I recently wrote that there is no middle ground between a world created by, accountable to, and forgiven by God and a world where we, in despair, are entirely on our own. Today, I want to apply that to racism.
When we think of race in terms of red and yellow, black and white, we get simple and largely inadequate answers. Race is not only a construct contradicted by biblical teaching, but also a construct that has no real definition at the very moment when it counts most.
Consider this: in Brazil during the 2020 elections, 42,000 of the local candidates claimed a different race then they had claimed in a previous election. This is due not only to mixed race ancestry but also to incentives such as financial support for certain racial minorities. (Economist 10/31/20 p32). Race is very fluid. Try deciding which nation you are from if you have ancestors from each of the following nations: English, Scottish, Irish, French, or German.
Despite that confusion, today we find many claims that race is absolutely specific and determinate. If you are white, you are fully white, fully privileged, fully fragile, fully powerful, fully enraged, and fully racist. There are no mixed-race whites, just whites. Fluidity has disappeared.
Intersectionality, in fact, insists that each person’s fixed place in society is determined by race along with sexuality. Fixed, not fluid. Intersectionality declares race to be absolutely unchangeable and requires anyone in each group to identify fully with the characteristics, perspectives, and grievances of their group.
This has the advantage of making all white people guilty of racism and liable for reparations, but it has many disadvantages: fatalism, loss of freedom, the impossibility of change or even of forgiveness.
To explain this, let me quote from an Acton Institute webinar I attended in September with Dr. Elizabeth Corey of Baylor University on the topic of intersectionality. In the Q&A time, I was able to ask what a white person can do to atone for whiteness. The answer was that there was nothing anyone could do. There is no atonement and no forgiveness. The best a white person could hope for is to become an ally. This may calm the conscience of the white person, but it changes nothing. Race is destiny.
All the sincere white Christians, including churches and colleges who want to better resist and refute racism are facing the fact that we live in a silo of no escape. We have a guilt that can never be forgiven; in fact, there is no one who can forgive us. There is no hope, only the false hope of social revolution.
So, for the woke I suggest that you collect the signatures of ten African Americans who will testify that you are no longer guilty of being white, a supremacist, or privileged. This will prove that you are fully acceptable in black society as an equal. Let me know when you get all ten. For all others, I suggest that we consider the opportunity…the hope of forgiveness and reconciliation based on the fact that we are all in deep need and we all are welcome to become forgiven at the cross of Jesus Christ.
I was reading about Calvinism as master historian Will Durant fully scorned the fatalism of Calvin’s predestination. “It is hard to love the man who darkened the human soul with the most absurd and blasphemous conception of God in all the long and honored history of nonsense.” (Story of Civilization VI. 490). At least Calvin allowed for God’s forgiveness, permitting redemption, if only for the chosen.
Those who say that race is identity, and that destiny is limited to this life, are not only fully fatalistic, but they offer no hope; no pathway; no forgiveness. Only the bleak and despairing landscape of racism.
Why would Christians ignore the common humanity of mankind as created by God? Why would Christians ignore the hope of the crucified and resurrected Jesus? Ignore all that, and in return, we get the social determinism and spiritual bankruptcy of race as the primary definition of what it means to be human.
If we divide the world into good and bad people, the bad need to be hated and eliminated. But if we are all bad people, we can all find forgiveness at a common source without hating each other. Ask MLK. This is a good time to look into Bethlehem’s manger to see the only true hope of forgiveness and reconciliation.