about not enough women on the task force is an obvious grumble about the lack of women in clerical leadership in the SBC in general, while I see that as one of the major strengths of the SBC. Twelve out of twelve apostles were male. All of the elders in the NT were male. So yeah the task force is rightly all male.

The second is more troubling. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is not restricted by race or ethnicity (or to either gender for that matter). The open letter however seems to imply that a "darker complexion" in America can only be reached by a task force with a similar darker complexion. Are we to assume that blacks and Hispanics and Asians can only be "effectively" reached by people that look like them? Here I thought the power of God for salvation comes from the message, not the skin color of the messenger? Silly me. I guess the Gospel is like a soft drink, it is all about the marketing. I understand the being all things to all people but this is a task force for crying out loud. It is 19 men who will look at how the SBC can improve personal evangelism and report back next convention.

"[Tuesday] you voted to allow me to appoint a task force to study how Southern Baptists can be more effective in personal soul-winning (personal evangelism) and also evangelistic preaching," said Gaines, pastor of Memphis-area Bellevue Baptist Church in Cordova, Tenn. "This committee is charged with bringing a report and any recommendations to the SBC meeting in Dallas, Texas, June 12-13, 2018."

It is not like these are the only guys who are going to be evangelizing, it is a task force! As I pointed out in a prior post, the SBC is something like 85%+ White so yeah, the task force is going to be White simply by virtue of the majority of members and leaders being White. Last time I checked in the New Testament, being White was not a stumbling block to evangelism and someone who would reject the Gospel because the one preaching is a different race is someone who is clearly not elect in the first place and thus not going to believe the Gospel no matter who is preaching it.

As a side note, this is what you get from a man-centered view of salvation. It is all about the methods, the style, the marketing instead of being about the power of God to save sinners. I believe the New Testament teaches clearly that God has decreed an elect people that He will save and that not having evangelism task forces with sufficient melanin will not thwart the will of God.

The desired end-result here is clear. It is a remaking of the Southern Baptist Convention into something very different from what it is today, namely a flawed but largely orthodox denomination that takes seriously what the Bible teaches on most issues and most especially on the most pressing questions of the day where most denominations are tripping over themselves to distance themselves from Scripture: the authority of Scripture, gender roles, marriage, homosexuality, abortion. A Southern Baptist Convention that spends all of their time worrying about having X number of blacks or women on task forces instead of standing firm in the face of a hostile world with the life saving Gospel of Jesus Christ is worthless to God and a delight to Satan.

I hope that the leadership of the SBC refuses to capitulate to those who are seeking to undermine and distract the SBC from her mission. I am half tempted to join and/or plant an SBC church just so I can fight against this from within instead of crabbing about it from the outside.

So It Starts, Southern Baptist Edition

Last month I wrote repeatedly about the fiasco at the Southern Baptist Convention where delegates committed the sin of initially choosing not to proceed on a clumsily worded, hysterical resolution condemning the alt-right. In one of my several posts I wrote:

Back to the resolution. I have to give credit to Dwight McKissic. Whether intentional or not he very neatly maneuvered the Southern Baptist Convention into a corner and now it looks like he will get a version of his resolution and in the future the SBC will be cowed into approving any racially based resolution that comes forward out of fear of being raked over the coals again by the media and appearing insufficiently "woke" on matters of racial reconciliation. Well played indeed.

In other words this resolution is less about any fringe meme-based ideology and more about the opening salvo in a movement to transform the Southern Baptist Convention into the image of progressives. Or even more likely to simply undermine the SBC until it collapses. Once you capitulate once, the SJW sharks smell blood in the water and won't stop. I was right and it didn't even take very long. The blood is in the water and here come the sharks.

From the hallowed pages of the New York Times (All the news that's fit to print!) we see the following:

Why I’m Leaving the Southern Baptist Convention

It is written by a black Southern Baptist pastor named Lawrence Ware. I have never heard of him before. His bio at the bottom of his editorial says this about him: "Lawrence Ware (@Law_writes) is a co-director of the Center for Africana Studies at Oklahoma State University and the diversity coordinator for its philosophy department." That pretty much explains why I have never heard of him. He starts off with this:

The first time I was called a nigger to my face was by a fellow camper at a Southern Baptist Convention retreat near Oklahoma City. I was 13, and it was 1995. Devastated, I complained to a counselor who suggested I pray for the ability to turn the other cheek. Since then, I have done just that and more: I’ve been an ordained minister in the convention for almost a decade. 

But I’ve had enough. Today I am officially renouncing my ordination in the Southern Baptist Convention, the country’s largest Protestant body, with about 15 million members, and the world’s largest Baptist denomination. 

My reasoning is simple: As a black scholar of race and a minister who is committed to social justice, I can no longer be part of an organization that is complicit in the disturbing rise of the so-called alt-right, whose members support the abhorrent policies of Donald Trump and whose troubling racial history and current actions reveal a deep commitment to white supremacy.

Why does the New York Times, America's newspaper of record, devote an opinion page editorial, some of the most sacred and valuable property in progressive media, to the resignation of a relatively unknown minister from Oklahoma of all places? Simple. It is the same reason that they will give space to Russell Moore and others as long as they can see a way to advance an anti-Gospel "progressive" message or to hurt people who have committed thought-crimes. The editors of the New York Times hate most people who go to Southern Baptists churches and blame them for not doing as their betters told them and electing Hillary Clinton.  As I read the rest of his editorial, I wondered why he was in the SBC to begin with. Mr. Ware continues:

A contingent of predominantly white, old-guard members refused to take the resolution seriously, even while many black and progressive clergy members advocated its adoption. It was not until chaos ensued that a reworded resolution vowing to “decry every form of racism, including alt-right white supremacy, as antithetical to the Gospel of Jesus Christ” was adopted. 

What’s more, while they hesitated to adopt a resolution that condemned white supremacy, they did not hesitate to throw out activists who tried to raise awareness about the ways in which the convention fails its L.G.B.T.Q. members.

If you are keeping score at home, it took Mr. Ware just over 300 words of his essay about why he left the SBC because it is so full of the alt-right to abruptly shift gears and bring up homosexual behavior. Notice the conflict he creates between the "white, old-guard members" and the new and improved "black and progressive clergy". Mr. Ware continues, getting up a head of steam (bold at the end is mine):

To be sure, many prominent convention leaders have opposed Mr. Trump and the alt-right. Indeed, one of them, Russell Moore, went so far as to voice his criticism before the election.

But not enough has been done to address the institutional nature of white supremacy in the convention. Many churches are still hostile to the Black Lives Matter movement, and even more were silent during the rise of Mr. Trump and the so-called alt-right. For all of its talk about the love of Jesus Christ, the Southern Baptist Convention’s inaction on the issues of racism and homophobia has drowned out its words.

Well that exhibits all the subtlety of a wrecking ball. In case you missed it here is the summary: Pliable people like Russell Moore are good. Anyone who voted for Trump is in the alt-right and burning crosses in the yards of black folk. If you don't support the militant Black Lives Matter groups and you don't support normalization of sexual perversion, you are obviously a racist.

Mr. Ware muses: "I don’t know why I stayed so long." I kind of wonder the same thing. If you are looking for a church that supports racialism in the form of Black Lives Matters, that affirms homosexual sin as normal, you can find plenty of them and there are lots of great seats as those "churches" are dying out. Onward....

Yet it saddens and scares me to think that the church, especially given its role in the black community as a place for moral correction and existential validation, may no longer be able to serve that purpose. Despite our need for such a place, acquiescence in the face of racism and homophobia won’t heal them; it will only allow the wounds to fester.

Here Mr. Ware makes a good point, although inadvertently. The church historically has been a place for moral correction in the black community and it apparently no longer serves that purpose but the fault is not with the alt-right or mean white Southern Baptists. When people like Mr. Ware try to use the church to force the normalization of homosexual behavior under the guise of justice, the church has lost all authority for moral correction. Saying that men sodomizing other men is normal and natural and God-pleasing behavior and trying to lump sodomy in with simply having black skin takes an enormous leap but it exposes something. The sin of the SBC is not "racism" or association with the "alt-right". It is being insufficiently progressive on a whole litany of issues. Mr. Ware ironically mentions declining membership numbers in the SBC multiple times but at the same time favors the sort of progressive nonsense that has already killed outright multiple denominations.

It is his conclusion however that really gets to the heart of the matter by showing Mr. Ware's heart, emphasis mine.

I want to be a member of a body of believers that is structured around my Christian beliefs of equity, not one that sees those issues as peripheral. The equality of all people should be a fundamental principle that is a starting point of the convention’s existence, not a side issue to be debated.

I love the church, but I love black people more. Black lives matter to me. I am not confident that they matter to the Southern Baptist Convention.

There it is. Thanks for getting to that at the end of an exhausting exhibition of partisan political rhetoric dressed up in progressive religious lingo. Mr. Ware is saying the exact same thing that he would accuse the alt-right of, raising racial identity above the Gospel and making race an idol. He claims that the SBC doesn't care about black lives but it is without dispute that a weekend in Chicago or Baltimore is far more dangerous to a black man than any number of alt-right types, who mostly post memes from their computers at home, or from a cop. The city of Baltimore is trying to have a "Nobody kill anybody" weekend and for good reason. According to the Baltimore Sun, 2017 is "...on pace to be the city’s deadliest year ever. ". With back to back years of over 300 murders and 2017 on pace to exceed 2015 and 2016, guess who is dying? Largely young black men. Guess who is killing them? Hint, not cops. Not Richard Spencer or David Duke. They are being murdered by other young black men. If black lives matter to Mr. Ware, and I have no reason to doubt him, why is he focused on homosexuality when young black men are being slaughtered by other young black men every single day in America? Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of aborted black babies. Here is the sad reality that you are not allowed to say.

Black Lives Matter is not about saving black lives. It is a politically expedient cover phrase for a radical leftist ideology.

As such, Black Lives Matter has no more of a claim to be accepted and affirmed by the church than the alt-right does.

Rod Dreher and Todd Pruitt, among others, have written in response and they pretty much conclude precisely what I said would happen back in June in the same essay linked above:

Not to mention the reality of introducing a lot of people to the alt-right and their ideology.

Gee, I am like a prophet or something. I don't think many Southern Baptists had a clue of what the alt-right stood for in May of this year but I bet a lot more of them do today. This whole thing is vintage progressive lunacy. You write up a goofy resolution that condemns a problem that wasn't really a problem in the SBC. You pitch a fit because it doesn't pass and you call in the attack dogs of the "media" to try to shame the SBC into doing your will. The SBC leadership, terrified of looking like racists, decides to keep voting until they get the result they want and pass a strongly worded resolution but it wasn't the resolution that Dwight McKissic proposed and it wasn't passed immediately so the SBC is racist. Now you have some random Oklahoma Baptist leaving the SBC and he gets published in the New York Times. How many people in the SBC that had never heard of the alt-right have read some of the material now?

Do you want to see more people in the alt-right? Because this is how you get more people into the alt-right. You abandon in terror the rhetorical battlefield over this sensitive and divisive issue and leave it in the hands of people on the extremes of both sides. If you are a Southern Baptist that wants nothing to do with the cop-hating rhetoric of much of the Black Lives Matter movement and is not interested in homosexual normalization, where do you go? Thanks to the cowardice of the SBC leadership on this issue, the road to Richard Spencer is not very long. Dreher, who uncharacteristically didn't mention his book in this essay, a sign he is fired up, writes:

Good grief. See, this is the kind of thing that vindicates some on the alt-right, who say that it doesn’t matter what you believe or why you believe it, they’re still going to hate you and accuse you of being one of us. So why not be one of us? (they say).

Yep. He continues:

More than anything though: Can you imagine someone writing, “I love the church, but I love white people more”? Or, “I love the church, but I love straight people more”? We would know exactly what was wrong with that person: they had made idols of race and/or sexuality. Had Ware written, “I love the church, but I love the truth more,” that would have been understandable. It sounds like he has apostatized to the Church of Identity Politics. It’s a false religion, but an increasingly popular one, alas.

Please note for the record that this latest racial division, in the SBC and elsewhere, is entirely a result of progressive activists who want to pervert the meaning of justice and make it clear that unless you stand equally for recognizing all people as made imago dei regardless of race along with affirming the normalcy of sodomy and cross-dressing and stand shoulder to shoulder with the radicals in Black Lives Matter who, as quoted by Dreher, seek to destroy the family...

We are committed to disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, and especially “our” children to the degree that mothers, parents and children are comfortable

...then clearly you are a racist.

The church is losing the conversation on race but not because of the alt-right. I don't know who Mr. Ware is and I wish him all the best in the future but if the cost for having him stay in the SBC is affirming homosexuality and cross-dressing and bowing to the far left, anti-family, anti-law enforcement demands of Black Lives Matter, then I bid him farewell.