Introduction
As I have been noting for some years now, this cultural conflagration that we are all going through—while some in the back are still stoutly maintaining “this is fine”—is actually a battle over editorial control of the dictionary. And what with all the pronoun nonsense now showing up in the liver, lungs and brain, this thing appears to have metastasized into our books of grammar. We are badly diseased with regard to vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and what we desperately need is for someone to write an elegant little volume of sane English usage that will make us all whole again. We need a little Strunk & White Supremacy.
Change the metaphor. We have a problem, and the problem is one of hyperinflation. If accusations of racism came in a currency like the papiermark, and they do, what it amounts to is that we have so much of it sitting around in piles now that it is worth nothing anymore. The printing presses are hot, and you can’t even buy a paper clip with paper currency anymore. Being a racist today is like becoming a millionaire in the Weimar Republic.
What we need is a return to the gold standard of Scripture. Scripture defines sin, and only Scripture. That means Scripture defines any sin having to do with ethnicity, and only Scripture gets to do it. That means that ethnic vainglory is sinful, and to be despised, and ethnic animosity is sinful and to be despised. What the world is currently calling the sin of “racism” is not a sin at all. It was a dubious currency when they first started using it, but now their racism is worthless in the description of any sinful attitude. You couldn’t buy a used popsicle stick with any amount of it.
Two Shootings, Days Apart
So there was the shooting in Atlanta, where most of the victims were Asian and the alleged perpetrator was white. Then there came a shooting in Boulder, Colorado, where the alleged shooter was Muslim named Ahmad Al-Issa and the victims were all white. But according to the received totalitolerance wisdom, if you failed to note the racial component in the former situation, you are a racist, and if you took any note of the racial component in the latter situation, you are also a racist.
The real issue here is that if you don’t see the politiscam that is being run on you, you are what Bugs Bunny would call a maroon.
Set Aside the Guns for a Moment
In the aftermath of the Boulder shooting, Jory Micah, not content with having distinguished herself in the smearing of such luminaries as John MacArthur, James White, and, ahem, what the Victorians would have politely called the present writer, moved on to announce that we must seize all the guns of all the white guys “until we figure out what the hell is going on.”
Now remarkably, I had already come to that same conclusion myself. Being a white guy, and an owner of a number of guns, and also one who sometimes wonders what the hell is going on, I had determined that I was going to go down to the appropriate authorities and turn all of my guns in. But then my wife reminded me what happened last summer, when I lost all my guns in that unfortunate boating accident. Oh yeah, I said.
Racism Ain’t What It Used to Be
So let me confront the elephant in the room. Not my room, no elephants here, but some of you may have heard from various unreliable sources that I am a racist. I have written books like Black & Tan, and have described myself before as a paleo-confederate, and other such monstrosities. And confronted with such undeniable facts as these, I remain singularly unapologetic. This causes some people to imitate the hot froth on top of your average Starbucks drink, and the word indignant doesn’t really begin to cover it.
Because these baseless lies have been widely circulated, I actually have a link on the front page of this blog that reporters can click on if they want to find out what I believe about the human race and ethnic sin. Here it is for you—you don’t even have to click.
God created the entire human race in our first parents, and He did so intending a glorious and variegated unity. “And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation” (Acts 17:26). When our first parents disobeyed Him by eating the forbidden fruit, they plunged that entire human race into spiritual darkness. This meant that we began to sin by means of everything we could lay our hands on — whether it was sex, metallurgy, tribalism, architecture, or music. If we interacted with it at all, we began to sin with it. After the judgment at Babel scattered us into all different directions, this became profoundly true of our ethnic groupings, and so our tribal enmities both grew and hardened over generations.
I continue on, unrepentant.
With the coming of Christ, God signaled that His purposes in redemption would touch even this, and so the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost indicated that the curse of Babel was now to be reversed in Christ. In Him, we “have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him: where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.” (Col. 3:10–11).
And then, still unrepentant, I go on to identify those things related to ethnicity that Scripture would regard as sinful.
So as we labor to eradicate ethnic sin from our lives, there are two basic forms that ethnic sin can take in the Scriptures. One is when a person’s membership in a particular tribe is used as a foundation for justifying malice or enmity toward members of a different group. The second is when it is used as a foundation for a false pride or sense of inflated superiority. The two sins are therefore ethnic enmity and ethnic vainglory, and they are both hated by a holy God. But they are not more radically evil than any other forms of enmity or vainglory, grounded on other baseless trumperies. The sin is always the same kind of blind folly, and Christ died for all of it.
Now, if this is racism, then racism ain’t what it used to be, and perhaps you all ought to consider becoming racists also.
But this clear vindication may well leave some of you muttering discontentedly, because you feel, somehow, some way, I have brought these charges of racism down on my own head, and that I should try to explain that.
I will tell you what I think it is, in all honesty. My offense is that I saw the beast slouching toward Bethlehem a few decades before others did. That is my crime. The onset of our current cultural frenzy did not begin when the Beatles came to America. It began with Rousseau, and the French Revolution, and those seeds of secular totalitarianism. There was a clear direction to all of it that can be traced through nineteenth century America, and our War Between the States was no small part of it.
And because, in the modern parlance, a racist is anyone who is winning arguments with leftists, and I have been that kind of a racist for some decades now, ongoing and very strident attempts have been made to sideline me. The good news is that it is not working. I say this to the current race hustlers—your racism is a sham and a cheat.
I invite you to watch this interaction, and if you are offended by it, then I would submit that you are the problem.
Go Home, America
So I am not here as a white man standing my ground. I happen to be white, and that by itself is worth precisely nothing before the throne of Christ. This next point is not made from a position of situated ethnicity. It is not a sampling of white supremacy. It is not an example of someone spouting off while sitting on the cushions of white privilege.
No. What I am is a Christian standing my ground. What I am is a Christian minister who refusing to cooperate with all the regnant nonsense. Somebody needs to tell America what to do, and here it is. “Go home, you’re drunk.”
The problem is not that whites hate blacks or that blacks hate Jews or that any given sinner hates any other given sinner. Those things are the fruit of the central problem, but the central problem is that America hates Christ. And because we hate Christ, and the name of Christ, we are hating the only one who can deliver us from our current insanity. Hating Christ is just another phrase for “hating salvation,” or “hating deliverance.”
But if America does go home, and does sleep it off, then I would invite our poor bedraggled sinner of a nation to come back to church. No more need to tell our country to go home. Rather, the invitation now is to come home. Come to Christ. Repent and believe. Chuck all the nonsense. Stop blustering. Stop slandering the preachers who tell you the truth.
Christ died, and was buried, and rose again from the dead. Because of that, and only because of that, America can be delivered. There is no other way. No other name.
Come home.