By Davis Carlton

The mainstream conservative response amidst the onslaught of “wokeness” now plaguing the West has been to call out liberals for their supposed hypocrisy on race or betraying the “dream” of their beloved Martin Luther King. Conservatives are aiming at preserving the fragile and unsteady status quo of the late twentieth century following the Civil Rights revolution which sought to detach America’s identity from her past rooted in European colonization of North America. The idea defended by most conservatives and Christians is that race is unimportant and shouldn’t matter. When conservatives defend principles of liberalism that are a mere few decades old, they vindicate R.L. Dabney’s powerful assessment of modern conservatives as “a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is to-day one of the accepted principles of conservatism.”

Conservatives are perpetually behind the curve when it comes to understanding liberal tactics; choosing to believe without justification that liberals are basically good faith Americans seeking to correct past injustices, even if they are sometimes wrong about the methods that they employ. Mainstream conservatives have fully accepted the legitimacy of Leftist rhetoric on the immorality of concepts like “racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” and “transphobia,” with the hope of demonstrating that Leftists are hypocrites even by their own standards and that they are in fact the real bigots who are guilty of the very “isms” of which they are constantly accusing others of violating. Pointing out the hypocrisy of the Left is not without its merits, but not if it means legitimizing false beliefs about morality and ethics, and this is exactly what the mainstream Right has been doing for some time. A particularly pitiful example of this is Sean Hannity’s defense of Bruce “Caitlyn” Jenner in his bid to become California governor. Hannity accused Jenner’s critics of “transphobia” for criticizing his stance against boys competing in women’s sports.

Conservatives have been using the same tactics with the subject of “racism” for some time now, and the Left remains predictably – and justifiably – unimpressed. Several Christians have attempted to use this approach in the fight against the “woke” insurgency. Owen Strachan attempts to deconstruct critical race theory and “woke” theology in his book Christianity and Wokeness, but nevertheless agrees with one of its underlying premises that race is a mere social construct. “I use ‘ethnicity’ because, as we shall see, ‘race’ is not actually a positive biblical reality, but a construct. On this point, ironically, I agree with CRT advocates, much as many of them state that race is a social construct, but then practically operate in many senses as if it is real.”

Recently members of David Platt’s congregation have pushed back against his social justice agenda and have prepared a 35 page document of their grievances against him. Unfortunately but predictably the members of McLean Bible Church deny that race is a meaningful identity for Christians:

“No one with a Biblical Worldview does this [speaks in terms of racial categories]. The secular world does this based on a lie of Satan about ‘races,’ but there is no excuse for this to happen in the church. If we are properly teaching the true history of mankind in Genesis 1-11 to every follower of Christ, especially new believers before they are dry from the baptismal, there should be no one in the church classifying others by the fake category of ‘race,’ and there should be no one in the church self-identifying by the fake category of race either. One should never hear phrases like, “As a ‘black’ man/woman … or as a ‘white’ man/woman …” uttered in the church. These kinds of fake secular categories should not be used in the church. We should stand out as totally different from the world, and not use their categories or terminology.”

I appreciate the efforts of men like James White and Voddie Baucham who call out Leftist ideologies like critical race theory for its hypocrisy and anti-white hatred, but they are mistaken when they take the position that race is a mere social construct as Voddie does in this clip. Elsewhere Voddie has stated “One of the sad realities of antiracism is that it is 100 percent correct about race being a construct.” Along similar lines the Dallas Statement on Social Justice, considered by many evangelicals to be the gold standard in rejection of modern “woke” social justice states, “‘Race’ is not a biblical category, but rather a social construct that often has been used to classify groups of people in terms of inferiority and superiority.”

Finally this YouTube video is a good example of a conservative attempt to superficially link the “woke” movement of today with the “racism” of the past. The video is admittedly funny but still incredibly shallow. I can also attest that I have seen many opponents of ethno-nationalism suggest that Kinism is simply the white version of race hustling. Of course figures as divergent as R.L. Dabney and Richard Spencer on the one hand and Elijah Muhammad and Al Sharpton on the other think that race is important. There are however many obvious differences that make Kinism distinct from most examples of non-white racial advocacy and neo-pagan white nationalism.

Kinism is distinct from non-Christian white advocacy and nationalism in that our standard of ethics is entirely different. Any non-Christian who seeks to preserve the white race can only support this for cosmetic reasons or in order to preserve some purported product of eons of evolution. There can be no ethical principle that preserving racial distinctions can appeal to apart from the revealed will of the one true God. Thus Kinism is the only form of racial advocacy that is morally consistent.

Is Kinism simply the other side of the coin to non-white race hustling with a victimhood complex? Not even close. The reality is that much of the racial advocacy that is typical of the “civil rights” revolution is nothing more than self-enrichment through guilt manipulation. Popular black “preachers” like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Jeremiah Wright have enriched themselves while condemning America for its white, “racist” history. These men complain about “systemic injustice” and oppression when blacks are justifiably killed by police while ignoring the epidemic of black on black crime.

Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter is another prominent example of this kind of hypocrisy. She used BLM donations, many coming from wealthy, virtue-signalling “woke” corporations to purchase four homes worth over one million dollars. Numerous other examples could also be provided, but it’s safe to say that the leaders of black advocacy organizations are grifters seeking to capitalize on white guilt. They do not actually care about the lives of their fellow blacks or else they would be protesting violence and degeneracy within black communities as the source of their poverty and unhappiness.

Is the position that race is a matter of indifference and that we ought to be colorblind a live option at all? This is the perspective of Rich Lusk who asks, Is the Bible Colorblind? Lusk asks, “Suppose you did not know humans came in different skin colors. Could you figure out that fact just from reading your Bible?” Is this even a good question to ask and does this appropriately approach the way in which the Bible is intended to convey information? I contend that the answer to both questions is a resounding no, and as I unpack Lusk’s case we will see why.

Lusk suggests that “Scripture acknowledges different ethnicities, tribes, languages, etc., but it is (oddly, to modern sensibilities) totally silent about the relation of ethnicity to skin color” which Lusk ties to “varying levels of melanin.” Almost immediately after claiming that the Bible is “totally silent” on the existence of racial differences (his emphasis), Lusk then concedes counter-examples in Jeremiah mentioning the Ethiopians’ skin in Jer. 13:23 and the Shulamite mentioning her dark complexion in Song of Solomon 1:5. Lusk even echoes John Piper’s speculation that Miriam was given white, leprous skin as a punishment for her supposed racism in opposing Moses’ marriage to Zipporah. Lusk’s unwarranted hyperbole aside, are his questions even the right way to think about this and similar issues?

I don’t believe so. The human authors of the Scriptures are writing in a historical context and using concepts that already have currency among their readers. We could use the male/female binary as an example of this. The Bible teaches that God created Adam as a man and made the woman Eve from his side. Moses and other Biblical authors assume that their readers know the basic differences between men and women so that there is no need for detailed anatomical and physiological differences between men and women. References are made to differences between men and women in passing, for example circumcision and menstruation, without the need to go into detail on biology or comparative anatomy. The same could be said for Moses forbidding cross-dressing in Deut. 22:5. Moses is able to mention clothing that pertains to men and women and naturally assume that his readers will know what he is talking about.

The same could be said of the examples of racial characteristics that Lusk acknowledges above. The Israelites had words and concepts denoting persons of different families, clans, tribes, nations, and peoples. Different “peoples” had different physical characteristics, which is why Jeremiah uses Ethiopians in his example about the constancy of skin color, rather than the more closely related Hebrew people and why the Shulamite woman assures the daughters of Jerusalem that her darker complexion is due to sun exposure. Combine this with the fact that in ancient Israel and throughout the world until recent history the vast majority of people would have only interacted with others of their race. Finding casual references to racial distinctions is exactly what would expect to find in the Bible if in fact these realities were simply understood by everyone.

With this in mind we can see that Lusk’s objection is simply semantic and quibbling over terminology. He complains that we care too much about melanin content without realizing that using terms like white and black are simply shorthand for identifying the most obvious external difference between two particular races. Historically other terms were used like Caucasian or Indo-European for the white race and Negroid or sub-Saharan African for the black race. While are English word race might not be an exact fit for the various terms of kinship in the Bible, the concept is still one that the Biblical authors understood.

Many well-meaning Christians such as Rich Lusk, Voddie Baucham, and Owen Strachan are attempting to deconstruct woke theology by associating it with the purported “racism” of our forefathers that has become universally despised, while at the same time agreeing with an underlying premise of woke theology that race is a social construct. This strategy will not work, and the Marxist proponents of woke theology know this. The nations of the West are being flooded with non-whites who aren’t under the delusion that race doesn’t exist.

The denial of race as a mere social construct is simply a rhetorical weapon being aimed at white people. The Left traffics in contradictions that cannot be reconciled, so they have no problem with Christians taking one side or the other in their false dialectic. Only a truly Christian understanding of national identity can stand up to the Marxist assault against what little remains of Christendom, and in time well-intentioned Christians will learn this. I just hope that they don’t have to learn the hard way.