Dear Pastor Perry,
Genes affect culture? Are you serious?
Bojidar Marinov
My Dear friend Bojidar,
Yes, genes affect culture. The great Rushdoony taught this idea himself.
Ah, yes … uh, true, God has created the diversity of mankind and therefore each of the Christian cultures will begin with the sovereignty of God and the authority of His Word but there are areas where their particular talents and diversities will be expressed, so that, even as I, for example, have aptitudes in certain areas while a very dear friend of mine has aptitude in another area and is every bit as zealous for the Sovereignty of God as I am but when he talks in the area of sciences he loses me in about the second or third sentence. But he is applying the word of God in the context of his situation. Now that’s a little more extreme than cultures or nations, but there is no question that different peoples have different aptitudes and abilities. We tend today, just as I.Q. tests are today artificially constructed so that they will eliminate sexual differences (women will come out ahead in most fields except the two I mentioned) and racial differences because their are variations. People of one ethnic background will have marked abilities in one area and not as marked in other areas, but they don”t want to believe that there are these differences you see, therefore they try to eliminate them. Well, in a Godly culture we will consider those as blessings of God to be developed.
R. J. Rushdoony, Lecture — The New Absolutism — 44:00 minute mark
Note here Bojidar that the great RJR recognized that people of different ethnic backgrounds have different strengths and based on those differing strengths that are accounted for, in part, by their genetic inheritance, it is fairly obvious that genes affect culture. I am surprised that you would be surprised over such a simple idea, Bojidar.
To suggest that individuals and peoples are only different because of the propositions they think is to deny our human-ness and the concrete families, places, and times that God has ordained for us. When Christ called me and set me apart He called me and set me apart as a “Wilkins.” My Christian faith has not obliterated my “Wilkinsness.” I am, to be sure, a new man in Christ, but the new man that I am remains me. My memories are not erased. My genetics are not altered. The nurture and nature of my existence is what is redeemed.
I am my Father’s and my Grandfather’s son. Now, they were not Christian and I am Christian but I still retain, often-times most unfortunately, their strengths, their weaknesses, their predilections, and dispositions. That is part of what it means to be human. No matter how much I put off the old man and put on the new man created in the image of God at the end of that sanctification process it is still a Wilkins who has been sanctified. It is not good anthropology to suggest that who God has created us to be by nature and nurture is obliterated by belief(s). It is my conviction that when we seek to obliterate our concrete human-ness with Christianity we become gnostic by the affirmation that the propositions that a person thinks in their head is alone what makes them what they are. I am not just the propositions I think, though I am never less then that. I am also part of a family, and part of a people. Now, to be sure the propositions I think (my beliefs) will completely re-arrange the way I lean into life (I sure hope that people would see a difference between me and my Father and Grandfather) but that leaning will still be done as a Wilkins, as a descendant of white Scot-Irish Europeans, and as a son of the West. Good Christian, non-gnostic anthropology requires me to think this way.
So yes, seriously Bojidar, genes affect culture. Anyone who denies this is flirting with gnosticism.
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