So, on Ethnicity, Kinism, and Nationalism

This post is a catchup on social media discussions.

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Calling racial preferences inherently racist as I did is an overstatement.  I recant.

 

And yet.

 

Those ethnic or racial preferences within us are not justified by their natural existence, much less are they obligated by Scripture or natural law.

 

They are like any natural impulse or temptation, which must be disciplined by the Word.  When I hear “God Bless the USA,” I can agree and even get emotional, but I need to temper it with “God may judge the USA, instead.”

When we say grace perfects nature, we mean exactly this.  Natural affection needs sanctifying, not celebrating or justifying without qualification, just because the Left vilifies whites or America, or just because we feel it well up in us naturally.  C.S. Lewis, in The Four Loves, on Storge, is excellent on this. 

 

(To clarify, I have no qualms about tearing up watching a Trump rally where Lee Greenwood sings, “God bless the USA.”)

 

So equating natural affection for one's own tribe or race with the fifth commandment obligation to honor our fathers seems a mistake to me.  I shouldn’t come to hate my country and its founders.  But neither should I  adore it without qualification, without some theological lenses on, evaluating that nationalism.

 

 

One of you defined racism as “the belief, explicit or implicit, that one race is born morally superior to another race. It creates arrogance and pride in one group while also lowering the other group, sometimes to sub-human status.”  That is hard racism, but there are lower-grade versions that are not the woke-white-guilt variety.  I would add that Kinism asserts some level of principled segregation or preference for one’s own ethnicity, with NO inherent animosity or belief of superiority toward other races.  (Though some strands of it are undoubtedly white supremacist.)  This is a view I believe should be soundly rejected by church leadership.  I stand by Uri’s post. 

 

When Uri says “chased out of the church,” realize that we do this all the time with other issues: “We’ll have no talk of women in leadership here.”  “You want to blow up abortion clinics?  You are NOT welcome here.”  I’ve had to do this once or twice at church, in my years of ministry.  All the talk charging that I want to excommunicate people with different social theories, or throw out discipline procedure, is uncharitable to my and Uri’s position.  The question is simply where the Overton window is.  I’m deeply concerned that it has shifted recently in our circles, toward allowing and justifying ethnic preferences, in reaction to the immigration crisis and leftist reverse discrimination for minorities, which we now face, and should oppose.  However.  Whatever happened to judging people by the content of their character, instead of the color of their skin?  That is a sound Scriptural principle, regardless how some may want to ad hominem attack the man who said it.

 

Right now the church I serve has no minorities attending.  That is not a problem to fix, out of some white guilt.  I am not virtue signaling like the leftists, as I’ve been accused of.  But if the Asian or black visitors who come are made to feel awkward or excluded by things we say about this, that IS a problem.

 

More on preferences.

Yes, as of now I prefer that my single daughter marry a nice, white, Dutch Reformed boy.  The controversy isn’t over that abstract preference, but over what you will do when she brings home a black or Latino boy instead.  If he’s a gangster in lifestyle, we all agree on urging her back to a Christian way of life, and leaving him.  But if he’s a Clarence Thomas type, it seems we don’t agree.  Maybe I’m wrong.  My preference then needs to give way to God’s providence.  I don’t dig in and say my preference is based in the natural order, and God forbids or at least frowns on such a union, because He set the boundaries of nations, etc.  If it’s a problem that a black or Asian settles in to a white, Dutch Reformed church, or that a Moabite convert to Yahweh marries a faithful Israelite, or that a Hittite soldier becomes one of David’s mighty men, I define that as unbiblical Kinism, which should be (r)ejected from the church.