Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Why is 11:00 on Sunday Morning the Most Segregated Hour?

Episode Date: April 22, 2021

Is the church responsible for racism? Is the church becoming too woke? How do race and religion fit together? Learn from https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/keith-simon/ (Pastors Keith Simon) and https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/patrick-miller/ (Patrick Miller) as they discuss this topic and address these questions. Interested in more content like this? Scroll down for more resources and related episodes, including https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcasts/what-is-critical-theory-who-is-jesus-luke-18-9-14/ (What Is Critical Theory?) and https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcasts/george-floyd-race-protest-and-the-bible/ (George Floyd, Race, Protest, and the Bible). Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/ (website) and follow us on https://www.facebook.com/TenMinuteBibleTalks (Facebook), https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/ (Instagram), and https://twitter.com/tmbtpodcast (Twitter) @TheCrossingCOMO and @TenMinuteBibleTalks.  Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life in the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. Also, if you want to connect with us, follow us on Twitter at TMBT Podcast. You can also check out our hashtag, hashtag, AskT, TMBT, where you can ask us anything, and we'd love to connect with you. So, Keith, you got your COVID vaccine yesterday. How are you feeling? The second one, I'm now a double vaxer. Is that a term? Is it everybody who is a vax or a double vaxer?

Well, no, you could get the J&J and have a blood clot, I guess, and die. I don't know. Anyway, so yeah, I got the second vaccine yesterday afternoon and my arm hurts, but otherwise I feel pretty good. So it's a mind-ever matter thing. Well, really, I got the chip yesterday. I got 5G when I got my second one. How long have you had yours? I got my second vaccine on Sunday, actually, so we're on the same schedule, apparently. Have you noticed the black helicopters following you around?

Yeah, it's been really eerie. They're constantly tracing me around. They're constantly following. But I didn't have serious symptoms. Like, I got a little bit tired the day after, but I just powered through. I told myself I didn't get enough sleep the night before, and that was it. I was good to go. We're talking about black helicopters and chips and all because I don't know if you guys

have seen it, but there was a TikTok personality. I think it's Taylor Rousseau. Yeah. I don't know if that's her TikTok handle or if that's her name. How does that work? We keep going back to Rousseau. No matter what we. we do. The podcast returns. Well, I have to say that I think, by the way, that's a Glennon Doyle podcast

reference if you didn't catch a couple weeks ago. Yeah, a couple weeks ago. When I saw the Rousseau thing, I thought maybe it was made up, but then I thought this person's TikTok didn't seem like she's probably a big reader of Rousseau. So maybe it is real. I don't know. Anyway, I don't know if you guys have seen it, but she put out a TikTok video in which she was kind of reenacting getting the vaccine and equating getting the vaccine with getting a chip and the bark of the beast, the sign of the beast, And then if she got the vaccine, she was accepted and everything's okay. And if she didn't, then she had blood all over her face. She got beat up.

But God said, well done, good and faithful servant. The video itself is actually, don't go watch it, but it is tremendously funny. It's not like profaner anything. They don't go watch it. It just makes you dumber. She actually plays two different characters because the first character gets it. Basically, the person is giving the vaccine says, if you don't get this, you know that I'm going to have to kill you. That's what the person says.

It's not great acting. It's not going to be an Oscar or something. And she goes and she's crying and she's nodding her head. Yes. Yes, I know that you will have to kill me if I get my vaccine. And of course, I mean, she doesn't get the vaccine. She's beat up. And then at the end, she does like a green screen effect where she's praying.

And above her, a voice says, well, done, get a faithful servant. Probably a handful of people out there probably think that this stuff's true. Oh, it's become a whole phenomenon. There have been some really good parodies of it. There's one gal who, instead of receiving. keeping the vaccine, she's saying that Tom Holland is it the best Spider-Man. And if you say that, you know I'm going to have to kill you. And she goes, yes, I know.

And so she's being beat up and she's remembering all these terrible scenes from the original Spider-Man. And finally, she's in heaven and she looks up and she sees God, she goes, is that Sam Ramey, which is a different Spider-Man actor. But I thought it was funny. Yeah, I don't. I know. You don't know what I'm talking about. I don't get all that. But you don't actually watch movies.

Cool. So what are we talking about today? What we're talking about is not the COVID vaccine and its side effects. We're talking about a topic that's obviously been in the news a lot recently with yet another shooting, which is the topic of race. And in particular, rather than talking about that more recent shooting, we want to talk about an article that comes from across the pond over in England by a guy named Douglas Murray. And I'm a big fan of Douglas Murray. He's kind of an interesting guy in the sense that he is gay, conservative, conservative in the British sense. of the word, atheist, friendly to Christianity. So that's what makes Douglas Murray so interesting to read or to listen to. It's just because he comes from a kind of a heterodox point of view. Is that what you say? Heterodox? Did I use that word right? Yeah, I think he used the word right. He's, again, an interesting figure. He's the editor at a magazine called Spectator, and he writes an article about the Church of England. So quick pause here. Maybe our American audience won't know this.

In England, they still have a national church, whereas in the United States, there's no such thing is the Church of the United States. But there is a national church in England, and it's not in control of the state or anything like that. I think Anglican. In the United States, Anglican, Episcopalian would be similar to the Church of England. Yeah, very similar to that. And he writes a piece called the Church of England's new religion. And he's essentially asking the question, is the Church of England too woke? So I just want to read a little quote from it. He says, as the new religion, and what he's saying the new religion is is kind of the social justice, anti-racism, wokeness religion, those are probably all terms that he would personally use.

He says, as the new religion, he's ever closer into view, I realize that I prefer the old religion to the new one. Now remember, this is an atheist gay man. Atheist, he's married to a man, atheist, but friendly to faith, and understands, what I like about Douglas Murray is he understands, even if he doesn't quite believe it, he understands the importance of the church to society, British society, human society. He goes on and he says, I would rather attempts to influence the country's morals were preached from a pulpit than through a group stampede on Twitter. So he's making a point here. He's saying that the Church of England is now apparently being influenced by what he sees as a stampede of people on Twitter. He's referring to a recent Church of England report, which begins with, to be honest, it's kind of a hagiography of George Floyd.

He's presented in very glowing terms. And obviously what happened to George Floyd, and we've talked about this in the podcast in the past, was terrible and reprehensible. It shouldn't have happened. And he was a complex figure, but that's not how he's presented. And then the report goes on to speak about people who are in the Church of England's pews. And I'm just going to quote Murray again. He says that it describes them like the KKK prayer. So I think Charles Murray's point is that the Church of England has turned on its own people and accusing them of horrible racism. I think that's exactly right. And the actual plan that the Church of England lays out, Me personally, there's a lot of parts of it that actually really have no problem with it. It seems wise even.

But they're suggesting that they add in learning modules on anti-racism, adding in modules on black theology. That much sounds like actually a pretty good idea to me. They're adding in quotas of minorities into various committees in the Church of England, and they're moving towards removing any symbols or images of people who were in the past associated with racism or slavery. There's a lot of stuff in there that seems good. I mean, symbols and images of racist past and slavery, that seems like a pretty smart move. Again, most of the things I don't really have a hard time disagreeing with the Church of England on. So Douglas Murray is criticizing the Church of England for, in his opinion, being too woke. Now, the phrase woke itself means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. In fact, there's a really interesting chart by an author named Eric Mason, who Keith and I both really like, where he's exploring how different things. forms of wokeness all overlap. And I would try to describe it on the podcast. It's far, far, far too complex. Yeah, it was super interesting. He seems to have his finger in that chart on different kinds of people and how much Jesus in the cross is necessary to have a firm grasp, a clear grasp,

a helpful grasp on both white, black issues plus the gospel. And it's too much. We can't talk about it here. It's dependent on this image, kind of. And so what are we going to do? We're going to post it on TMBT Twitter. Yeah, we'll post it on our Twitter. Yeah, we'll post it on our Twitter. we can probably also post it on our Facebook. So on Twitter, it's TMBT podcast, and Keith and I will retweet it on our own Twitter accounts whenever we get there. But you'll want to look at this chart, because I think it helps address a different complex question, which is what doesn't mean to be woke? But back to the story. So Douglas Murray, he writes this essay in The Spectator, and another guy named Entie Wright, who works within the Church of England, and he's one of Keith and I's

very, very, very favorite authors. He writes a response to Murray's article in The Spectators. I'm just going to pick up with Wright's response. He says, Sir, Douglas Murray complains that the Church of England has embraced the new religion of anti-racism. But the truth, which neither he nor the church seem to have realized, is that the anti-racist agenda is a secular attempt to plug a long-standing gap in Western Christianity. Yeah, I love what Wright does there, is he takes an attack on Christianity, and he says, you know what, they've got some good points. But what they're trying to do is to fill in a gap that the church has missed. In other words, the church dropped the ball, and the secular agenda is trying to pick up that ball.

And so what Wright's article does is calls the church to be better. So we want to read through Wright's article and discuss some points that he has, because I think a lot of people right now are asking this exact question. Is the church too woke? Is the church not woke enough? Where should we fall on these issues? I have lots of people asking me that exact question. and Wright offers a really, really interesting answer to that question.

But we have to start with where he starts, which is that there is a gap in Western Christianity. The image I think he's using, although he doesn't say it explicitly, is almost one of a wall or maybe even a dam. And something's come out of the wall so that the water's coming through. There's a gap. There's a hole that needs to be plugged up. So the question is, what is this gap in Western Christianity? Yeah, the gap that you're talking about is the history of race inside the church. Church worldwide, but we're thinking right now just about the American.

in church. And what I find is that a lot of Christians don't know their own church history. And so- In particular, white Christians don't know the history of race inside of the church. And therefore, they are unaware of how the church created a lot of the problems, or at least contributed to those problems, that the quote-unquote woke movement is trying to address. So just for example, we've all heard that 11 o'clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America that white Christians and black Christians have tended to go to different churches, churches that are predominantly white or predominantly black. And it's not for theological reasons. It's not for doctrinal reasons. It is for cultural reasons. It might even be for racial reasons.

Yeah, absolutely. And so the question is, where does this come from? Why is 11 o'clock on Sunday the most segregated hour of the week? And this all begins, I'm going to state the obvious here, well before there is anything known as the United States of America. It predates America, and you can go all the way back to 1667, and you'll find a document called the key slavery statutes of the Virginia General Assembly. I was reading that last night. Who's pumped? Who wants to talk about this? Now, one of the problems when the African slave trade moves into North America that people had to wrestle with was that in English common law, there was a practice. If someone was baptized, they could no longer be a slave. And the theological principle there makes a lot of sense. If someone's your brother in Christ or your sister in Christ, how could they possibly be your property? And so what ends up happening as African slaves are moving into North America, I shouldn't say moving, as African slaves are being moved forcibly into North America, well, you have slave owners who don't want their slaves to be told about Christianity, because if they're baptized, then they have to set them free.

Yeah, it's kind of an awkward situation where you're a Christian and you believe that heaven or hell is on the line here, that nothing more important than someone hearing about Jesus and believing in Jesus and following Jesus. But I don't want my slaves to hear about Jesus because if they were to believe in him, then I would have to, what, free them. Yeah, well, and it just shows the darkness, how willing we are to compromise our morals, our integrity for economics, for power, for a whole. Am I right to just wonder if you can. call yourself a Christian and be holding slaves and trying to keep them from hearing about Christ because it threatens your power, but who knows? Who am I to judge? Let's keep going. Yeah, I think that's a really good question. And unfortunately, there are missionaries who want

these enslaved Africans to be told the gospel. And so, in a sense, they kind of make a deal with the devil. They come up with this new ad hoc theology. And they say, you know what? Actually, even if your slave is baptized, you don't have to set them free. Shocker. Yeah. And that takes us to this key slavery statute of the Virginia General Assembly. This is what it said in 1667. It is enacted and declared by this grand assembly and the authority thereof that the conferring of baptism does not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedom. So it's a deadly compromise. Souls are saved, but entire lives and generations to come are lost. And of course, this could have gone a different direction. Things might have stayed the way that they

were previously, and people would have been baptized and they would have been set free. Isn't it shocking that these people came up with a new theological insight that allowed them to ease their conscience and maintain all their power? It's awful, and as we're going to see, it's a pattern that white Americans repeat over and over and over again. When faced with the obvious theological problem of chattel slavery, generational chattel slavery, Americans, white Americans, show a remarkable ability to create ad hoc made up in the moment theologies to defend their actions. An author named Craig Keener wrote this. He said, the first American slaveholders did not want their slaves to hear about the Bible because they feared that the slaves would understand that

Christianity made them their master's equals before God. His co-author said this, slaveholders feared that Christianity would make their slaves not only proud, but ungovernable and even rebellious. So there are these people who are purporting to be Christians and are part of the church who are saying, let's keep Christianity away so that we can maintain our power, our control, our economic self-interest. And again, a lot of our listeners might not realize that actually the early Christians and the early church, throughout the early Middle Ages, they rejected slavery. So Ambrose and his disciple, Augustine, who most Protestant Christians would say was kind of the first Protestant. He's a guy that we draw a lot of our theology back to. They both said explicitly that slavery is from sin.

Another major theologian from this era, John Chrysostom, he wrote that slavery is the fruit of covetousness of degradation of savagery, the fruit of sin and of human rebellion against our true father. Gregory of Nissus, St. Elogist, they used their tremendous wealth to actually buy British and Saxon slaves so that they could set them free. So there's this tradition that runs throughout the Middle Ages of Christianity that slavery was looked down upon. It was not a good thing. and it actually meant that during this period, slavery was not widely practiced at all in Christendom. And yet when Africans are forcibly enslaved in the United States, the church concocks a whole theology around why that is okay. Which never existed before. This was a theological invention.

And that has had long-lasting repercussions in our country, long-lasting repercussions, as we'll see, of why there even exists a separation between a black church and a white church. and why black Christians are, I think, rightly, a bit suspicious of white churches. So there's a local Catholic school in town, just a, I don't know, five, ten years old, something like that called Tolton High School, Father Tolton. And, you know, I don't think the vast majority of people in our community have any knowledge of why it's called. I honestly had no idea why it was called Father Tolton. I mean, I'm not Catholic.

I don't know my Catholic figure, so it had no meaning to me. And there's probably wherever you. You live, schools in your town that are named after somebody and you don't know the story behind them either. But I learned recently why that school has the name Tolton High School. How did you learn this, by the way? I never asked you. Well, it was in the book we both read. It's just that you didn't read it very carefully. I mean, I think I heard of nowhere else, but it was in the book we read. Which book?

Color of Compromise by Jamartisbee. I just don't think I put together that the Tolton here is that Tolton there. Really? I don't know. I have friends whose kids go to Tolton and you don't have friends. So maybe that's why. So Augustus Tolton was a slave born in Missouri in 1854. And I don't know a whole story behind this, but he was baptized Catholic.

His family flees to Illinois. A lot of German Catholics in Missouri. So he probably had a German Catholic. And I guess his owner baptized him now. I don't know. He runs off with his family into Illinois, and they settle in Quincy right across the river. And he starts going to a Catholic school. And eventually Augustus Tolton gets a call, at least what he senses as a call, to be a Catholic priest.

He wants to go to seminary. But here's the problem. There's no seminary in the United States, no Catholic seminary that will accept black students. So here you have this kid who wants to go be a priest, but the American Catholic Church won't let him be a priest. So he works. He works. He works. He saves his money.

Some other people help him. He has some benefactors who throw in a little bit, and he goes off to Rome to attend seminary. So just stop and think about that. He couldn't, because of the ad hoc theologies that white people have developed in the United States about who could go to seminary and who couldn't go to seminary. He couldn't get a seminary education in the United States. He has to go all the way to Italy to make it happen. Yeah, he eventually wraps up seminary. He comes back to the United States.

And in 1886, he becomes the first person of African descent to become a Catholic priest in America. And the cardinal who ordained him said this to him, said, Augustus, if America has never seen a black priest, it has to see one now. He eventually went on to be the priest of a thriving church of black Catholics on the south side of Chicago. But like you were saying, Patrick, think about this. Here's a guy who wants to be a leader in the church, but the church says, no, thank you. Not because his doctrine isn't right. No, he had no problem with his doctrine. not because his character wasn't right, not because he wasn't spiritually mature, he was all those things.

The reason they refused him is because of his skin color, because he was black, because somehow they convinced themselves that he wouldn't be a good priest because he's black. But just think about this. That could have gone a different direction. The church could have embraced him. They could have planted churches among black and white people. The church could have been multiracial, but instead it would have been. wasn't. And the reason it wasn't is because of the white Christians who were in charge.

What many white Christians don't realize is that the segregation that we see in the church was forced by white Christians. So let's go back to a figure named Richard Allen. He's born a slave in Philadelphia in 1760, and he is given permission to attend church and eventually becomes a member of the Methodist Church in 1777. Fast forward nine years, and his freedom is purchased, and he becomes a regular preacher at St. George. Now, at this time, St. George is an interracial Methodist church in Philadelphia. Now, think about how good of speaker he must be. And what an incredibly hard worker, smart guy he was. He's born a slave. He doesn't have probably the best educational opportunities. He wants to be a part of a church. He's asked to be a preacher,

a regular preacher at that church. Probably a pretty talented guy. Incredibly talented, but unfortunately, his fellow black members of the church were treated terribly. He, because he's such a good preacher and because he's black, begins to draw more and more black people into the congregation. And as that happens, the white families that are part of the congregation are becoming increasingly uncomfortable. Yeah, the story is the way I understand it is that he and a friend come into the church and pray. And they sit in the white section. I don't get that it was intentional. Maybe it was, I'm not sure, but I didn't get the impression that was necessarily intentional.

And one of the leaders of the church, maybe doesn't recognize them. Again, hard for me to believe, comes up and tells them while they're praying that they've got to leave. And they're like, well, can we just finish praying? And they were trying to get them off into the black section of the church. And so eventually Richard Allen and his friend, they get up and they walk out and they never go back. They never come back. Prior, when you were talking about the segregation, there was actually a forced segregation that happened inside of the church. And it was a result of so many black families coming into the church. And so they were breaking the rules. Again, whether or not they were doing an intentionally or not besides the point, they leave. They never come back,

and they found the AME in 1816. African Methodist Episcopal Church. So they started to have to hold the nomination. Why? Again, the same reason that Augustus Tolton couldn't find a place to go to seminary. Because they were black, the white church drove them out. Yeah, I've heard Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. brought up in this same context, and people have said that one reason he went up north to Crozier's seminary, which was more liberal of a seminary, is because seminaries in the south, seminaries that probably taught the same things we believe about the Bible and the gospel and Jesus wouldn't let them in. So think about this for a second. Imagine a different way. Imagine that the church had embraced its heritage. What Christians have taught for centuries before,

that we as a church should be a multiracial community. Had they embraced, Augustus Tolton, had they embraced Richard Allen, had they embraced Dr. King, we maybe wouldn't have a church that now is divided upon racial lines. Jamar Tisby, who wrote a history of color in the American church. The book that Patrick didn't read very carefully, but that I did. Obviously. This is what he wrote. He said, harsh, though it may sound, the facts of history, nevertheless, bear out this truth.

There would be no black church without racism in the white church. Ouch. And he is fundamentally correct. Ouch. The segregation that we see today at 11 o'clock on every Sunday, if you want to know, who done it? It's easy. You just go to the white church.

It's sitting on our doorstep. We are a predominantly white church, and we fought to become more racially diverse as a community. But at the end of the day, I have to know it falls at my ancestors' feet why the church looks the way it does today. Well, even when we talk about multiracial churches today, what that usually means, not always, not always, not always, but what it usually means is let's see if we, a predominantly white church can bring in black people into our church. How many times do you see white people, white Christians, yeah, going into predominantly black churches and sitting under the leadership of black pastors and black leadership? How many times do you see that? Almost none. Our idea is you guys should come back over here. Why would you want to come back over here after we kicked you out. Just another example of these little ad hoc theologizing that the white church did, one of the reasons or one of the ways that the white church

both justified slavery and then later justified banning interracial marriages was it was a theology based on the sons of no one. Now this is about to sound really bizarre, but this was widely, widely believed in almost all churches. Okay, let me just say this. Before Patrick dives in, is that this sounds so dumb, you're going to think he's making it up. But when he says it's widely believed, it really was, and by really smart people. And so that should tell us, smart people can convince themselves of really dumb things if it protects their self-interest. People who could preach the gospel, it could tell you that the Bible was inerrant. People who had theologies that a lot of our listeners would agree with, they taught that Noah had three sons.

Now, this much is true, and his three sons are Shem, Japheth, and Ham. Now, Noah curses his son, ham. And the way the Bible goes is that it describes the lineage of all three sons. Now, it's not really clear what nations actually come from each of the three sons of Noah and the Bible, but these ad hoc theologizers said, look, the sons of ham, these are the Africans. And so this means that all Africans are cursed. They're naturally servile. They're naturally positioned for physical rather than intellectual labor. And it means that because they're cursed, we shouldn't intermarried. There should be no mixing between. The levels of irony here are tremendous. When you think about the history of white slave masters raping black female slaves, and then they're at church theologizing about the problems of

interracial marriage and survive. I mean, it is dark, it is disgusting. And this theology, it lasts up into the 1950s. You go to white churches in the 1950s and hear people talking like this. You go in the 1960s and hear people talking like this about interracial marriage. It is within living memory. Yeah, and I don't want to give the impression that that is what the majority of the white church taught in the 1950s or 1960s. But there were definitely pockets of it. And there were seasons where a lot of churches believed that. And just to go back- I say if you're going to conservative church in the South in the 1960s, there's a pretty good chance. That's the kind of theology you were going to hear. And there is nothing in the Bible

to justify that black people came to the sons of ham. I mean, zero. This is people who want to maintain their power and use religion to do that. So they create, make up, devise theology that is their man-made stuff to, again, maintain their interests. So again, if I put myself into the shoes of someone who is black, why would I want to go to a church whose history? And I hate to say it, it's in our, not our church's history's history in sense that we have ever taught it, but in our church's denominational history, it's a part of our denominational history, absolutely. Why would I want to go to a church? Why would I trust the theology of people who have a history of theologizing to diminish my race and my dignity?

It's just a question you'd have to answer. Yeah, so let's fast forward a little bit and say, okay, how are we addressing these issues as a church? And when people start talking about race inside of a church, and I know this from my own personal experience, when you start talking about race, what some people will do is say, hey, watch out, you're getting in. into social issues. You're turning into politics. You're turning this into a social gospel. You've got to get back to Jesus and the Bible and not talk about social issues. But those same Christians that come and say that to me when we talk about race, they don't say that to me if we talk about abortion. They don't say that if we talk about sex trafficking. They're like, yeah, let's go out and let's try to bring justice to the unborn, and let's try to bring justice for those who are sold into sex trafficking.

They'll marshal armies and give money toward those issues. They don't ever say, oh, stay away from them because they're social or political or that kind of thing. But as soon as you bring up race, now it's like, oh, wow, we got to be careful there because that's a social issue. And that attitude has a long history. If you go back to evangelicals who were popular in the 1950s in 1960s. There were social issues that you just mentioned, sex trafficking wouldn't have been one, that people could rally themselves around. They were different issues back then. What, prayer in school? Prayer in school would be a major one. Reading the Bible in school and stuff like that. Communism. Yeah, they would de-emphasize the things that they discreet over.

Because you had some white Christians who were very pro ending Jim Crow and segregation, and you had other Christians who were very against ending Jim Crow and segregation. And the compromise that was often made amongst white Christians is we simply won't talk about this. This is going to be one of those political or social topics that we don't get into, and we're going to focus on what we agree. Now, again, I just want people to understand the history behind this. One other historical example, and maybe we'll have to move on here soon. But one would be the KKK. Now, you might not realize this, but the KKK has actually gone through kind of three different iterations. It started as a gang of hooligans in the South who were trying to fight against Reconstruction, and it was quite

literally put down by Ulysses S. Grant. It goes through a second birth that then dies again. It has a third birth after the very first blockbuster movie. It was a three hour long silent film. What was it called again? Birth of the Nation. Yeah, exactly. Birth of the Nation. So what happens? It's a terribly, terribly, terribly racist film. I've only seen scenes of it. It's bad. Yeah. I've never watched the whole, I mean, I don't watch silent movies. I watched a few scenes of it, and it will turn your stomach. So one scene I watched it. By the way, the goal of the movie is to tell you how the KKK was founded. And people actually believe that this was the true, non-fictional story of the founding of the KKK.

And one of the main scenes that happens is there is a white woman who's being chased through the woods by a black union soldier. Now, of course, it's a white man in blackface, and he's chasing her to rape her and to protect her chastity, she jumps off a cliff. She kills herself to rescue herself from this man. And the KKK is founded to go and hunt him down and other people like him who are threatening the chastity of white women. Now, of course, the entire story is made up. It's a narrative that has been used historically over and over and over again to justify violence against black men. And like you said, even though this is made up, a lot of people believed it was true. And one of the people who believed it was true, wait for this, was president of the United States. Woodrow Wilson.

He showed this film in the White House multiple times to large groups of people. I don't know if everybody is aware of this or not, but Woodrow Wilson, our president, was very, very racist, terribly racist. He was also a part of a Presbyterian denomination, and he was steadfast in his preaching of orthodoxy. Now, I don't know if he was a Christian or not. Some of his views seemed crazy weird, including that he was a terrible racist. But the point is that he was associated with the church, and yet he was promulgating lies about the KKK, about black people, white people, and the most racist tropes out there. Right in the White House, all happening inside the people's house. Woodrow Wilson has been celebrated by Presbyterian denominations, and particularly

conservative Presbyterian denominations, for being a defender of orthodoxy. In fact, at my We had to do a class on Presbyterian history. Now, I don't think the class had been rewritten in 20 years. It wasn't even taught by a professor. It was a terrible, awful class. I did not go to the same seminary as Patrick, which I'm proud of at this moment. You should be, because it presented Woodrow Wilson unblemished. Now, we didn't have a Woodrow Wilson lesson. It was part of a longer thing, but no one bothered to say, oh, and by the way, this guy believed that crazy Sons of Ham theology. This guy showed a terribly racist film to hundreds of people and said that it was like history written with lightning. None of that is said. He's just a hero of orthodoxy. Now, again, if you know your history, this should kind of disturb you. You would say, no, we probably need a more nuanced picture of this person. He's not a defender of orthodoxy. Sons of hand, that's not orthodox stuff. His theology of race is entirely opposed to what the Bible actually says about race. That's not orthodoxy. In the KKK, which you were talking about used this film as part of their propaganda, maybe we should do an episode on the KKK sometimes. That would be really interesting.

Because they had a few different manifestations. Well, so this is the third birth of the KKK. This film comes out, and it becomes incredibly popular, especially in the north, but also in the South. More and more people start joining this. And a lot of Christian ministers were a part of it. 40,000 Christian ministers in the last century were members of the KKK. I don't know how anyone knows that.

I mean, where do you have like your KKK membership card? Like your vaccine card? No, I think they had membership. Did they? Yeah, they had membership. We've got to keep in mind. We're talking, most of these were in the earlier 1900s. People go in and they sign it, and hey, I'm pastor of First Baptist Church.

The reality is that the person who was out there burning crosses into the front yards of black neighbors was climbing the pulpit the next day. And that is a dark reality. It is. I don't know how you know exactly how many people are part of it. You said that so confidently. That's where I got thrown off. You know what I got it from? I got it from that book I didn't read very well.

Confidence is sexy. That's what Patrick says. All right. So, anyway, in the third iteration of the KKK and perhaps the most, you know, evil iteration, had a lot of Christian ministers who are a part of it. They would read Romans 12, which is a chapter about loving each other at the beginning of all of their... It's Satanic. Oh, it's absolutely Satanic. It's evil. And the reality is that Christians, they failed by and large in this period, even the Christians who were against segregation,

the Christians who were against lynching, the Christians who wanted to see Jim Crow end, they took a moderate, slow approach to it all. Billy Graham, he was famous for removing the segregation ropes in 1953 in Chattanooga, Tennessee. And he said, no, I'm not going to allow my crowds to be segregated. That's not what I'm doing. But when it came to issues of race relations, he encouraged moderacy. He wanted people to take it slow. Now, later on, he said that he really regretted, not marching and taking a stronger stand in this particular issue. But in the moment, he was representative of a lot of northern Christians. Now, he was not northern himself, but a lot of Christians who were against what was happening, but weren't willing to step up and say anything.

Billy Graham was the ultimate of the moderate Christians. The people who are trying to kind of say, hey, we need to make racial progress, so I'll tear down the ropes of racial segregation in Chattanooga. But at the same time, I don't want to go fast. We need to go slow. We need to take an incremental approach. Let's don't upset anybody. These are the same kind of moderate Christians that Martin Luther King Jr.

spoke so powerfully to in the letter from Birmingham jail written in 1963, where he says, look, it's the moderates. It's the people who are saying go slow that are oftentimes racial progress is greatest enemy because it gives kind of a moral cover for the status quo. And so Billy Graham is a complicated person and there's parts of his life that I really respect and there are parts that I don't. He did push racial issues more than most people were. He had Dr. King come and pray at one of his crusades in New York. But then when Texas, a few years later, they didn't want Dr. King to come pray there, the organizers of the crusade. And so Billy Graham acquiesced to that. So he tried to walk this narrow line. Now, why is he so

important? Well, he's so important because he came to represent Christianity in the 50s and 60s, and even well beyond that, but especially then. That was Billy Graham's heyday. And what message is the church through Billy Graham sending? Well, it's a mixed message. It's a go-slow message. It's a, I can live with this message. Yeah, you can live with it because it's not your kids. It's not you growing up in it. Once the Civil Rights Act is passed, a lot of changes start happening politically. People begin to realign politically. So what a lot of listeners might not realize was that before the Civil Rights Act, most Southern Christians would have identified as Democrats. After the Civil Rights Act, that begins to change. You start seeing Southern Democrats become Republicans, because Republicans

became known as the party that wasn't necessarily against desegregation, but was actively slowing it down, throwing in wrenches, and was trying to break against the new status quo. Well, it's complicated because the Civil Rights Act doesn't pass without Republican support. It would not have. Everett Dirkson in the Senate worked with LBJ to pass that legislation. So it's not as easy to say that there was one party for civil rights and one against. There were factions in both parties who were on both sides. That's absolutely right. It was probably more of a northern southern debate.

You could find Southern Republicans who were going to be against it and Southern Democrats who were going to be against it. But why Democrats became aligned with that particular movement was because LBJ was the one who pushed it through and passed it. And again, you can look back. This was a major political realignment. And evangelicals begin to realign with Republicans. That becomes the new party of Christians.

And again, like he said earlier, they found great agreement on a number of social issues, especially those related to the sexual revolution. That was an area that they could find agreement. And what became de-emphasized, again, were these issues of race. And as fewer and fewer black people identified as Republican, that only escalated and scaled up. But remember, the issue we're talking about is why is 11 o'clock on Sunday morning, the most segregated hour? Why is it that there's a black church and a white church in the United States of America. Why is it that we are not worshiping the same God or the same theology together in the same room? And the issue is that the church, for a while, kicked out black Christians.

And in other seasons, persecuted black Christians. And in other seasons, took a go-slow approach to it. I mean, just think of promise keepers, which that came of age when I was a younger Christian. I don't know. It's not my kind of thing. I don't go to conferences with a bunch of dudes. and hold hands and sing. But a lot of people really liked it and it was this big booming movement. Is that what happened at those conferences? I got talking to one and it was way too touchy-feely for me. I mean, it was too- He doesn't like hugs. No, stay away from me. The only part of COVID that Keith loved. Oh, that was social distancing. You didn't have to touch people? Yeah, he was thrilled. There's nothing worse than me standing somewhere and somebody coming up from

behind you and putting their hand on my shoulder or something like, who are you? Did you violate me? Anyway, I felt violated. Okay, so promise keepers was a big thing. everybody loved it, booming, blah, blah, blah. It's going really well, but then the bottom falls out. And the reason, well, it's hard to say the reason, because I'm sure there are a lot of factors, but you couldn't help but notice the bottom falls out of promise keepers right when it starts to make racial reconciliation a big deal. It simply says a lot about evangelicalism.

This was an incredibly large, exciting movement of men. And when the mission shifts to, hey, we need to create reconciliation between white and black Christians, all of a sudden, where's the white Christians? All of a sudden, this isn't something that our church wants to be a part of. If fast forward, another kind of major racial reconciliation movement began about 10 years ago, five years ago, where this was a big conversation, especially inside of white evangelicalism. And again, since then, it has, in some senses, lost steam and died down,

and there's been a whole new set of divisions that have been created in the aftermath. Now, it's important for us to realize that the white and black church, neither one are monolithic. So we're not at all. We're not trying to say all black churches and all white churches should just get together in one big group hug. What we are trying to say is that white Christians and black Christians, a lot of them have more in common.

Maybe it's liberal black Christians and white Christians. Maybe it is conservative, evangelical white Christians and black Christians. There are reasons to go to different churches. Theology would be one big one, but race should. be the issue. The black church is not monolithic, just like the white church isn't. We should be able to worship with black brothers and sisters in Christ who agree with us on theology and mission. That's the point here. And another way that this is manifesting itself right now that's causing more black-white church divide is over critical race theory, especially in the Southern Baptist

Convention. Now, this is going to be tough because you know that Patrick and I, have pushed back on critical race theory, on parts of it at least, and there are parts of it that are good. But unfortunately, this now is becoming another divisive issue that's driving white and black Christians apart. And that part, I think we can all agree on, is terribly unfortunate. There have been a number of things that the Southern Baptist Convention has done. Probably the one that's gotten the most attention was when six Baptist seminary presidents, which they kind of represent all of the major SBC seminaries, they wrote this together. affirmation of critical race theory, intersectionality, and any version of critical theory is

incompatible with the Baptist faith and message. Now, the statement, as you just heard, wasn't actually very nuanced. The SBC itself released a different statement, which was far more nuanced, and I actually found some things that say, there's something to agree with there. They said that CRT actually does have some value that it can be used as an analytical tool, as long as it's subordinate to scripture, which is almost verbatim, by the way, what you and I have said in the past, We've both learned a lot from critical race theory and authors who are in that camp, and they've challenged us to both analyze our own internalized racism, to see ways how systemic racial injustice is still present in the present and in the past. And yet we say that it has a limited role. It's an analytical tool. It helps you see things and discover things, but it doesn't work as a comprehensive worldview. That's what we've tried to say in the past. And this has caused us problems and issues because that sounds like a rejection, whereas I think we would say, no, we want to both end. Well, a lot of secular theories, including critical theory, are better at diagnosing problems than they are at proposing solutions or solving problems.

And so I think, at least from a Christian perspective, and so I think when you say analytical tool, what you're saying is, let me dumb that down for people like me, is that you're saying that it helps us see people's personal situations. It helps us understand cultural dynamics. It helps us diagnose problems, but isn't near as good at proposing solutions. Is that right? Yeah. So let me give an example of a different analytical tool, mental health. People for all time have not known what mental health was. But now we have this concept, an analytical tool of mental health, that lets us identify the fact that sometimes people have sicknesses, which aren't physical sicknesses in the sense of, I've got cancer or something bodily happening, but they are sicknesses that are happening inside of our mind, inside of how we think,

inside of how we feel. And so we've created a term, mental health, an analytical tool. And it's allowed people then to research and think about why do we have problems like depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder. And as we've used that tool, we've discovered actually some of it is physical. It is rooted in the brain. But it's a tool that helps us see things. Mental health can't explain everything in your life, however. It's not a worldview. It's just a tool to help you see something. And so when critical theory helps us see things, then it's helpful. When it becomes a comprehensive worldview, then it becomes a problem. But back to the big point here is that this argument over CRT and the- It's dividing everybody. Well, especially when you come at it from a it's all bad or it's all good

perspective. Which seems to be the only two options that have been put on the table and it drives me nuts. I saw Anthony Bradley. I don't know. Do you follow Anthony Bradley? He had a kind of an approach of chew the meat and spit out the bones. And so that's trying to take a little bit more. And obviously he unpacked that in his article. He didn't just say that and stop. But chew the meat spit out the bones as a way to kind of have more of a nuanced approach. There's some good here, and there's some that we need to reject. Yeah, and if I could push back on you and I a little bit, another person who's helped me a lot is Dr. Anthony Bradley is black. Another black author, Issa Macaulay, who's also a professor. He wrote something that challenged me. He said that

white Christians have a very difficult time telling the difference between critical race theory and traditional, orthodox, black teachings on issues of racial justice. He says, look, if you go through the history of black theology, you will realize that these questions of race and justice, they aren't new to us. We've been thinking and theologizing about this for centuries now, and white Christians sometimes have a really hard time differentiating. His point here is basically, look, the black church precedes critical race theory, and many of the insights of critical race theory, they're already present in the black church. In other words, all the best parts of critical race theory, you could probably find somewhere in a great Orthodox black church. But because I've never attended

an Orthodox black church for or at least on a regular basis, I'm unaware of them. Yeah, so let's don't turn this into another episode on critical theory. Suffice it to say that there's some things about it that can be helpful. There's a lot of it that we find unhelpful. The key issue here is that currently today, right now, it again is dividing the church. It's pushing black Christians and white Christians further and further apart. Now, all this falls on our doorstep. Did we cause it all?

Are we responsible? How are being white Christians? Well, yes, white Christians for sure. Absolutely. And maybe that's first and foremost. But this problem is on the church's doorstep. And while we didn't create it, we are responsible for responding to it and realizing our cultural moment. And this is probably not the time for Christians, white Christians, to put up more walls,

more barriers push black Christians away. Now, you could say the same thing maybe to black Christians, but that's not my history. That's not who I am. So I'll let other people say that or whatever's appropriate. But what I can say is that now for white Christians, this is a time to listen, not unguardedly. I mean, not uncritically. We've got to think, but it's a time to listen, to humble ourselves and to realize our past sins. Not past mistakes, past sins. I hear a lot of people who resist this, because they say, well, I didn't own any slaves. Well, I wasn't alive during the Jim Crow era. Well, I've never stopped anyone from voting. I don't do anything racist. So this isn't my problem. I didn't create this problem. I don't have to solve this problem. And you can kind of

somewhat understand that, at least on face value. Those statements are- I think it's a little naive. It's for sure naive. But I understand how that comes into people's mind. I saw this morning that yesterday Bernie Madoff died. I don't know if everybody remembers us. You remember you? You remember him? I remember Bernie. Yeah, he lost all my money. I'm just kidding. Yeah. He went to prison for running a Ponzi scheme. Essentially what he was doing is recruiting high level, smart people, very smart people, accomplished people to invest with him. But he wasn't really investing their money. He was just turning around and keeping their money, living high on their money. And then he was always recruiting new investors to be able to pay off the people who,

who are in first. So there's this whole scheme developed to take new money in, to pay off old money, but he was never doing what he said he would do with the money. He was just spending their money on himself. And he promised people incredibly high rates of return. Yeah, he promised him good rates of return. And he delivered on high rates of return. Do you invest Patrick in the stock market? I mean, I have retirement accounts, so I trust other people who know what they're doing with my investment dollars. Do you even cryptocurrency? I've not bought into crypto, but I know you have. I have the other night at dinner. One of my sons told me he had a large amount of Ethereum. And I was like, dang. So I bought a very small amount of Ethereum. And then it went up the next day.

Oh, did you make a few bucks? It's become my side hustle. What's your side hustle? I don't have a side hustle. Although the guy who came over to... Teaching Latin. Yeah, teaching Latin. The guy came over to... That father, Tolton. You didn't even know existed. To help me with our thermostat because the air conditioning wasn't working. he really wanted to talk to me about crypto and he was trying to convince me

that if I would just invest in the crypto My HR guy? If he goes, I'm going to retire early He's like, you need to invest in this exact cryptocurrency that I'm investing in. I started thinking, oh my gosh, it feels like a Ponzi scheme. Well, I'm getting advice for my 21-year-old and financial advice, so why should I criticize you?

Hold on. Did you invest in GameStop? No. Yes, you did. Come on. I didn't. I wish I would have early on. By the time I figured it out, I think it was too late.

We have a friend who very seriously told me I was going to, but then I felt like it was immoral. And he told me that if he had done it and followed the exact plan he had when he had done it, that he was going to gain, I think something like $2 million in the process. That makes everything moral. I always love confident statements in retrospect. People say it is gambling more like, if you tithe 20%, now it's a 20% tithe on it, not 10. But we can take anything you do and wander it through the church and make it moral. I think we should one day,

whole episode on what should Patrick's side hustle be? Oh, what should my side hustle? I mean, I don't have like a money-making hair hustle. We learned last week that you care so much about your hair that you don't wash it. Okay. First of all,

this comes from the guy who gets his haircut twice a month. Oh my goodness. So I don't know who cares about their hair and how it looks. Maybe it's me. I don't get my hair cut twice a month. That's because it's gray. Let's be honest. Your hair?

Just trying to keep the gray down. That's good. Okay, where were we? We were talking about side hustle. Well, let's get back into the actual... Because Bernie made off... So let's go back to Bernie. So Bernie ran this Ponzi scheme.

He paid out money to people that he was supposed to be investing. Now, let's say that you're one of the people... And people who invested in him after the Ponzi scheme came out, lost millions and millions, maybe even billions of dollars in the deal. So people lost their entire life savings. A guy who wrote one of my favorite autobiographies of his experience during the Holocaust, he had invested with Bernie Madoffey. This is Viesel.

Yeah. What's his first one? he's a wrote the night. That's a great book. Short book. It's a great book. And he invested his life. So here's a guy who survived the Holocaust.

He invested his entire life savings with Bernie Madoff because he had such great returns on investment. He lost everything that he had. So now the question is the people who received money from Bernie Madoff thinking that he had invested it. So this is before the Ponzi schemes revealed. They took their payout. So they got their money.

They thought he was investing it. They thought it was all legitimate, all moral, all fine. They got their money. They spent it. They planned on spending it. They re-invested it. They did all this stuff. Now it comes to light that this is all a big scam. What are they supposed to do with that money? What's the right thing for those people to do with the money that they got immorally and illegally from other people's investments? And they didn't know that they were getting it immorily and illegally. And they spent it. So not only did they not know it, but they bought a house or they bought a boat or they did whatever. It didn't pay for college education. The house and give part of the proceeds back to Ellie Wiesel who lost everything? They didn't do anything wrong, but they benefited from what other people did wrong. And there are people who put in money to Bernie Madoff who lost all that. Should they be compensated by the people who gained immorily and illegally?

It's not an easy question, is it? Or is it? I don't think it's an easy question. I think it helps us deal with where a lot of white Christians are at today. A different metaphor for this would be a baseball game. I want you to imagine two different teams who are playing baseball against each other. I've never actually played baseball, so this is a funny analogy. Let's see if you get it right. We're just going to all listen and say, can Patrick?

So for the first seven innings, one team is cheating. They are cheating, obviously. The other team doesn't know it. The other team knows that they just can't do anything about it. There's nothing that they can do to stop this other team from cheating. And the other team is up by 15 points by the end of the seventh inning. And then... Fifteen points.

I kind of did that seriously. I'll say 15 runs. Yeah. Just like the people who would always make money if their investment strategy was executed.

You're the guy who just throws in some mistakes for our... Every now, then. Just for a good gap. God bless you. Okay. So they're up by 15 runs

at the end of seventh inning. And then it comes out, yes, they have been cheating, and now the reps are ready to do something about it. They're going to stop... umpires. This is so good

The refs. Riffs are in basketball and football. Okay, let's keep going on. Even hockey. I've never read baseball for dummies. I've never read baseball for dummies. I've never going to. As I said in our previous episode,

I've been boycotting baseball my whole life. Don't plan to stop. Okay, so the umpires we're finally ready to enforce the rules fairly. So you've got one team that's up 15. The other team has zero. And now they say, hey, we're going to enforce the rules fairly. Is that fair?

for the rest of the game to go on, they get to keep their 15 points that they had unfairly, and the other team has to start with zero? Is that really a fair game? Is that really a fair start? But it feels like that's what white Christians are doing. They're saying, okay, look, we did some things wrong in the past, and let's just move forward now that that's been exposed. We agree, we won't cheat, we won't take advantage of you any further. But how do you repair the damage that's been done? How do you undo that? What should you do if you got money from Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme. What should you do if your team has benefited from cheating? These aren't easy questions, and we don't propose to say that the Bible has some verse that tells you exactly how to

handle it. But we as white Christians at least need to understand the complexity of the moment and how black Christians feel. And maybe we need to repent, maybe we need to repair, maybe we need to undo some things. I don't know. I don't have the answer, but I know it's not as simple as saying, hey, let's all start going on the same church now. No, it's not. And that takes us back to Douglas Murray and his article about the Church of England and N.T. Wright. We took a long

circuitous route to get back to these. But let's do it. All right. Here's the deal. N.T. Wright, and we're going to read the rest of his response because it's so good, N.T. Wright makes a point that this should never have been an issue in the church. Remember what he said in the section that we read previously? He said, there's been a long-standing

gap in Western Christianity. We just spent the better part of an hour going over that gap. We have failed in the Western Church to deal rightly with the issue of race, but that is not because the Bible doesn't deal with the issue of race. The gospel has a solution on the table for race. That's one of the craziest things when people come up and say to you, race is a social issue. You're like, what are you talking about? Race is all over the Bible. My normal response is, have you read Paul? Have you read the Bible? But somehow American Christians are able to read the Bible in such a spiritualized, to be honest, wrong-headed way,

that they don't see the racial conversation that's happening from Genesis to Revelation. The single greatest issue facing the early church, the issue which is found in every single one of Paul's letters, was that you had two groups of people from different ethnicities, Gentiles and Jews, and they were trying to figure out, how can these two people with totally different backgrounds, with different lifestyles, with different ways of seeing the world, one of whom the Gentiles has spent centuries at this point oppressing the other, that's the Jews, and the one group, that's the Jews,

who say, we actually have a better way of living than you do. You have these two groups, how do they live together united under Jesus? That was the central issue that faced the early church, and Paul's letters are littered with references to it. So if you aren't talking about race in church, it is arguable that you really haven't fully understood what the gospel means. All right, so back into the right letter to the editor. The NT-write letter to the editor, which we also think is right. Oh, yeah. See?

Pun. Well, just sounded confusing. Yeah, puns, private school. The answer is to recover the full message, not to bolt on new ideologies. Okay, so let's just pause there. I could not agree with NT right more here. He's saying there is a gap in Western Christianity. The answer is that we need to go back to what the gospel says about issues of race and

reconciliation and how we live when we come with histories. Remember, Jews and Gentiles, they had a history behind them that they brought into the room with them, just like black people and white people and Asians and others, all bring into the same room. That was true back then. It's true right now, but he says the answer isn't bolting on a new ideology. You're not going to solve the problem of this big gap by just bolting on critical race theory or critical theory or all these other solutions to the problem. So back to right, the earliest Christian writings insist that in the Messiah, there is, quote, neither Jew nor Greek. Now, that's just quoting part of Galatians 328.

All right, back to right. The book of Revelation in visages, Jesus' followers as an uncountable family from every nation, tribe, people, and language. Now, there he's just referring to Revelation 7. At the climax of his greatest letter, St. Paul urges Christians to welcome one another, across all social and ethnic barriers, insisting that the church will thereby function as the advanced sign of God's coming renewal of all creation. So back to what Patrick was saying a second ago. This is what the storyline of the Bible is about.

At the beginning, God made humanity, and sin ruptured those relationships. And ever since Genesis 12, God has been about restoring that family. There's one way of reading the Bible that says that the emphasis is upon reconciling reconciling the ruptured relationships between human beings, not just between individuals, but between groups of people, and that we see that reconciliation fully and finally taking place in Revelation 7, where we are worshipping together alongside people of every tongue, tribe, and nation. There's a big challenge here, and it's a challenge that I think in this case is issued to both sides. Remember what I said about Jews and Gentiles?

Jews had spent centuries being oppressed first by Greek Gentiles and then later by Roman Gentiles. Thousands and thousands and thousands of Jews were crucified in the exact same manner that Jesus was crucified. Jews were heavily taxed. They were oppressed. They weren't even allowed to self-govern. There's countless ways that the Jews suffered under the Gentiles. And so it's understandable why a Jew in Galicia would say, look, the Messiah came from my line, my lineage. he was a Jew just like me. And you and your people, look how you've lived. Look what you've caused.

You need to come and be like us. You need to be circumcised. You need to follow our food rules. And Paul comes in and he speaks to both groups. He says to the Jews, no, they don't need to enter into your culture. But then he says to the Gentiles, who in some cases were the proud ones and said, you Jews don't get it. All that stuff's old and done with.

And we don't have to do any of that. We don't have to worry about that history, that past. He comes to both of them. He says, welcome each other. Radical forgiveness, radical humility, radical apologies, radical boundary crossing on both sides. It is incredibly hard to do, and I can only own my side as maybe in this situation being more like the Gentile. Back to Entie right. This is the three-dimensional meaning of justification by faith. All those who believe in Jesus, rescued by His cross and resurrection

and enlivened by his spirit, are part of the new family. This was and is central, not peripheral. The church was the original multicultural project with Jesus as its only point of identity. It was known and was for this reason seen as both attractive and dangerous, as a worship-based, spiritually renewed, multi-ethnic, polychrome, mutually supportive, outward-facing, culturally creative, chastity-celebrating, socially responsible, fictive kinship group. Genderblind and leadership, generous to the poor, and courageous in speaking up for the voiceless. What Wright is describing right here is what the early church was, and it's what the church should be today. Don't you want to be a part of a movement like that? I mean, I want to be a part of

that church. But because Christians have walked away from this, that's the gap that you were talking about, is that we've created the gap that all these other secular theories are now coming in to try to fill. But we have the opportunity to fill the gap with the truth. And that is a multicultural people worshiping Jesus, following Jesus, loving one another, laying aside our rights for the benefit and for the interests of other people who are different than us. Let me finish out what Wright wrote. This is the last paragraph. He said, if this had been celebrated, taught and practiced, the church would early on have recognized ecclesial racism for what it is, the ugly side effect of splitting the church into language groups and thence into national churches, preparing the way for

and disarming the church against the self-serving racial theories of social Darwinism. If it has taken modern secular movements to jolt the church into recognizing a long-standing problem, shame on us. But the answer is not to capitulate to the current identity agenda, and then to enforce it with breastbeating, finger-wagging, neo-moralism. Douglas Murray doesn't like that, and neither do I. The answer is teaching and practicing the whole biblical gospel. I love into you right even more after this, because somehow he's able to put his finger on the problem, speak respectfully to people he disagrees with, call the church to be what God always intended us to be, and show a way forward that is hopeful.

The last little part about finger-wagging neolism bears thought, in my opinion. We are all, myself included, drawn to self-righteousness. I want to be self-righteous towards anybody who disagrees with me. And of course, people who disagree with me want to be self-righteous towards me. And I think Wright is challenging that. He's saying, and I'm speaking in particular, not to the black or white church. I'm speaking to, in particular, actually, white Christians who are buying into some of these secular ideologies that they're trying to bolt on that the gospel deals with, and becoming self-righteous towards each other, either in our disagreement with the ideology or our agreement with the ideology. I think we set both of those things aside and say,

we don't need it. What we need is to cross boundaries, to reconcile, to forgive, and to love one another. Yeah, and unfortunately, I think I'm complicit in it. I think the church is complicit in it. I think in this finger wagging every single human being. It's like what Twitter exists for is to scold others. Oh, I know I've done it. I mean, I hate myself for doing it, and yet I can't stop myself from doing it. And that's why I love this quote, because that's what it's trying to get me to do. And unfortunately, there's this line you got to walk about speaking truth and saying hard things and calling people to repent and pointing out past sins and saying, look, we're never going to get further unless we own up to where we've been. But on the other hand, being gracious and loving and kind and believing the

best, forgiving like you said, it's hard to do both. And so I'm afraid that in the name of speaking the truth, we unfortunately speak more self-righteously and divide people more. We mentioned Jamar Tisbee's book, The Color of Compromise, and I think we both really liked it. It has a lot of hard things in it, but it's well-researched. I think even it's fair. I mean, fair in the sense of accurate. Oh, I agree. Not fair in the sense of it's what you want to be true, but he does a good job with it. And yet, when I see Jamar Tisby on Twitter, I don't know. He seems to be more scolding and angrier. And I don't know what to say about that as a white Christian because I don't want to be the kind of person Dr. King addressed in the letter to the Birmingham jail of saying, hey, go slow

and don't be upset. I think there's a lot of reason to be upset. On the other hand, I just don't know how far we get. I like the Jamar Tisbee of Color of Compromise more than I like Jamar Tisby on Twitter. I don't know them, so it's obviously one person. I'm trying to act like it's two different people. It's not.

So I guess my whole point is that... How do you catch the balance between Sloan's scolding? Yeah. I think that it is an incredibly hard balance. And my guess is that the way we're not going to move forward is by dividing the world up into this very clear either or. that's what's happening, whether it's critical race theory or just race in general, is that you see people beginning to tribalize and herd up into their particular perspectives, their way of seeing the world,

and they want everybody to fit into one category of the other, which puts, I think, people like me and me, and by the way, I know lots of other black Christians who are in the exact same situation that Keith and I are in that I've talked to, spoken with, who'd say, well, I don't really fit into either of these camps, and yet people in both those camps force me into the other one. It's as if we need to choose truth over tribe. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. That's what we need to do. And so where I've just gotten with this issue is, I need to constantly be uncomfortable with this. If I start getting too comfortable saying I don't have to think or worry about race, it's not a good place for me to be because there's still our issues that need to be dealt with. If I begin to think I'm going to solve racism by seeing it everywhere, I have to again resist and say, well, no, that's actually not the gospel answer to it. The gospel answer is reconciliation. And so is that a weird in-between place to be? Absolutely. But it's the only thing.

place that I would want to be in this particular situation. I might just add to keep reading people that make you feel uncomfortable. Keep reading books, articles, blog posts, maybe even the Twitter account of people who disagree with you and do it with an open mind, not to refute them. But if you're on the critical theory side, keep reading people like Douglas Murray, Andrew Sullivan, Barry Weiss, so many others out there. Thomas, Shelby Seal, Glenn Lowry. I mean, those are all blackouts.

Thomas Chatterton, Will. Williams, Coleman Hughes. There are so many good voices, white and black, on the non-critical theory side, who are opposed to it. But if you're opposed to it, then you might need to read some people who are embracing it. Robin DiAngelo. Read them. You're not going to agree with them. I don't agree with any of them. I don't agree with myself half the time. But read them with an open mind and keep this forefront of your mind. I want to love Jesus. I want to love everybody that Jesus loves. I want to own up for my past sins. I want to welcome people in. I want to create in spaces where black and white people can follow Christ together, be in friendship together. I want to lay

aside my rights on behalf of my brothers and sisters in Christ, regardless if they're white or they're black, their man, their woman, doesn't matter. I want to be a bridge builder, a peacemaker, a person who pursues reconciliation. That is really important. to me. And so I'm not going to make jokes. I'm not going to be self-righteous. I'm not going to look down on other people. I'm not just going to listen to people who agree with me because that's never going to land me in a place where I'm being used by God to be a bridge builder. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps others find this podcast more easily. Also ask yourself who you could share this podcast with.

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