Apr. 13, 2019

Subject: American Leftism vs. Christianity, Part 5: Which Worldview doesn’t care about your Race?

Galatians 3:28 “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female; for we are all one in Christ Jesus.”

While on a business trip in Austin, TX last week, I took an Uber from the Austin airport to the University of Texas campus. My Uber driver was named John – a skinny black father of two from Nigeria. John has been living in the United States for the past fifteen years. His English is pretty good. His personality lights up any place he is. As we made small talk, I asked him what he thinks of Christian persecution in Nigeria.

Nigeria is split almost equally between Christianity and Islam, but Open Doors ranks Nigeria as #12 in the world for Christian persecution: “Nigeria’s score for violence is as high as possible, due to increased attacks on Christian communities by Hausa-Fulani Islamic militants. These attacks claimed the lives of hundreds of believers, and scores of villages and churches were burned to the ground. On February 17, 2018 Boko Haram militants attacked a Christian farming village in Borno State, killing 106 people. On June 23, 2018, 120 Christians were killed by Fulani militants in Plateau State, as they returned from attending a funeral.” In Nigeria, claiming Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior is a life-and-death choice.

John immediately said he is a Christian. He explained that in Nigeria being Christian is often something you are born into, but he decided to follow Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. We spent the next 20 minutes talking about Christ as if he and I were brothers who grew up in the same home. We talked about what Jesus means to us, what we love about Him, and what makes Christianity so unique compared to Islam. Here we are, in an Uber in Texas, a white man raised in America with a black American raised in Nigeria, agreeing that we are brothers in Christ and praying for one another and our families.

This is the essence of Christianity. This is what our verse this week is all about. Paul is writing to the church in Galatia, explaining to them that God doesn’t care at all about your skin color! This is a radical notion that we need to understand, so we can see the hypocrisy in our culture today that is fixated on race.

In fact, our verse goes much farther than just race. Paul says that in God’s economy there is neither Greek nor Gentile (ethnicity), slave nor free (social status), male nor female (gender). But instead, everyone is welcome in God’s house. The only issue that keeps anyone out of God’s family is if they are willing to agree with God they are sinners and must turn to Christ for forgiveness. This is the common ground that united John and I, in a 20-minute Uber ride, as brothers – our unity in Christ.

This is the exact opposite of Leftism, where people who adhere to this new religion are fixated on dividing the nation by skin color, sexual identity and social status. And nowhere is this more prevalent than at our university campuses. Starting this fall semester, the University of Kansas will offer a course called ‘Angry White Male Studies’, where students will examine “the deeper sources of this emotional state while evaluating recent manifestations of male anger since the 1950s.” Although “university” means “unity in diversity”, leftist schools aim to train the next generation of leaders to divide according to skin color.

Professor Shelby Steele, a Robert J. Oster Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who specializes in race relations, multiculturalism, and affirmative action in American culture, struck back in a recent interview with The Daily Caller: “Leftism really retards development. The left encourages people to take multiculturalism, diversity, inclusion, all these sorts of things, and identify with them and give themselves a self-esteem based on these empty idealisms that have no connection to reality.”

Steele, a black Conservative scholar, refutes the Left’s continual drumbeat of what he calls ‘White Guilt’: “Today’s ‘group-think’ insisting on White Guilt feeds many of today’s black population with retroactive thinking, of a need for justice and reparations, and of a rejection of their own present-day freedom and liberty. And whites fear being seen as racists or bigots… for anyone not still agonizing over the past, White Guilt disarms them of moral authority. It is this susceptibility on which clever leftists play to get their way and to secure more power.” Steele’s case in point: KU’s ‘Angry White Male Studies’ class.

But the message of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, which has been drowned out of our universities and is scorned by the Left, is the very message to which we must return for racial unity. There is no race distinction in Christianity. As John and I discovered, we are all one in Jesus Christ.

Ed Croteau is a resident of Lee’s Summit and hosts a weekly study in Lees Summit called “Faith: Substance and Evidence.” He can be reached with your questions through the Lee’s Summit Tribune at [email protected].