Skinism

This post was originally published September 10, 2005. With republished posts, you shouldn’t expect the links to still work.

My friend Phillip Johnson has a category of links on his blog that he appropriately entitled appalling. One of them is a site that is called Little Geneva. There are some related sites which can be sampled here or here. This group call themselvs kinists, and one time, a little while ago on this blog, I called them skinists.

In commenting on this, I take it as a given that any conservative Christian who addresses cultural issues at all is not worth his salt if he does not get himself accused of racism. I am convinced that unless we are drawing that charge somehow, some way, then we are not doing our part to threaten the prevailing multi-cultural hoohah. It is therefore important to incur the charge of racism. It is equally important that the charge be a slander and a falsehood.

Sometimes the liars on the left start to believe their own propaganda, and cannot fathom why I would be in a conflict or dispute with any kind with racist. The answer is very simple really. Their leftist propaganda is false, and racism is not a sin against the state, or the people, or the prevailing leftist sensibilities. Racial malice and racial vainglory are sins against God, not because they take the obvious factors of race into account as they interpret the world, but because they are malicious and vainglorious.

Cultures can be sinful or righteous, good or evil, orderly or chaotic, advanced or primitive, rich or poor. But all of them are a product of a people’s cultus — they are a function of the god or God they worship, and not a function of the God who made them. The thing that requires me to identify these web sites as racist (and as much in defiance of the Scriptures as any they oppose) is the overt malevolence they routinely show toward the image and work of God Himself. To mock folly and sin is a prophetic duty. To mock the color of a man’s skin is to defy the handiwork of God. The recent events in New Orleans (e.g. rapes and murders in the dome) revealed a pathetic culture, the end result of worshipping pathetic gods. They were not the end result of the triune God’s decision to make some of us white and some of us black. When whites worship pathetic gods, the end result is the same kind of twisted result. The issue for us as Christians is always worship. And how can these people say they love God whom they have not seen when they routinely taunt the handiwork of God in others, handiwork they have seen, thereby showing that they detest the image of God. Of course, they might say they only mean to insult certain sins — they might say that in response, but it is not what they actually do. Spend fifteen minutes on any of these sites and you will find plenty of examples of hostility to the creational work of God. If I were admonishing a man for laziness, and I suddenly found myself upbraiding him for having two legs, I have crossed over from legitimate admonition of a character deficiency into a critique of God’s engineering skills. And if I cannot tell the difference between the two, I ought to shut up for a while. When men are attacked for being black, the attack is on Jesus Christ Himself — for He is the one who is the Creator of the black race, made in the image of God. But the response will come: “Lord, when did we attack and insult You . . .?”

Imagine a great work of art that had been horribly vandalized by some deranged criminal. And suppose further a group of people were standing around looking at the damage. The different responses reveal the modern politics of race very well. One man says that he thinks the orange spray paint and razor action across the venerable Da Vinci canvas show the work of alternative genius, a primitive and authentic statement, a cry from the heart. This critic is a multiculturalist. Another fellow says that it is a darn shame about the vandalism and begins dusting for fingerprints. He is the normal one, a cop without any graduate credits in sociology. I want to be like that guy. But the third is the skinist. He starts going on and on about the awful vandalism, and what a tragic loss it is. And thus far we agree, and for about ten minutes I think we are okay. But the more he talks, the more we hear him savaging aspects of the original painting. He is not praising the orange paint; he is damning the orange paint and the original paint, and the canvas, and the horse it rode in on. He is the skinist. The first man praises the vandal and rejects the painter. The second man praises the painter and rejects the vandal. The third damns both the painter and the vandal.

The fifth commandment requires us to honor our father and mother, and Scripture is clear that a man is to take care of his own household first. If he does not, he is worse than an unbeliever. This responsibility works outward, in concentric circles. And I freely assert that honoring my father and mother brings with it a requirement to honor my people. These folks might want to say that makes me a kinist. No, not at all, and a moment’s thought should reveal why.

To use the fifth commandment as a template for understanding this, the multiculturalist tries to instill respect for another man’s mother by instilling contempt for one’s own. The kinist tries to instill respect for one’s own mother by instilling contempt for the mothers of those “others.” In contrast to both, the biblical position is that it is precisely because I honor my own mother that I understand why another man is required by God to honor his.

But sin complicates things. To continue the illustration, not all mothers are equally venerable. This is why we must learn to preach the gospel to all, admonish all, identify sin in all, and in all this, sin is to be understood as the enemy of our true humanity in Christ. St. Peter tells us in unambiguous terms that we are to honor all men. But these people reserve to themselves the right to show contempt for men as men, under the guise of rebuking their sins, cultural or personal.

So one of the awful things that is routinely done at these websites, in the name of sound theology and God’s law, is to heap contempt on the work of God, the image of God. It is one thing to attack the work of the vandals — faithfulness requires it. And when you attack the vandals, the multicultural relativists will counterattack with their own spurious charges of racism. Fine, let them do so. But when these people enter the fray and start sniping at the original work of God as though that were part of the vandalism, the results are detestable. And this post is a rebuke of their petty malevolence which must be repented of. But I do not attribute their sin in this to the fact that God gave them ten toes, red hair, or a couple of kidneys.