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- Hi there, dear ones. I hope you're enjoying your Saturday here, and I just wanted to get on here briefly, just to encourage you.
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- So many of you are currently, right now, and in the past few weeks, are engaging in the hard work of racial reconciliation in our culture today, and it is work, we must admit that.
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- It's not going to be easy, but the fight for equal rights for African -American citizens is going to be a hard one, but a necessary one, for the
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- Gospel of Jesus Christ. And I wanted to just offer you three encouragements and three strategies for dealing with the inevitable pushback that you will receive if Martin Luther King Jr.
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- and that great prophet Malcolm X, if they receive pushback for the hard work that they did in the 60s and 70s, you will most certainly receive pushback in the hard work of today's civil rights era.
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- I'll give you, one of the main things that I want to prepare you for is the accusation that you are race -baiting or stoking racial tensions in a time when you should not be.
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- And I just don't want you to be discouraged by that, because what we're really doing, and this is one of the first strategies that I would recommend, is to remind yourself that you are just speaking truth to power, and you are doing the hard work of truth -telling and storytelling.
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- Yeah, you know, you might not know for a fact if the white police officer that shot the black criminal in the back as he was resisting arrest and going into his car to pull, you know, who knows, a knife, gun, who knew what he had.
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- You know, you might not know for sure that that officer was motivated by racism, but it's still truth -telling to talk about that as an example of the problems of our culture when it comes to racial issues and racial justice.
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- So the first thing I would suggest when you're called a race -baiter is that you rename it, you pivot off of that.
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- I'm not a race -baiter, I'm just telling the truth. That's a very effective strategy, in my opinion.
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- Now, the other thing that you could do, and I would highly suggest this as well, especially if you're one of the
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- Christian brothers that's engaged in this fight, is that you would baptize what you're doing. Instead of race -baiting and racial tensions,
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- I'm just caring about justice, because we all know that the Lord is on the side of the oppressed.
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- And that's a great Bible verse that you can use at any time when somebody accuses you of doing something wrong or believing something wrong.
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- The Lord cares about the oppressed, and the Lord is on the side of the poor and the oppressed.
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- That's another strategy that you can do. The third strategy that I think is very effective, especially if you're new, especially if you haven't really said much about the racial tensions in our culture, the racial injustice and the racial bigotry that our
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- African -American citizens feel every day. As soon as they leave the house, they can see it.
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- They know it's every moment of every day. They're just accosted and assaulted with racial tension.
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- If you're new to this fight, one of the most effective things that you can do out of the gate, out of the gate, is act indignant, right off the bat.
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- You could say something like, go to your Facebook, go to your Twitter, say, I've not said anything for weeks and months, but I cannot abide any more of this black crime and police brutality.
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- Just get indignant. That's one of the most effective strategies that we know in this fight is to be as emotional as possible.
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- That's how people know you're serious. I would suggest that if you're new to the fight, get as indignant as you possibly can.
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- It also helps to use words like abide in countenance. I will not countenance another scene of a police officer brutalizing an
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- African -American. That's probably the next thing you can do. The fourth thing that you can do is just to double down as often as possible.
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- Repeat yourself. Often, you've probably seen the tweets where it's just one sentence, all in caps, over and over and over again.
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- This person is an effective anti -racial, anti -racism warrior.
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- You should take a couple of clues from that person and repeat yourself often.
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- Let me give you a perfect example. One time I found myself in a conversation with a gentleman and I said that, what do you think about the latest police shooting?
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- Have you ever considered how racist our police officers are in our country?
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- This gentleman looked at me and he said, how did you know it was about race? I looked at him and I looked at him very intently and I asked him, have you considered how racist the police officers are in our country?
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- This is an effective tool. Just repeat yourself as if nothing ever happened, as if there was no pushback, as if nobody said anything in response or as a rebuttal.
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- Just repeat yourself. The narrative must march on. The strategy works in such a way that if you just keep going, it's almost as if no one has even opposed you.
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- Everyone from the start has agreed with you. Double down. It helps if you combine these.
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- Sometimes it's good to rename things, to use Bible verses, to get super indignant and at the same time double down.
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- Let me give you a fifth one. This one you might not have thought about, but this is,
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- I think, can be very effective. Very effective indeed. One of the things that you can do is just to keep your opponents off balance when you're doing the work.
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- You're putting in work for anti -racism. One of the most effective strategies that I'm aware of is to keep people guessing.
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- You throw a few bones to conservatives, just a few, just to keep them guessing so nobody looks into anything.
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- A good thing you might want to do is maybe recommend a conservative book or maybe potentially a conservative commentator on an unrelated issue.
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- I've seen a couple of examples of people sharing books by the very problematic
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- James Lindsay. James Lindsay wrote a book about critical theory and it might be a good idea to share a book like that or to share someone's criticism of critical race theories and things of that nature.
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- Most people, what you need to understand is most people won't actually read the book. Most people won't actually look into what's in the book and even fewer people will ever apply what they read in that book to everyday people and so you can continue to do your anti -racism work unabated.
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- So remember to throw a few bones to conservatives every now and then, just to boost up your street cred just a little bit so that you can continue the hard and necessary and important gospel -centered work of anti -racism.
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- One bonus feature, I know I said I'd only give you a few but I wanted to give you one more.
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- One that I think has been effective over the years I've seen is when you're refuted finally and it doesn't look like there's any way around it, one of the things that you must do is to refer to your own credentials and track record as a faithful conservative minister of the gospel.
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- That's one of the most effective ways to rebut any criticism that you don't know how to rebut in the moment and I've had to deploy this many times.
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- I've referred to my degrees, I've referred to my track record, I've referred to my book deals and conference speaking gig and track records.
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- This is like Teflon, it's like having a bulletproof vest on you.
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- Any argument will have to fall down to the mere fact that you've been trained and you have credentials in these fields and you've been trusted on other issues before and so that's the final piece of advice.
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- If all else fails, refer to your track record and credentials of work in conservative
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- Christian issues. Lastly, lastly, it always helps, always, to frame the issue in a way that makes it as unreasonable as possible for your opponent.
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- Let me give you a perfect example that's unrelated to the issues of anti -racism.
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- Hypothetically, let's say somebody called you a heretic and you asked them, well why did you call me a heretic?
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- And they said, well, it's because you don't believe in hell. You are actually a, oh, hold on a second, oh, one second here, they said you're a universalist, you don't believe in hell and that's why you're a heretic.
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- Well, one thing you might try is to say something like this, well, if believing
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- God is too loving is a heresy, I don't believe that. I believe that believing
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- God is loving is biblical. Now you might confuse some people with that kind of an answer because it's actually not really referring to the issue at hand but it can be a very effective tool in this fight because if somebody criticizes you for what you've said about race or about justice or anything like that and they have seemingly credible sounding accusations and points in the
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- Bible and stuff like that, one of the things you might try is to say, look, to preach about the
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- Bible and justice and race is not heresy, it's merely biblical.
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- I don't see how anybody, any honest person could deny something like that and so that's why it could be quite helpful and so I hope you've found some encouragement in this and if you found this encouraging,
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- I would ask that you would encourage others through this and these helpful and easy strategies for engaging in the work, the hard and necessary biblical work of anti -racism.
