Supreme Court, BLM, Thabiti, 2 Cor. 4:4

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line on a Tuesday. I mentioned yesterday on the program, the Supreme Court decision had just come down, the Bostock decision, I think is what it's being called now.

Actually, it was a bundled decision. There were a number of different cases thrown together, which is amazing to me, because one of them was the funeral home where you had a man who decided to identify as a woman and wanted to start dressing as a woman in his role as a funeral director.

And so that's cool now. That's, you can't do anything about that as an employer. You can have cross-dressers, because that's the new thing. And yeah, of course, no one, the founding fathers, and in fact, no one in 1964 when the Title VII was passed and the civil rights legislation back in the 60s, none of them envisioned any of these things, but it doesn't matter, see?

That's where we are today. So I mentioned we would take some time to look at it. There's already been a tremendous amount of excellent material produced, commentary, articles. I realize most of us are just like, I just can't take any more of 2020.

Just, I can't go there. It's too much. And I think that's purposeful in many ways. I think the idea is to get us all just to throw our hands up in the air and say, okay, it's done, we surrender. Too much craziness.

We just want to live our lives. We want to build our families. We want to raise our children, our grandchildren. We don't want to, we want to be able to go to Target and bashes and Kroger's and buy food and repair our cars and just live life.

And we struggle with the people who have so much energy to invest themselves in destroying everybody else's lives, because we just don't have that. And so it's, yeah, I get it. I hear you. Take some time off, everything else.

But if you are a Christian in business, in education, doing almost anything in our society, you have to understand what has happened and what will happen as a result of what has happened. At the very, very least, everyone who has been making the constant argument, it's all about the Supreme Court, that's never, never what the Founding Fathers intended.

That's not what the Constitution envisions. But let's be honest, the function of our governmental system has been severely compromised by the fact that there are now enough people on the left. I'm not saying on the right, because there's a difference between the left and right.

The left are ideologues. The left have a fundamental goal of the re-creation, which obviously requires the destruction, first of all, but the re-creation of the American government. And so they vote as a bloc.

There's no such thing as bipartisanship anymore. There's no such thing as doing what's best for the country anymore. There's no such thing as honoring the Constitution anymore. And so the legislative branch is pretty much not able to do anything any longer.

And so legislation has now been moved to the courts. And you get through the courts what you cannot get through the legislatures. And where do the judges come from? But from the Ivy League schools, which are absolutely soaked in the most anti-American worldview possible.

So shouldn't be shocked, shouldn't be surprised. Literally what happened with this decision is that the Equality Act, which we warned could be passed even under the Republicans, but it was unlikely, but would definitely be passed if a Democratic majority was obtained via, especially rigged elections by mail-in ballot.

And that basically is no longer relevant. As Justice Alito in his scathing dissent wrote, quote, there is only one word for what the court has done today, legislation. The document that the court releases is in the form of a judicial opinion interpreting a statute, but that is deceptive.

Not, it's my opinion that that's wrong. No, that's deceptive. What the court did, and this was, you fully, what we fully, we fully expected the leftists to do what leftists do. Leftists have a different moral concept than the founders ever envisioned.

For them, the reforming of American society into a socialist utopia is a good and moral thing to do. And therefore they'll do whatever they need to do to bring about that final result. Even if that involves all sorts of contradiction and self-contradiction and everything else that goes along with it, they'll do that.

And so when you see how the voting takes place in the Supreme Court, you will see that especially Justice Kagan tries to pick off one of the, at least one of the conservatives to swing everything. She did that with Gorsuch in this one.

And of course, Roberts is compromised from the beginning. So what we've seen here is in the important worldview issues, the court is still 6 -3 leftist. We don't have a conservative court. We have a leftist court and it'll only get worse from here.

But the point again is that this isn't how it was supposed to be. And once you have a sufficient number of people within a constitutional republic who want to destroy that republic, they will succeed.

And we have people at the very, almost everyone in the seats of power. What's actually amazing is that it has survived, this constitution has survived an amount of poison in its bloodstream over the past 50 years that would have killed, it would have killed an Italian constitution in about three seconds.

Given that at one point a little while ago, the Italians had had more governments since World War II than there had been years since World War II. Yeah, an Italian constitution would have died at this level of poison in a matter of seconds.

So give them credit, but no one can design a governmental system that can survive the fundamental treason of pretty much everyone that is elected to positions of authority within its system. It has to assume that the people participating want to keep it going.

And that's not the case anymore. That's not the case anymore. And the reason is a worldview issue. And that is seen in this decision. We now, if you read it, if you read the decision, it's available online, number of different places you can download it.

If you read the decision, what you read is Gorsuch playing word games. Because look, no one seriously believes that in 1964, anytime in the 60s, into the early 70s, even when other legislative work was done on all of this and the statutes, no one believes that they had in mind or intended to say that by banning discrimination based on sex, that this had anything to do with homosexuality.

And certainly it had nothing to do with transgenderism. Homosexuality was still illegal in a large number of states at that point in time. Transgenderism was considered a mental disease and should have remained in that consideration because it is.

But there's just no rational human being can possibly believe that A, the founders would have for a second envisioned any of this or felt that anything that they had written could in any way, shape or form be interpreted as having room for this kind of legislation and thinking and the violation of the created order because that's what it is.

And then secondly, no one in the 1960s had this mindset either. This is not what was being voted for. The president who signed it wasn't thinking this. And so you have a modern Supreme Court redefining the meaning of words so as to expand past legislation because this wasn't going through Congress.

It wasn't gonna make it through the Senate. And so legislating for the bench. Usurping the authority of the legislative branch, fundamentally undercutting not only the societal norms of the United States, but the governmental structures as well.

And like I said, I think John Adams and others, you've heard the quote from John Adams, the constitution is only sufficient for a moral and religious people. It is wholly insufficient for the governance of any other.

He's exactly right about that. We are no longer immoral and religious people by any stretch of anyone's imagination. The deists amongst the founders would say that. The deists would be astounded at the utter lack of moral fiber, let alone the completely non-theistic perspective that is present now.

And so it's not at all surprising. So what you find is you find Gorsuch playing word games to try to literally call this a textualist argument. And in the process, I mean, it wasn't as childish as the Kennedy, as Obergefell's, as that majority opinion was.

It wasn't as feely-feely, emotional. What about the little children stuff that you had in Obergefell? But it was still incredibly sad to read. I mean, when you listen to an argument like this, and that's what the two sides of this issue are.

It's a debate, it's an argument. When you read the majority side, it is strained and easily refuted. And Alito tore it to shreds. Without hardly any difficulty at all. Justice Thomas joining with him, even just going point by point, even the times that he attempted to say, well, certain dictionaries say this, and certain dictionaries say that.

Everybody knows exactly what was meant by discrimination on the basis of sex. Now, I would say that we planted our own seeds back then of our own destruction by getting the government involved in things that the government wasn't supposed to be involved with in the first place.

This whole issue of discrimination, the very term goes back to the Latin. And the funny thing is, the function of a court is to discriminate. It's just, you're deciding between different things. That's what discriminare means.

So we sort of have been building our own coffin for a long time as the government has gotten bigger and bigger and bigger and intrude into things that it was never intended to intrude into. Anyways, and now we have this entire worldview on the part of many, many people, where if you have something that you feel needs to be done, well, the government has to do it.

That behemoth, once the government starts growing, it'll never stop until it eats itself. It has nothing left. And it feeds upon the citizens and feeds upon their liberties and their freedoms. And so that's what you get.

And so I would recommend to you the reading of Justice Alito's dissent, because he, even though Gorsuch and the majority try to say that this is somewhat of a narrow decision, it's not. It is precedent setting.

It will have impact in a huge number of areas, but especially for Christians who own businesses, who try to work in the realm of business, schools, seminaries, universities, this decision will be the basis of an absolute flurry of legislative action seeking to, in essence, banish the last vestiges of a Christian worldview from the public square in the United States.

This is exactly what the left wants. This is what the elite left wants. This is what BLM wants. This is what the radical revolutionaries want. This is what the latte-sipping, vegan burger-eating revolutionaries in Chaz in Seattle want.

And they're all coming together at the same time. Now, I know in the long run, they can't hold it together. Right now, they have a target, the established governmental order, societal order of the United States.

They want to take that down, and they want to end our influence in the world. They want to, they're being funded by George Soros and by the Chinese, who have differing, they have different, Soros has different goals than China has.

But if you've all got the same goal, you'll work together to accomplish that goal. Then you can turn on each other later. You both think you're smarter than the other one, and so you can turn on each other later.

And that is where the real interest is going to lie, is what's going to happen then when they start turning on each other, because they don't have any moral foundation to not do so. But anyway, but what is fascinating here is the court literally is trying to, what the court did was the court destroyed the historic common sense necessary for human flourishing and existence definition of sex, gender.

They destroyed it without ever defining it. There's no positive definition of what a transgender person is in the majority opinion. So that's going to lead to all sorts of further confusion and breaking down, division, intersectionality, everything else.

But that's what they did. They refused to stand with what would hold the society together, and instead go with this nebulous decision, which will result in all sorts of lower courts running with this every which possible direction.

But the one thing that is obvious and plain is if you hold to natural understandings of these words, the words that actually function in the world rather than they're simply the fevered result of someone's percolating brain, you will feel the full weight of the society coming down upon your shoulders.

And as was pointed out, I read Pastor Gabe's tweet yesterday, and I've seen a number of other people follow up on it today. If you had your hand out to Uncle Sam for that payroll stuff just a few weeks ago, he owns you.

He owns you. You took his money. It was a cheap sell. It was a cheap sell. Yeah, it was a cheap sell, but he owns you. And Christian schools, they're only going to give you a little bit of money. There's only a few that have always said, we will not take our money.

We won't take Pell Grants. We won't take any of those student loans. We'll work with you in other ways, but we're not selling our souls. There are very few schools like that. Very few schools like that.

And so every school that has been taking that stuff is under the authority of this decision and everything that's going to come from it in regards to every aspect of what discrimination now supposedly means.

So, and if you're a church, and you just went, hey, that sounds like, come on, Uncle Sam, let's get some of this. Ah, Caesar never, ever, ever gives without demanding something back with interest.

This morning I was watching Fox News and a conservative pundit commented that while he is a conservative and he knows that the language in the 64 Act doesn't actually say sexual orientation, what the court wisely did was extended, took an extension from the language, and he thought it was a good decision.

And I'm listening to him and I'm like, do you hear yourself? You're basically admitting to the fact that they're inventing this stuff, they're inserting words and thoughts in there that were never intended,.

And you think that's a good thing? Yep, they do. It doesn't, this is not a conservative leftist split, sadly, this is a worldview issue, and that's why Trump's response was, hey, that's fine, no problem.

It's been obvious, it's been plain, it's been clear that Donald Trump as an individual does not have a worldview issue with transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that stuff. That's his worldview, he's a New Yorker, and New Yorkers have been diverse for a very, very long time, is how they would put it.

He has no issue with it. There may be people in his administration that do, but he doesn't, and that's plain, that's clear. There are very, very, very few people in positions of high authority that have any concept of the long-term impact of the degradation of the worldview that is necessary for the Constitution to function, and the left just wants to get rid of all of it because they don't want to see the Constitution function.

They want to see it turned into a mashed potato so they can just form it into whatever they want, but the people pretending that they actually recognize the importance of the Constitution, if they are secularists, they have no mechanism for defending it outside of pure traditionalism.

And that's what I was gonna say, is not only do you have Trump in that situation, but I noticed, where did that go? Where did I put that? Oh yeah, here it is. Uncle Gary, Uncle Gary DeMar put up an article recently, well, this morning actually, talking about the home church of Gorsuch.

Judge Neil Gorsuch and his family have been sitting under the ministry of Reverend Susan Springer, who pastors St. John's Episcopal Church in Boulder, Colorado. Let me tell you something. I know Boulder, and there are some good believers in Boulder, but Boulder is deep, deep, deep blue.

Okay, it ain't purple, it's deep blue, yes.

My wife's from Boulder, did you know that? And the interesting thing about the downtown shops in Boulder, I think you and I have actually walked those malls together. I've been there.

You know what it reminds me of? Well, after I came down from the high that I got from walking down the streets in Boulder. Chop. What? Jazz?

Yeah. Seattle. Yeah. I think they moved to Seattle, is what I think. Yeah, that's Boulder. Because you go there and it's like, oh, that's life, that's the way it is. Yep. The high is all get out.

Yeah, that's Boulder. But that's not the most important part about that, it's Reverend Susan Springer, and it's an Episcopalian church, okay? Machen was right, Christianity and liberalism, different religion, and this church is as leftist as you can get, it's way, way out there.

And so what do you expect? Heresy has results. Heresy matters. And for a long time, a lot of us have just sort of looked at the liberals and just sort of chuckled at how absurd they looked in their rainbow frocks with their women preachers and their trees walking in to do environmental church services.

And their numbers crashing, disappearing. I mean, the Episcopalian is the dodo of the theological world, it will eventually disappear. But this shows you the damage that it can do on its way out, is you can have people who looked, quote unquote, conservative when they were chosen to the bench, but the reality is all these people are coming out of institutions of higher learning, Harvard and Yale primarily, that are soaked in a worldview of secularism.

And I posted something this morning, and I bet, I bet a lot of people when I posted this this morning were like, oh, yeah, come on, really? But I grabbed a graphic and I posted it and I said, realize something, none of this, none of this could ever, ever have happened were it not for this man.

And I posted a picture of Charles Darwin. And if you're one of those biologos guys that has a picture of Charles Darwin in your study, you just don't get it, you just don't get it. You may be as smart as they come when it comes to theories and everything else, but you don't understand this worldview thing.

None of this could have ever happened in the world before Darwin. That doesn't mean you didn't have homosexuality and things like that beforehand. You did, but you did not have this idea that what we think between here and here creates reality.

Even the unbeliever still had to deal with the reality of the existence of God in a day of judgment. Darwin ended that. Darwin opened the door, set the world free. And you'll hear atheists saying this all the time.

They fully understand this. Set the world free from all the restraints that kept it from spiraling into the insanity we now see overtaking Western culture. And there is no meaningful Christian response to this to what's going on with the sudden rise of the race issue is all there is.

The whole issue of man and ethnicities, the Christian church has no response to that if we have bought into Darwin. If we no longer have a creator who is making us in his image, if we no longer have a creator who has a decree that he is accomplishing, by the way, you really don't have anything to say to what's going on, which is why we see so many Christian churches just, it's like the flood just picks them up and walks off with them.

One day there's a VBS going on and singing the same songs I sang when I was in VBS. And the next day they're floating by with rainbow flags sticking out the windows. How did that happen? Well, the foundations were rotted through.

Foundations weren't there. Our message is rooted and grounded in the fact that there is a creator who defines who we are and what human flourishing really is. We don't get to make that up and then tell God just to give us whatever we want.

And so, I'm hearing a lot of people saying, this is all the Christian church's fault. I've never been one of the go burn the churches down because of what the society is doing type people. I don't get it, I don't understand it.

But if you want to define church in a super broad fashion and include everything that has nothing to do with the church in that, okay, fine. Have we been as quick on the button to respond? No, no, no, I certainly wouldn't make that claim.

We are normally behind the curve. But that's the past, the issue is now. With the speed at which things are happening, which only seems to be accelerating, we need to really understand the application of the Christian worldview.

And that needs to start within our families. That needs to start, I tweeted last night, more than ever before, that conversation around the dinner table with the children. I know that never happens anymore in the modern family.

But if you're wise enough to be doing homeschooling so that that time does exist, then that's when children remember what it is you have to say. And they need to have a positive understanding of how it is that God is their creator, gives them transcendent meaning.

It makes every little boy made in the image of God is called to be a man. And that's a distinct set of priorities that is fulfilled in light of the gifts that God gives to that little boy. And he is to be instructed and trained to take that energy that is his and that growing strength that is his and to channel it in such a way as to glorify God and to fulfill his purpose as a protector and a leader.

And that little girl is to be taught that it is good to be a girl, that she would want to be a woman, that she would want to be a godly woman, that she would want to be a wife and a mother and to nurture her own children in the fear and admonition of the Lord.

And that she has transcendent meaning, transcendent value before God, that she is created in God's image and she has purpose. And that the world will seek to steal that from her by lying to her in so many different ways, in so many different ways.

This has to be illustrated. It has to be modeled. It has to be made so very clear. And then we seek to communicate that reality to others around us. And right now, we still have those freedoms, but we can see.

If you cannot see what's coming, if you cannot see the daily deluge of examples of people losing their jobs for saying things that would have been barely controversial six months ago, people get ready to be maligned in the same way that Christians were maligned in the early church.

The Christians, the early Christians in those first, that first century, they were accused of cannibalism and all sorts of sexual debauchery. They were called atheists. They were said to be basically opposed to the peace of the Roman Empire.

They were seeking to overthrow Caesar. There were all sorts of lies told about them. And you read the second century apologists and they're constantly referring to stuff and refuting stuff that we were like, why are they spending so much time on this?

It was because of the constant public slander that was aimed at them. And so they had to respond to these things. That is what is already happening to us and is only going to increase. So we'll have it from outside the church, but one thing that is different now is that we will have it from inside the church too.

You didn't have the apostate Christian church. You did have false teachers, but they were abused by the Romans too in those first few centuries. But now we have a different situation where you will have the apostate church joining in and you will have those within the church they may not be a part of apostate groups, but they are within the church and they will seek to sow confusion and to attack.

And so what we call Christian cancel culture, it will be upon us. Things that were unthinkable just a matter of months ago will become normative. If I go speak at a church someplace, there have already been times in the past for normally narrow reasons where people would contact the church and say, you know, you shouldn't have that guy in because he's this and he's that.

That's just going to become the norm. That's just going to become, you're going to be accused of being a bigoted, racist, racist, bigoted, bigoted, racist, racist bigot. They don't really have a whole lot of stuff, but they repeat it loudly and scream.

It's a little bit like that awesome video of the chick and the cops in, where was that? That these, that look at, if they had tried to get an actor to play that cop, they couldn't have gotten anybody to do it any better than that cop did.

Because he's just look, and he's just got that face. That's just sort of like, really? I mean, every time you talk to us, you're just insulting us. Don't you think there's something wrong with that? And then she just starts screaming.

And the look on his face is sort of like, ah. Yep, bye-bye, we'll see you. We're leaving now. That's, the cops get it all the time. We're gonna get it all the time too. And see the thing, I'm in trouble here because I look at a woman like that and I go, you're not, you are not even living up to being a human right now.

You are literally, your mental functioning here is below the level of humanity. My cat is more rational than you are. And so I have more respect for my cat than for that woman who just sits there and starts screaming.

My cat is careful when crossing the road. My cat's thinking about the future. This person isn't even up to that point. And I really struggle when people turn their minds off and just let their emotions run wild.

Yeah, that's my weakness right there. I will admit that. But anyway, this is coming. So I'm sure it's already happening, but pressure will be put on every Christian publisher to censor. We will end up going to smaller and smaller publishers over time.

Amazon will start getting rid of our books, especially books on homosexuality, transgenderism, things like that, anything that holds up any type of biblical moral norm will end up being compressed. But even they will be put under attack and there'll be calls for, well, they shouldn't be allowed to be on the internet.

And so they should be banished from the internet. And so we need to find out who's hosting their websites. And I mean, these people, the other side are totalitarians. They have one goal. Everyone has to believe the exact same thing.

There can be no dissent. There can be no, and there's no debate either. There's no debating these folks, none. It can't be done, not allowed to be done. The very fact that you would try to debate is considered to be a horrific, terrible thing.

Now I'm watching the clock going by very quickly here. Thank you. Tucker Carlson mentioned a Rasmussen poll that said that Black Lives Matter had a 62 approval rating in the United States right now.

That is astonishing to me. That is astonishing to me. I'm not sure if we can, oh, I don't even want to see that kid punching that 92 year old lady again. Oh, if you've seen it, they're trying to blur her out now, but I saw it unblurred and it was just, just, you just wish you were there and could have just.

Anyway, did you, Rich, did you see this video? Let's see if we can, let's see if we can pull this up. This is, this is awesome. Let me, did y 'all see this? This guy walks up to all these medical personnel that are standing outside of a hospital for Black Lives Matter, and he starts talking to them.

And so, hold on a second.

Do you got audio? I do. Okay. Okay, here we go. Black Lives Matter or just some black lives? All Black Lives Matter. The black lives killed by black men matter, right? Yes. Yes? Yes. The black babies killed in the abortions clinics matter, right?

Thought so. The black, the black officers killed by that bastard in Minnesota, that matters too, right? Okay. But the black babies that are killed in the abortion clinics don't matter, do they? Medical people.

Do their lives matter? Does the future of our black babies matter? What's up? What's up? Awful quiet now, aren't they? It's okay if we kill them in the womb, right? But you have a problem when we, you don't seem to really have a problem when we kill them on the streets.

Yes, well, we know they're the same issue. If we don't respect the lives of our unborn children enough to save them and fight for them, our lives mean nothing once we're born. You all have a good day.

Ow, absolute wow. Do you hear the quiet? Hear the quiet? That's what happens when image bearers are faced with their own rampant hypocrisy. But that's what Black Lives Matter is. Did you see the rallies over the weekend for black trans lives matter?

Black trans lives matter. In fact, Elizabeth Warren was talking about the plague of deaths of black trans people as if there's some plague of deaths going on. You cannot say anything against Black Lives Matter.

If you're an employee of any type of major corporation whatsoever, you cannot say anything. And the people who should be standing up and saying, wait a minute, this organization is seeking to fundamentally destroy our form of government, our society, our peace, the societal cohesion, and they support the destruction of the nuclear family.

They support homosexuality. They support transgenderism. They are pushing these deviant behaviors as if they are moral goods, but you can't say a word about it. And how many people, again, in positions of leadership are willing to stand up and do so right now?

Almost none. Instead, what you get are all the people taking a knee and all the people wearing their Black Lives Matter shirts. And then you have the massive hypocrisy of Starbucks where you can't wear a Make America Great shirt again, if you're a quote-unquote partner, but you can wear Black Lives Matter.

And everybody knows when you donate to Black Lives Matter, they're giving the money to democratic sources. So you've got an entire huge corporation saying, we don't care. We're gonna support one side against the other in an election year.

And yet some of you are still sitting around going, all this stuff just happened. It's just, there's no, you can't be a conspiratorialist. Okay, right, all right, whatever you say. Just an amazing amount of stuff there.

Yeah, Gabe Hughes, he commented on what I just played for you. Notice there's a woman who comes up and bows to him. Then she looks back at her friends and immediately gets back up again when she realizes what he's asking and where he's actually standing, because he's a black man.

And so he shows up and she comes forward to bow. She takes a knee. And then as soon as he says, what about black babies in the abortuary? Oops, I can't bow to this black man because this black man has the wrong views.

So his black life doesn't matter anymore. And all the black lives, 95 of them that are murdered in the United States are murdered by other blacks, but they don't matter either. It's only the ones that are killed by whites because that will allow you to push the narrative and remake the society.

The very name of the organization is a lie. They don't believe it. And their promotion of a lifestyle that destroys black people, transgenderism, what is the increased amount of suicide amongst transgenders again?

And amongst homosexuals again? What's your stand on abortion? Yeah, okay. So just like Planned Parenthood, which is behind the murder of black babies every single day, is standing up and saying black lives matter.

So Black Lives Matter, along with Planned Parenthood is involved in destroying black lives. But you can't say anything about it. There you go. There you go. Wow. What an amazing, an amazing, an amazing day that we live in.

What made it all the more amazing was a series of tweets that I saw over the past couple of, well, it's a couple of days ago when they were posted by Thabiti Anyabwili. Now, years ago, I spoke at a conference on Islam with Thabiti and, hello.

And we spoke on the subject of Islam and this was before, you know, this is like 20, might have even been before 2010. So this is a while back. And obviously there's been a lot of changes over the past number of years.

And I posted, when I mentioned I was going to refer to this series of tweets, I posted a link to a dividing line where I responded to some of the things that Thabiti said back in 2018. And interestingly enough, my response was focused upon Colossians chapter two.

In Colossians chapter two, we have that assertion that there is this renewal of the Holy Spirit is a renewal in which there is no ethnicity. There is no Jew, no Greek. There is no Scythian or barbarian.

These are ethnicities that would have been known to the Church of Colossae. That's what I was focused upon. And so when I first read one of these tweets, I had to find the thread because I'm going, no way, no way.

But it said what it said. So here is what, now I believe he is a Together for Gospel board member, as I recall, or Gospel Coalition board member. I'm sorry, Gospel Coalition, TGC. These acronyms, they all start with T.

If he's not now, he was at some point, I think. I could be wrong about that. I don't keep up with things like that very much. He says, there's something I've been trying to find words to express for some time.

I'm still not confident these are the words, but I will use them and ask you, dear reader, to receive them as best as God's grace will allow you. I'm still grappling for better expression. I'm grateful for the many white brethren in Christ who have expressed genuine concern and weariness about recent events.

I appreciate the expressions and like many, I draw some encouragement from them. Please don't stop sharing how you feel. A lot of expressions of empathy are addressed to African-Americans as brothers and sisters in Christ.

A welcome that, I think it should have been, I welcome that recognition of our kinship in the Lord, especially when a number of other professing Christians weaponize and politicize that kinship to deny justice.

But it must be said, and here's where I struggle to find the correct words, that the site of our struggle is not our shared Christian faith. Therefore, expressing Christian solidarity falls short of the kind of solidarity that's needed in the moment.

Let me just repeat that. Therefore, expressing Christian solidarity falls short of the kind of solidarity that's needed in the moment. To put it another way, George Floyd, a Christian, as I understand it, was not mistreated and killed because he was a Christian.

Breonna Taylor was not killed because she was a Christian. Same for Ahmaud Arbery. The man in Central Park was not threatened because he was a Christian. So these are different issues that have come up over the past number of months.

Vast differences between each one, when you really think about it. Vast differences between each one, but they have been woven into a single narrative. You could have, if you wanted to, woven a different narrative for a different ethnicity with an equal number of examples, but no one does that because that's not the narrative right now.

That's not what is succeeding right now. They were killed or threatened because of the country's attitude toward black people. The site of the struggle is anti-black sentiment, discrimination, and injustice.

Therefore, the solidarity most needed is with black people as a people, Christian or not. I want you to hear this. This is from a Christian pastor. This is from a reformed Christian pastor. This is from a pastor who wrote on these issues years ago in a very different tone than now.

And I want you to think with me seriously about what he's saying. I want you to hear what he's saying. Therefore, the solidarity most needed is with black people as a people, Christian or not. Now, notice he did not bring up the black police officer that was killed or the black police officers who've been killed.

He does not bring up the thousands of blacks shot by other blacks, which is, he faces, what's the number? 25 times the danger from another black man than he does from a white man or a white cop. But that's not the narrative right now.

That's not the narrative that is repeated over and over and over and over and over and over again. With such repetition and force that the facts, that's why the president of the Southern Baptist Convention can sit there in his presidential statement and say, let's not talk about statistics.