Racial Justice Fallacies

The dehumanizing racial assumptions of influential evangelicals

The video above is of Matt Chandler, evangelical pastor of the Texas-based Village Church. It was made somewhere around 2020, close to the time of the BLM riots just following the death of George Floyd. It’s interesting to watch this video with those events now in the rearview mirror. Chandler’s apparently elevated sense of his own prophetic discernment doesn’t hold up very well given what has come to light in the years since.

There is much about this video that I find objectionable: the irate persona; the tongue-lashing; the emotional manipulation. Chandler is angry because the broader evangelical church didn’t jump on board the BLM bandwagon and try to lead that parade. He’s so worked up about it that, by the time he reaches the 1:22 mark in the video, he looks like he’s about to crawl out of his skin. In hindsight, given all the fraud and graft that we now know infused those events and organizations—even what many have begun to suspect was the dubious prosecution of Derek Chauvin—Chandler’s moral outrage here has lost a lot of its sheen.

In the video, be sure to notice Chandler’s insistence that, if Christians had a modern day prophet, he would likely take the form of a Marxist socialist. Good to know Chandler’s take … I guess? It might reveal more than I wanted to know about how Chandler approaches interpreting the biblical text. One suspects his opinion on socialism is unlikely to hold up any better than his assessment of the events of 2020.

But I primarily included this video because I want to highlight Chandler’s racialist closing assumption that all black people think alike. Watch the video until the end and you’ll see what I mean (although he bungles his data). 12-13% of the people in this country are black, not the 12-13 million people that Chandler calls out. So, though I think he misspoke with his numbers by confusing population with percentage, he seems to suggest that every single black person thinks alike where racial issues are concerned. Thus, the events precipitated by George Floyd’s death, in Chandler’s telling, reflected the lock-step “lamentations” of every black person in America.

Alas, other examples of this kind of race essentialism can be found at the Village Church. Dubious ideas regarding race are not confined to a single rant by Chandler. The Village Church has devoted entire sermons to a kind of race-essentialist ecclesiology.¹ They seem to have drunk deeply from the poisoned chalice of racial determinism, openly embracing the assumption that skin color pre-determines much of what you need to know about a person’s life and thinking. A heightened racial consciousness for white Christians has even been taught at that church as a necessary requirement for Christian love.

“Color blindness is an enemy - not a friend - of hospitality and love.” - Beau Hughes, The Village Church

And this is the dehumanizing assumption that can often be found among left-ish Christians where race is concerned. It is the belief, inescapably materialist, that benign anatomical features predetermine a person’s conception of the world. It is not culture that informs understanding. Not ideas. Not faith. Not worldview. Not the biblical text. Not the moral framework that is baked into reality itself. Not even truth. No. It is melanin, they insist, that decisively determines what one believes about the world.

For thinkers like Chandler, melanin seems to serve as a universal decoder ring for unlocking social psychology and differences in outcome. It is as if such thinkers assume that a brown person’s skin has somehow incapacitated the moral agency which one normally expects to find in another human being. For race essentialists, brown skin apparently undermines even a person’s ability to think his own thoughts. Thus, race essentialists assume that brown-skinned people think in a kind of lock-step uniformity—automatons of their pigmentation.

Chandler is not the only celebrity pastor who responded to the events of 2020 in disappointing ways. There was a surprising (to me, at least) eagerness on the part of numerous pastors to publicly engage in racial struggle sessions, with all the kneeling and begging of forgiveness - typically for unspecified offenses - that those sessions entailed. This tendency seemed especially prevalent among those pastors who most assiduously cultivate their media presence.

Someone once said “war doesn’t make heroes, it reveals them”. Which is to say that conflict serves as a revealing catalyst - something that uncovers what pre-existed the conflict itself. The simmering conflict over racial questions has been especially revealing over the last few years, but not in the “hero” sort of way. It has been unpleasantly revealing of what is going on in the heads of various outspoken Christians, and especially the leaders of various evangelical organizations. If I’m being honest, I have to say I have been gobsmacked. I don’t refer only to statements about the tragic circumstances surrounding George Floyd’s death. I’m more appalled by many comments, much more broad, sweeping and racially charged, for which Mr. Floyd’s death merely served as a launching pad.

These racially charged statements, always issued in high dudgeon and usually combined with broadly applied accusations, are not even minimally informed by reality. To someone with my personal history, these statements sound like the babbling of children walking away from the polar bear exhibit at the zoo. Even though the exhibit is artificial and the polar bear is confined behind the glass, they are nevertheless convinced they know what it is like to actually live at the North Pole. All of the ranting about race, by numerous influential evangelicals, is noticeably lacking in the kind of sober understanding that is almost always the product of having ventured out into the actual frozen wild.

So to those posters and posers about racial justice, come join me in the stories of my life. Come venture with me beyond your screens and keyboards.

It is 3 a.m. You’re sitting on a bench in a long, cavernous, empty hallway. You are at a large county jail in Texas. The hallway is empty and echoes periodically with the sound of a large heavy metal door closing. The fluorescent lights are abnormally bright. Here and there, on the floor, are little blobs of some kind of dried nameless goo. You’re sitting on a bench near a window made of bulletproof glass. You just gave $2500 in cash to the man behind the glass in order to pay the accumulated fines of a young black man who was arrested in the middle of the night. You’re trying to get him out of jail in time to make it to work so he doesn’t lose the first good job he’s had in a while. The young man was involved last night in an altercation at his apartment complex with another person, also black, who was drunk. When the police arrived, they arrested the young man you are posting bail for due to his many unpaid traffic citations.

The bail money is from your own bank account. You didn’t “raise” the money from others. You didn’t put up a Gofundme page. There was no time for any of that, not that you were so inclined anyway. You have a little bit of savings, this man needed help, so you did it. Were this man’s problems due to “white privilege”? Did “systemic racism” make him violate the traffic laws? Was it “white privilege” that caused the drunken altercation last night?

The scene changes. Now you are in a filthy apartment. You have driven the occupant, an entirely different person, but one who happens to be a drug addict, to a residential treatment facility (i.e. “rehab”). Now you are back at the apartment to clean it out so that the occupant doesn’t incur another month’s rent while he is in rehab. You bag up the empty liquor bottles and the porn DVDs and you eventually take 60 garbage bags of debris to the dump. Then you load up the furniture, which is reeking of dried vomit or feces—you’re not sure which—and you take that to the dump. Is it white privilege, or is it rather the addict’s moral freedom, which provides the most explanatory power for this state of affairs? Does the addict’s melanin levels have anything to do with it at all?

Now your arms are loaded with grocery bags full of food. You’re carrying the bags of food into a house in an urban community. The house is occupied by a black, off-and-on drug dealer, and his “family”. There are multiple women and 3 children in the house. An infant and 2 preschoolers. The children have gone without food for two days. The drug dealer is adorned with perhaps $10,000 worth of gold around his neck and in his mouth. His body is covered in thousands of dollars in tattoos. But he is not feeding his children. For the children’s sake you bring the food. How does white privilege explain the plight of these children, or of their self-decorating father, who will not provide for them?

Now you’re sitting at a fast-food restaurant. You just bought lunch for a completely different black man that you know. He is father to five children by three different women. He has never married any of the women he impregnated. He has never provided financial support for any of his children. One of the women managed to obtain a judgment against him for failing in his obligation to provide child support, but the other “baby mamas” don’t even try. Though he doesn’t provide for any of his children, this man somehow acquires sufficient funds to provide himself a steady supply of marijuana, cigarettes and, less frequently, cocaine. He manages to do this even though he has not held a steady job in years. He is actually a reasonably capable auto mechanic. You encourage him to get a job and provide at least something for his children. He declines, explaining that he doesn’t like “busted knuckles” and the state will garnish most of his wages for child support anyway. I look forward to our vehement Christian accusers telling me, again, how “white privilege” and “systemic racism” are the causes of this man’s problems, along with the problems of his children.

You are now standing in a funeral home. In the coffin lies a young black woman. Clinging to your legs and sobbing are three elementary-aged children. The woman in the coffin was a periodic surrogate mom/caregiver to the children, whenever the children were removed from their biological mother by child protective services. The children suffer abuse, sporadically, at the hands of their biological mother. The woman in the coffin, someone the children loved, is dead because she herself overdosed on drugs while “partying” with a new boyfriend. Please tell me, all you racial justice aficionados, how the plight of these black children is the result of “white privilege”. Did “white evangelicals” provide the drugs or pay the hotel bill for the party? Did “systemic racism” force the fatal pills down the dead woman’s throat?

I tell these stories and ask these questions because the messiness and the tragedy of real human lives do not fit neatly into the racialist abstractions so popular among the cool kids on the left. Broad, sweeping generalities about the color of a person’s skin don’t even begin to address what is real. Christian pastors and publishers only manage to make themselves ridiculous when they climb on the bandwagon of such silly ideas.

The poor urban blacks I have been describing lead very different lives than the lives being led by my other black friends. My other friends are accomplished, faithful to their families, wise, and productive. Millions of black Americans are skilled in many professions such as education, public administration, medicine, engineering, as well as many other worthy fields of endeavor. They are devoted moms and dads, faithful husbands and wives, friends to people of all races, committed Christians - people of faith and love.

How does any concept of white privilege or race centricity account for the wildly different outcomes one can easily find within a single racial demographic? How is it that systemic racism was unable to foreclose the great achievements of men like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, Ben Carson, Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, Frederick Douglass, or Thurgood Marshall? Here’s a hint: it is neither white privilege nor melanin which ultimately determines achievements and failures in real life.

In the bedroom down the hall in my home sleeps a precious little boy. My wife and I love him with all our hearts. Late in our lives, we find ourselves again raising a child. His mother-by-birth is dead from a drug overdose. If you see the world with racially charged eyes, you might primarily see him as a black child. To be honest, we never even think about his race. My wife, with pinpoint accuracy, describes him simply as someone “who wakes up every morning and seeks out the joy”. We love him so much; and he loves us.

So tell me again, those of you who rage about racial justice from behind screens and keyboards, how this little boy’s plight is due to “white privilege” and “systemic racism”. Tell me again how I should be teaching him to assume that the biggest challenge he will face in life is not the development of his own self control, or the formation of his own good character, but some nameless, malignant group of white strangers who are wholly unconnected to him. Tell me more about how, just because his skin is brown, he should be taught to drink from the cup of bitterness and suspicion. Because that is the endgame of your racialism.

To all of the celebrity Christians who lecture the rest of us about race from the comfort and safety of your megachurches or universities, allow me to make some suggestions for how you might rid yourself of racialist superstitions and perhaps develop a more reality-based understanding of human nature. I’m assuming, of course, that your interest is really in understanding the way things are, and not just in cultivating an even larger sense of your own moral superiority.

First, since your grasp of human nature could use some recalibration, consider taking a job that requires you to produce economic value. Work at that for quite a while. If you’re under 40, you would learn even more by working at something physically demanding; something that involves sweat and physical exhaustion. A job from which you come home filthy and stinking at the end of the day would be ideal. Pay your own bills. Don’t “raise” money. Pay your bills by the sweat of your own hard work. Don’t ask someone else to support you. Do it entirely on your own. Squirrel away your few extra pennies and, when you have a little bit saved, find someone among the urban poor, dig deep, and give your hard earned savings to help them. Don’t give someone else’s savings away. Don’t advertise your “ministry” or ask other people to support a “worthy cause”. Do it quietly, secretly, from your own sweat and toil. Ask nothing of anyone. Please don’t give cash to drug addicts - be responsible. But find a path to give away what YOU yourself have earned by creating economic value at the expense of your own tired back. You might be surprised—doing this one thing may alter your entire understanding of the world.

Second, take a social media sabbatical and get involved with actual human beings who engage in self-destructive behaviors. I’m talking about people who won’t delay gratification. People who use drugs. People who are sexually promiscuous. You get the picture. Move beyond the broad accusations you traffic in from the comfort of your offices. Actually venture out into the urban wilderness and involve yourself in the lives of some of the real people whose problems you insist are caused, not by their own terrible choices, but by the so-called privilege and systemic malice of people they don’t even know. Observe them even as you are trying to help them. Ask yourself if they are really being helped by your encouragement that they blame their problems on a nameless cabal of white malefactors. Are you really helping a young man, one who won’t quit smoking dope and hold down a steady job, by telling that young man that his real problem is “systemic racism”? Try to let yourself learn from real people and actual experience. It is far easier to posture and pose online than to truly help another human being.

Third, read two books - both of them by Theodore Dalrymple. Dalrymple is the nom de plume of psychiatrist Anthony Daniels. He worked for many years in British prisons and among the urban underclass in British cities (mostly London, I think.) Read the stories he relates and ponder them. The first book is “Life At The Bottom”; the second is “Romancing Opiates”. Try to set aside your cocksureness and your materialist presuppositions about human nature and just quietly learn from someone else’s real-world experience. And consider this: the underclass in Britain has historically been predominately white, not black. Yet they have engaged in many of the same pathologies found among the urban American black community. Ask yourself, “why?” (Hint: it has nothing to do with skin color or systemic anything, but everything to do with worldview.) Give honest consideration to Dalrymple’s hard-won learning, which was gained only by accumulating many years of real-life experience treating and interacting with patients.

Fourth, consider whether the accusatory finger-pointing you have directed toward “white evangelicals” - essentially suggesting their “guilt-by-anatomy” - is in any way consistent with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Understand the theological implications of your public statements along these lines, and retract your words if you should.

Fifth, stop trying to borrow virtue. I get that you don’t have any virtue of your own. Neither do I. Neither do any of the brown people you profess to be so concerned about. Nevertheless, quit trying to inflate your own moral resume by accusing the rest of us. Don’t try to purchase the social approval of the cool kids by throwing innocent people you don’t even know under the bus. It’s evil and dumb. Most of you influential Christians present yourselves as being theologically astute. You should be embarrassed, then, to be making such sweeping assertions about the motives and mindsets of entire groups of people on a foundation as flimsy as their anatomy. Of all things. Just stop it.

Finally, quit conceiving of human nature through the materialist lens of skin color. You’re Christian? Then why not adopt a biblical rather than a sociological understanding of human nature? (Have you ever bothered even to look into the reproducibility crisis besetting the soft “sciences” that many of you are so fond of? Yeesh.)

Stop proclaiming your love for “people” in the abstract and involve yourself in the life of an actual embodied person. Not at arm’s length or online. Bring them into your own home. Sit around the table and talk to them. Share the gospel with them. Sacrifice in responsible ways for them. With all their dysfunction and habitual self-destructiveness, cultivate the vision to see past the mere color of their skin and perceive the fully-formed human being who is abusing their own moral agency. Maybe then you will begin to recognize that the thing which is eating them alive is not someone else’s privilege, nor is it the residual effects of long dead racists, but it is where they themselves have chosen to place their affections. When a person is in thrall to lies, the lies will eventually destroy him. And the lies can do this without any recourse to privilege, or any need for systemic injustice.

If you condescend to do any of the things I have suggested, and you are willing to learn, you will quickly realize that the biggest challenges all of us face in life have little to do with systemic this or privileged that. Where a person places his affections will determine far more about his life’s trajectory than anything having to do with skin color. No amount of exculpatory complaints regarding unfair racial advantage can compensate when someone is pursuing a life of dissipation. You simply cannot love the good and the true on someone else’s behalf.

If, having followed through with my suggestions, you start to find yourself feeling a bit embarrassed by the misdirected outrage that you have expressed in the past, it would be nice if you let the rest of us know. Please be sure to tell us, just as publicly and loudly as you offered your original accusations, when your rage-baiting and racial determinism has started to sound as silly and malevolent in your ears as it already sounds in mine.

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I don’t want to leave any reader with the wrong impression. I have no interest in painting a rosy picture of myself, of all people, in regard to any of this. To be really clear, it was not out of unsolicited love for my fellow man that I found myself in the situations I describe above. I was thrust, against my will and for over a decade, into close contact with all the pathologies of the urban poor. I was involved in these situations, as well as with many others along similar lines, under intense duress. The complexities and risks were often acute. Many nights I lay down to sleep very happy that I had a loaded weapon within easy reach. I do not recommend living that way and would never have chosen it out of any kind of misguided nobility.

So it wasn’t all spiritual and altruistic. While I tried to do what was right, given the situations into which I was being thrown, my responses were often desperate and scrambling. Mostly with too little time to figure out how to effectively help people who had serious issues.

I’m afraid my own faith has often looked less like serene devotion and more like white knuckles and gritted teeth. But, I take solace in something Anthony Hopkins once said, in his role as C.S. Lewis in the movie Shadowlands: “You learn … by God you learn.”

My unsought experience among the urban poor has disabused me of many of the superstitions I once held about human nature and the world.

1. See Beau Hughes’ sociological argument as a moral imperative.