Only Christ Can Reconcile Blacks and Whites, and Everybody Else, With God

I wrote my book, Race in America: Liberalism’s Attack on Minorities and the Church, from a perspective built on 30 years of work in the public policy arena, having watched year after year modern liberalism’s assault on the church, culture, government, and markets—though I readily admit I didn’t have a biblical perspective on these, or anything else, 30 years ago. 

This assault shouldn’t be surprising; we live in a world at war, a war that has been raging (Psalm 2) since Adam defied God and abandoned Eve to Satan’s deceit to get a taste of some forbidden fruit and rebel against God. I’ve also watched the church too often fall for Satan’s deceit and retreat from its duty of “declaring [to the culture] the whole counsel of God.” Instead, it often adapts Scripture to fit the world’s ideas because it is “deluded … with plausible arguments” and taken “captive by philosophy and empty deceit” while being “surprised … that the world hates” believers and forgetting that “friendship with the world is enmity with God.”

This retreat is particularly evident when it comes to race and culture. The world seeks to divide that which is whole and make whole that which is divided. Thus, the single race of mankind becomes hopelessly split into various “races” while the greatest of all divides, that between believers and unbelievers, is ignored. Racism, primarily white racism, is said to be at the heart of racial tension in America today and the primary cause of many of the problems that minorities face. Unfortunately, all too often the church today falls for this worldly counsel.

This perspective is seen even in conservative evangelical denominations like the Presbyterian Church in America.

For instance, PCA Pastor Timothy LeCroy recently explored his racist heritage:

You see, I didn’t hate Black people, but I was still a racist. I was a racist because I looked down on African Americans. I stereotyped them. I didn’t seek to know them or understand them. I may have never called them names or raised a Confederate flag or done anything overtly racist, but I was racist nonetheless—racist in ways that I am only now coming to understand.

Similarly, ruling elder and past PCA General Assembly Moderator Alexander Jun makes the same point by reciting a story about a giraffe’s blind bias against elephants. After seeing the elephant make shambles of his house which, after all, was built for giraffes, the giraffe proclaims:

I know the problem. You’re too fat. If you lost some weight, you’d fit in here just fine. Or maybe if you took ballet lessons you’d get light on your feet. I love having you here and I’d love for you to keep coming back but you kinda have to change if you are going to stay here.”

Though not everyone in the PCA thinks this way. Black PCA ruling elder Al Arnold embraces his great, great grandfather’s role in the civil war as a slave to Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forest and an orderly to Robert E. Lee. He also writes of his time growing up:

To suggest that having a white prom and a black prom at one high school is racist doesn’t fully comprehend the important role of culture and the importance of race. That doesn’t mean that we don’t acknowledge that these practices may have derived from impure motives. … But to suggest that because these events were separate was inherently racist is wrong. As much as we loved our white classmates and were loved by them, we also loved our culture so much that we enjoyed our differences without allowing them to destroy our love for each other.

Similarly, in policy work, I’ve seen many people attempt to blame the continued existence of poverty, violence, and single mothers in black ghettos today on white racism, past and present. But Thomas Sowell says this explanation “will not stand up under a closer scrutiny of history.”

If oppression by white racists was actually the leading cause of the low economic and educational status of blacks, we would have expected to see improvement in these areas as the government passed civil rights laws to end institutional racism and welfare programs designed to advance blacks economically despite continued racial economic discrimination. Yet just the opposite is true.

As Sowell notes, “The rise of blacks into professional and similar occupations was faster in the five years preceding passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than in the five years following its passage.” Similarly, the number of blacks receiving college degrees increased fivefold from before the First World War to 1935, and in 1947 black colleges in one year granted more college degrees to blacks than had been issued to all blacks before the First World War.

Rather than white racism, the primary cause of the seemingly permanent black underclass is liberalism, embodied in policy prescriptions such as the welfare state, born out of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society—also known as the “unconditional [and spectacularly unsuccessful] war on poverty,” which has trapped millions of blacks in poverty, unemployment, and failing public schools. Payments to non-working mothers for having children out of wedlock has helped break down the black family and left millions of black children without fathers. Those children, especially young, black males—usually unskilled, who try to break out of this trap are stymied by laws mandating minimum wages, imposing heavy regulation and high taxes on businesses, and forcing workers to join unions to get a job.

The negative consequences of the welfare state for blacks should not surprise Christians who pay attention to what the Bible says, especially those who have also read Marvin Olasky’s book, The Tragedy of American Compassion.

While the church is debating how to use government to overcome white racism and be more compassionate, Olasky writes “generations are being lost. Crack babies in inner city hospitals tremble and twitch uncontrollably. Teenage mothers, alone with squalling children, fight the impulse to strike out. Women in their thirties, abandoned by husbands, wait for their numbers to be called in cold welfare offices. Homeless men line up impatiently at food wagons before shuffling off to eat and drink in alleys smelling of urine.”

At times the divide between blacks and whites appears to be almost as wide as the chasm between Abraham and the rich man in Hades. But that is only because of the world’s perspective that focuses on the color of people’s skin instead of on the unity through diversity found in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Endless cycles of confession and repentance by whites, the welfare state, and forced reconciliation through affirmative action, reparations, or related means will not effectively address the socio-economic issues associated with race and racism today. Rather, it will require a biblical understanding of the many facets of this conversation today: culture versus race; the social gospel; what biblically-guided public policies look like vs. the worldly policies of today; the primary and secondary causes of black poverty, crime, and poor educational outcomes—and why these are being perpetuated; a historical perspective on slavery and on racism in the culture and the church; and generally how liberalism has in many cases successfully assaulted the culture and the church.

Secular liberalism, supported by theological liberalism and its replacement of the gospel of Jesus Christ with the social gospel, not white racism, stands behind the bitter fruit of racial tension and minority poverty that our society must deal with today. Little progress will be made in unifying Christianity across racial, ethnic, cultural, and economic lines by obsessing about how predominately white churches should relate with blacks and other minorities while ignoring the larger context of how political and theological liberalism have fostered and perpetuated division in society.

One step forward in this battle is to change our civil government from one that oppresses through the welfare state, affirmative action, legalized abortion, and excessive taxation and regulation to one that justly upholds life, liberty, and truth with a focus on preparing the Earth as the dwelling place of God with man. A government like this will eliminate much of the bitter fruit accumulated from years of racial hostility and the welfare state.

But the most important step we can take is to worship God according to His Word and properly understand, preach, and live out Christ’s ministry of reconciliation:

From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:16–21 ESV)