The thinkers that have been most instructive for me concerning so-called racial issues and racism have been five: Thomas Sowell, Walter E. Williams, Clarence Thomas, Shelby Steele, and Ward Connerly. Among these, Shelby Steele has written the greater volume that has confirmed and shaped my own understanding. This blog article is not focused on racial issues even if what prompts it is Shelby Steele’s recent Wall Street Journal article, “The Inauthenticity Behind Black Lives Matter: Insisting on the Prevalence of ‘Systemic Racism’ is a Way of Defending a Victim-Focused Identity.” Steele insightfully observes that past sufferings of America’s Blacks became a “moral power” that “seduced us into turning our identity into a virtual cult of victimization—as if our persecution was our eternal flame, the deepest truth of who we are, a tragic fate we trade on.” He exhorts, “Victimization may be an experience we endure, but it should never be an identity that defines us.” Steele’s admonition to his fellow Black Americans is one to which I want to direct my fellow evangelical Christians. Here, I use “evangelical” in its historic sense to distinguish the Christians to whom I appeal from others who still cling to the designation but whose hearts are far from bowing their knees unequivocally to Jesus Christ as their Redeemer Lord.
During his priestly prayer, in the night before his crucifixion, our Lord reminds us that we, his people, are “in the world” but “not of the world” (John 17:11, 16). Because we inhabit this present world as pilgrims and strangers the beliefs that govern us must not derive from this age but from the age that is yet to come, which is to say, from the new creation. Thus, what is to govern our view of the world and for the world is the Last Day’s resurrection and verdict of divine judgment brought into our space and time by Christ Jesus who dwelled among us to accomplish our redemption by his bearing our judgment and by rising from the dead on our behalf, now proclaimed as the good news.
Defiantly set against this view of the world and for the world is the contemporary evil age’s worldview that seizes aspects of the gospel only to fill them with its own counterfeit content. That worldview that now rules our culture and has seduced numerous Evangelicals to embrace it initially made its incursions into public discourse in the 1960s and 1970s. The self-anointed visionaries for hope and change imposed their view for the world upon public school educators with their harmless-sounding but highly destructive “sensitivity training” for teachers and “values clarification” for students. Then, during the 1980s and 1990s, those same self-important activists stealthily expedited their agenda by foisting their worldview with the virtuous-sounding agenda, “Multiculturalism and Diversity,” upon all public institutions of learning. Not to be left behind, ingenuous administrators of private and religious institutions of higher learning, who think in bits and pieces rather than in wholes, seized hold of the disingenuous movement, failing to realize that they were embracing an ideology that does not unite but divides and demands uniformity of thinking while unrelentingly refusing to compromise with Christianity but instead invariably corrodes and ruins it and every institution it enters. Thus, the Coalition of Christian Colleges and Universities foolishly incorporated this worldview with an initiative to compel all member institutions to accept its vision by a pursuit to mirror the ethnic diversity of its surrounding culture, an altogether seemingly innocent effort fraught with destructive assumptions. Evangelical magazines, publishing houses, and many churches followed.
This deceptive worldview movement does not alter its agenda even if its featured banners change as public discourse evolves with shifting terminology. With the dawn of the new millennium, the movement’s warriors began to march with their cry for “Social Justice.” Numerous Evangelicals, especially students, pretentious scholars, and heads of institutions and organizations, joined the march to identify themselves as virtuous Social Justice Warriors. Against this march, though it seems much longer ago than September 2018, thousands of critically evaluating Evangelicals endorsed the Statement on Social Justice & the Gospel to oppose the culture’s downward gravitational pull upon Evangelicalism. Now, under the directives of overly inflated egos of published pseudo-scholars, such as secularists Robin DiAngelo or Ibram X. Kindi and professed Christians Jemar Tisby or Brenda Salter McNeil or Daniel Hill, the movement crushes and cancels all resistance on university campuses, in the culture generally, in the political sphere, even within evangelical churches, among evangelical leaders, on CCCU campuses, and evangelical seminaries with the ruthless and relentless imposition of academic-sounding policies of Critical Theory/Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality.
This thoroughly deceptive and subversive worldview imposes upon society its inflexible collectivist binary categories for people who are not viewed as individuals but as members of collectives. People are classified either as oppressors or as oppressed. The oppressed are subjected to additional balkanization into numerous intersectionality groups depending upon their alleged victimization whether according to their ethnicity, sex, sexual preference, “gender,” age, or any other conceivable non-essential aspect of being human. All alleged oppressors, regardless of skin color, and their allies are charged with ineradicable White Guilt and White Fragility for their original sin of White Supremacy. The embrace of these unrelenting anti-Christian beliefs has already swept many Evangelicals out to sea with its riptide. The same current threatens the rest of us who have thus far resisted that worldview’s powers of deception and seduction.
Many among us who are threatened are unsuspecting because they view themselves as stalwarts who oppose Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality’s segmenting of society into victimized groups. Given the intensity of opposition to Evangelicals who have supported President Trump because of his endorsement of and enactment of policies that are in harmony with our Christian beliefs and advocacy, many unwary Evangelicals are at risk of becoming the mirror-image of what they regard as opposed to the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. We all must guard against the spirit of this evil age lest we be seduced into accepting the tragic moral error of victimology. What is the danger? The peril that would entrap us is the enticement to surrender to victimization by identifying ourselves as victims, victims of abuse and of persecution by the powerbrokers who have established the Cancel Culture. Hear Shelby Steele’s appeal again, but this time hear it as a call for Christians who need to be wary lest we suppose that our being persecuted becomes our “moral power” that “seduces us into turning our identity into a virtual cult of victimization—as if our persecution was our eternal flame, the deepest truth of who we are, a tragic fate we trade on.” Hear Steele again when he exhorts, “Victimization may be an experience we endure, but it should never be an identity that defines us.” Indeed, the Apostle Paul admonishes us, “In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evildoers and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived” (2 Timothy 2:12-13). Never yield to those who demand submission to their inflexible binary categories of victimizers versus victims. Never trust the intentions of those whose worldview anoints themselves as redeemers of victims. Not only do they seek to dethrone the only Redeemer, our Lord Jesus Christ, but they also are the preeminent persecutors and cancellers of God’s true people. Our identity is not in our being persecuted or canceled. No. Our identity is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
A dozen years ago Os Guinness recognized the same truth that Steele points out and of which I am writing. Guinness rightly cautions Christians against playing the victim when he wrote, “As one who believes that the call of Jesus is to a path of suffering that shuts the door to every form of victim-playing, I am angered by organizers of the Religious Right who play the victim card and appeal openly to Christian resentment.” He continues by asking, “Do they not know that those who portray themselves as victims come to perceive themselves as victims and then to paralyze themselves as victims?” (The Case for Civility, 93-94).
If we refuse to regard ourselves as victims, this does not require that we lie down as doormats to be trampled by persecutors. Nor does it call for the abandonment of our divinely authorized rights as American citizens. More than once the Apostle Paul appealed to his divinely authorized rights as a Roman citizenship to counter injustices enacted against him. The more familiar occasion is his appeal to stand in Caesar’s court following his unjust arrest at the Temple in Jerusalem. After some years of confinement first in Jerusalem and then in Caesarea, Paul stood before Festus to make this appeal:
I am now standing before Caesar’s court, where I ought to be tried. I have not done any wrong to the Jews, as you yourself know very well. If, however, I am guilty of doing anything deserving death, I do not refuse to die. But if the charges brought against me by these Jews are not true, no one has the right to hand me over to them. I appeal to Caesar!” (Acts 25:10-11).
After Festus conferred with his council of advisors he issued his decree: “You have appealed to Caesar. To Caesar you will go!” (25:12).
Less familiar is the account following Paul’s imprisonment in Philippi with his associate, Silas. The Apostle’s exorcism of the evil spirit from a female slave who worked as a fortuneteller disrupted the financial profits of her owners who had Paul arrested, flogged, and bound in prison. After the divinely timed earthquake liberated the missionary pair along with all other prisoners from their chains, though none escaped, the local magistrates seem prompted by superstition to be eager to rid themselves of Paul and Silas. They order the jailer, “Release those men.” When the jailer informs Paul, “The magistrates have ordered that you and Silas be released. Now you can leave. Go in peace” (16:36), the Apostle responds, “They beat us publicly without a trial, even though we are Roman citizens, and threw us into prison. And now do they want to get rid of us quietly? No! Let them come themselves and escort us out” (16:37).
Indeed, Paul’s appeal to Roman citizenship alarms the magistrates so that they come to appease Paul and Silas and then to escort them from prison, begging them to leave their jurisdiction. They do eventually leave, but only after paying a visit to Lydia’s house where they meet with several other Christians, doubtless taking plenty of time for instruction and admonition.
Like others in our culture, we may be subjected to endure victimization, but victimhood must never be an identity that defines us. If we Christians stand morally opposed to the worldview that magnifies and sanctifies victimization’s appeal to the basest aspects of human nature, we are also morally compelled to refuse to accept victimization for ourselves. We must stand against the tide and refuse to accept victimization as the centerpiece of our Christian identity. Neither Christ Jesus nor his apostles surrendered to that temptation. Like the Apostle Paul, we must refuse to play the victim. When subjected to indignities against which citizenship protects us, we must not hesitate to appeal to the law’s protection of our divinely authorized rights as citizens. To do so is not sub-Christian. To counter injustice with justice IS the Christian response to injustice. If an appeal to justice does not avert injustice, we are obliged by the Lord Christ to accept the injustice with our identity found in Christ alone and not at all in victimization.