Bible Reading Challenge
A regular reader here. Just wanted to write to say I’ll be taking part in the Bible Reading Challenge this summer. You write that “Tens of thousands of people are already involved in this movement. If it were hundreds of thousands, we would begin to see changes.” Perhaps (just perhaps) there are many of us who are relatively silent readers, who don’t contribute to comments, but who are faithfully reading our Bibles this summer, and perhaps (just perhaps) God will work change through these folks. Who knows? God may not be done with America just yet.
Jason
Jason, let’s hope so. I don’t believe that much salt could get salty again without having an impact.
Sexual Temptation in Young Men
I’ve been reading your book Future Men and I wanted to thank you for it. Rest assured I have ultimately thanked God many times. I have a question regarding one of things in the section on sexual temptation. You wrote, “This means that fathers must assume that a difficult sexual struggle is occurring in their sons’ lives. (If a sexual struggle is not occurring, then the potential problems are greater, not less.)” Could you elaborate of what the greater potential problems are? I am not tracking with you here. Thanks!
Jerrod
Jerrod, what I was referring to there was the problem of having an effeminate son, one who is not interested in girls. If a son is highly sexed, there will be challenges when it comes to instilling and teaching self-control. But it would be worse to not have those challenges.
The Wahoo Trump Factor
Yes and amen to your piece, “Our Diseased Republic.” But you said one thing that brought me up short. “No responsible conservatives are enchanted with Trump.” It seems to me that the word “responsible” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Either that, or you hang out with a much more responsible band of conservatives than I do. Because in my own corner of Baptist evangelicalism, “enchanted” is precisely the word I would use describe their attitude toward Trump. They post paintings of him on Facebook sitting at the Oval desk with Jesus leaning over his shoulder; they attribute every criticism to the “lies of the mainstream media.” It seems to me that our embattled mindset has led many a Christian into seeing the guy who beats up their enemy as their kinsman. I too delight in seeing Trump beat up the enemy . . . but it’s enchantment that seems to me to be the reason we’ve heard no large-scale denunciation of the president’s open approval of LGBTQ+ madness. Perhaps the likes of Jerry Falwell Jr., Robert Jeffress, Eric Metaxas (author of the children’s book Donald Drains the Swamp), Tim Wildmon, and Franklin Graham are not “responsible conservatives,” but they represent—and speak to—an awfully large subsection of this group we call “conservative evangelicals,” including the ones I’m around most of the time. That group, in my experience, doesn’t want to hear any criticism, no matter how muted, of Trump’s deficiencies or unbiblical stands. “Hey, the president has enough critics,” they will say. “He doesn’t need friendly fire from our own side.” I submit that the level of enchantment with Trump the man, bordering on a cult of personality, is higher in evangelical circles than you are giving it credit (or blame?) for.
John
John, thanks. I don’t know enough about the individual supporters of Trump that you name to say anything one way or the other about them. But I don’t doubt that there are MAGA hat churches, and that there is certainly personality cult support for Trump among evangelicals. But I am not in those circles at all. So I don’t think I am asking the word responsible to do too much heavy lifting. That kind of support is just not responsible.
The bigger difference is between conservatism and right-populism, with the latter too much mistaken for the former. Unlike your responsible conservatives, populists of a type very much are enchanted with Trump, though the ones who are best able to articulate enchantment, and best situated to profit from exercising that ability, may be faking it to impress the ones not so able. Trump is not so much chemotherapy as a secondary infection. There is no incongruity at all in Trump supporting the homosexual agenda, no reason to have expected better from him, and coming from him no reason to characterize that support as folding. The incongruity lies in the fact that he thinks he can get away with it where his base is concerned. Or is that not so in-congruent either? The man does have his instincts. That a Republican president feels free to send valentweets to the LGBT world is more telling as to the state of the nation than anything establishment insiders are doing.
John
John, thanks, and you make reasonable points. But it really is more complicated. He sends those valentweets, which are awful, but he has also reversed or undone some of the Obama administration’s advancement of the sexual revolution. The homosexual activists have reasons for hating him—it is not just Trump derangement syndrome.
Criticism of You Who
Just listened to a podcast by the “Theology Gals” that was critical of Rachel’s book You Who. The title of the podcast is “How Rachel Jankovic Is Wrong On Identity.” In the middle of the podcast they get critical of you as well. Having just bought You Who for my wife I was interested in listening to this podcast. I listen as I work, so needless to say I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to follow their arguments with a fine tooth comb. I may have missed a response from you or Rachel but if not I’d be interested to hear what your response is to their criticisms. They claim to be reformed, quote the Westminster Catechism, and J Gresham Machen so it made me think you’d be interested in what they had to say. Of course I reserve the right to be totally wrong . . . that happened once before.
Timothy
Timothy, I am not totally up on their criticism, but suspect that it consists of some recycled confusions from the Federal Vision days. I think that when Rachel says obedience, they hear works. But we believe that the just shall live by faith, from first to last. If their criticism boils down to thinking we deny sola fide, they are completely misunderstanding.
Crowd Sourcing Actually Works
Crowd source the question: Thiago, the reader from Brazil, was looking for a form on bringing accusations/complaints. They are located here Under the “Forms” tab there are three forms for this: FORMS Agreement for two or more Christians who are having difficulties/Application for Filing Ecclesiastical Charge(s)/Notice of Appeal of Ecclesiastical Judgment
Rope
Rope, thanks very much.
Ethnic Boundaries
One could also argue that King’s adultery was worse than that of Trump’s, because he was a pastor, and pastors are to be examples to their flock. This article makes one wonder if Mr. Mason knows what the gospel is, as many of Dr. King’s writings seem to dispute the resurrection and divinity of Jesus Christ. It is important that when Dr. King is exposed publicly, most Christians are not standing around him, for that will lead, if anything, to many people leaving the church. It is also serious because, although it would be a pleasant surprise to find out in the end that Dr. King put his trust in Christ as he walked out of the hotel before being shot, many of Dr. King’s writings seem to imply that he did not believe Jesus was truly divine, or that he rose from the dead, so over-promotion of Dr. King leads Christians away from the true gospel.
I would, however, like you to clarify what you mean by identity politics. If that means animosity and unfair treatment towards other races, or supporting the KKK and black panthers, I agree with you. But is ethnic separatism always wrong? Are the Kurds wrong to separate from Iraq, and would it be wrong for Afrikaners to separate from South Africa at this point? Special concern for one’s ethnic group does seem to be supported by some passages of the Bible. Israelites were told only to choose an ethnic Israelite king, and Paul, it seemed, loved his unbelieving Jewish kinsmen at least as much as his Gentile brothers in Christ, for he said he could almost sell his soul for them in Romans 9. I understand that this is a very complex subject, but I would like to hear a little clarification.
James
James, thanks for the question. There is absolutely no problem with birds of a feather flocking together. There is a problem when that natural affection outranks your loyalty to Christ. So a Pole who loves Christ is a closer brother to me than an American who hates Him. In short, the universality of the church introduces a necessary cosmopolitan and catholic element into any regional or ethnic attachments.
Holding Heavenly Happiness Hostage (4H!)
This is not in response to a specific post but in response to just having read your Mere Fundamentalism. With regard to rewards in heaven, I get that we will rejoice with all and be envious of none but that got me thinking of something you didn’t address in that short book. What of those who went before us that we looked forward to being with forever that are not there?
Timothy
Timothy, good question. Lewis points out in The Great Divorce that the damned are not going to be allowed to hold hostage the happiness of the redeemed. Their misery is ultimately self-inflicted, and will be seen as such by all. One of the things that rattled Charles Spurgeon before his conversation was the fact that his mother said that he had had a Christian upbringing, and had had the gospel presented to him, and that if he were finally lost, when the day of judgment came and God pronounced the fatal sentence, depart from me, his mother would be standing there, and she would be saying amen.
A Republic, not a Democracy
There is probably no single reason for why the republic is diseased, but here’s a pretty big one that you missed: Conservatives love anti-democratic institutions like the electoral college and the two-senator-per-state-regardless-of-population rule because conservatives know that anti-democratic institutions are the only thing standing between them and single payer health care. But one side-effect of anti-democratic institutions is that politicians are no longer responsible to the voters. So long as majority opinion is simply irrelevant to election outcomes, there is no political incentive to heal the disease. That’s part of the reason we now have multi-trillion-dollar deficits: Under our current system, red state Republicans can still bring lots of pork home to the district while paying no political price for the deficits that follow. Now, I’m not saying that getting rid of those anti-democratic institutions would be a panacea that would fix everything. What I am saying is that this is a case of pick your poison. Our political dysfunction stems in large part from the fact that anti-democratic institutions shield the GOP from accountability to the voters, and this is the result. It may be that in the scheme of things, that’s still preferable to single payer health care. But if that’s the policy choice, then be aware of the nasty side effects that follow.
Mike
Mike, you are partly right. I love the Electoral College, and thank God for it. I love the fact that Texas gets two senators and Rhode Island gets two. But this is not our disease—rather, it is residual health from our Founding. I wish we could go back and eliminate the direct election of senators, and have them chosen by the state legislatures again. At the Founding, we were a republic, not a democracy. We needed a democratic element (the House of Representatives), like any good zoo needs a monkey house, but who wants the whole thing to be a monkey house? Not me.
A Question About Short Accounts
On Keeping Your Marriage from Being Troubled. I’m not married, but I’m interested in learning as much as I can before that happens so that my marriage will be as godly as possible. I appreciate the wisdom of your “fix it now” approach to bumps, and want to apply the concept as much as possible, but I sometimes need to get away from such conflicts for a while before I can revisit them with a right response. Both the realization of my own sin and of others’ sin frequently takes at least a little time, as I’m emphatically not a quick thinker. I’m sure that I can improve with practice, but shouldn’t there be some wiggle room for situations that may be a little more difficult to figure out?
Liv
Liv, there is always room for a detailed discussion later, after the immediate challenge is over. But the sin element—the anger part, the annoyance part, the biting remark part—that doesn’t require any time at all. So just leaving to walk around the block is never appropriate. But it would be appropriate to say, “Honey, please forgive me for snapping at you. That was wrong, please forgive me. We can talk later about where that came from after I sort it out in my head. But until then, I had no right to speak to you in that way.”
Constructive Desertion?
Your “Letter to a Trapped Husband” startled me a bit. I wasn’t expecting the advice to move out. But I guess it’s a type of “constructive desertion,” which was a move abuse victims (including my mother) used to make back in the days when you actually had to have a reason for divorce. I still have a couple of follow-up questions, though: 1) How might the advice have differed if there were little kids in the picture? 2) I’m not sure I grasp what exactly is the lie he’s been telling her. Is it something along the lines of “It’s OK for a wife to behave like you’ve been behaving?”
Kyriosity
Kyriosity, yes. I would only recommend a move like that when there are no other options, and it is being done in a last ditch attempt to save the marriage. And you are right—the advice would be very different if there were littles involved. And yes, the lie he is telling is that her behavior is not outlandish when in fact it is.
In “Our Diseased Republic”, I feel that you missed the actual central point of disagreement. The issue they were most explicitly at odds on was whether the ends justify the means – can we trust that acting like Christians (as defined by Jesus, the Bible, Church doctrine) will be enough to bring about that which we believe God desires to see in this world? To extend the cancer analogy, the real question is, “Jesus said this can only be cured by faith and obedience, but I don’t feel that’s working. Can I try for the opposite?” In a life of… Read more »
I’m still trying to wrap my mind around the Trapped Husband’s lying. As I mentioned before, I get the gist of it but I want to know just what you mean by it more concretely. Can you give us an example or two of some actual thing she does and how he actually responds that constitutes lying? I know an example would be only an example, but I still want more clarity on the kind of thing you have mind.
I’m guessing it’s not so much literal spoken lies, but unspoken false principles that she’s based her behavior on and he’s acquiesced to: You, husband, have no authority in this house. My rebellion is righteousness. It’s OK for me to set this example for our daughters and encourage the same attitudes in them.
I think this is what Doug is getting at. Maybe also times where the wife throws a fit about something and the husband agrees with her to smooth things over rather than hold his ground on (what he believes to be) the truth. There is also the classic lie to prevent accusation/recrimination. These have entered the cultural canon with things like “does this dress make me look fat?” or “do you think my friend is attractive?” Or “what are you thinking about?” If a wife asks these sorts of questions (or many others) and shows displeasure at the “wrong” answer… Read more »
It strikes me as pretty easy to answer those questions (which no wife should ever ask) without telling lies. “I think there’s something wrong with the way that dress is cut–I don’t think it was designed for women who actually have figures.” “Yeah, I think she’s pretty enough but your looks do a lot more for me.” (Of course, if she is asking “Are you sexually attracted to my friend?”, being unable to answer honestly is the least of your problems.)
I don’t know Jill. Women read between the lines even when there is no between the lines, so I have a feeling most of them would read into “figures” just what was there, and maybe more. This really shouldn’t be that difficult for a man anyway. Just answer No. That will always be honest AND what she wants to hear. After all, if she isn’t really fat the dress doesn’t make her look that way, and if she actually is, it is not the dress that makes her look that way. As for the that second problem, it really is… Read more »
John, that makes a lot of sense to me! I knew not to ask my former husband questions like that, but I also learned early on not to seek his opinion unless I really wanted it. “Honey, I baked this cake for the church tea; how does it look? Two minute pause. “It looks really good. But I don’t think the two tiers are exactly aligned because the front is fractionally higher than the back. And the leaves beside the rose petals–well they’re pretty but that’s not how rose petals look. They should be more serrated and the green is… Read more »
Cause “How does it look?” does mean “How technically correct is the image rendered in frosting ?” It took him longer to critique a cake than it took you to decorate it. I can only imagine how he’d go on over something he actually cared about.
Jill, I think you are right that most “dumb” questions are asked out of insecurity, not vanity, manipulative scheming, or malice. Which is very understandable – look at the world around us, we are bombarded with sexualized images that seem designed to elicit feelings of insecurity in women (and increasingly in men). Also, many (probably all, if they knew all) have legitmate reasons to be concerned about their husbands thoughts and behavior. But this just makes the question asking environment more toxic and more fraught. If the “wrong” answer is proffered it isnt just a blow to the wife’s out… Read more »
I could make a lot of guesses, they’d be similar to yours, and they’d probably be close to right. I’d just like Doug himself to explain, so we’re all definitely on the same page.
I agree. Also, if it is something more like the atmosphere of the home, or just the husband keeping his mouth shut when he needs to speak, then I don’t know that lying is the best charge.
I don’t know, we could dissect the meaning of lying and its applicability here, but it seems to me that the charge of being willingly complicit by your deliberate actions or deliberate choice not to act, in someone believing something false, is quite close enough to lying to make the point that needs to be made. The moral theologians can argue about it in the corner and get back to us with a more precise label if they want to, I guess.
Creating a false narrative must be a fairly common problem, I think. A spouse who dislikes confrontation then reinforces it by silence and the other one ends up holding all the aces. If the husband says ‘ I don’t want you to do X’, he’s domineering. If he says, ‘I’d rather you didn’t, but I’ll let you decide,’ he’s not supportive. If he says ‘It’s up to you,’ it means he doesn’t care. And if he happens to be in full agreement that X is the best possible course of action, it will be recorded in the marital history books… Read more »
Jane, there are many ways to do this, but the kind of thing I had in mind was this. A wife pitches a hysterical fit, telling herself that this is within bounds, and that everybody has emotions, and her emotions should be respected too, right? That’s the narrative she has running in her head. When she looks for confirmation for that narrative, she can point to the behavior of her husband, who also appears to agree that this is no big deal, etc. . . .
Thank you. That does track with what I thought you were getting at, but having an example confirms it, because it puts it into concrete terms.
Liv, I do encourage you to continue working and preparing yourself. Having a warm, graceful atmosphere of confession and forgiveness within the home is a real blessing. I’m working on leading this in my family and am feeling the blessing of it over time. It’s so difficult to do at times…especially when there is a felt pressure (guests on their way over, or in the middle of a drive to church or small group). But it’s also something that seems to spread within relationships. I think if you work on these things amidst the relationships you do have right now… Read more »
Doug,
You said: “There is absolutely no problem with birds of a feather flocking together. There is a problem when that natural affection outranks your loyalty to Christ.”
Why then, in a recent post, did you say that kinists offer a “demented response” to attacks on the West? Isn’t kinism stripped to its basics nothing more than “birds of a feather flocking together?”
Perhaps Doug will answer. My own take is that it is not wrong in itself for a Hispanic person to prefer living in a Hispanic neighborhood. It is not wrong in itself for a white person to feel more at home living in a mostly white neighborhood than in Little Saigon. Whether you prefer living among people of your “own kind” or among a diverse population is not a point of morality. (As a side note, I would say that “own kind” doesn’t have to be defined by ethnicity; nor does shared ethnicity equate to shared culture as a left-wing… Read more »
Well, then here’s a head-scratcher: if “loyalty to Christ” and “shared Christian faith” are more important that shared ethnicity, income, and credit scores…then, do we not have an obligation to “collude,” exert pressures, and show preferential treatment TO fellow Christians and against–say–Muslims? Why wouldn’t we be in favor of creating and maintaining a distinctly Christian neighborhood by voting against the inclusion of a mosque or barring Allah-quoting Pakistanis from buying houses in our communities?
Feather-together FOR, with justice and respect for other feathers, fine. Feather-together AGAINST, to put down or lock out other feathers further than justice or group purpose requires, not so fine. Read N T Wright on Jesus (inclusion with repentance) vs Pharisees (get right with God so we can kick THEM out).
I agree it’s a head=scratcher and I’m still looking at different angles. First, I don’t think that shared preference should cause us to violate the law. You can say it violates a Christian’s conscience to force him to bake a cake for a gay wedding, but I don’t think you make a conscience case for only living among Christian people in a society such as ours. The early Christians lived among pagans. Were they encouraged to separate and live only among each other? I think the preferring our fellow Christians should apply exactly as St . Paul said. If I… Read more »
What about having a preference about what kind of people you like obligates you to use government force or coercion in order to force your preferences on the entire community? It feels like you made a big leap there. Pretty much the entire history of the Civil Rights Movement and the rejection of segregation, apartheid, Jim Crow laws, etc. is built on our decision as a society that such forced segregation is always going to be damaging to the excluded minority. So far as loyalty to Christ and shared Christian faith being the most important, in my experience adherence to… Read more »
Only if loyalty and shared faith as such create obligations to collude, exert pressures, and show preferential treatment or and against anybody. You pose it as a question, but even thinking that the question reasonably follows is quite a leap.
Jill, the problem with this post is that it is exclusively White Centric. Every minority group is capable of just as much racism as Whites.
The vast majority of people in this blog’s audience are White, White people have traditionally been the main drivers of segregation in American history, and even today White people hold nearly all of the meaningful positions of power and thus can do a lot more damage via segregation than anyone else can.
So while non-White people can certainly be just as racist as White people, it’s White people’s issues that are more relevant to the blog audience and more consequential in our nation’s history and policies.
Kinism, at least as I’ve seen it advocated, denies that living among Christians of different ethnic or cultural stripes can be every bit as good as living among a mixed group of believers and unbelievers of one’s own feather. That’s how the natural affections outranks the loyalty to Christ. It ranks the “feather” of cultural or ethnic background higher than the “feather” of unity with and in Christ, often going so far as to strongly imply that Christians of different ethnic or cultural backgrounds *aren’t* the same feather.
Jane, this concept often leads to uncomfortable struggles with my conscience. I know that the women at my church are my sisters in a way that the witty, secular friends who share my interests are not. I also know which ones I’d rather have lunch with. Is that a sinful preference to be subdued, or is it okay as long as the less congenial group is not neglected?
I’m not talking so much about a comfort level of who is more fun/easy to be around. I’m talking about a fixed opinion that you’re prepared to argue in defense of, that in making active choices over who you will keep company with, it is acceptable or even virtuous to think that blood of lineage is more important than the blood of Christ. I would say that your own tendencies are something to be subdued, but not so much in the way of “Bad Jill! Bad for thinking that way! Badly done!” But rather, by cultivating a stronger sense of… Read more »
Amen to all that.
Armin, from the perspective of Kinism, as you would define it, should a white Christian man expect to find greater kinship from his white atheist neighbor, or from his black Christian neighbor?
We should ask the same question to some the woke/identity politics types as well (Bradley/Mason/Howard/Ron Burns/Tisby/Uwan/etc.) You have to wonder when they still reject their Christian name in favor of a name they adopted in some whacko nationalist group.
Our thinking them mistaken and their influence harmful is all the more reason to avoid like error ourselves.
Mike, Good question. The short answer is the black Christian neighbor, however, I think this needs to be expanded upon. I don’t actually have a working definition of “kinism,” as I’ve never really studied the meaning of the term (just googling it doesn’t seem to provide much clarity) or the people who identify as kinists. However, I can say that, in terms of social policy, I would refer to myself as anti-diversity. This is grounded in my understanding that with increased diversity comes a decline in social trust, group cohesion, and quality of life. See the below article for a… Read more »
I spent much of my young adulthood in Southern California, where my initial and most lasting relationships came in an extremely multicultural environment, and I have trouble imagining anyone (even the racists in our midst) describing our groups as “tragic”, “forced”, or “degraded”. As a result of that experience, my wife is non-White, and even now 20 years later my closest friends are a fairly even mix of Asian, Middle Eastern, Black, and White, with a clear majority of them in cross-ethnic marriages. Until I left for college my experience had been almost exclusively racially homogeneous where I was in… Read more »
I don’t know. I’ve gotten the impression there are some racial animosities among the Hawaiians. However, I agree there is no reason think racially heterogeneous communities are “tragic”. Depraved human nature will always find some excuse to mistrust and divide, it doesn’t have to be race or ethnicity.
I have definitely heard that there are some racial animosities among the ethnic Hawaiians (though they are a very small % of the whole and actually none of my good friends from Hawaii are ethnically Hawaiians, perhaps cause ethnic Hawaiians go to college out-of-state less often). There are some ethnic animosities to be found among some members of every group, even in Hawaii. However, in my experience those are less of an issue in Hawaii in comparison to pretty much everywhere else I’ve lived even though Hawaii is more diverse than almost anywhere else I’ve lived. Off the top of… Read more »
My perception is based on what I’ve heard from people who have lived there, include those born and raised there. The deepest prejudice in Hawaii seems to be against Caucasians. This article also talks about that: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120431126 To a lesser extent I’ve gotten the impression there may little resentment or envy toward people of Japanese background, as they tend to be more prosperous, and that Samoans are in the a position similar to that of black people in some parts of the continental US, in terms of poverty and the way other people see them. However, again, I have less… Read more »
Hawaii is diverse, but not in the way that is encouraged by the diversity crowd. While there is some amount of ‘hate’, there is no ‘hate speech’. Realizing and emphasizing ethnic difference is encouraged – even joked about in a manner that could be considered inappropriate and cruel to PC mainlanders’ standards. ‘Feelings’ are expressed easily and disregarded quickly. Where life is easy, it;s hard to take it too seriously.
Hawaii is a good example to follow as an alternative to the PC madness that has infected our world.
From what I know your description of race relations in Hawaii is accurate. As for your commentary, perhaps “diversity fringe” would be a better name than “crowd”. My understanding is that the type of ultra-PC stuff you’re talking about (labeled SJWs at times) is a small % of the whole. One study pegged it as 7% of the population. There are many people who are pro-diversity who also are anti-PC madness. In my experience more successful diverse communities encourage the recognition of ethnic difference. I’ve related before that Intervarsity Christian Fellowship in the Los Angeles area even held breakout “Race… Read more »
I didn’t catch what you meant about prejudice against Caucasians being talked about in that article? Maybe I missed something? I have heard a couple White people relate feelings of prejudice there, most explicitly in a private conversation with Warren Duffy where he said it was the first place he had ever experienced prejudice. From the other things I know about the state, I think it likely those feelings come from the fact that for many White Americans Hawaii is the first place where they ever experience being a minority, and so experiences which are run-of-the-mill for many other minorities… Read more »
I suppose the better way to put it is that the article talks about the racial animosities to which I referred: “The rainbow of cultures its residents brag about is no exaggeration, but some say that beneath the veneer of geniality are deep-seated ethnic and racial tensions between the island’s white community and native Hawaiians.” As you note, Caucasians are a minority in Hawaii, and a large proportion of the state’s population are racially diverse and would not consider themselves white. Not sure what is meant by “native Hawaiians”. Some people native to Hawaii are white, and the people of… Read more »
Where the article speaks of “Native Hawaiians”, they aren’t speaking of people born in the state or of any White/Asian/Samoan peoples but only the small % of Hawaiians who are descended from the original pre-European inhabitants. I was pointing out that the tensions the article describes are not between white people and the non-white majority, but between the white minority and the even smaller Native Hawaiian minority, and are directly rooted in fairly recent historical events that many Native Hawaiians are looking for some sort of actual resolution to, which for many would mean the official recognition of aboriginal status,… Read more »
And, because the prejudice described is held by a relatively small proportion of the whole and rooted in the desire to rectify a historical grievance rather than general racial hatred, white people aren’t subjected to a meaningful level of discrimination as minority groups are in many other US states. Which among other things is why White people can be so successful politically in a state where they are such a small minority.
I supposed that might be it, but I wonder if it means people descended *only* from the original pre-European inhabitants (awkward, but more accurate than “native”) or if it also includes people whose ancestry is partly that and partly something else, which is quite a lot more people.
I’m not so sure the prejudice is held only by that fraction of the population or has only to do with desire to rectify a historical grievance. In any case, sadly, apparently Hawaii is not altogether a racism free zone.
Hawaii isn’t an animosity-free zone, but remember that the passage I was referring to was setting a much, much lower ceiling: If I could describe our current situation in one word, it would be “tragic.” It is truly tragic that our society consists of so many people groups with such great differences forced to share the same space and “get along.” Frankly, it’s hard for me to think of the U.S. as a “society” at all. Multiculturalism and diversity have the effect of diluting and degrading the peoples and cultures made subject to it. We’re all told we must put… Read more »
If I may quote myself, my initial response included:
“However, I agree there is no reason think racially heterogeneous communities are “tragic”. Depraved human nature will always find some excuse to mistrust and divide, it doesn’t have to be race or ethnicity.”
I just noted as a matter of fact that some degree of racial animosity does exist in Hawaii.
Oh, it’s hard to imagine how it wouldn’t. It’s sin nature. Find the Whitest community in the world and there will be someone there who will have some degree of racial animosity against some other race that they’ve heard exists, somewhere.
Jonathan, “Find the Whitest community in the world and there will be someone there who will have some degree of racial animosity against some other race that they’ve heard exists, somewhere.” I think you are modeling this wrong. some sort of ethnic solidarity and distrust of outsiders is certainly present in every community. Part of what defines a community is that they are not like [insert other group here] but in the absense of proximate highly visible racial differences it won’t be “I hate those Africans over in the Sudan,” it will be I hate those Catholics across town, or… Read more »
I think we’re thinking about several different things at once, but everything you contributed was good.
I know. I’ve seen it. Same thing would be true of the Blackest community in the world, or any community of any racial makeup. That’s what you meant, right?
Yes, but I purposely said “whitest” because that’s the actual alternative that Armin and others have in mind. I believe the author he linked said that Black people can’t even manage a so ciety or something to that effect.
Jonathan,
The AmRen article is pretty bad – if Armin is wanting to convince people you would think he would use better sources. But Putnam’s research and the many replications all over the world are solid. You are absolutely right that a bunch of Germans moving into an all anglo part or America would lower social trust. This effect isn’t really about “race” in our simplified definition, it is about the way that communities form and cohere around shared cultural norms and expressions. If new groups move in to quickly for assimilation to take place there will be damage.
Armin, back when I had my battles with the kinists, and I would visit their web sites, there was very little affection displayed for their own people (which I think is normal and human), and a great deal of contempt displayed for others. It was stark.
Doug,
Perhaps I’m a little unclear on the actual definition of “kinism” then. Might there be a spectrum, ranging from mere affection and pride toward your own group to outright murderous hostility and contempt toward out groups? In any case, if displaying affection for your own people is normal and human, could “your own people” include people of European descent, or is that not a valid category? Could it also involve having a righteous indignation toward people you perceive to be attacking your group?
For example, promoting books like The Camp of the Saints has nothing to do with affection towards one’s own and already places one into the clear area of open hostility for others.
I think that Doug is saying that although the movement claims to be founded upon a natural affection for one’s own kind, it’s actually very little in evidence, compared to the amount of time and energy they spend despising those of other kinds. By Doug’s account, if I’m reading him right, the whole “natural affection” argument is a fig leaf, not an actual motivation.
At times I think it can be an actual and honest motivation, that then because it is encouraged and reinforced and subjected to bad influences, builds into the animosity towards others that we see.
In an interesting postscript to that conversation where fp tried to deny the Southern Strategy ever existed despite both Republican leaders and the strategists themselves openly acknowledging it, there’s continued proof that the Southern Strategy is alive and well:
https://www.salon.com/2019/05/31/gop-operative-pushed-census-question-on-trump-it-would-help-whites-hurt-democrats/
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/census-case-about-white-mans-government/590977/
I understand that dropping random Salon (fire sale! Only $5 million!) and Atlantic talking points do not make an argument. Especially when those talking points have nothing to do with the “Southern Strategy”. But thank you for proving to the rest of us that you think illegal aliens should have the right to vote, thereby rendering citizenship meaningless — after all, it is the majority Democrat position (gee, I wonder why?). The fact that you’re freaking out over something as simple as declaring whether you’re a citizen on a census form says more about you than it does Trump or… Read more »
The links quote a Republican operative saying directly that the purpose of the Census question is to advantage Republicans and non-Hispanic Whites. That is a direct quote from his own personal documents which he submitted to other strategists involved in adding the question. And his arguments, including from that exact paper, were exactly what the Republicans used in arguing their case for the census question, where they lied and claimed that the goal was to protect Hispanic voting rights (a claim that literally no one believes the Trump administration is concerned with). Your claim that I render citizenship meaningless is… Read more »
Jonathan, you said: The links quote a Republican operative saying directly that the purpose of the Census question is to advantage Republicans and non-Hispanic Whites. That is a direct quote from his own personal documents which he submitted to other strategists involved in adding the question. And his arguments, including from that exact paper, were exactly what the Republicans used in arguing their case for the census question, where they lied and claimed that the goal was to protect Hispanic voting rights (a claim that literally no one believes the Trump administration is concerned with). And that allegation came from…… Read more »
Jonathan, you said: The links quote a Republican operative saying directly that the purpose of the Census question is to advantage Republicans and non-Hispanic Whites. That is a direct quote from his own personal documents which he submitted to other strategists involved in adding the question. And his arguments, including from that exact paper, were exactly what the Republicans used in arguing their case for the census question, where they lied and claimed that the goal was to protect Hispanic voting rights (a claim that literally no one believes the Trump administration is concerned with). And that allegation came from…… Read more »
Once again you’re lying. The allegation didn’t come from the ACLU, it came from Common Cause, a non-partisan watchdog group. And they have the supporting documents to back up exactly what they say. Mark Neuman, adviser to Wilber Ross and Trump transition team official, has already testified that Hofeller was the one who urged Trump’s transition team to add a citizenship question. DOJ official John Gore has already testified that Neuman, who has been Hofeller’s close friend for decades, was the one who gave him the draft of the arguments to be used to push the census question. Yes, I’m… Read more »
And unfortunately for your argument, Common Cause continues to release more Hofeller info. Now it turns out that when Republicans gerrymandered North Carolina, they absolutely lied when they claimed that race wouldn’t be involved and that they didn’t even know what the racial compositions were. Too bad that Hofeller was including those compositions right on the top of the maps he was producing for them and clearly was using them to form his borders. Looks like Republicans lied about multiple other stages of the process too. Hofeller’s words have become prophetic: “Redistricting is like an election in reverse. It’s a… Read more »
Jonathan said, egg still sliding down his face: Once again you’re lying. LOL. Says the guy who claimed the majority of Democrats don’t support illegal aliens having the right to vote, and that the “Republicans didn’t have a long history of fighting for Civil Rights”. However, since I’m such a nice guy, I’ll give you the benefit of Hanlon’s razor. The allegation didn’t come from the ACLU, it came from Common Cause, a non-partisan watchdog group. Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle. Common Cause instead of the ACLU. That changes EVERYTHING. By the way, that “non-partisan watchdog group”, which you… Read more »
Keeps getting worse and worse for you:
https://oversight.house.gov/sites/democrats.oversight.house.gov/files/2019-06-07.%20COR%20DEM%20Memo%20re%20Kris%20Kobach%20Interview.pdf
ROTFLMAO. Did you actually read the memo? Here are the main takeaways from the memo: 1) OMG!!!! Like, the Trump administration, like, TOTALLY, used executive privilege inappropriately!!! 2) Like, this is totally NEW! Kobach CONFIRMED something we already knew!!! The President and top aides were involved!!!!!! 3) Zoinks!! Kobach APPEARS inconsistent with Ross’ testimony before the committee!!!!!! And here is how rational people would respond: 1) Democrats always accuse Republican administrations of using executive privilege in a way they don’t like. Same old play from the same old, musty playbook of theirs. 2) So Kobach confirmed the involvement of the… Read more »
Of course, your ignore that the question at stake is the reasons for drafting the census question. And the administration refused to let Kobach testify to that. Which would not be necessary if the reasons were legitimate. It’s not just the bs about claiming executive privilege over a private citizen’s testimony. It is WHAT they are claiming executive privilege over that matters. The claim had been that the DOJ initiated the reasoning. That has already been proven false, and now more and more evidence is coming out that not only Hofeller and Ross but also Kobach and Trump were involved… Read more »
Of course, your ignore that the question at stake is the reasons for drafting the census question. In the real world, rejecting the premise of a question is not the same as ignoring the question. And the administration refused to let Kobach testify to that. Which would not be necessary if the reasons were legitimate. You don’t know what the reasons are; therefore, your opinion is irrelevant. It’s not just the bs about claiming executive privilege over a private citizen’s testimony. The Democrats sure do come up with a lot of BS, don’t they? Again, whenever a Republican administration claims… Read more »