There’s an old story about a visiting preacher in a black church who’s preaching hard against various sins. When he declared that drug dealers are going to hell, there was applause and shouting, and a couple of middle-aged women sitting next to each other shouted “Amen!” and “Preach it, reverend!” When he declared that carjackers and gangbangers are going to hell, there was even more shouting, and one woman turned to the other and said, “He’s the best preacher I’ve ever heard. He tells it like it is.“ But when he declared that fornicators and adulterers are going to hell, there was dead silence, and the first woman turned to the other and said, “He done quit preachin’, and done gone to meddlin’.”
These days, John Piper has the exact opposite problem. He’s not meddling – he doesn’t come down hard against actual sins. Instead, he’s peddling – lies, distortions, hatred, cultural Marxism, political correctness, and invented “sins” that are nothing of the kind. Not only are they not sins, they’re virtues that every Christian should practice. Piper’s “ministry” may have started out well, but for the past couple decades (at least), he has been doing far more harm than good.
The damage Piper has done to America’s Christian people and heritage shouldn’t be underestimated. For instance, he constantly promotes the abomination of interracial marriage, which is part of the Marxist plan to eliminate the white race from the face of the earth. Plus, he was one of the leaders in the movement to get thousands of Christians to put down their cross and start embracing the perversion of transracial adoption. Christians openly embracing tranny adoption is a sign that evangelicalism has become extremely feminized; no white man who is both mentally and spiritually healthy wants to raise another man’s child, especially a black, brown, or yellow child. Tranny adoption is a disgrace and perversion, and only a deeply degenerated religion could promote such a thing.
Like a demon-possessed Energizer Bunny, Piper never lets up. He’s constantly slandering white people, denigrating our history, denouncing police officers for having the gall to defend themselves from attack from criminals, denouncing law and order as “hate”, etc. And, like all radical leftists, he’s constantly moving even further to the left, no matter how much of a fool he makes of himself by doing so.
And it appears that Piper has apparently decided to just shamelessly go full retard. His latest piece, Structural Racism: The Child of Structural Pride, may well be the stupidest thing The Gospel Coalition has ever linked to, and TGC has linked to a lot of really stupid articles. Before we jump in, if anyone thinks I’m exaggerating how idiotic this article is, check out this passage:
My other strategy is to show that structural racism is a child of structural pride, and a sibling of the fraternal triplets, structural greed, structural fear, and structural lust.
Now he’s just pulling stuff out of his hat. Structural lust? What in the world is that? Not even foaming-at-the-mouth self-avowed Marxists talk about “structural lust.” In fact, if Google is to be believed, John Piper is the first person to ever use that phrase. In other words, he’s just making this stuff up, in an effort to deceive Christians.
In fact, Piper goes on to blatantly admit that that’s exactly what he’s up to — using spiritual buzzwords to get Christians to accept his blatant rejection of scriptural teaching and a Christian worldview:
My assumption is that Bible-shaped people are going to resonate with the idea that pride, greed, lust, and fear are imbedded in social structures and institutions like entertainment, advertising, capitalist business processes, university tenure procedures, the practices of party politics, and more.
Structural pride? Again, Google says Piper just invented this concept out of whole cloth – no one has ever before used that phrase. A few people such as architects and city planners have used the phrase “structural fear” before, but not at all in the sense that Piper is using it. Once again, he just pulled this concept out of his rear end. We’ll come back to why he did that. But let’s examine the article in depth.
He begins like this:
My aim in this article is to reduce the instinctive, white, evangelical reaction against the idea of structural racism or systemic racism.
He doesn’t admit to it, but Piper is deeply troubled, and with good reason. He says what he hopes to accomplish with this article, what his aim is, but he is completely silent about why he’s writing it. Well, his motive couldn’t be more obvious. Piper and his ilk have been very successful at convincing white Christians to hate our ancestors for their slavery, segregation, poll taxes, lynchings, miscegenation bans, etc., etc. Most white Christians in America regard virtually all of our forefathers, the entire white population of America until about 1980, as vile, unspeakably wicked people oppressing the poor innocent black man for 400 years, just for kicks, simply because they didn’t care for the color of his skin.
For evangelicals, the belief that our forefathers were all despicable, no-good SOBs is pretty much settled Christian doctrine. No white evangelical today would ever call for interracial marriage to be outlawed, or suffrage for blacks to be revoked, let alone for sending all blacks to Africa. They would be horrified if anyone else suggested any of these things, and would loudly insist that the person who did so is no Christian at all, and publicly consign him to Hell at every opportunity. These days, white Christians go out of their way to welcome, flatter, pamper, coddle, and serve blacks. It’s their duty as Christians, to make up for our wicked ancestors.
By and large, however, very few evangelicals are buying into the notion being pushed by radical leftist SJWs and preachers that there’s an invisible, all-pervasive evil force that even today is savagely oppressing black people in America, called “structural racism”, “institutional racism”, or “systemic racism”. They rightly find the idea absurd, many of them likening it to a belief in the bogeyman. This alarms people like John Piper and Russell Moore. They’ve been pushing this idea for years, yet they haven’t made much headway, even after Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Colin Kaepernick, PCA and SBC apologies and resolutions, eight years of Barack Obama, etc., etc. Even after Piper and his fellow travelers have labeled just about everything white people say, do, or enjoy as “racist” — Starbucks, white babies, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Major League Baseball, PB&J sandwiches, pumpkins, etc., etc., etc., ad infinitum.
What’s wrong with white people? Besides being racist, that is? Piper just can’t figure out why they haven’t yet gotten fully on board with racial suicide. And since the desirability of white genocide is self-evident to people like Piper, he assumes that all decent white people would agree if they just understood, but they just haven’t fully grasped all the concepts yet. Once they do, they’ll fall right in line. So Piper wrote this article to help even the densest white person understand what structural/institutional/systemic racism is, and why it makes all white people racist and everything they do racist.
After spelling out what he hopes to accomplish with the article, Piper then “defines” race, racism, and structural racism.
A race is a group of people distinguished primarily by skin color, but also by facial features and hair type. I choose this simplistic, street-level definition simply to be able to communicate when I talk about racism.
Naturally, Piper wants to focus on mere physical characteristics of races. Races also have mental, spiritual, and other traits, and these are extremely important. But Piper doesn’t want us to think about those, because he knows they’re the main causes of “prejudice” and “discrimination.” Piper is promulgating the idiotic lie that white people dislike blacks and Mexicans simply because of “the color of their skin.”
Racism is an explicit or implicit feeling or belief or practice that values one race over other races, or devalues one race beneath others.
Actually, that’s not the definition of racism as experienced by white people these days. That’s what white people used to believe the definition of racism is, and it’s what Piper wants racism to mean. But more and more whites are starting to grasp that racism is simply the existence of white people, and that ending racism means ending the existence of white people.
Also, we can easily substitute some other words in here to show how deeply anti-Christian this definition is:
Sexism is an explicit or implicit feeling or belief or practice that values one sex over the other, or devalues one sex beneath the other.
Does believing that my daughter shouldn’t marry a woman value men over women? It does, if believing that my daughter shouldn’t marry a black man values whites over blacks. Does barring women from the pulpit devalue women below men? Nearly all liberals would say so, and more and more evangelical and Reformed leaders are agreeing with them.
Patriotism is an explicit or implicit feeling or belief or practice that values one nation over other nation, or devalues one nation beneath others.
If it’s a wicked sin to show favoritism toward your own race and have more love for it than for other races, then it’s just as wicked to love your own country more than other countries. Anyone who says racism is “hate” but patriotism isn’t is just making up his own rules, and making a fool of himself. SJWs already agree that patriotism is racism. (Of course, being SJWs, they aren’t consistent – it’s certainly OK to hate Russia and any Arab country Israel is currently asking America to attack.) And white Christians increasingly agree that patriotism is racism. Here’s an evangelical writer who says Jesus came to destroy divisions between countries, and so patriotism is not only racism, it’s idolatry:
Our only identity is global, it is connected by our Lordship in Jesus Christ. When we wall ourselves in to preserve our flawed national identity, and send out weapons of war instead of the Gospel of Christ, we only restore the divide of nationalities that Jesus Christ broke down, and place our faith not in him, but in America. It’s idolatry, and causes non-believers to Blaspheme God on our behalf. Keep that in mind for 4 years ahead.
Piper continues:
Racist, as a noun, refers to a person who is characterized by racism without hating, renouncing, and seeking to eliminate his own racist attitudes and actions, and the harmful effects of them. The implication is that while everyone, as sinful and self-centered by nature, is tainted with racist tendencies, not everyone should be labeled a racist.
Again, this is just the phony definition of the word racist that leftists like Piper and SJWs want to sell us. But, as becomes clearer every day, racist just means white person.
Racist, as an adjective, refers to the quality of any feeling, thought, act, speech, object, idea, expectation, norm, rule, policy, law, procedure, or anything whatsoever, which embodies or expresses racism.
Again, this is just the definition that Piper wants us to swallow, without giving it much thought. But actually, as an adjective, racist simply means anything that isn’t bad for or unfair to whites or doesn’t hasten the day when the last white person is removed from the face of the earth. That’s why things that used to be considered “anti-racist”, are now condemned as racist, too. Things like “judging a man by the content of his character and not the color of his skin”, being “colorblind”, opposition to quotas and affirmative action, etc. These things might be “fair”, but they don’t tend toward the end of the white race, so they’re racist. That’s why the Miss Black America pageant is just dandy, but a Miss White America pageant would be unspeakably evil. And it’s why we have a Reformed African American network, but any PCA member who tried to start a Reformed White Network would be excommunicated. It’s not about “fairness”; it’s about what’s bad for white people.
Structural racism is the cumulative effect of racist feelings, beliefs, and practices that become embodied and expressed in the policies, rules, regulations, procedures, expectations, norms, assumptions, guidelines, plans, strategies, objectives, practices, values, standards, narratives, histories, records, and the like, which accordingly disadvantage the devalued race and privilege the valued race. Implicit in this definition is the important fact that structural racism, therefore, may have its racist effects even if non-racist people now inhabit the institutions where the racist structures still hold sway.
Got that? In other words, while Piper won’t come right out and say it, he believes that all white people are racist, because they benefit from a system that has oppressed black, brown, red, and yellow people for 400 years, and continues to oppress them today. (The supposed benefits whites derive from “structural racism” are called “white privilege.”)
With those definitions in place, I turn now to show why it would be astonishing if structural racism were not pervasive in institutions where sin is pervasive. The reason is that human sin, a supernatural devil, and an evil world system collude to weave pride, greed, fear, lust, and racism into all human institutions.
Well, sure, now that those definitions are in place, it all makes sense! Uh-huh. Sure it does. Just as when you allow liberals to come up with their own definition of gender, it’s easy for them to “prove” that Bruce Jenner is a woman. So when you begin by positing that “racism” is a bad thing, it’s a cinch to “prove” that this same wicked racism is “pervasive” and woven into “all human institutions”, constituting something called “structural racism”.
But from here, Piper digresses into a long discourse, filled with references to verses and passages, on what the Bible says about sin, the evil world system, pride, and the devil. Because no Christian who reads this can argue that these aren’t very, very bad things, Piper is breaking down their resistance by getting them to mentally assent to one assertion of biblical truth after another. This is one of the first lessons news salesmen are taught: ask the prospect a series of questions to which he’s obviously going to answer “yes” — “You want the best for your family, right?”; “You like saving money, right?” – to prime him to say “yes” when you go in for the sale.
Then Piper lapses into theobabble – a lot of words and phrases that sound spiritual and profound, but which are complete nonsense. He says greed, fear, and lust are the “fraternal triplets” of “Father Pride” and that because all human institutions are created and run by humans, they’re all really shot through with pride, greed, fear, and lust. That means that pride, greed, fear, and lust are “institutionalized” and “structural” – every human institution in existence is filled with them.
Really, Piper? So the local mom-and-pop bakery is rife with pride, greed, fear, and lust? The bookmobile is shot through with pride, greed, fear, and lust? Same thing for the Goodwill Industries store? The local hospital?
This part of Piper’s article is unbelievably stupid, revealing just how much of a fool of himself he’s willing to make to pervert the Gospel. He goes through these idiotic mental contortions because if he can “prove” that “structural” pride, greed, fear, and lust are in every human institution, he thinks it necessarily follows that these same institutions are also shot through with the wicked sin of racism.
I conclude, therefore, that in a biblical worldview, structural racism is a given. It finds expression everywhere that pride, greed, fear, and lust do. Where cultural winds blow against it, which thankfully they do today, it tends (tragically) to go underground.
This may well be the stupidest major article written by a prominent Christian leader in the last decade.
But this idea of “structural racism”, or “institutional racism”, is spreading like wildfire among evangelical leaders. They’re between a rock and a hard place – they believe the races are equal, yet black people can’t compete with whites in education, can’t stop having children out of wedlock, can’t stop committing crimes and filling our prisons, and so forth. If blacks are equal to whites in every way, how can this be? Especially when outright racist policies and practices have been illegal for fifty years, and blacks are given all kinds of preferences and privileges? People like Piper obviously can’t blame blacks for their behavior, and it’s ridiculous to say that white racism is open and widespread, so they have to explain this stuff somehow. They’ve latched on to the concept that there’s this mysterious thing called “institutional racism” which somehow still oppresses blacks and holds them back.
But evangelicals didn’t invent the concept. It’s been around for some fifty years. The term was made popular in the 60s by the civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael, who later went on to accept the title of Honorary Prime Minister of the Black Panther Party, and eventually changed his name to Kwame Ture and moved to Africa, where he led the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party.
Up until quite recently, institutional/structural racism was a concept only accepted by extremely radical academic types, the kind who openly and proudly called themselves Marxists. Conservative and mainstream academics rejected the concept; some laughed at and scorned it as the obvious scam it is. Few members of the general public had even heard of the idea until quite recently, as it was just another Marxist fad that caught the attention of a few radicals for a few years, but then pretty much died on the vine. Even Wikipedia admits that the concept was practically dead for decades:
The concept of institutional racism re-emerged in political discourse in the late 1990s after a long hiatus
But now here we are, and Judeochristian leaders like John Piper are latching on to this discredited Marxist doctrine and proclaiming it the clear teaching of the Bible.
God help us.
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