Saturday Special: The Interracial Marriage Debate

Welcome to a Saturday special edition of When We Understand the Text. Looking at current events and responding to them with a solid understanding of scripture. Visit our website at www .utt .com. Here once again is Pastor Gabe.

Romans 1 and the Backstory of the Interracial Marriage Debate

The Interracial Marriage Debate. Pastor Gabe's blog for January 24, 2026. Romans 1, 16 -17 says, For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.

For in it the righteousness of God is revealed, from faith for faith. As it is written, the righteous shall live by faith. Some of you may be aware that there was a debate about interracial marriage on the internet a little over a week ago, and most of you are probably not aware.

It's not like everything that happens on the internet is automatically common knowledge. The debate included Ruslan K .D., along with Avery from God Logic Apologetics, who were for interracial marriage, versus a pastor named Joel Webbin, along with Antonio Griffith and Wesley Todd of NXR Studios, who oppose interracial marriage.

By the way, NXR stands for New Christian Right. Ruslan and Avery mopped the floor with Webbin and his team. Ruslan came prepared, with Bible open and sources ready. Webbin and company were very unprepared, perhaps thinking they could rely on their wit to gab their way through it.

I'll get to the specifics of the debate in just a moment, but let me begin by sharing how this debate came to be in the first place. The lead-up to the debate. It was only recently that I realized I played a small part in setting this debate in motion.

On January 5th, Corey J. Mahler, who is a neo-Nazi and co-host of the anti-Semitic podcast Stone Choir, said on the social media site X, Under Christian nationalism, interracial marriage will be made a capital offense.

In case it needs a definition, interracial marriage involves couples that come from different ethnic backgrounds, though it's largely subjective. An interracial marriage is called such almost exclusively based on noticeable differences, especially skin color.

The most commonly referenced example is a black man with a white wife. You would say that's interracial. But if you saw a Korean man with a Japanese wife, you probably wouldn't call that interracial, at least not right away.

My background is almost entirely Welsh, while my wife is a mix of German and American Indian. But would anyone look at us and think we were interracial? If you saw a Middle Eastern man with a Latin American wife, would you even notice the difference?

I hold that there's actually no such thing as an interracial marriage, not in the sense that term is often defined. As the late Vodie Bauckham pointed out, race is a social construct, and many times those distinctions that we might call racial distinctions aren't clear.

Race is not a biblical concept. The word doesn't even appear in the King James Bible, first published in 1611, because that word as a category distinction between human beings would have been brand new at the time.

We are all of the human race. Every human being is descended from Adam and Eve, or even more narrowly, from Noah and his wife. After the Great Flood, every person and nation on Earth was the same skin color, speaking the same language.

It wasn't until God cursed the people at the Tower of Babel and confused their languages, dispersing them across the globe, that we became ethnically distinct. After Christ came and died on the cross, making purification for sins, Hebrews 1 .3, he rose from the dead and ascended back to his Father.

All who believe in Jesus are no longer of the fallen race of Adam who are under condemnation, but we are of a new race, a chosen race, as called in 1 Peter 2 .9. The only two races of people, then, are those of the first Adam and those born again by the last Adam, who is Jesus Christ.

So the only sense in which there could be interracial marriage is if a man who is of the first Adam, meaning that he's not a Christian, marries a woman who is of the last Adam, meaning that she is a Christian.

And such a union should not be. As 2 Corinthians 6 .14 says, do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. Only in this sense could we say that interracial marriage is not God's design for marriage. Of course, when Corey Mahler condemns interracial marriage, he's saying that if a black man marries a white woman or vice versa, that should be a capital crime.

Within a day, his declaration on X received one and a half thousand likes. Now on X, you can't see who likes someone else's post. You used to be able to, but this changed, I think it was in the last year.

Likes are now hidden. But wouldn't it be interesting to know who liked that post? Which pastors like that post? Wouldn't it give you a good idea of whom to avoid? So on January 6th, tongue in cheek, I screenshot Mahler's post and said, hey, Elon, referring to Elon Musk, who is the owner of X, can we get a special privilege for one post and see who liked this?

Justin Peters even commented and said, no kidding. But I tell you what, the anti-interracial marriage bigots came out in full force in the comments, which by the way, I expected to happen. Said one, why would you want to give your kids genetic diseases and decrease their IQ?

It should be a capital offense. Said another, it's obviously true. Why would I not like it? Another said, I like that post. Miscegenation is the ultimate betrayal of a family. Another said, I liked it and called me the F word for homosexual.

Several others called me hateful and demonic. Dozens more told me they liked Mahler's post, many of them throwing profanity at me in the process. But these were all anonymous. Even the comments I quoted above, I did not see one person put their name and face on their admission.

They're so chicken about it. They could fry themselves up and get served with a side of fries and coleslaw. Now, a friend of mine named Lizzie also commented under my post, and she said, definitely Joel Webben, meaning that Webben would like Mahler's idea about interracial marriage being a capital crime.

Webben responded and said, nope. To which Lizzie replied, are you for or against interracial marriage? On January 7th, Webben made a post in response to Lizzie, in which the name of my online ministry, WWU TT, was also cited.

And he said, quote, the average Christian woman on social media is retarded. I don't mean to be rude, but this is a lesson for the general public that is simply too valuable to pass up. First, I will truthfully and plainly answer the woman's question without apology.

I am against interracial marriage. That is to say, I believe interracial marriage generally goes against God's normative design for humanity, nations and cultures, unquote. His response went on for another 400 words, but you get the idea.

And of course, not only did he feel compelled to share his opinion on interracial marriage, but he also so lovingly expressed that most Christian women on social media are mentally handicapped in defense of Webben.

We also got this beautiful gem from a pastor named Dale Partridge, who said, quote, as a Christian man, happily married to a Mexican, Spanish, American woman. I actually agree with Joel Webben. Interracial marriage is not the ideal, unquote.

So Partridge is happily married in an interracial marriage, but it's not ideal. It's astonishing that he actually thought about those two sentences, typed them out, saw them with his own eyes and didn't for a moment think, you know, this is probably not the best way to honor my wife or our marriage.

Those couple of days produced some of the highest comedy responses I've ever seen on social media. And somewhere in there, Ruslan KD challenged Webben to a debate over this statement that interracial marriage is against God's normative design.

Webben and his team even flew Ruslan and Avery to Texas for the debate and covered their expenses. I think it's crazy we're even having this debate in 2026. I, for one, would not have agreed to it. Nonetheless, the wokeness ideology that has permeated the left side of American politics and the influence of guys like Nick Fuentes on chronically online young men have led many to redraw lines of ethnic discrimination, making this debate relevant.

Ruslan KD and the Biblical Case Against Ethnic Discrimination

So there's the backstory. Now on to the specifics of the debate. The debate itself. Ruslan KD, whose full name is Ruslan Karaglinov, is a Christian content creator and hip hop artist who is now also a bestselling author.

He is of Armenian descent, born in Baku before his family fled persecution to settle in the United States. He was an atheist gangster who converted to Christianity. His wife, Monette, is black. They've been married for about 17 years and have children together.

Though I believe Ruslan is a brother in the Lord and he addresses a lot of Christian controversies through his channel, I do not recommend his content. He can be soft on progressive and liberal subjects.

He welcomes prosperity teachers and those from the New Apostolic Reformation. He's very critical of reformed theology, and his overall presentation is very click baby. Recently, his church was criticized for not being transparent with their finances, but credit where credit is due.

Ruslan did excellent in this debate. The question they were debating was this. Is interracial marriage against God's normative design? Ruslan said no, and Webin took the affirmative position. Ruslan was sure to make the distinction that if a person is going to take the position that interracial marriage is not God's normative design, then God disapproves of it.

So he does not approve of, say, a black man marrying a white woman. This is not merely a disagreement over preferences. There's no gray area. This has moral implications. Ruslan opened the debate by simply stating that in the Bible, we see a strong record of interethnic marriages without any hint of disapproval.

Certainly no condemnation. Moses was married to a Kushite woman. In Numbers 12, when Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses' marriage, God punished Miriam. He did not punish Moses. In the genealogy of Jesus Christ, Ruth was a Moabite woman married to Boaz, a Jew.

Rahab was a Canaanite woman and is made an ancestor of Jesus. These are not fringe stories, Ruslan said. They are redemptive history moments. If these were the exception to the rule, we would expect to see that laid out clearly in Scripture, and Scripture never speaks negatively of it in the slightest.

There are clear rebukes throughout the New Testament prohibiting all kinds of sins, sexual immorality, or any kind of sex outside of marriage between a man and his wife, idolatry, disobedience to parents, murder, theft, lying, greed, covetousness, sorcery and witchcraft, fits of anger, crude joking, sowing division among brethren, and false teaching, to name a few.

But not one time is there even a hint of disapproval against what we might term today as an interracial marriage. Colossians 3 .11 says, Here in Christ. There is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, scythian, slave, free, but Christ is all and in all.

The Bible simply does not make ethnic distinctions between people in the body of Christ that we have a tendency to make, and it especially makes no prohibition whatsoever on interracial marriage. Ruslan was very biblical with his defense, whereas Weben was not.

Ruslan was prepared, whereas Weben was not as prepared and appeared to be taken off guard by how ready Ruslan was, at times easily thrown off by basic questions regarding interracial marriage. At one point, Weben said that he would not encourage his white daughter to marry a black man even if he was a Christian.

Avery of God Logic, who is black, said, Would you discourage it, though? This is a simple yes or no question, but Weben put on a struggle session to answer it. Avery had to ask that question two more times before Weben gave a straight answer, and he finally, after a long pause, gave a stuttering, Yeah, yeah, he would discourage it.

At the start of the debate, Ruslan demonstrated that this opinion of Weben's is new. Ruslan played a clip of Weben from just a couple of years before, saying that he would praise God if his daughter brought home a Hispanic or black man as long as that man loved the Lord.

Here is Joel Weben.

The natural thought process is that that skin, that blood needs to be preserved. And so you have to turn inward rather than outward and embracing people from every tribe, tongue and nation. And, you know, I've got three girls, and if one of them, you know, bring some Hispanic guy home one day when she's older and the guy loves the Lord, then I want to say, Praise God, marry my daughter, you know, or black guy.

Praise God, marry my daughter. But but I feel like if race is such a you can't say that.

If race is such a big deal, you can't say that. So I don't know. I think I think at best, Joel, you've clearly flip flopped on his position really bad at.

Worse.

This is a part of a bigger play for partnerships with other Christian nationalists. But if race is a big deal, racism is a necessary wall of defense to preserve the big deal. Now, you guys have said race isn't everything, but it's not nothing.

So I'm just more curious on how you just a couple of years ago went from that to where you are today. And really, my frustration is in you saying I'm against interracial marriage. You can say I have preferences.

I wouldn't even be mad if you said, hey, I want my grandkids to look like me. I want my kids to marry. But when you go out and say I am against something as a pastor, I think I have some issues with that because I just don't see it in Scripture.

On March 15th, 2022, Webin was on X lambasting the woke for discouraging interracial marriage. And now Webin appears to be exactly where he says the woke are. There's a reason this segment of Christian nationalists are often referred to as the woke right on some issues, especially regarding race.

They sound like the woke left. Webin said that interracial marriage is biblically permissible, but not ideal. And to defend his case, Webin compared it with polygamy or having multiple spouses, saying that polygamy is permissible according to Scripture.

This goes against explicit text where Jesus said that marriage is to be between one man and one woman, Matthew 19, four through six, and that a godly man should have only one wife, First Timothy three, two and Titus one, six.

But it also goes against Webin's own statement of faith. The church that Webin pastors uses the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith 1689 as their faith statement. So does my church. Chapter 25, paragraph one on marriage says, quote,.

Marriage is to be between one man and one woman. Neither is it lawful for any man to have more than one wife, nor for any woman to have more than one husband at the same time. Unquote. If Webin is going to hold the position that polygamy is biblically permissible, then either he has to step down as a pastor of a reformed Baptist church or his church can no longer call themselves reformed Baptist.

He's going against his own church's historic statement of faith. Ruslan also demonstrated that Webin's perspective is not consistent with church history. But most especially, Webin failed to give a single biblical example as to why interracial marriage is not God's preference.

Rather, Webin gave his preference elevated to a position of God's preference, which is exactly what a false teacher does. Paul told Timothy not to allow any teacher to teach any different doctrine that would promote speculations and vain discussion, desiring to be teachers of the law without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make their confident assertions.

See First Timothy one, three through seven. After the debate, the burden of proof was on Webin to prove from scripture that interracial marriage is not God's normative design, and Webin couldn't bear it.

One of the most widely circulated clips from the debate was a point where Webin had a hypocritical meltdown.

He said, my whole thesis that kicked off this whole thing where everybody got mad at me, thousands of people, Christians calling me a racist, saying that I hate people who these are people who have been saying it for years.

They haven't even taken the time to watch the show to see that one of my cohosts is interracial. These are are deceitful, mean spirited people.

They're being mean.

It's wrong.

Yes, remember that whole thesis that kicked this whole thing off that thesis where he called a friend of mine retarded and most Christian women on social media are mentally handicapped. Oh, but they're being so mean to me, Webin says.

You know, it was less than a week after this debate that Webin quoted me on X and accused me of saying something I did not say, also accusing me of spiritual homosexuality, except the word that he used was the F word for this abominable sin.

According to Webin, we're all the mean ones, but he is the paragon of civil discourse. He has a reputation for name calling and belittling. It came out by Ruslan in his opening statement of the debate that Webin had a tendency to put down people who disagree with him.

After the debate, Webin went on his channel and said, I would say out of 10 people, nine.

People who thought we lost the debate. If you follow their accounts and you know who those people are, probably about a 90 to 110 IQ. And then one out of 10 very generous who thought that we won the debate also coincidentally happened to be guys with 130 IQ plus.

If you think Webin is rude and brash, his followers can be much worse. Earlier this week, I got an email from a guy named Elliot defending Webin's position in the debate. I thought about posting the email and showing you my response, but it would just lengthen this already lengthy article.

In short, he said that the white race is being systematically erased or blended out of existence, which he called a white genocide. I responded to him with a hypothetical question. Let's say that 300 years from now, if because of interracial marriage and so forth, the amount of melanin in humanity's overall pigmentation is just slightly less white than it is today.

That's if it were possible for us to measure such a thing. And we would even notice after three centuries that we're not quite as white as we used to.

Be.

I simply said to him, why would that be a bad thing? While Elliot was previously broad and articulate, he suddenly got short and terse. You are not a Christian. You are a Kuckstein, he said, which means he's saying that my wife sleeps with other men in a second reply.

He said, you are a demon and you are evil beyond measure, evil beyond measure. This is all because I asked him a hypothetical question that he did not want to think about or answer. He had an absolute meltdown and said I was going to hell.

The Gospel Answer to Racism and Ethnic Hostility

Now, I don't deny the increasing discrimination in our culture against white people, especially straight white men. The liberal left may not be in control of the government right now, and President Trump has done things on the federal level to remove the woke DEI and LGBTQ standards that were enforced by the Biden administration.

But that doesn't mean wokeness has gone anywhere. Lots of jokes are being made right now about the new Star Trek show called Starfleet Academy, because it's obviously pushing a diversity, equity and inclusion narrative that is anti white male.

It's also, as I understand it, just an extremely terribly written show. The movie Sinners, which is now the most Oscar Award nominated movie in history, has an anti white narrative. And the actors of the film and the movie's director have made comments that discriminate against white people.

Just today, I saw a comment from a former reality TV star turned podcast host named Jennifer Welsh, and she said, this is a cancer.

White evangelical Christianity is a cancer. These are the worst of our country. These are the worst people in our country.

Surely you've seen or heard similar comments. It's hip and cool on the left to discriminate against white Christians. Sadly, the anti white male discrimination has even found its way into many churches and seminaries.

I don't deny this discrimination exists. It's because it exists that young white men, especially those who are chronically online and spend too much time on YouTube X and Reddit are getting fed up and pushing back even hating nonsensical things like interracial marriage.

But the answer to this is not more racism. That's exactly what the woke agenda was pushing. More racism. As race baiter Ibram X. Kendi infamously said, the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.

That's from the left. And it's as if a segment on the right has said, you want it? You got it. But the solution here is the same one I was giving when wokeness got its foot in the door of the church. The answer is the gospel of Jesus Christ.

If by faith in Jesus, your sins have been washed away, there should be no discrimination in his body, the church. We are one in Christ and co-heirs of his eternal kingdom made up of people from every tribe, tongue, and nation.

Revelation 7, 9 says, behold, a great multitude that no one could number from every nation from all tribes and peoples and languages standing before the throne and before the lamb clothed in white robes with palm branches in their hands and crying out with a loud voice, salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne and to the lamb.

Conclusion: One Body in Christ, Not According to the Flesh

Conclusion. As said in Ephesians 2, 14, he himself is our peace who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh, the dividing wall of hostility and second Corinthians 5, 16 says from now on, therefore we regard no one according to the flesh.

Titus 3, 3 says we were once hated by others and hating one another, but when the goodness and loving kindness of God, our savior appeared, he saved us. I suspect that this is not the last we've heard from this debate.

We're going to be attacked with woke ideologies from the right and from the left, but I am going to continue to stand on scripture as my standard, which says there is no distinction between Jew and Greek for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him.

Romans 10, 12.