A pastor friend of mine emailed me last night just as I was texting back and forth with an evangelical leader. Both were on the exact same topic. There is extraordinary pressure right now on Christians and their churches to take up the cause of racial injustice in America. They should. But the question is how.
“Black lives matter” vs. Black Lives Matter
Many people who do not know better (and some who do) are pushing churches to partner with Black Lives Matter, the organization that uses the statement of fact phrase about black lives mattering. There’s just a problem. The organization is not the statement of fact.
In fact, the organization is deeply progressive and advocates values Christians standing on orthodoxy cannot embrace. For example, Black Lives Matter claims it seeks to disrupt “the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.”
The nuclear family structure is not a Western requirement, it is a God-ordained creation reflected throughout the Bible and established in the garden. Christians can find agreement in support for extended families and communities all involved together in common purpose, but cannot abandon the God-ordained ideal of children being raised in two parent homes.
Likewise, Black Lives Matter states they both “foster a queer‐affirming network…with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking” and also “do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege.” Christian orthodoxy has a multi-thousand year old sexual ethic that clashes with and is incompatible with these statements.
Christians need to fight for justice. They need to stand against injustice. But they cannot throw out scripture and a Biblical worldview to get there.
The Adoption Issue
One area where Christians are seeing the scales fall off their eyes when it comes to race in America is through interracial and interethnic adoption. Ironically, both the woke far left and the alt-right are allied against this practice.
A growing movement on the left and the alt-right seeks to undermine and stop white Christian families adopting outside their race or adopting internationally. I cannot tell you the number of Christian friends I have who have told me they didn’t realize how black children are treated in society until they adopted black children. But I have just as many white Christian friends who have horror stories related to trying to adopt outside their race or from overseas.
The Christian family that is blind to color is going to be one of the chief engines of progress on this issue. But forces on the far ends of both sides of the political spectrum are working to stop them. If you don’t think this is an issue, just consider the New York Times opening a debate on the issue in 2014.
We should be encouraging adoption across racial lines and, instead, cultural forces increasingly align against it.
Education
Do I really think we are going to find a solution to what divides us on race? As long as teachers’ unions are protected and police unions are attacked, no. I won’t defend police unions, but we have ample data to suggest public schools are failing black families, white families, and other families in poor communities.
For years, conservatives have advocated for school choice reforms and those reforms are routinely blocked by both Democrat politicians and Republican politicians from rich neighborhoods with private schools who don’t want poor public school kids coming there.
The leftwing utopian solution is to shut down the private schools, but as long as public schools are teaching sex ed in kindergarten and dragging in drag queens for talks, good luck getting parents with traditional values to participate and cooperate. The progressive solution is to shut down all forms of education from private to homeschool to get everyone in public school. We actually need to expand private school and school choice options for poor families. It is no panacea, but it would certainly enable progress.
I’m actually kind of fascinated by the media on this issue and if there is latent, systemic racism, this is where it is in the press.
On guns, the media reliably advocates for gun control from editorial positions. On abortion, the media reliably advocates for killing kids as a choice. On LGBTQ issues, the media is reliably with gay rights advocates. But on schooling, it is rare to see the press really engage on the failures of public schools and explore any alternatives that don’t blame the people who packed up and left for better private schools.
The amount of contempt for homeschoolers in culture these days is astonishing. Remember, it was only a few years ago that Illinois tried to force parents to pay teacher union dues if they homeschooled their students.
If we cannot improve education for all Americans, we really won’t overcome a host of stigmas and injustices, including racial injustice. But to improve education, teachers unions must be challenged and too many of the progressive cultural forces against racism are aligned politically with those unions. So nothing will change.
And Now…The Turd in the Punchbowl
This is where the audience turns on me.
Please read this piece by Matthew Continetti. Here is an excerpt:
What has been remarkable about the George Floyd protests is not so much the destruction and violence that accompanied some of them as their overall numbers, scope, and duration. The unjustifiable death of Floyd was a catalyst for demonstrations grounded not in spiritual torpor but in righteous conviction. This is a mass movement amplified by social and digital media and, in all probability, helped along by the joblessness and boredom that have accompanied months of coronavirus lockdowns. And it is a mass movement that most definitely stands for a set of values: what is known as "social justice" in its racial, sexual, economic, and environmental forms. The republican virtue of the Founders it is not. But, in its expansiveness, adaptability, and popularity, the ethos of social justice is as close as America gets to having a public philosophy.
It would be not only wrong but self-defeating to dismiss or pathologize the beliefs that inspire fellow citizens to march in the streets, post to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and vote for Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in the Democratic primaries. The ideas that motivate such activities are not the product of a conspiracy. They do not exist in a vacuum. What they are instead is the leading edge of an earnest and egalitarian new progressive morality that, through the prism of antiracism, understands American democracy to be fundamentally corrupt and based on a lie.
…
In the absence of institutions that cultivate republican virtue and leaders who model it, Americans, young ones in particular, have turned to the moral certitudes of the new progressivism. It is the failure of American elites to articulate a compelling justification for the state of our economy and society that has brought the nation to this perilous impasse. And until the defenders of the Founding are able to explain, in language persuasive to every American, why both constitutionalism and republican virtue are necessary for freedom and order and justice, they will continue to be on the defensive. If the advocates of a free society wish to shape the future in any way, they had better get started reaffirming and demonstrating the moral basis of American civilization. And soon.
Dwell on the last paragraph.
The American President is, even in the eyes of some of his supporters, viewed as an immoral jackass. He is great at fighting and surviving and making everything about himself, but offers no real vision to counter what the left is doing.
There are those who would pick up the slack. The Vice President, various senators, some governors, etc. might try. But the President has the chief bully pulpit and he is not using it to cultivate contrary values. If anything, the President is as divisive as the left.
There are no better angels to listen to when the President himself chooses to ignore them. If the right cannot articulate the values conducive to a free society, don’t be surprised when the left coopts that free society and makes it less free.
The President is making a case for his re-election. The left is making a case for social change. The arguments are not only not compatible, but not on the same playing field. Right now, all the attention is on the left’s playing field. Republicans, should they see these four years come crashing down in November, will have a lot to say about the cause. It could be the press, the virus, bad candidates, etc. They won’t blame the President so long as he has his twitter feed to respond. But make no mistake, if the President cannot paint a vision for the future that counters the left in a way that inspires people, well, you can’t really win by fighting crazy with crazy.
I've read it three times and plan to continue to reread as I ponder so many profound points you make. I think we can get lost in the labels Progressive and Conservative. In the world we live in with video making phones everywhere, it is hard to sweep mistreatment and abuse out of sight. And that's a good thing. Certainly, it is to be expected that some will seek to gain political advantage. They always have and always will. But there are reforms needed--common sense reforms based on values most Americans share. I wish there was a religious leader today with the standing to help lead us. But I can't name one. Nor can I name a political figure who seems capable of leading us through this morass safely. I pray we find a path through the next few months. It's going to be a bumpy ride.
MLK said, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of the character." Those in the alt-right don't accept that because they choose to judge by skin-color, which is determined by the amount of the pigment melanin, that everybody who isn't 100% albino has. Those in the progressive-left don't accept that because progressive ideology is dependent on classifying people based on everything but the content of their character.
Continetti's argument is BS. The violent riots related to George Floyd were based on one primary value, i.e., that advocates of progressive ideology are not in power and they want to be. Treating urban areas as cannon fodder was deemed an acceptable loss in the fight to regain power. It is not the case that progressives don't know that the violent destruction of private property is wrong. It is simply that they don't care because their ultimate good involves regaining power at all costs. In the progressives worldview, that is the moral basis for civilization, and they couldn't care less about the Constitution or the worldview of America's founders.