“Sin is sin, on the right or the left. Kinism is just as evil as critical race theory.”
“…we’re not called to repay evil for evil, racism for racism, Kinism for critical race theory. ” - CPost
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Great article. I had never heard of Kinism. What strikes me is that the closest argument that a Kinist could come up with from scripture is the Israelites being forbidden from marrying with the pagan nations. But when you look closer at the issue, you find out that they were allowed to marry across racial lines, but not across religious lines. In other words, if a person of a different race converted to follow the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, then they could marry an Israelite. Moses married a woman of a different race, and his sister was condemned for her rebuke of him. There is simply no solid Biblical argument against interracial marriage.
Further, by this point in history, there are very few- if any- people who do not already have multiple races in their family trees. My mother stood out as being 100% Swede, but even though all of her family tree can trace part of it's roots back to Sweden, we do not know how much interracial marriage took place in Sweden or before earlier ancestors moved to Sweden. My sister likes looking into our family tree, and we have strong indications that the Swedish side of our family is actually not 100% Swede even though all our recent ancestors can trace their homeland back to Sweden. It all becomes quite ridiculous at a certain point.
When I started blogging in 2005, I had at least one commenter from the kinist position, and one interesting thing was that when the subject was theology, they seemed orthodox until....they started talking about the Confederacy, or about their membership in a society like the John Birch Society, agrarian nationalism and Wendell Berry, and the like. You will see a fair number of them among Trump's supporters.
The thing that struck me as most obnoxious is that when confronted with evidence of the Apostles and such reaching out to other cultures, that whole point was lost on them. It was strange.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
It will be interesting where these people see themselves in heaven. Revelations is quite clear that all of heaven will be filled with people of all tribes, praising God as one people. It is interesting to me, how they view we must separate on earth, but not in Heaven. Our diversity points to the grace and glory of God.
I don’t think I’d ever heard the term “kinism” until today, but this kind of thing convinces me even more that being raised with a “colorblind” point of view from my parents is something I am very, very thankful for. It’s not that I actually don’t “see” the color of people’s skin, but that I was taught that skin color differences are no different from eye and hair color differences, and that all others are people just as I am. I don’t discount the experiences of others, but I firmly believe just as Justice Roberts does that to end discrimination based on race, we have to stop discriminating based on race.
As the scriptures show (and as dgszweda also pointed out) that all tribes and nations will be part of the heavenly throng praising God, I refuse to give any time to or take seriously any philosophy that says I have to go out of my way to notice (and treat differently) anyone based on completely unimportant differences like skin color.
I have over the years heard some of the different speakers who tried to make us think that we should maintain differences that have arisen since the time of Adam or Noah, but such teaching (and how they tried to twist scripture to justify it) has always sounded suspect to me, and still does to this day. I can’t take any credit for that — it comes from my upbringing. I endeavored as much as possible to pass that on to my children as well, and it’s too bad that so many today are taught that racial differences are almost all that really matters. I suppose such thinking will never go away, but I certainly don’t have to give it any time or credence.
Dave Barnhart
I've heard of them before--unfortunately. In fact, I'm a bit of a commandment-breaker by their reckoning, I'm afraid (my wife being Asian).
Thing is, you go around the world enough and this kind of thing becomes absurd: Who should Turkmenistan people be allowed to marry, for example (go ahead; google them; and saying "other Turkmenistanis" is a cop-out). What about northern Indians? Are they Caucasian? Can Mexicans marry Spanish or only other Latin Americans? Middle Easterners? Finns were once considered non-white. They ok now? Etc.
The whole thing always breaks down at the borders because people mix and mingle, always have, and (with proper caveats for religion, cultural expectations, warnings about additional challenges, and so on) should always be allowed to do so.
Kinism is also a feature among the reformed segment of Christian Nationalists that are in the Douglas Wilson camp, which has steadily increased in number and boldness in the past decade.
While I do appreciate the author (Say) taking a firm stand against this blatent type of racism, his writings against CRT are among the worst interpretations of CRT scholars that I've ever read. Thus, comparing CRT to Kinism weakens his argument against Kinism rather than strengthening it.
Defining CRT is like defining Christian nationalism. It means different things to different people. Often people will use CRT to mean something different than the scholarly theory just like sometimes people will use Christian nationalism to mean something different than the idea of liking to have Christian values influencing the people of our nation. There is a wide range to both those terms and it is easy for people to talk past each other when using those labels. We must be cautious in suggesting that these terms can only mean what we want them to mean or what we decide they have to mean, when in common usage they are applied to a wide range of meaning. I understand it can be frustrating, but it is part of the challenge of language.
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