A Few Difficult Things
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.
If you've never read "The Naked Public Square," by John Neuhaus, I'd recommend it to you. Neuhaus was no fan of the religious right, as portrayed by the likes of Jerry Fallwell or his son; but he was crystal-clear on the problems that by necessity are created when religion, and the Judeo-Christian ethic that accompanies it, are removed from the public square. His point was that the loss of the religious voice in civic affairs does not create a void, but instead a vacuum. And that vacuum must be filled by something that speaks to people's innate, and ultimately religious needs. This usually takes the form of some sort of authoritarianism or soft tyranny. America's religious tradition provides a somewhat fragmented voice on matters of conscience or other moral questions, and has been slow to recognize the co-opting forms of religious zeal that these secular movements represent. But you are right that for America to regain it's footing, the Church has to regain it's footing, and enable those within it to make the moral argument for American/Western civilization. The weight of history is behind the Church. We who constitute it need to be the ones right now, who, in the words of WF Buckley, are standing athwart history, yelling "stop."
From Neuhaus:
"Chesterton's observation that America is a nation with the soul of a church underscores the fact that Americans are a people on purpose and by purpose. In most other major nations, the people were prior to the polity. America, however, has been fabricated, in the precise sense of that term, by ideas and beliefs. Religion provided the "sacred canopy" under which that deliberate construction took place. For this reason Tocqueville could confidently assert that religion is America's "first political institution." The founders' talk about "Nature and Nature's God" was a lowest common denominator form of ecumenism aimed at comprehending a diversity of beliefs, but it was not just rhetorical fluff. A limited, individualistic, and procedure-based polity was only plausible because so much else was already in place, so to speak. The values and virtues that the polity assumed were chiefly the business of religion. But there was no "separation" in the sense that term has assumed today.....There was, in short, an expansive understanding of what was "public" in American life. ... Some of those who deplore the decline of the public role of religion accuse militant secularists of engineering that decline. ...These religionists, however, seldom recognize the degree to which they have collaborated in their enemy's crusade."
I don't always have to "like" what you say or "agree" with you. I try very hard to hear and understand your points. Learn what I can and weigh each point accordingly. At 57, I have lived a different life than someone at 70, 25, or 40. I keep trying to listen and understand and not just hear what people have to say with my response just tripping off my tongue because I want to get my thought in. That is a problem. People don't truly listen and respectfully articulate a response. The whole time a person is speaking the "listener" is fabricating their response. The fine art of listening is no longer taught. The education system no longer teaches critical thinking.