"Fundamentalism provided fertile recruiting soil for ... the Ku Klux Klan"

Please help me. I’ve never understood why malice or hatred based on race or nationality is worse than the individual malice/hatred for individuals close around including sometimes family members, neighbors, or coworkers regardless of race or creed. It seems that racism is an abstract social attitude directed at no one in particular although it may contribute to the maliciousness of wicked people.

Brother Pittman, it is hard for me to accept that you really believe this. “racism is an absract social attitude directed at no one?”

But I will go back to your question, because it is such a good one. How is racism a worse sin than a personal offense? . If I mistreat or hate someone like me it is a sin, but it is a sin between men. It goes to another level of hate when you deny another person’s humanity based on the least of differences. If I strike a man, or steal from him, or cheat him, that is a sin. But when I do the same to a whole people, and remind them every day for centuries by law and custom that they are less than me, and not as human as I am, that is a greater sin. And if they stand up to me, and I come to them in the night, armed and in force, and burn their homes, and hurt their women, and then whip them and hang them from a tree as an example to others of their kind that they had better not transgress the boundaries I’ve placed on them, it rises to a new level of sin. If I tell them their children are unworthy to sit beside mine in school, or be on the same playground, or sit together at the movies, or even in church, I have attacked their very humanity. If I make sure, by law and by custom, that they can never improve themselves, and attain to positions of rank in the community no matter their intellect or accomplishments or virtues, I have made injustice a way of life, which is far more than an individual act of sin and hatred. Does this really need to be pointed out?

As Martin Luther King put it: “When your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are), and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro… when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness” - then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.”

Biblical texts? I agree we don’t see anything as pathetic as skin color separating people in the ancient world. Prejudice was more about cultures and other groups who were different in more meaningful ways. One exception might be Numbers 12, where Miriam was made leprous because she despised Moses when he married an African woman. But in terms of the black experience in America, surely all the texts related to strangers apply, since they were brought here as chattel against biblical law.

Ex 12:49 “The same law shall apply to the native as to the stranger who sojourns among you.”

Lev 19:33-34 ‘When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. ‘The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God.”

Really? America’s most grievous sin? I hope this is hyperbole…. I would say the murders of 40 million unborn babies has that sin beat by a long shot.

I have to disagree, brother Shep. Only a person who hasn’t thought much about what the Atlantic crossing in a slave ship was like could say that. I believe abortion to be a great evil, but it is merciful compared to what millions of blacks endured. There are more than numbers at play here. Also, abortion is an act by individuals, and not a systemic oppression of a whole people. They are both great evils, but abortion is not a greater sin “by a long shot,” and it has been acceptable for a much shorter amount of time.

I am not comforted that pagans and Muslims also practiced barbaric forms of slavery. Christians are supposed to know better. America was supposed to be a city on a hill, remember? You can’t blame Darwin for racism. Darwinism justified it, but racism was around long before Darwin. I am very aware that many Christians opposed it, including some Puritans, Quakers, and the great English evagelicals. I own a Methodist circuit rider’s book of discipline published in 1860. It directly and openly condemns slavery on pain of excommunication. Yes, good Christians led the way against slavery and racism. However, many Fundamentalists in the 20th century did not follow their noble example. The humiliation BJU put minorities through is unconscionable.

i like Thomas Sowell, and have read him for years. He brings a helpful corrective to liberal propaganda, but I doubt he would say American slavery was not a serious crime against his people. Did he really suggest that slavery wasn’t very serious compared to abortion?

[RPittman]

[Wayne Wilson] I don’t think racism is the original sin, but it is America’s most grievous sin – a deep sin – an early sin that went uncorrected and continued on in worse forms for a very long time, a sin of unspeakable cruelty and injustice to a whole people, and prompting more sin through rationalization and justification and eventually a perverse theology. I do not think America is a racist country today. Thank God. But there are still elements that linger, and sadly, among believers too.

Please help me. I’ve never understood why malice or hatred based on race or nationality is worse than the individual malice/hatred for individuals close around including sometimes family members, neighbors, or coworkers regardless of race or creed. It seems that racism is an abstract social attitude directed at no one in particular although it may contribute to the maliciousness of wicked people. Racism is more a social-political question than a moral question. Can you give me one clear Scripture condemning racism per se? I cannot recall one passage off the top of my head but I can give you many Scripture passages condemning individual malice/hatred.

Real sin is malice/hatred of the individual who is God’s image-bearer regardless of race, not social mores. Now, I fully realize what foolish charges to which I have left myself open. I am not defending racism or any such thing but I am just trying to balance the scales. So-called social sins have filled our vision that we can no longer see the real sins.

How is trying to balance the sides any different from trying to pick the lesser of two evils? 1. It is impossible to reliably choose the lesser of the two evils, because at times you will wind up choosing the greater despite your best efforts. 2. No matter whether you choose the lesser or the greater, you are still choosing - still consenting to with your own will and actions - evil. It is better to simply withdraw yourself from the no-win situation. The same is true of “trying to balance the sides.” Why when both sides were wrong? The North being wrong in their “war of aggression” against the South doesn’t mean the south was right. The wrongs that southerners experienced during Reconstruction doesn’t justify the KKK’s existence or crimes. If that were the case, then murderous slave revolts led by the likes of Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, John Brown etc. were justified, as were race riots, the Nation of Islam, the Black Panthers etc. A specific example: one of the main justifications that people gave for supporting black hate groups like the Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers was that they acted to defend the black community from violent white racists. (The full name of the Black Panthers was The Black Panther Party for Self Defense.) Now were I concerned with “balancing the sides”, I would state that in the context of the times and conditions that they lived in, the Nation of Islam, the Black Panthers, and similar groups were justified, similar to your KKK defense. But since the Bible is my standard, my position is that they were just as wrong as the KKK was.

I agree with the problems of accepting liberal theology on sin, and that the concept of social sin is a liberal one that denies both original sin and individual accountability for sin before God. I am aware that liberal and liberation theologians have redefined sin to fit their political, economic and social agendas, and that racism is a primary example. Still, claiming that all sin is individual, that there is no such thing as a “sin culture” rejects a whole lot of teachings in the Old Testament and Revelation. When sinful behavior is embraced, practiced, and glorified in a culture to where it becomes normal and doesn’t seem sinful, you have a sin culture. The development of sin culture is why God destroyed all of humanity save Noah with the great flood. It is why God divided humanity at the tower of Babel. It is why God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. It is why God warned Israel not to have any dealings with the pagan cultures around them, and commanded that Israel totally destroy the people living in the land that He gave them. Israel did not listen, developed their own culture of syncretism, violence and decadent immorality, and that is why they themselves were overthrown by the Assyrians and Babylonians. And in our own contemporary society, we have many cultures that breed and proliferate many types of sins: the drug culture, the homosexuality culture, the pornography culture, the illegitimacy culture, the violence culture, a huge new consciousness/new thought culture that is being promoted by the government, education system, religions etc. So yes, during the time that the KKK was active (and before and also after) widespread sinful cultural conditions caused whites to hate blacks and blacks to hate whites just like the same sinful cultural conditions in OT times caused people to offer their own children in human sacrifices in order to cause their crops to grow and livestock to reproduce.

So that goes back to the “balancing the sides” thing, between trying to choose between two things that are both wrong. The liberal theology of social sin rejects the Bible, but so does rejecting what the Bible says about groups and nations that give themselves over to sinful practices. So, there are those who are going to be on the side of the KKK, those who are going to be on the side of the Black Panthers, but in the end, both sides will perish. Only those that are on God’s side will persevere.

[Wayne Wilson]

Really? America’s most grievous sin? I hope this is hyperbole…. I would say the murders of 40 million unborn babies has that sin beat by a long shot.

I have to disagree, brother Shep. Only a person who hasn’t thought much about what the Atlantic crossing in a slave ship was like could say that. I believe abortion to be a great evil, but it is merciful compared to what millions of blacks endured. There are more than numbers at play here. Also, abortion is an act by individuals, and not a systemic oppression of a whole people. They are both great evils, but abortion is not a greater sin “by a long shot,” and it has been acceptable for a much shorter amount of time.

I am not comforted that pagans and Muslims also practiced barbaric forms of slavery. Christians are supposed to know better. America was supposed to be a city on a hill, remember? You can’t blame Darwin for racism. Darwinism justified it, but racism was around long before Darwin. I am very aware that many Christians opposed it, including some Puritans, Quakers, and the great English evagelicals. I own a Methodist circuit rider’s book of discipline published in 1860. It directly and openly condemns slavery on pain of excommunication. Yes, good Christians led the way against slavery and racism. However, many Fundamentalists in the 20th century did not follow their noble example. The humiliation BJU put minorities through is unconscionable.

i like Thomas Sowell, and have read him for years. He brings a helpful corrective to liberal propaganda, but I doubt he would say American slavery was not a serious crime against his people. Did he really suggest that slavery wasn’t very serious compared to abortion?

Sorry, I disagree there. Abortion IS a systemic and systematic murder of a whole people. Abortion is necessary in order to facilitate our society’s exaltation of sexual immorality. And it is not just abortion. The exponential increase in brutal sex crimes, many of them against children, can be directly tied to our liberalizing laws against pornography, is also part of it. As far as the slavery versus abortion thing goes … we have to remember that the Bible in no place calls slavery a sin, and quite the contrary the New Testament in at least a couple of places commands Christian slaves to be obedient to their masters, including even those masters that mistreated them. So, the worst that can be said about slavery in America is A) it involved man-stealing and B) it did not heed the regulations given in the Bible designed to make slavery more humane. It is actually easier to make a Biblical case against racism - which inherently involves hating and mistreating people - than against slavery, which does not. Abortion by contrast is murder, and the Bible explicitly, repeatedly condemns murder, and counts it as one of the very worst sins. Many references in the Bible are to God bringing judgment on individuals and nations because of shedding innocent blood. I am not aware of a reference where God did so because of slavery. If it exists, it is because of man-stealing, not slavery.

The idea that slavery is in and of itself sinful is how Enlightenment thought influences Christianity, because that thought makes it a great offense to deprive a person of his “rights” so to speak … his ability to live and act according to his own free will and volition and not have anything imposed on him without his consent. There is also the egalitarian ideal of the Enlightenment, where all people ideally are politically, economically and socially equal. Both notions - individual rights and egalitarianism - are completely absent in the Bible. Were we to simply admit that, it would be a lot easier to refute a central fallacy of liberal Christianity, which is that the Bible is a political/philosophical text intended to address and correct social ills. That’s why your statement that abortion is merciful when compared to slavery is terrifying. The Bible does not call for all people to be granted a certain status or level of existence, but instead calls upon all people to submit to and worship God regardless of that status or level of existence. When the Bible commands us not to shed innocent blood, it does not qualify it by saying “unless that person is a slave, poor, or a member of an oppressed or disenfranchised group” because the Bible declares human life to be precious and protected, not the status or quality of human life. So, the idea that abortion is more merciful than slavery sounds very much like the “mercy” of the eugenicists, who, let us remember, were also in many instances products of Enlightenment thought.

So, the worst that can be said about slavery in America is A) it involved man-stealing and B) it did not heed the regulations given in the Bible designed to make slavery more humane.

The worst? It sounds so innocuous putting it as you do. I would agree with you, brother, if American slavery did not involve hundreds of thousands of murders in the crossing and in staggering abuse. Would you rather be beheaded or crucified? One is quick, the other an extended horror. That’s all I meant by the comparison. Abortion, which I believe is taking a human life, is relatively quick, and involves lives that haven’t had a chance to hope and dream. That’s probably the reason people don’t act more directly and more violently to end abortion. American, or colonial, slavery took the lives of about 4 million men, women and children just in the middle passage. The survivors were likely condemned to a short, cruel life completely at the mercy of their masters. American slavery, including the slave trade, did not just fail to meet with some biblical rules of governance, it was a nightmare of hopeless, endless cruelty for many, many people. What did Wesley call American slavery? Oh, yes, “the vilest that ever saw the sun.”

is its continuing refusal to love and serve God. All other sins, including abortion and racism, flow from this one failure.

[

is its continuing refusal to love and serve God. All other sins, including abortion and racism, flow from this one failure.

Now that puts things in perspective. Still, if you are simply looking at cultures, and their dominant flaws, racism was one of America’s greatest flaws for many, many years. I am glad it is no longer so. I just wished Fundamentalism had been better at leadng us out of it. I think that was the subject of the thread…

[Jay C.] is its continuing refusal to love and serve God. All other sins, including abortion and racism, flow from this one failure.

Excellent, Jay. This puts the rest of the “discussion” in proper perspective.

And therefore, the second greatest sin is to not love your neighbor as yourself.

[Jim Peet] http://sharperironintheironskillet.blogspot.com/2011/08/si-you-lie.html

OK for those who don’t get filings … and I guess the above author is one of them

Why do we care what Lou thinks, and why don’t we just ignore him?

Roland, you feel the need to “balance the scales” concerning racism? Why? In what possible way can we find “balance” regarding a grievous sin like racism?

[Greg Long] Roland, you feel the need to “balance the scales” concerning racism? Why? In what possible way can we find “balance” regarding a grievous sin like racism?

I obviously cannot speak for Roland, but perhaps one of the things he has in mind is Matt. 23:29-31 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Because you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous, and say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.’ Therefore you are witnesses against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets.”

I mentioned Thomas Sowell in a previous post. In some of his writings he talks about the U.S. before and after slavery and the civil rights struggles that followed. While he clearly condemns slavery and racism, he makes it clear that these problems were interwoven into the fabric of society and culture so much that there was no simple solution. Therefore the attempts of the Liberals to demonize our founding fathers (and other great Americans of the past) because they owned slaves or held some “racist” views does not take into account the fact that human nature is very complex and all of us exist in some state of biblical cognitive dissonance. I am sure when we get to heaven we will all have to answer the question, “Why did I believe that”; or “How could I practice that” since we now are Christians who pride ourselves on our orthodoxy and orthopraxy.

What I don’t agree with everything he says, Roland does not seem to be trying to “balance the scales” concerning racism, but to put some of these events into proper historical context. (Just my 2¢ worth.) :p

[MShep2]

[Greg Long] Roland, you feel the need to “balance the scales” concerning racism? Why? In what possible way can we find “balance” regarding a grievous sin like racism?

I obviously cannot speak for Roland, but perhaps one of the things he has in mind is Matt. 23:29-31 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Because you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous, and say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.’ Therefore you are witnesses against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets.”

I mentioned Thomas Sowell in a previous post. In some of his writings he talks about the U.S. before and after slavery and the civil rights struggles that followed. While he clearly condemns slavery and racism, he makes it clear that these problems were interwoven into the fabric of society and culture so much that there was no simple solution. Therefore the attempts of the Liberals to demonize our founding fathers (and other great Americans of the past) because they owned slaves or held some “racist” views does not take into account the fact that human nature is very complex and all of us exist in some state of biblical cognitive dissonance. I am sure when we get to heaven we will all have to answer the question, “Why did I believe that”; or “How could I practice that” since we now are Christians who pride ourselves on our orthodoxy and orthopraxy.

What I don’t agree with everything he says, Roland does not seem to be trying to “balance the scales” concerning racism, but to put some of these events into proper historical context. (Just my 2¢ worth.) :p

We seldom take into consideration the times in which folks lived- evolutionary thinking, to a tremendous degree, justified the brutality inflicted on blacks and Jews. If it’s OK to kick the dog, it’s OK to beat your slaves. Who was going to question science?

We also pay little attention to how our own culture impacts our decision making process. We are often far too intimidated by current societal norms, and easily swayed by modern ‘scientific’ discoveries, even when they contradict Scripture. Will Christians 100 years from now be looking at our churches today and ask “What were they thinking?”

As for racism, I agree with Jay- people are always looking for reasons to hate each other, and often twist Scripture to justify their actions. How many men in IFB churches abuse their wives because they are the ‘head’ of the house and that heifer needs to be submissive? How many children are beaten senseless because ‘the blueness of the wound cleanseth evil’? Gender, nationality, religion, socio-economic status… pull out pride by its roots, and you address the real issue. Prov. 13:10

Lou is not a friend of fundamentalism. He repeatedly mispresents men, their positions, and thier ministries. He repeatedly mispresents SI, especially Aaron.

As a moderator, I was the one who brought this filing to SI’s attention. Stokes made a strong claim about fundamentalism, and I thought it would be good for fundamentalists to be aware of his claim and to discuss it. So, Jim Peet agreed to post the filing.

So what does Lou do? He writes an article claiming that this posting on SI is proof that SI is not fundamentalist. He is obessed with questioning the authenciticity of fundamentalists who do no agree with him.

Whether we want to admit it or not, Christianity and Fundamentalism has often been associated with unhealthy, if not illegal, groups like the KKK. It has also looked the other way while Scripture was distorted for selfish gain, as per Susan’s earlier point. We all also know that the OT has very clear guidelines for the treatment of slaves as well, which were probably referenced in the 1700-1800’s by Christians who did own slaves and were used to defend slavery. Finally, it should be noted that a lot of Christians and Fundamentalists worked hard to overthrow slavery and are still working against it…William Wilberforce is a great illustration of this and John Piper has written a fantastic book that is freely downloadable from Desiring God’s website for any who are interested.

If someone is going to claim a label, then it means that they have to take all the accompanying baggage that comes with it. It also means that we have to learn from those errors in the past that come along with the claimed label. So now, we need to take the time to cull out any hidden pockets of sin, prejudice, or racism that may exist in our own lives, and take passages like I Corinthians 12:1-27 and Galatians 3:23-4:7 to heart.

Was just scanning this thread again…. suggest a couple of you might want to establish contact via Private Message and trade apologies, maybe.
The topic of racism is really tough one, though. It reminds me of marital counseling. Sometimes a history is so emotionally charged that even much later those connected to it (even distantly in some cases) can’t seem to talk about it with an even keel. There is just too much pain.