Silence of the Shepherds

I don’t know what it is about my friend David French that drives all my other friends crazy, but man does he do so. I don’t want to spend a ton of time delving into his piece from yesterday on structural racism, but I do want to note a few things.

There was a time when a lot of the segregationists got themselves in power and passed laws designed to keep segregation in place. There’s a place near mean called Avondale Estates. There’s a great brewery there called Wild Heaven.

Years ago, Avondale Estates banned yard signs for properties that were for sale. To find out which properties in the city were available, one had to go to city hall and request it. If you didn’t look like the kind of person who belonged there, they’d tell you there were no houses for sale at the moment. The ordinance was put in place in 1968. It lasted until the early 2000s.

In the eighties, if a black family roamed the area, the police usually showed up to question them because it was rare for a black family to be given the housing list. Over time, and this is the important part, it was less and less likely that the list was withheld from people for any reason. But the law and the procedure lasted well past the point at which they were used to keep black people out.

So reasonable people should be able to agree on a few things. Racists put policies in place to maintain segregation. Few policies, if any, still are implemented or enforced to maintain segregation. Some policies are still on the books, even if not used to maintain segregation. But the result of the policies is that full integration into society has happened slower than it otherwise would.

I think it is safe to say we should get rid of those policies, but also safe to say time heals all wounds. I find it fascinating that some, embracing critical race theory, are now engaged in discrimination and support for things like blacks only dorms in colleges and mandatory whites only meetings. Jim Crow is at home within critical race theory, which is why we should all fight it.

We should also be willing to recognize structural racism has been a thing, but those structures are perpetually collapsing, are frequently now used by progressives to go after conservatives and Christians, and did not block the first black President, first black Vice President, or much of anything else in recent history related to race. Likewise, time, not government, is going to fix the problem unless the critical race theorists can take over. If they take over, it’ll just get worse.

Structural racism is different from systemic racism. The latter is a pure mythology that means all white people are inherently racist and all nonwhite people are inherently oppressed and there’ll never actually be resolution. Some of the people who embrace systemic racism attack things as structurally or systemically racist that are not. The ACLU, for example, is the latest to attack the second amendment as a form of structural racism implemented to keep black people in their place. That is false history. So we must be careful in both acknowledging there are structures put in place by racists and also honest in calling out the B.S. and wild claims of progressives who see everything as racist.

One of the chief ways the left claims something is structurally or systemically racist is using disparate outcomes. But many of those outcomes come through failing government education and failing families, caused not by racism, but by government thinking it can substitute Uncle Sam’s man boob for a mom and dad.

Now, some of the people most committed to dealing with structural racism and who have bought into the mythology of systemic racism are in pulpits of evangelical churches.

Many of them, appalled by their congregations bringing Trump to church in various ways, allowed their congregations to radicalize them in opposite directions. I have friends who have fallen into this. I have a lot of sympathy for them as I personally have felt the effects of cults of personality in politics coming into the church.

In physics and relationships, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The George Floyd incident combined with so many evangelicals embracing Donald Trump has radicalized some very good men in the pulpit who have decided to become militant and strident about race, race issues, and racial reconciliation. Some of them have now made an idol of it to compensate for those around them making an idol of Trump. Instead of preaching Jesus, they’re spending all their time talking about race. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction unless Jesus is present.

The American church needs to talk about gospel centered racial reconciliation. I have a few friends who have lost or nearly lost their jobs because they have spoken about race, the need for Jesus and the gospel as the solution, but their congregations concluded they were woke because they dared bring racial reconciliation at all.

Race has been a relevant cultural issue in the past year and we should want the shepherds to address current issues and how the gospel can deal with them.

But, we should be mindful that a lot of the loudest voices in the church right now on race issues are men who have chosen to remain absolutely or mostly silent about abortion and Biblical sexual ethics. If a shepherd of Christ’s flock can’t be bothered to speak about the Alphabet gang targeting Christians and Christian schools and businesses being harassed to change policies on transgenderism, marriage, and abortion, we should not waste our time listening to the on race. Those are the men most likely chasing their idols, not professing the gospel.

In my own denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America, some of the very same pastors who embraced Revoice — a group of gay activists who claim one can identify as gay and Christian and be in ministry — have unsurprisingly embraced critical race theory. The overlap is not surprising at all and I expect we are on the verge of seeing these same pastors claim they fully embrace the Westminster Confession of Faith, but through the eyes of non-white woke theologians. After all, a hallmark of postmodernism and critical theory is that words no longer have fixed definitions and reality is shaped by words. They’ll take the words of the gospel and give each word a new meaning.

I continually stand amazed at the number of men in the church, shepherds of God’s flock, who want to lecture the church on race — often in ways unrelated to the gospel message — who have never spoken up for the unborn or have decided a persecuted Christian hasn’t been persecuted because they’re still alive even as their business and livelihood is gone. Persecution has been, perhaps, the first word redefined by the postmodern pastors and woke activists.

Those who do these things are wolves, not shepherds, and they are best ignored if not defrocked.