Friday, April 20, 2018

Woke church

1. In addition to race-baiters like Thabiti Anyabwile, Anthony Bradley, RAAN, Reformed Margins et al., we have a social contagion that's spreading to race-baiter enablers like Danny Akin, Matt Chandler, Ligon Duncan, Albert Mohler, Russell Moore, John Piper, David Platt et al. And that in turn has a coercive impact on students and employees to tow the party line or else.  

And this isn't confined to "racial reconciliation". "The church" is to confess its historical mistreatment of LGBT people. 

2. One of the acute ironies of this movement is that if you wish to fan or reignite racial animus, then collective defamation is a predictable accelerant. In identity politics, straight white Christian males are at the bottom of the pecking order. "Evangelical" race-baiters and their enablers unwitting stoke the alt-right. If you keep scapegoating men, or white men, or straight white men, or straight white Christian men, that provokes an utterly predictable backlash. That's how Trump got elected. The Obama administration fueled racial animosity, with predictable results in the voting booth. The race-baiters and their enablers feed they very thing they fear. And that has a lot to do with Jordan Peterson's ascendancy. 

3. In addition, if you constantly cry wolf, people tune out, so that when there are bona fide cases of unjust discrimination, that's discounted as fake news. The race-baiters and their enablers make the point that the past has present-day reverberations. That's true, but we don't agree on how they interpret the racial dynamic in modern-day America.

There are actually some things that both sides could agree on, if there was a shift in emphasis. For instance, high rates of black incarceration are due in part to criminalizing victimless crimes (e.g. a drug habit). According to Ben Shapiro, that was originally pushed by black politicians. 

But presumably white libertarians don't think we should criminalized victimless crimes. So there's a potential meeting of minds on that issue. This is not to deny that a drug habit has collateral damage, but that's true of many self-destructive behaviors we don't criminalize.

4. The attitude of race-baiters and their enablers is a throwback to heathen funerary cults, where the dead were thought to exert a malign influence on the living. There were rituals to appease revenants and vengeful spirits. For the race-baiters and their enablers, it seems that nothing short of sacrificing a batch of chickens will atone for the guilt of one's nameless ancestors. We need to obtain execration spells from a voodoo queen. Let the ceremonies begin! 

1 comment:

  1. Many Asian Americans have been in the US as long as other Americans. Take the Chinese who worked on the 19th century transcontinental railroad along with the Irish. Many of them suffered unjust "working" (if you can call it that) and other conditions.

    Many Asian Americans today suffer unjust institutionalized discrimination in college admissions. Not unlike the Jews in the past.

    Why don't these prominent Christian give these Asian Americans a voice?

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