Is 'Racism' a Sin?

Among Christian circles discussion of race and prejudice has been limited to denunciations of racial bias. White people are, throughout history, accused of being fake Christians and heinous sinners for holding slaves and thinking lowly of Blacks.

  

STERYOPTYPES / DESCRIMINATION

First we must ask the question: what is ‘racism?’ If racism means hating somebody just because they belong to a different race then I don’t think anyone will dispute that racism is wrong. However, I’ve yet to meet anyone who hated everyone from another race.

I once had a friend of a friend who claimed he hated Blacks. He talked about it all the time. He made jokes about hanging Black people on trees and lynching them and all kinds of awful stuff. Naturally, I assumed he hated people because of their race. A few weeks after I met him a Black guy came to one of our parties and the two of them became best friends. When confronted about it my racist friend of a friend said ‘well, he’s just different then most nig***s.’ So even my lynch happy friend of a friend turned out to not really hate people because of their race. I myself, even though I am writing this insanely ‘racist’ document, have many Black friends. But if hating members of another race isn’t racism, what is?

Most people in the media and popular culture define racism as some kind of bias against or generalization about another race (except white people, anyone can slam them and be ok). Usually, however, making a generalization about a race is only considered racist if it’s negative. So if I said ‘Asians are really smart’ that wouldn’t be racist, but if I said ‘Blacks are really promiscuous,’ that would be racist.

The Bible doesn’t say anything about this kind of language or thought. However, the Bible does USE this kind of language and thought. In fact, the sinless Jesus himself uses it. Consider Matthew 18:17: ‘If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the assembly. If he refuses to hear the assembly also, let him be to you as a Gentile or a tax collector.’ In this verse Jesus is telling people what they should do with a person that will not repent of sins. Jesus uses two negative generalization in this verse, he equates Gentiles, which is a term for a person that is not racially Jewish, to tax collectors, a group that everyone hated and viewed as robbers. So what Jesus says is: people who are not racially Jewish are just as sinful as people who steal money, and should be treated like an unrepentant sinner. Of course Jesus wasn’t saying that all Gentiles are miserable rotten people, but he was stating and confirming a negative bias founded upon race.

God acts upon racial generalizations commonly in the Old Testament. Probably the most famous example of this come from Samuel chapter 15:

‘This is what the LORD Almighty says: 'I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’

God judges an entire racial group based upon the sins of the past generations.

   A similar situation occurs in Numbers chapter 5 when God orders the people of Israel to: ‘Treat the Midianites as enemies and kill them,’ because many of their women had misled the men of Israel into idolatrous worship. Rather than isolating particular individuals, however, the Lord singles out an entire racial group for punishment.

 

Another common definition of racism is that it occurs when a person shows favoritism towards members of their own race over members of another race. For example, if a Black person and a White person applied for the same job and a White store owner hired the White person because they were similar racially.

However, ethnic/racial bias shows up in Jesus’ ministry on earth. Consider Matthew 15:

‘Jesus went away from there and withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon. And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and cried, ‘Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely possessed by a demon.’ But he did not answer her a word. And his disciples came and begged him, saying, ‘Send her away, for she is crying after us." He answered, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’ But she came and knelt before him, saying, ‘Lord, help me.’ And he answered, ‘It is not fair to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.’ She said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table.’ Then Jesus answered her, ‘O woman, great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire.’ And her daughter was healed instantly.’

Also consider when Christ sent his apostles out to preach in Matthew 10: Jesus sent these twelve out, and commanded them, saying, ‘Don't go among the Gentiles, and don't enter into any city of the Samaritans [Samaritans are a group a racial mix of Jewish and gentile blood].’ 

Both of these verses from Jesus’ ministry demonstrate that Christ knew that it was at least sometimes necessary to demonstrate racial bias. Jesus even stated that he was not sent but to his own people, the Jews.

The fact that Christ grants the Canaanite women her request detracts nothing from his racial bias because, as he says, he is only sent to feed the children (ethnic Jews)… not the dogs (gentiles).

 

ETHNO-NATIONALISM

Although all kinds of ‘racism’ could be discussed I want to focus on one socio-political brand of it. Personally I endorse ethno-nationalism and I want everyone else to endorse it too. Is it a sin? Is it a sin to deny citizenship and political rights to groups of people based on their race? Is it a sin to found a nation based on a common racial group and therefore exclude immigrants/minorities that do not match that racial makeup?

The Anti-racism social justice Christian pests usually scream ‘yes!’ to all these questions and then, through the bull horn, recite Galatians 3:28: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’ These multi-culturalist Christians start spouting nonsense about how we should all live together in perfect harmony and all the races should marry one another and live in Christian communism.

I don’t even have to come up with an incredibly complex argument to divorce Galatians 3:28 from the anti-racism cause because the passage accomplishes this on my behalf.  The verse says: ‘we are all one in Christ Jesus’… it doesn’t say: ‘we are all one in government, we are all one in society, we all one in where we live, we are all one race, etc.’ It’s quite easy for me to accept that I am one with some loin cloth garbed African in Nigeria when it comes to Christ. In fact, I’m quiet glad that all around the world there are people of all races and cultures who serve the same savior I do. If my religion was isolated to one race, and one nation, I might think it didn’t represent universal truth. Of course if I ever received the opportunity I would wish Christian’s from any part of the world Godspeed, and I would do whatever was in my power to help them physically and spiritually. However, I am not so stupid as to suspect that these diverse cultures and races could live peaceably in the same neighborhood as my culture and my race when we have so many irreconcilable differences!

I love many people, however, most of them I would not want to come sleep in my bedroom every night. On a social level, there are a lot of cultures and races I love, but I don’t want them to transport themselves to my community and local school. Any reasonable person understands that that is a recipe for utter disaster and chaos. Loving your neighbor doesn’t mean you want to marry and share your whole life with them (and it doesn’t require it). I might spiritually love Australian Aborigines, and yet, I have no desire whatsoever to go live with them.

Another part of Galatians 3:28 that everyone seems to miss is ‘male and female.’ According to the anti-racist Christians we  should interpret Galatians 3 to mean we shouldn’t base our decisions on race… so I guess that also means we shouldn’t make decisions based on gender seeing as how that is mentioned alongside race. I suppose we have to throw out everything that Paul said about women being subject to their husbands and being good mothers. I guess Paul was contradicting himself.  Of course this is all ludicrous sarcasm and I am only mocking to the absurdity of the social justice multi-cultural Christian creed.  

Now that we know that the multi-culturalist Christian’s best argument is total crap let’s move on to see if we can find a place in the Bible where God gives a ‘thumbs-up’ to ethno-nationalism. Oh wait… I have one… the entire Old Testament!

The entire Old Testament, save a few chapters about the creation of world in Genesis, is about the history and literature of the Nation of Israel.  The Nation of Israel is endlessly referred to as ‘God’s chosen people.’ Some of the most memorable stories in the Bible are those that involve God saving, blessing, and even cursing his chosen people. The Nation of Israel begins when God promises Abraham that someday the land of Canaan will belong to his descendents, literally his blood line, and through him all nations of the earth will be blessed. Over the course of centuries Abraham’s blood line grows into a great nation bound by a common genetic lineage. Finally God grants the land of Canaan to the Israelites and establishes the Hebrew nation-state. As the Israelites march into Canaan God gives them their command:

‘Only in the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave alive anything that breathes. But you shall utterly destroy them: the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite and the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite, as the Lord your God has commanded you, so that they may not teach you to do according to all their detestable things which they have done for their gods, so that you would sin against the Lord your God.’

In the only political state that God ever personally designed he orders that there be absolutely no ethnic diversity, no pluralism, no multi-culturalism. God orders that entire races of people be wiped out or driven away. The Promised Land is intended for the Hebrew ethnic descendents of Abraham, and Yahweh worship, and for them alone.

After the Jewish state was founded the laws of the land openly favored Jews over other ethnic peoples. A Hebrew could not keep a fellow Hebrew as a slave for more than 7 years, but he could keep a foreigner or even a non-Hebrew residing in the land of Israel as a slave for their entire life, and even pass them down to their children as inherited property.

The Lord ordered that certain races of people could never enter his assembly and could never be the partner of Israelites in treaty:

‘No Ammonite or Moabite or any of his descendants may enter the assembly of the LORD, even down to the tenth generation. For they did not come to meet you with bread and water on your way when you came out of Egypt, and they hired Balaam son of Beor from Pethor in Aram Naharaim to pronounce a curse on you.’

Deuteronomy 23 makes it very clear that God is discriminating based upon genetic racial inheritance by being very specific in prohibiting cooperation with certain people based on their lineage (‘to the tenth generation’). In this passage God is creating a socio-political law that openly discriminates against a race of people based on the sins of those individuals’ ancestors. God leaves the enforcement of this law in the hands of the Israelites; he tells them to openly discriminate by race. How many more sins must Blacks commit against our society before we hand down a similar proclamation?

The Nation of Israel was founded upon a common racial blood line and upon a common religion and language. Nowhere in the Bible is multi-culturalism endorsed. Nowhere in the Bible is modern ‘racism’ condemned. In fact, racial bias is found throughout the entirety of the Holy Scriptures from Abraham to Jesus Christ.

If God was opposed to the creation and maintenance of ethnically and religiously homogenous countries, than why did he choose to save the human race by creating and utilizing one? The Old Testament is arguably the most ‘racist’ document ever concocted. The idea that only one small ethnic group held the key to the spiritual salvation of mankind for thousands of years, at the exclusion of all the other people groups on the globe, is the most prejudiced belief system yet devised. It is very nearly impossible to exhaust the number of ways in which it can be communicated that the Old Testament is profoundly racist. Today sensible people are denounced for holding the opinion that the White race is intellectually superior to the Black one. Today the same sensible people are blasted for not hiring in such a way in which all the races and ethnic groups in America can be represented equally. Schools enact affirmative action programs so that everyone has representation. Today Blacks and Muslims and Mexicans can all vote for how our country is run so that ‘all will have a voice.’ If you oppose such ideas of equality than you are a sinful racist, but God ‘one-ups’ such racists. In fact, God makes today’s racial realists look tame. Consider for a moment that out of the 40 some authors of the Bible every single one was ethnically Jewish. If there was ever a time for racial equality don’t you think that the writing of mankind’s sacred book would be that time? Apparently, God didn’t receive the equal representation memo because he decided to deliver his divine will through a group of White Jewish males.

There is one more comment I want to make about ‘racism.’ The Bible states that if a man will not provide for his own family he is worse than an infidel. What is race except for an extended family? Just like the Nation of Israel consisted of individuals that were genetically linked back to Abraham modern races are just really large family groups. For example all Anglo-Saxons in America are related to one another. If you doubt this consider that I grew up in Ohio and upon moving to Alabama I began attending a new church. Soon after, I discovered through ancestry.com that I was 6^th cousins with my minister’s wife and daughters. We shared 2 different grandfathers who lived in the 1600s.

Consider a world where no one showed bias towards their own family… what if a father decided that he didn’t want to be biased toward his own kids, just because they were genetically related to him, so he bought an equal amount of food for every kid in his neighborhood including his own children. His offspring would soon starve.  No one would suggest that genetic bias is wrong when it applies to your own household and yet the same people that would scorn such an idea openly argue that being biased towards ones broadly extended family (i.e. race) is somehow an open abomination against Christianity. Every thinking human being knows that bias is a good thing, as it relates to family, and yet their all too dumb to see how that principal can be extended. These people are unthinking brainwashed idiots. If one takes 5 seconds to think the entire thing through one wonders how ‘racism’ ever became a sin.

Author: I. J. Talour