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Part 1 of the series

 

Introduction

John Piper, the pastor for preaching at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has recently authored a new book on race, entitled Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian. I have already reviewed the material in the book leading up to the first chapter, and I will therefore proceed with a systematic kinist critique of his various anti-white and anti-“racist” assertions in the first portions of the body of his new book.

The Presumption of Southron Sinfulness

Piper introduces his first chapter with a lesson from none other than Mr. Barack Obama, noting that history is not some distant series of events in the past, but directly affects our present lives: “This collective history, this past, directly touches my own” (p. 31). Piper’s point is that his own barbarous, iniquitous upbringing in Greenville, SC—so characteristic of whites, as we know from our own experience—has had a great effect on his identity today.

Southron inhumanity at the time had a variegated expression—white supremacists are creative, you know–but their salient sin resided in the various segregation laws, as applied to a number of institutions and locations: “drinking fountains, public restrooms, public schools, public swimming pools, bus seating, housing, restaurants, hospital waiting rooms, dentist waiting rooms, bus station waiting rooms, and—with their own kind of enforcement—churches, including mine” (p. 32). As before, and as is always the case with the fearless enemies of racism, Piper does not bother explaining what was wrong about this, or where this violated the law of God. He just deems it all unjust. The presumed accusation, of course, is that these are a manifestation of white hatred for blacks: because it was whites in power who enacted these segregation laws, therefore it must have been from a white motive to hate being in blacks’ presence.

But how does this follow? Perhaps the blacks hated being in whites’ presence, and so the whites decided to grant independence to them—while building them facilities and buildings to use, of course. Perhaps both desired to be in each other’s presence, but the magistrate still deemed it improper for other reasons, and therefore imposed segregation as a noble sacrifice to be made by both races desiring the other’s company. Perhaps there are a number of other possibilities—but Piper does not even mention one of them. He just assumes that if whites deal with other races in any way other than suicidal groveling, then they are indubitably transgressing the sixth commandment.

Segregation’s Justification

I do not want to pretend that the enactment of Jim Crow legislation was because whites just loved being around blacks but knew they were better off on their own. Though they certainly did not see blacks as some sort of diseased vermin, as Piper implies, it would be a joke to suppose whites and blacks were best friends. A central reason in this, so often overlooked by any anti-racist analysis of segregation, was the historical circumstances. Since the abolitionist agitation strategies in the antebellum South, and since the tyranny of “reconstruction” with its incipient Afro-supremacism, Southern whites had been battling against overt communist and Jacobin infiltration and subversion. Not all of this was the Africans’ fault or even their intention: they were often mere tools, used first by the Yankee Unitarians and then later by the cultural Marxists, to attack the white Christian civilization in the South and America in general. Nevertheless, this does not invalidate segregation laws as a means to reduce the effectiveness of this tool to their enemies.  After the War of Northern Aggression, in which the Southern states lost their sovereignty, the South desired to maintain as much domestic autonomy as possible; and this included segregation laws. Especially as the twentieth century further progressed, Southrons fully understood the intention of the cultural Marxist egalitarians to dissolve their noble people through racial admixture; they comprehended that race-mixing was communism by destroying distinctions.

One can easily witness the effects of this purposive amalgamation today in the remnants of white Christian culture. Two obvious examples are the most idolized sports in the country, football and basketball, in which blacks happen to excel. Further, the sexual degradation of our culture cannot be separated from the sexual degeneracy characteristic to both African and African-American society—especially when one witnesses the “dance” moves prominent in high school proms. The prominence of rap and hip-hop music today is astounding, and its permission to be utilized in or related to worship would have baffled Christian pastors only a couple decades ago.

It is unquestionable that black pagan culture has degraded white Christian culture, and although I would never wish to blame Western immorality solely on that, it is nonetheless a clear influence. But if cultural dissolution is so influential to our decadence, then the honest, undisguised attempts of our nation’s founding stock to prevent their subjugation must be applauded as righteous. Southern whites wished to preserve their people and their culture. Having lost national sovereignty, their hand was forced to retain domestic sovereignty by segregational measures—and they unapologetically did so. If Piper had actually followed the segregationists in considering how the past truly touches the present, rather than merely repeating the platitude of our mulatto “president,” he would not be in the service of antichrists.

Piper’s Guilt

One might postulate Piper’s innocent ignorance on this matter. After all, the only real reason Christians condemn segregation is because the government schools and media teach them to shutter at its very utterance, and no doubt such propaganda has likewise influenced Piper. Yet he gives signs to show he is quite aware of his culpability. On p. 32, he says the following:

I owe my life and hope to the gospel. Without it I would still be strutting with racist pride, or I would be suffering the moral paralysis of “white guilt.”

Racially aware Christians use the term “white guilt” to refer to whites who have a false sense of guilt for the heinous sin of, say, looking at a black and noticing he’s black or having pride in our ancestors. It is the moral and psychological sickness which drives whites to pseudo-altruistic suicide in propitiation for their sins. But Piper here thinks it refers to the genuine sense of guilt whites have for their genuine racial sins, which needs to be absolved by Christ’s penal substitution. If he were aware of the term, he ought to have been aware of the concept. His misuse of it is not only irksome but revealing.

Second, Piper notes that the witness of conservative Christianity at the time ubiquitously supported segregation (p. 33). Like Russell Moore, he ought to have taken the hint; but he instead concluded that this widespread sinfulness forced Martin Luther King, Jr., to attend a liberal seminary. He does not for a second consider whether their unanimity provides evidence for their veracity, but unbelievably shifts the guilt from the Christ-denying philanderer to his alleged racist oppressors. His lack of reasoning is astonishing.

Third, we can locate more evidence of Piper’s guilt in his lamentation for the plight of his family’s black servant, Lucy. Without mentioning a single instance in which Lucy was maligned, injured, scorned, or victimized at all, Piper issues the amorphous grievance that “the whole structure of the relationship was demeaning” (p. 33). In doing so, he himself slanders his parents, who not only sanctioned the relationship’s structure but were so generous as to hire her in the first place. He does mention how much his family loved Lucy, but qualifies that we love our dogs too. All this rhetoric communicates the novel notion that social or hierarchical inequality is equivalent to the denial of an inferior’s humanity—inequality is exactly how the “structure” is “demeaning.” As argued by Tribal Theocrat, this is perfectly egalitarian, and it utterly contradicts his own arguments elsewhere that gender complementarity is not inherently demeaning.¹ His obvious contradiction in this area, in addition to his implicit defamation of his parents, is profoundly disturbing.

Fourth, Piper mentions a question-and-answer session he attended during his collegiate education at Wheaton. Warren Webster, a former missionary to Pakistan, was asked how he would respond if his daughter fell in love with a Pakistani, to which he replied: “Better a Christian Pakistani than a godless white American!” (p. 35). Of course, Piper claimed that this response had a profound impact on his understanding of miscegenation, even though the “argument,” if it can be called that, abuses morality by a textbook instance of a false dilemma. Sure, if there were two suitors in the entire world for one’s daughter, then the Christian non-white would be preferable; but that does not morally permit miscegenation in ordinary circumstances. The same argument could be used to universally justify nearly any action. Consider lying: we grant that lying would be permissible in rare circumstances, such as when others’ lives are at stake, but we would never assert its universal permissibility. (The reader might recall the politically correct example of how a hider of Jews should respond to a Nazi on his doorstep.) Similarly, one can conceive of dreadful circumstances in which one might be obligated to sacrifice one’s own child—but that would never imply its permissibility in ordinary circumstances. To morally reason by hypothetical scenarios like this is to destroy the practical and ordinary nature of morality.

Fifth, in discussing a paper on miscegenation he wrote for his professor Lewis Smedes, Piper outlines (and sympathizes with) Smedes’s hesitation to accept interracial marriage on the grounds that it militated against “authentic black identity.” Piper himself concedes that there is a “subtle threat to minority identity in marrying a person from the majority culture,” but sees it as overridden by the good of racial-matrimonial diversity (p. 37). Glaringly, he devotes not a shred of attention to white identity. The utter lack of concern he shows for his own people at this point is jaw-dropping. Even though he concedes on an earlier page that his previous agreement with segregation was due to miscegenation’s sinfulness (p. 35), he apparently had an atomistic, abstracted, and undeveloped idea of its unrighteousness. He has never given any considerations to the effects miscegenation has on a people considered corporately.

Conclusion

These errors are nearly too much for any conscious mind to bear. Piper offers multitudinous examples of unthinking, even though he has at other times provided book-length responses to scholars on important biblical and theological issues. He convincingly demonstrates the brainwashing unfortunately imposed on the West—and it is high time that Christians, to be relevant, stepped back to think on these issues. The educational and cultural conditioning of this country to prejudice us against white Christian culture is not accidental, and we need to take dominion in response.

Piper’s embellishment of Southern segregation as the epitome of evil and “supremacy” provides fuel to the ongoing amalgamation and white ethnocide in the West. Rather than perceiving Jim Crow laws as the Southrons’ wise usage of their own property for the preservation of their own culture, Piper blindly asserts their racial bigotry. He focuses on supposed wrongs now fifty years in the past while ignoring the ongoing massive injustices in black-on-white crime, exploitative taxation, and institutionalized reverse discrimination. Therefore, Piper’s error is not merely being too scrupulous about the authority which civil magistrates possess to enact segregation laws—he also is complicit in the demise of our people. Righteous men should reject his teachings and love their people.

 

Part 3 of the series

 

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