Should Evangelicals Agree with CRT Advocates on the Definition of "Race?"

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Welcome to the

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Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. I'm gonna be traveling next week in Kentucky, in Tennessee.

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Would love to see you. Go to worldviewconversation .com if you wanna see me on the trip. That means that I had to schedule some podcasts ahead of time for that because I'm not gonna be around to record them.

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So I have a number that are dropping, but not as many as I'd like. And there's a little gap today, the weekend and then

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Monday, I don't have anything. And so I thought, you know, I'll make a quick one. I'm about to step out and do some errands.

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And I don't have a full file. My wife calls them files when I have a very organized pile of information that makes something understandable.

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I don't have that. But I do have some questions and I do have a problem that needs to be solved.

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And so maybe you can help me with this. I'm gonna give you some questions, some ideas, and maybe you can help me solve this.

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So before we get to it, I wanna just mention GoldRiverT, goldriverco .com.

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And when it's winter, you need tea. If you're a coffee drinker, just take the plunge. Start drinking some tea. So that being said, let's get into the information that I do wanna relate to you and the questions

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I have. This is kind of like a minefield. And I'm gonna explain why in a minute. We're gonna talk a little bit about the definition of the term race, the concept of race as well.

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And I want to start this off by identifying what I think is a problem.

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The problem is the way that conservatives and also conservative evangelicals, so those on the political conservative side, but those on the theologically conservative side who are against critical race theory, the problem is how they are approaching this in my mind.

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I knew there was a problem a few years ago. I've always sensed that, I think. But it's been more in the last year.

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I've really just, it's come into a clearer focus for me.

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Let's start with critical race theory and what it teaches. One of the elements of critical race theory is it teaches that, or those who are critical race theorists teach, that race is a social construct, okay?

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Not just that, they teach that race is a social construct that represents power relationships.

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Let me repeat that. Race is a social construct that represents power relationships. Now, on the front end, when we first hear that, we may not think that that's that big of a deal.

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But actually, it is kind of a big deal. And it's one of the hallmarks of Marxism.

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The definitions present the solutions. If you buy into the definitions, you generally buy into the solutions.

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Let me repeat that again. If you buy into the definitions, you buy into the solutions. So the definition, race is simply a social construct and it denotes power relationships.

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If there's a problem, like a disparity in the criminal justice system, or poverty, or something of that nature, what do you do?

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Well, you have to do something to rectify the situation, to alleviate the disparity politically.

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And you can do it politically. You know why? Because race is just a social construct. That's all it is. It's an abstract thing that exists in the mind, not in reality.

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So it's important for critical race theorists to say, you shouldn't view the world through a colorblind lens.

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You've got to view everything through the lens of race. And even many supposed conservatives are doing that. They're getting offended over so many things because they're hypersensitive to race.

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And they're seeing that in everything. They bought into the ideology to some extent. And so once you start seeing the world that way, the disparities start to present themselves.

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And when the disparities start to present themselves, then you can start the reallocation process, redistributing money, or privilege, or status, or whatever, power of some kind.

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So you buy into race as a social construct. You buy into race as a social construct that denotes power relationships.

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And then once there's a problem, a disparity that exists between races, then the only way to rectify it is to in walks intersectionality and do some kind of redistribution.

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And it's possible to do that because of the fact that race is, there's no element of it, there's no part of it that's rooted in race.

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It's not an objective reality. It's simply something that's in the mind, okay? So here's the situation.

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You have people groups that have suffered for centuries, and they've suffered because of, the story you'll often hear, because of rich white elitists who were colonizing.

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They're the colonizers who came into various areas. And they thought to themselves, you know how we can control these people by creating a barrier between us and them.

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And also between those who are under us, the whites who are lower class, we can create a barrier between lower class whites and let's say black people.

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And we can create a barrier between black people and lower class whites and natives of wherever they were colonizing.

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And if we do this, then they won't all realize we're the common enemy and come after us.

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They will fight each other and they'll bicker and we can make them, we can control them. And we can justify our oppression based on the fact that they are of a different race in those who are the natives.

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So that's the story that you'll hear from critical race theorists. And they'll say the race was a concept developed during the age of colonization, the 1500s, 1600s, starts getting used.

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And it's always represented a power relationship of some kind, okay?

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So how do you reverse course? How do you, now that we're in 2022 and you're looking around and you're seeing people who have, people groups who have been oppressed arbitrarily by some imaginary category that someone made up years ago.

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They've been, their families have been abused for centuries. How do you rectify that? You gotta do something.

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This is where the social justice comes in. You have to reallocate something to them to make it fair because you've been the beneficiary of not having that kind of oppression against you.

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You have white privilege, even if you're in poverty in the Appalachian mountains without running water, you're still in poverty.

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Or you're still, you have white privilege somehow. And you owe them something if you wanna make things fair.

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That's the clear picture of what's going on. And look where it all starts. It all starts with the definitions.

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Race is a social construct representing power relationships. And then all you need is a concept of fairness and justice that's from social justice that comes in and boom, you have it.

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It's not actually all that complex. You just gotta buy in the definitions. Conservatives have bought into, at least half bought into some of these definitions.

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I'm not gonna name organizations. I know I'll get in trouble, but the vast majority of books and organizations on the political conservative and the theological conservative right who are trying to deal with critical race theory readily buy into the idea that race is simply a social construct.

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They just do. And I've, you know, in my book, Christianity and Social Justice, Religions and Conflict, chapter six,

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I start to kind of skim the surface of this, but I don't full on go into this.

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And part of it is I'm still asking some questions about this myself. I was raised at a time when evolution,

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Darwinian evolution was considered to be a big threat to evangelicals, much bigger than any critical race stuff, even though that stuff was around.

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And it's very typical of evangelicals to fight battles from years ago that are, they're still important.

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Don't get me wrong. That is still an important battle, Darwinian evolution, but it's, we get sometimes stuck on older battles and we're not astute and ready for the new ones that are coming down the pike.

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I think critical race theory is still taking people in the church by surprise. They don't know what to do with it.

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And this is an evidence of that. The fact that we just buy into their definition of race or at least half buy into it. And I mean,

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I don't mean me, but many people of my persuasion on a number of other things. So all that to say,

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I grew up at this time when Darwinian evolution was the boogeyman and it wasn't a fake boogeyman.

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It was a real boogeyman. It was ripping people's faith apart when they would go to college.

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And the way of dealing with that was saying, we are all one race. And look at how

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Darwinian evolution has been used to oppress peoples. Look at Nazi Germany, look at eugenics, look at abortion. It's horrible stuff, and it is.

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And if we just understood that we're all one race and that there are no races, we're just a part of the human race, then that's the biblical understanding.

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Well, I've come to realize, and really through just reading classic literature, that this isn't exactly accurate.

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The concept is right, that we're all part of the human race. That is true. It's true that we all descend from Adam.

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It's true that we're all of equal worth, the Imago Dei. It's true that Darwinism rejected that.

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That's all true, but there's more information that I think we need in order to understand the current threat from critical race theory, because it's much different.

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Critical race theory agrees that there is no race rooted in biology.

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There is no genetic determinism. People haven't evolved differently from different places, and that's irrelevant even if they did.

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Critical race theory would agree on all that. So when we respond to critical race theory as if we're responding to Darwinian evolution, it's not making a dent.

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Not only that, it's actually creating confusion. Not only that, it also makes us open and susceptible to buying into the solutions critical race theory offers, in my opinion.

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So I started reading classic literature, and I started seeing things.

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I started seeing race being referred to in interesting ways, the race of women. Race, you know, to talk about gender or something.

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In fact, I have pulled up here, let's see if I can pull it up, an etymology of the term race.

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And in that etymology, you'll see that it says it was developed in the 1560s, and it could talk about breed, lineage, family.

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It could talk about, let's see, wines, 1520s, common occupations, from the race of,

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I don't know, painters, generations. But it came to mean tribe, nation, or people regarded as a common stock to an ethnical stock, one of the great divisions of mankind having in common certain physical peculiarities by 1774.

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So it means people group. And by 1774, that's what it meant.

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There's different kinds of men, different kinds of peoples. This is long before Darwinism, okay? And they had certain physical peculiarities.

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So there is a genetic element, but it's not strictly genetic. And it's a word that could be attributed from the 1500s to many other things.

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And in fact, into the 19th century, I saw it referred to like women, the race of women, gender.

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Or if you read Lord of the Rings, even into the 19th or the 20th century, the race of elves, the race of dwarves, all the fanciful things, there's a certain looseness to it.

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But in general, it refers to a people group. So genetics, religion, habits, traditions, food perhaps, all of that stuff, language factors into this, okay?

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Now, the interesting thing, another interesting thing is over time, look at this chart from Google Books Ngram Viewer from 1800 to today.

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The term race has been there way before Darwin, but when origin of species came out, and origin of species, of course, is all about the different human races and how they developed biologically.

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It's genetic determinism, it's terrible stuff. But when it came out, and before that, when you had phrenologists talking about the different sizes of brain skulls and things like that, and how that showed intelligence in their minds, you have a spike in the term's usage.

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It goes down. Ironically, it's going down even during the time of Nazi Germany and stuff. It starts to come up again during the late 80s.

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You start seeing it rise again throughout the 90s and into the 2000s, especially when critical race theory is very popular.

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So you have Darwinism, you have critical race theory, the term race is used a whole lot. And they use the term much differently.

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Now, if you go, let's see if I can, if you go and search, I put between 1600 and 1899, most of these examples are from the 1800s, the term race, you'll come up with the

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Aryan race, the black man, mostly groups of people, again, people groups.

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Let's see here. Some of this is like horse racing and stuff, so that's obviously a different usage.

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The white race, the human race, so it can be used in general, just to refer to humans in general. It's always been used that way too.

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So you have this term being used to designate different people.

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There was a pastor, Thomas Smith, I believe was his name, that writes about how we're all one race, we're all one human race, and he's writing against the phrenologists in Philadelphia.

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And this is a story that often goes untold. A lot of Southern preachers like James Henley Thornwell, Thomas Smith, were writing against the evolutionists, the proto -evolutionists really of their time.

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And they were trying to make the point that there are no distinctions wherein one group is less human than another group.

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And you hear this a little bit, well, I'll get into that. They were saying we're all of equal worth.

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Even as slavery is going on and stuff, they're human, okay? There wasn't a thought among Christians that people of different ethnicities or races or whatever, that they're not human or they're less human or their worth is somehow less.

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So those would have been kind of the Ken Hams, I guess, of the 19th century in a way, trying to make that point.

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But it was evolutionists who came along and injected their own meaning into a term that already exists and wanted to make it all about genetic.

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And that ideology pervaded. And now you have critical race theorists coming along and taking the term, and they wanna inject their definition.

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It's all just social construct, power relationships. And you're not allowed to deviate from it.

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And if you do deviate, if you color outside the lines at all, you're a racist. What you hear though from people today is, well,

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I don't believe in race, in the church at least. I don't believe in race because we're all made in the image of God or something.

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What are they responding to when they say that? They're responding to evolution, responding to Darwinism. But it's a different situation now.

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The way the term is being used is, and the definition that it's been given by critical race theorists is not the same as the definition that Darwinists were trying to give it.

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And so we're not actually responding to the objection that is being raised. And so it's on that point that I want to read for you an article.

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See if, well, I'm gonna read it for you. I'm not sure if it's gonna be, if it'll come up here.

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It's an article from a pastor. This is from Larry Ball. Race is real and not a social construct.

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I don't know who Larry Ball is. I just know that he raises some points that I think are worth grappling with. He says, Christians do not need to adopt the neo -Marxist theory of race as a social construct in order to do battle against critical race theory of neo -Marxism.

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It's better to recognize the truth that distinct races do exist in objective reality and that good and bad attributes become characteristics of races as a result of religion that dominates them.

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That includes both black and white. Spot on. Yeah, religion is pretty fundamental. It does, it really does affect people groups.

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After reading a number of books on critical race theory by evangelical and reformed authors, I have become convinced that sometimes good men get it wrong.

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Some of the writers I respect, most are saying that the existence of distinct human races is not real. It's just a social construct.

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What is a social construct though? It is a convention adopted by society that has no basis in objective reality.

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For example, Peter Pan is a social construct. We all know who he is, but he's not real. He exists in our minds for entertainment.

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A dollar bill is a social construct. It only has a value because society has given a value. The reality is it's only paper and ink.

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Social constructs are usually identified with neo -Marxist thinking. For example, neo -Marxists say that binary sexual identification is not real.

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The concept of sex that separates humans into male and female is a social construct. They push the concept that in reality, there are a multitude of sexes.

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As another example, the traditional family is a social construct. The idea of male and female parent with children is a convention created by society to oppress other legitimate families, like those who have two male parents.

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I'm hearing from my respected brethren that race is not a biblical term, and therefore, the concept of race does not exist.

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At the same time, these same men will say that there is only one race, and that is the human race. The human race includes all of us because we all come from the same atom.

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There is no difference between us other than the degree of melanin in the skin. It seems rather contradictory to me to assert that the concept of race is not real, but then to turn around and use the term race to describe all of the descendants of Adam.

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There are no races, but yet, there is only one race. It is true that the Bible does not use the word race in any

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English translation. More common terms are nation, tribe, clan, and peoples. However, the Bible does not use the term banana either, but that does not mean it is wrong to use the word banana.

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Historically, mankind has been divided into races, three prominent races are whites, blacks, and Asians. They're different in more than pigmentation of skin.

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They've been associated not only with the color of the skin, but with the texture of the hair, shape of the eyes, and even in physical speed and agility.

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If you watch the NCAA basketball, you will see what I mean. I don't believe that speaking this way is racist.

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It may be more racist to avoid reality and say all athletes are the same in ability, whether white or black. We need to learn to be more honest.

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Race has been associated with the word nations or peoples who have a common geographical boundary, a common language, and a common religion.

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This is certainly not necessarily true of our experience here in the United States, but our nation is a rather new experiment in societies, and it appears to be disintegrating rather quickly.

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That's a really good point. The United States was once a Christian nation, and this common religion provided a basis for the unity of the various races among us.

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We have changed religions, and therefore we no longer have any basis for peace. A nation without a common religion will not endure just as a nation without a geographic border or a common language will not long endure.

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Now, although we all descend from Adam and all are sinners needing a savior, we do still exist as distinct races who probably have more in common than not.

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Jeremiah identified the Ethiopian as a man who could not change the color of his skin. Just as important as noting the color of his skin, the prophet noted that the man was an

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Ethiopian who probably lived south of Egypt and who could be identified with a nation that had geographical boundaries, a separate language and a separate religion.

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In the New Testament, the Ethiopian eunuch became a Christian, which certainly teaches us that the gospel came as a blessing for all nations and races.

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The book of Revelation speaks of the New Jerusalem as a dwelling place for the nations and kings of the earth. Nations will not disappear, even in the very presence of God himself, all the distinct nations along with their kings shall be one in Christ.

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God allowed various distinctions to develop among the descendants of Adam. God loves diversity in colors, flowers, fruits and the two sexes and even races.

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However, absent from most discussions today about race is the fact that nations and often the distinct races that define them will always adopt a particular religion.

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This religion will have the major impact on the character of that nation. For example, while our white

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American forefathers were writing the very complicated United States Constitution, blacks in Africa who were sold as slaves by blacks to white

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Europeans and Americans could not read or write, why? The grace of God? Christianity conquered the continent of Europe and not

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Africa. Christians do not need to adopt the Neo -Marxist theory of race as a social construct in order to do battle against CRT of Neo -Marxism.

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It is better to recognize the truth that distinct races do exist in objective reality and that good and bad attributes become characteristic of races as a result of the religion that dominates them.

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This includes both black and white. Most of the average guys that I know in the pew think that this

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Neo -Marxist social construct invention is nonsensical. There's nothing to be gained by denying the obvious. Okay, so Larry Ball is a minister at the

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Presbyterian Church. He lives in Tennessee. So I think there's a lot of good points and it opens the door to a conversation

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I think does need to happen because there's something wrong, something just fundamentally wrong with the just going with this race is just a social construct thing.

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Why does the left push that? The left is the one that came up with this in the first place. This isn't something from the right.

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This is something from the social justice religion. Why do they wanna push that? And in the same breath, they're pushing for other stuff is also a social construct.

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Gender is just a social construct or sex. Why? Why, what's their purpose?

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And I explained to you, I think, one reason why that's their purpose. But I think behind that is something else. They wanna be the creators.

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And if race is something that God organically kind of created as a development over time that naturally occurred, dividing people up at the

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Tower of Babel, different people living in different areas, forming different habits, intermarrying, a mother and a father coming together and creating children and all the sacrifices and then they create children and all those sacrifices and moving on and the habits and traditions that they develop.

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And that's a race. That's something distinct. That's something tangible. We can see it. If you just deny that and say, well, that's just a social construct, then it's laughable.

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It doesn't comport with reality. There is something to that. And I think millennials even, as they watch travel channel stuff and they are interested in different foods and the way different people are peculiar, there is an insecurity that I see.

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There's an identity formation problem. People don't know who they are.

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And if everything's just a social construct and you can be whatever you want, you get rid of obligations and duties and you're just, you'll never know.

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People need to understand who they are, who they were created to be, and where they've been born, the place that God's put them through his providence.

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And that means something. It means something that I'm a Harris. It means something that my family

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I'm a mutt to some extent. I have Scottish and Irish and English and German, some

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Scandinavian, I have all of that, but that means something. I think it means something to a lot of people.

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They're going on ancestry .com to figure out what their story is genetically going back, right?

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Where did the people live who made the sacrifices that led to me being around today? People are hurting for that.

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Now, it means something. It's real. There is something that Christians who say race is just a social construct often also say in the same breath, and we are one in Christ.

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So we come together and all those genetic distinctions and cultural distinctions and whatever other distinctions, they all go away.

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Now, here's the thing. There's a temporal world. You don't stop being a father when you go to church, right? You don't stop being a husband.

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You don't stop being a member of the gun club. You don't stop being a family member. You don't give up those things.

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Those are still part of your identity as a person, but you gain a new identity that also is important, and in fact, more important than those identities, and that's you're a

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Christian. You're part of the family of God, but that's an eternal reality. Paul was still very much concerned for his people.

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He had an allegiance to his people. He wished he could give himself up for the sake of his countrymen. Is that bigoted?

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He didn't say that about any other group, right? And this is after he became a Christian. So there's a sense in which

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Jesus says you should hate father and mother in comparison to your love for me. That's my interpretation of what he says, and that's very true, but you should still have a love for your people, and yes, different people form different groups organically over time.

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The Samaritans, right? They formed their own distinct group in their own distinct area through intermarrying, but that takes generations, and so I think we're in a time right now where we just say race doesn't matter at all, and I'll back up because of the different definitions.

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I'm operating based on the definition from the 1600s. It's a people group. Being a part of the people group doesn't matter.

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Nothing really seems to matter. There's no identity that you're able to have, and it's not bigoted because there's a boundary.

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Every time you define something, you're creating a boundary. You're saying this and not this. When you go to the Old Testament and you look at the nation of Israel, distinct things that represented them, that God even laid down, as far as they weren't supposed to intermarry with other tribes that had false gods because they wanted to make sure that the nation of Israel would keep worshiping the true

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God. Don't mix fabrics. Peculiar things like that that were specific to them.

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Even the alien and the sojourner, right? The reason that you could identify an alien and a sojourner was because there was a distinction between them and national

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Israelites. Russell Moore didn't like that. He brings up the alien and sojourner a lot, but there's actually the reason, even saying that they're an alien or a sojourner means you're making a distinction.

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It means they're not Israeli. And so there is something important.

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There is something important to God about nations. And races would, in the broad conception of what a race is, it would go right along with this.

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Every tribe, tongue, and nation in Revelation, they're not, it's not just a meaningless definitions.

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They're all there specifically representing those identities.

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So I just have a hard time with giving that up. If you're gonna say, well, race is just a social construct and you're intending to answer

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Darwinian evolution, you gotta be specific about it and you gotta define it. And we need really clear definitions now more than ever.

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Say, I don't believe that our human worth is conferred to us through our biology.

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I don't believe in genetic determinism. I believe that we are all made in the image of God and we are all part of the human race.

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And understanding that God has also divided people groups up and people and families who have gone out and over a course of time have lived in certain areas and developed certain distinctions.

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And God cares about those distinctions too. In fact, the gospel is supposed to bless all the nations. Those are real distinctions.

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In the New Testament, the word ethnos is used constantly to refer to the nations or the

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Gentiles generally. Those are the two terms generally ethnos is applied to. And yes, we do have another identity.

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We do have a greater identity. And the distinctions that might, the wall of separation that may have been there, the barrier between people groups because of past hurts or whatever, that goes away.

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You have unity in Christ, but that doesn't mean that you're now no longer Scottish or you're no longer

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Ethiopian or something like that. You're still that. So we can't, that's immunitizing the eschaton at best.

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We can't do that. We shouldn't do that. From my own personal life, I've worshiped the

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Lord in Turkey. I've loved it. I've been with believers from, I mean, there's a bond you have.

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You don't even know them. There's a bond you have that's greater than whatever. I mean, I don't have any bond with white guys. I don't walk into a place, oh, they're white.

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Hey, you know, there's nothing like that. But you know what? It's possible.

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And let me give you a story. When I was in Turkey, I remember there was a woman who walked up to me and she had a little girl.

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And she says, where are you from? I said, from the United States. And she was from Great Britain.

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And she's like, oh, someone else just like me. Okay, I remember this.

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I'm like, just like, and I remember I was so confused at first. I'm like, you're nothing like me. We defeated you in the

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Revolutionary War. I mean, no, I didn't say that, but I was like, you're from Britain. But you know what?

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We spoke the same language. We looked similar to each other. We probably have some common ancestors somewhere along the line.

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We have probably similar habits and traditions compared to Turkish people. And there was something special about that to her.

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There was something, and it wasn't bigoted, okay? Anyone who would call that bigoted is a bigot themselves, all right?

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And it's disgusting that they would have a problem with that. We don't have a problem when people in the

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United States form like a Chinese church because they wanna be with the people that speak Chinese. That it's natural for people to filter into groups according to their traditions, language, all those things.

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And so I remember that. I remember worshiping with people from all over the world, but they were Christians. There was

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Turkish, there was all kinds of people in there, and there was a bond I had with them that was greater than whatever bond that woman thought she had with me.

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And that's so true. When I was in Virginia, I attended a historically black church. I would gladly support and submit myself to the pastor in that church and hug, and I did hug, you know,

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I did hug, and I prayed with my brothers and sisters in that church who didn't look like me, but they were my brothers and sisters in Christ, and I loved them dearly.

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And it's, I'm gonna, just on a personal note, I understand there's haters out there. I understand people wanna call me racist and stuff, and, you know, because they don't like what

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I'm doing. And one of the things that I find difficult about that is because I actually do love,

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I love my brothers and sisters, and I have many brothers and sisters who are from other races, and I love them.

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I love them for who they are, and to disrupt that unity, to try to disrupt it is disgusting.

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And I think that's a sense I have that is shared by a lot on the Christian right who wanna oppose critical race theory.

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And they think that by what I just shared, the way that they can articulate it is by saying race doesn't even matter.

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And I just think that's the wrong way to go. It does matter. In fact, the reason it matters, or the, when

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I am talking to someone who has a different heritage than I do, I can value them and their story and their heritage and their family more because I also, because I value mine first, because I was taught to, my family taught me to love my family, that you're a

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Harris. You look in the mirror, that's who you are. Because I was taught that, I can love others because I know that they are part of something just like what

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I'm part of. It's so important to them. To get rid of the distinction, it gets rid of how special it is.

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It's not special anymore. If there's just, race is just a social construct and all those things that accompany it, just they don't matter.

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We don't even believe that. Look, millennials watch travel blogs and they like experiencing different food and all of that.

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They know that race is not just a social construct, but they engage in the stupid fantasy.

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I'd like to be able to point to someone and be like, that's my brother in Christ over there. And this is my

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Chinese brother in Christ. This is my, I don't know, South African brother in Christ, French brother in Christ, whatever it is.

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And oh man, this guy, he knows all about, usually it's food first. He knows all about a particular dish unique to his people.

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Or he can tell you all about this or that. And that's what makes life interesting. It's what confers identity.

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And right now, we need to know who we are. We need to know who God made us to be. And it doesn't mean you hate other people if you love your own culture.

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So I've used some different words. I've used culture, I've used race, I've used ethnicity, I've used people. There's little differences and nuances and there's a competition for how to define a lot of these words.

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I'm speaking broadly about people groups. I'm speaking, I'm trying to take an understanding from the Bible and from history, and I'm trying to integrate it.

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And that's what I wanna just see other people doing who are in this. I don't have a fully formed opinion on all of this.

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That's why I would hope that maybe you have some ideas you can share with me about this. But I know we need to be doing better.

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We need to be doing better on this topic. Just showing the beauty of different people groups.

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There's a beauty that comes with that and affirming that beauty. And I don't know, just when you say race is just a social construct, it's so bland and boring.

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And then it just all becomes about power and it's all politics. And that's not who we are.

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Bobby Lopez, I'm gonna close with this. Bobby Lopez told me something that really rang true with me about critical race theory.

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He said, he was sick of academia, starting to introduce theory into everything, critical race theory being one of them and getting rid of humanities.

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We're losing our humanity, guys and girls. We're losing our humanity. We're becoming numbers.

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We're becoming cogs in a machine. Everything's abstract. Everything's just something you can manipulate through a central planner.

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And we're losing the actual experiences that, and the legends and just the beautiful art and all of that.

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The literature that is part of a tradition that usually accompanies a certain kind of a people group.

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We're losing all that and it's being replaced with dumb theories. And if we wanna crusade against racism in the definition that used to be around of hating others because of their color of their skin or something, then you need to be about humanities, about letting others share their experiences.

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And the experiences aren't just, well, we just need to all share our experiences of oppression and you who don't have those experiences should feel guilted and shamed.

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That's not what I'm talking about. Those are the only experiences that are allowed to be shared and sometimes they're made up.

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No, I'm talking about what God has done in different people groups.

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Naturally through his providence or through the gospel going forward in a people group, history is his story and it's all beautiful.

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And that's kind of, that's how I've always thought of history. And I've always thought of this whole subject.

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And so it's offensive to me when people say, race is a social construct and they mean by it that it's just meaningless.

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And there's, it doesn't matter. Our culture doesn't matter. Nothing matters really.

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The only thing that matters is power. That's called ideology and we need to stop it. So hope this was helpful for you in thinking through some of this stuff.

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Again, I don't have fully pledged thoughts on all of this and I'm open to challenge. I really am on some of this, but I wanted to get the conversation started at least in people's minds.