Is Segregation Scriptural?

 

Kinism is often accused of being a new invention by our multiracialist Alienist opponents.   Our response is that, while the name may be new, our beliefs are the same as historical Christianity; we are forced to take on a new name for ourselves due to the Marxist hijacking of modern Christianity.  While they may sit in control of the denominations and speak for what passes as Christianity at present, it is their views which are the new invention. We are the true heirs of the Christian tradition, and our views are the ones holding continuity with the past.  The first part of this proof is offered by the Alienists themselves.  That they must so thoroughly condemn and apologize for their forefathers betrays their discontinuity.  This alone should be enough, but as further and more concrete proof, I offer the following sermon by Bob Jones Sr. from 1960, entitled “Is Segregation Scriptural?”  In 1960, Protestantism was the predominant religion in the South, and Bob Jones Sr. was one of the most prominent figures in the Protestant South.  Bob Jones Sr. was the founder and first president of Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, which, along with Pensacola Christian College in Florida, was and still is one of the most influential fundamentalist Christian institutions in the region and even the country.  His disagreements with Billy Graham were a large contributing factor to the split between fundamentalists and evangelicals in 1957.  He helped pioneer the practice of giving sermons on the radio, which in fact is how this particular sermon was given.  Thus it is reasonable to say that his views in this sermon are definitely representative of the views of white, conservative Christians in the South at the time, and probably even some of the more moderate Southern Christians and white, conservative Christians in the North.

Is Segregation Scriptural?

Address given over radio station WMUU, Bob Jones University, Greenville, South Carolina, April 17, 1960

Words in quotes like those above are Bob Jones Sr.’s, and words like this are my editorials.

What does God teach about the races of the world?  If you will go to the seventeenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, you will find where Paul preached a special sermon on Mars Hill. . . .

Now, notice – this is an important verse – the twenty-sixth verse of the seventeenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, “And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth” (in some of the best original manuscripts, the word “blood” is not there; but it is not important anyhow, because the thoughts are the same).  “And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth…”  But do not stop there, “…and hath determined the times appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.”  Now, what does that say?  That says that God Almighty fixed the bounds of their habitation.  That is as clear as anything that was ever said.

This is great confirmation for Kinists, as we often use Acts 17:26 as a proof text as well.  It is comforting that our grandfathers viewed this verse as foundational to a Christian view of race, as we do, and even went so far as to rebuke those Alienists who always try to stop reading after the first half of the verse.  In the words of Bob Jones Sr., I too admonish them, “Do not stop there.”

God Almighty did not make of the human race one race in the sense that He did not fix the bounds of their habitation.  That is perfectly clear.

Our grandfathers saw the dictum, “there is only one race, the human race!” for the foolishness that it is.  In fact, they believed that the Bible made it “perfectly clear” that the opposite is true.

You talk about a superior race and an inferior race and all that kind of situation.  Wait a minute.  No race is inferior in the will of God.  Get that clear.  If a race is in the will of God, it is not inferior.  It is a superior race.  You cannot be superior to another race if your race is in the will of God and the other race is in the will of God.  But the purposes of these races were established by Almighty God; and when man attempts to run contrary to the directive will of God for this world, there is always trouble.

The fact that God has established boundaries between the races in no way diminishes the humanness of any race or implies that they aren’t fully Christian.  In fact, it is only inside of the boundaries that God has set that a race can truly be in the will of God and fulfill its purpose. We flourish only when we live among our own.

There is an effort today to disturb the established order [segregation].  Wait a minute.  Listen, I am talking straight to you.  White folks and colored folks, you listen to me.  You cannot run over God’s plan and God’s established order without having trouble.  God never meant to have one race.  It was not His purpose at all.  God has a purpose for each race. . . .

I want you folks to listen – you white and you colored folks.  Do not let these Satanic propagandists fool you.  This agitation is not of God.  It is of the devil.  Do not let people slander Almighty God.

Our grandfathers considered Christians advocating integration to be slandering God, since they were advocating for the overthrow of God’s established order in His own name.  How far we have come, that their grandchildren now praise a communist adulterer from the pulpit every Sunday in January for championing what their grandfathers apprehended to be blasphemy.

Yes, Paul said, “God… hath made of one blood all nations of men…” All men, to whatever race they may belong, have immortal souls; but all men have mortal bodies, and God fixes the boundaries of the races of the world.  Let me repeat that it is no accident that most Chinese live in China.  It is not an accident that most Japanese live in Japan; and the Africans should have been left in Africa, and the Gospel should have been taken to them as God commanded His people to do.

Wherever we have the races mixed up in large numbers, we have trouble.  They have trouble in New York.  They have trouble in San Francisco.  They have had trouble all over California. . . .

Let me tell you something.  When it comes to the quality of races, all these races have quality.  They have good qualities and bad qualities.

If we would just listen to the Word of God and not try to overthrow God’s established order, we would not have any trouble.  God never meant for American to be a melting pot to rub out the line between the nations.  That was not God’s purpose for this nation.  When someone goes to overthrowing His established order and goes around preaching pious sermons about it, that makes me sick – for a man to stand up and preach pious sermons in this country and talk about rubbing out the line between the races – I say it makes me sick.  I have had the sweetest fellowship with colored Christians, with yellow Christians, with red Christians, with all sorts of Christians – the sweetest fellowship anybody has ever had, we have had.  Christians have always had it.  We have never had any trouble about that.

The trouble today is a Satanic agitation striking back at God’s established order.  That is what is making trouble for us.

Having fellowship with Christians from other races on a spiritual level does not biblically lead to the erasure of God’s boundaries or the overthrow of His established order.  Trying to do the latter will only cause “trouble” for everyone involved, as the last fifty years of American history has shown.  The “pious sermons” of modern preachers and teachers like John Piper, Steve Halbrook, or Russell Moore would make our grandfathers “sick” and rightly be called “Satanic.”

There has never been a time, especially in the last ten years, when the white people in the South were so eager to help the colored people build their schools and see that they get what they ought to have.  All this agitation going on is not headed up by real, Bible-believing, Christian people.

These religious liberals are the worst infidels in many ways in the country; and some of them are filling pulpits down South.  They do not believe the Bible any longer; so it does not do any good to quote it to them.  They have gone over to modernism, and they are leading the white people astray at the same time; and they are leading colored Christians astray.  But every good, substantial, Bible-believing, intelligent orthodox Christian can read what the Word of God and know that what is happening in the South now is not of God.

Our grandfathers called those advocating for diversity and integration “infidels” who had abandoned the Bible for “modernism” and were leading the Christian flock astray.  I wonder what words they would use to describe the current crop of “pastors”?

God gave every race something.  He gave the Africans something.  He gave the Chinese something that he did not give the Japanese.  He gave races certain things.  He chose the Jews.  They are the most wonderful people who ever lived in the world.  God chose them; and God segregated them, not because they were inferior but because He had a purpose for that race. . . .

Yes, God chose the Jews.  If you are against segregation and against racial separation, then you are against God Almighty because He made racial separation in order to preserve the race through whom He could send the Messiah and through whom He could send the Bible.  God is the author of segregation.  God is the author of Jewish separation and Japanese separation.  God made of one blood all nations, but He also drew the boundary lines between races.

God is the author of segregation and racial separation.  Our grandfathers rightly believed that those who rebelled against racial separation rebelled against God Himself, the Author of those boundaries.

Of course, in America we do not have a serious problem with the Orient.  If we had as many Chinese and Japanese as we have colored people in the South, we would run into the same problem; but we have no Oriental problem here in the South. . . .

When you run into conflict with God’s established order racially, you have trouble.  You do not produce harmony.  You produce destruction and trouble, and this nation is in the greatest danger it has ever been in in its history.  We are facing dangers from abroad and dangers at home, and the reason is that we have got away from the Bible of our forefathers. . . . Do not let these religious liberals blowing their bubbles of nothing over your head get you upset and disturbed.  Let’s get back to the Word of God and be sensible.

Our grandfathers were wise enough to recognize that diversity and rebellion against God’s established racial order only breeds destruction and trouble, not harmony.  We, like our grandfathers, exhort Christians to “get back to the Word of God and be sensible,” and to ignore “these religious liberals blowing their bubbles of nothing over your head” about the wonders of diversity and multiculturalism.

Whenever you get a situation that rubs out the line that God has drawn between races, whenever that happens, you are going to have trouble.  That is what is happening today in this country.  All this agitation is a Communistic agitation to overthrow the established order of God in this world.  The Communistic influence is at work all about us.  Certain people are disturbing this situation.  They talk about the fact that we are going to have one world.  We will never really have one world until this world heads up in God.  We are not going to have one world by man’s rubbing out the line that God established.  He is marking the lines, and you cannot rub them out and get away with it.

Our grandfathers recognized that the drive behind integration was anti-Christian communism and one-world government.  What a shock it would be to them that many so-called Christians today advocate, as the biblical model for mankind, a borderless, unified world and the utter destruction of the boundaries God has drawn.

Now I can sit down with any Christian Japanese, any Christian Chinese, any Christian African, etc., anywhere in the world and as a Christian have fellowship.  That is a different relationship.  A Christian relationship does not mean a marriage relationship.  You can be a Christian and have fellowship with people that you would not marry and that God does not want you to marry and that if you should marry you would be marrying outside of the will of God.  Why can’t you see that?  Why can’t good, solid, substantial people who do not have any prejudices and do not have any hatred and do not have any bitterness see this?  Let’s approach this thing in a Christian way.  Let’s make the battle a Christian battle.  Do not let people run over you by coming along and talking about the Universal Fatherhood of God and the Universal Brotherhood of man.  There is not a word about that in the Bible.

Kinists run into this a lot from some of our dumber opponents.  Holding that two people should not marry in no way denies that either is human or a Christian.  There are plenty of Christians who should not marry each other, whether because they are already married, they are the same gender, they are closely related, there is a huge age difference, there is a significant language or cultural barrier, they are of different races, and so on.  Only a fool would assume that this means that there is no Christian fellowship between Christians who should not marry.  Our grandfathers were not fools.

Individually, we are one in Christ; but God has also fixed the boundaries of nations, and these lines cannot be rubbed out without having trouble.  The darkest day the world has ever known will be when we have one world like they are talking about now.  The line will be rubbed out, and the Antichrist will take over and sit down on the throne and rule the world for a little while; and there will be judgment and cataclysmic curses found in the book of Revelation.

I would differ with Bob Jones Sr. here on his eschatology.  However, it is very instructive that, far from their grandchildren’s view that mixing up the races and destroying racial boundaries are signs of Christian progress, their grandfathers viewed such things as harbingers of the Antichrist and “cataclysmic curses.”

A lot of this agitation comes from evangelists of a certain type who have never gone into this situation but who are going up and down rubbing out the line between those who believe the Bible is the Word of God and those who believe the Bible just contains or may contain the Word of God.  They do not get all of this “hot-air” stuff out of the Bible.  It is not in the Bible.  It is nothing in the world but “hot-air” glamour with a sentimental, soap-bubble, anemic kind of religion that is not in the Word of God.

Even back then, the people at the forefront of pushing diversity were those who had never experienced it firsthand.  Bob Jones Sr. refers to these as “a certain type who have never gone into this situation” and yet pretend to be experts on the subject.  We still have these today in people like Brian Schwertley, who likes to lecture on the sinfulness of Kinism and the wonders of diversity while safely tucked away in a 97% white county in Wisconsin.   Our grandfathers called such teaching “‘hot-air’ glamour with a sentimental, soap-bubble, anemic kind of religion that is not in the Word of God.”  Amen.

Now those passages are just excerpts from the sermon that I found especially relevant to Kinism, but the entire sermon is worth reading, even if just for context.  It is important to point out that the above excerpts from Bob Jones Sr. are in no way spoken in a spirit of hate – far from it.  He goes out of his way to repeatedly express how wonderful he thinks other races are, most especially the Christians in other races, and how well the white Christians and black Christians in the South get along, help each other, and need to stand together against the communism of the civil rights movement.  For example,

Some of the most wonderful people in the world are Chinese and some are Japanese; and some of the most wonderful people who ever breathed the breath of life are colored people.  Every one of you white folks who are listening to me now have colored friends.  I have, and I would fight for them; and you would, too.  It has always been that way.  Individually, we are friends.  Racially, we are not at enmity; but we are separate races.

So we have shown that the views of our grandfathers closely align with Kinism while denouncing Alienism in the strongest of terms.  But are not our grandfathers fallible?  Could they not have erred?  Absolutely.  In fact, there are a number of points in this sermon with which I would vehemently disagree.  By what standard do we judge whether or not our grandfathers’ Christianity has continuity with Scripture – whether we need to break with our grandfathers to align more closely to Scripture?  Bob Jones Sr. answers that very question near the beginning of his sermon:

All orthodox, Bible-believing Christians agree on one thing; and that is, that whatever the Bible says is so.  When they had old religious debates, they used to get together and say, “Well, we will discuss this subject.”  One man would say, “The Bible says this,” and another would say, “You are mistaken. It says this.” They argued about what the Bible said. They agreed that whatever it said was so, but they argued about what it said.

In recent years there has been a subtle, Satanic effort to undermine people’s faith in the Bible; and the devil has led the race along until men have put their own opinion above the Word of God.  You will find that practically all the troubles we are having today have come out of the fact that men in many instances have ceased to believe in an authoritative Bible.

Here at Faith and Heritage, we disagree with Bob Jones Sr.’s views on Southern slavery and Christian Zionism, but when David addressed both subjects, he did not simply denounce the opposing position, throw out some one-liners, blame cultural blindspots for the other side’s error, and walk away claiming victory.   He methodically, through an entire series of articles, walked through Scripture, history, and logic to show how the other position was wrong and his view was correct.

As shown by the sermon above, modern Christianity is dramatically at odds with the Christianity held by our grandfathers.  Our grandfathers are, of course, not infallible like Scripture, yet their opinions should still help to inform us of what Scripture teaches, just as Christian children highly value and presumptively follow their parents’ religious opinions.  The fifth commandment demands that we take our forefathers’ positions as default unless we can scripturally prove that they are in error; that is the proper role of tradition which keeps us firmly anchored against the ever-changing tides of culture.  Our grandfathers could have been wrong, but we are still called, in humility and deference, to presume their position is correct apart from investigating it thoroughly for ourselves. Only then, after that honest effort, can we permissibly reject their position if we find it to be unbiblical. Without this presumption towards the traditional view, we make ourselves susceptible to cultural deception as we seek to usurp our station and reinvent the theological wheel every generation; we essentially deny that God has situated us within organic generational lines through which our most holy faith is transmitted.

This is not some trivial minutia of theology meaningless to life in general; this is something our grandfathers termed “Satanic,” a position preached by “infidels” that posed the “greatest danger” to our world. It is the Alienists’ duty, as self-professed Christians, to seriously look into their grandfathers’ views (and thus our Kinism) and methodically, through Scripture, history, and logic, to show how we are in error, if we are in error.  To simply scream, “HERETICS!!! RACISTS!!! GALATIANS 3:28!!!” as they often do to “refute” us is laughably insufficient.  To immediately and completely discount their grandfathers’ views as merely a product of their times due to a cultural blindspot is lazy, arrogant, sloppy, unbiblical, and unchristian, and it exposes themselves a hundredfold to the same error which they accuse their ancestors of doing: adopting the cultural norms of the time as a substitute for Christian morality.  If they cannot perform this task, and I have yet to see even a credible attempt to do so, then their Christian duty to the Truth, right doctrine, and the fifth commandment demands that they maintain the traditional position apart from clear biblical reasoning to the contrary.

 

[Editor’s note:  As Providence would have it, this article is being published on the 50th anniversary of MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech.  Let everyone consider this to be the Christian counter-volley to his communist agitation.]

 

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