OK, it’s time for a little explainer. But I confess that this explainer is going to be a bit spicy. As in, I think I might have emptied half the jar of jalapeños into this post and then poured most of the Tabasco on top just for good measure. But it’s my birthday, and I am now past the ripe old age of 45, which probably makes me a boomer, so here I go.
I will start in a somewhat dignified manner, defining my terms and explaining carefully, but as I go along, I’m fairly sure I will break into something approaching a juicy (but jolly) jeremiad. This is because what I’m going to be explaining is an idolatrous shrine, and it’s hard not to start feeling something as you go along.
So here is my central claim: so-called “race realism” is the new liberalism. Just as the old liberals tried to adapt Christianity to Darwinism by saying “God did it” (so-called “theistic evolution”), these new liberals are trying to adapt Christianity to pagan theories of race and then baptize it by saying “God did it.” But you never fix your lies by putting them in the mouth of God. Aaron’s golden calf was not acceptable worship simply because he said, “Behold, your god who brought you out of Egypt.” In every case, it’s not Christianity; it’s a rival religion. It’s an idolatrous shrine that a bunch of fools are trying to roll into the sanctuary of God, like those Greeks did with that big wooden horse one time.
What Is “Race Realism”?
The general idea is that “race” is a biologically meaningful category, especially for traits like intelligence, temperament, and behavior, and that these biological markers are as determinative as environmental and social conditions, or more so. There’s a real range and a dimmer switch here. Some go in for the “curse of Ham” hogwash, and others just play footsie, flirting all around the edges of it, in what some of us have called “Revoice for Nazis.”
Now, I doubt anyone denies that genetics play some role in human behavior. If that were all that was being said, we’d all be race realists and there’d be nothing to talk about. But like all liberals, they play on the ambiguities of their claims. It’s a classic motte-and-bailey: when challenged, they retreat to the harmless claim that genes matter somewhat, and when no one is looking, they march back out to claim that race is approaching destiny.
Missing Voddie
I posted a short video clip of Voddie Baucham last week that excited a few folks on X. The clip is classic Voddie on race, pressing the point that, biblically speaking, we are all part of one human race. Our genetics differ by a fraction of a percent, and the most obvious difference in appearance, the color of our skin, is just varying levels of melanin. And in his very-Voddie way, he encouraged all of us pasty-skinned folks not to think we were inferior just because we had less melanin than him. I posted that clip saying, “Man, I miss Voddie.”
And the howling began. Some insisted that this was a rare Voddie fail, except that anyone who has watched and listened to Voddie knows that this was a point he regularly made in his writing and speaking.
The more articulate among them cleared their throats knowingly and patted Voddie on the virtual head as a dearly departed brother (gotta decorate the tombs of the prophets, you know) and then claimed that Voddie was wrong because (checks notes) differences between the races have been taught for thousands of years of church history. Others bemoaned how they too had once thought like Voddie, but the differences between the races were just too overwhelming to deny. Even the gospel could not account for them.
Now, I’ll grant that you can find churchmen in the past who taught some form of racial hierarchy. You can also find churchmen in the past who taught that the sun revolves around the earth. Please think carefully.
America Is Not a “White” Nation
All of this is part of a broader push to identify America as a “white” nation. In another post, a liberal suggested that all the Christian Nationalists leave America and start their own white Christian nation, and one goober replied that we already did: it’s called America.
Now, on the surface, I don’t have any problem with identifying the founders of our nation as a bunch of white Christians. You can find many similar descriptions from the founding generations themselves. This was because (gasp) nearly everybody was a white Christian, and they founded a nation. The reason I call the man who posted it a goober is because he’s playing right into a broader narrative that pretends this “whiteness” was somehow intrinsic to the project and that this is still what America is or should be.
But the color of our skin and other biological markers were completely incidental to our success in the West. Our old Adamic pride always wants to take credit for some of it. But God was absolutely clear when He blessed Israel: He did not choose them because they were a great nation; He chose them when they were little and few, to prove the power of His love and covenant faithfulness (Deut. 7:7–8). And Paul makes the same point to the Gentiles in Corinth: God has not chosen the wise, the mighty, or the noble, but the weak and base things of this world to confound the wise and mighty, so that no flesh may glory in His presence (1 Cor. 1:26–29). America and the West have been great to the extent that we knew we were not special and that all we have is a gift of God’s grace. To claim that “whiteness” or “blackness” or the shape of your nose or forehead had anything to do with it is paganism, and it’s classic liberalism to try to insert that into God’s grace.
The Yeah-Buts
Now, let me back up and address a bunch of the yeah-buts. Yes, I know that Democrats and RINOs have been intentionally flooding our nation with immigrants to dilute our broadly shared Christian culture. You can stand against that (as I do) and still not become a drooling race hustler. Though we wish the globalists hadn’t been stomping on the tube of immigration toothpaste for the last 30 to 50 years, we are not in a position to get most of that toothpaste back into the tube. I fully support efforts to close the borders and deport illegals, but it has nothing to do with the color of their skin.
Now, the based bros are quite excited because they have recently learned two Latin words: ordo amoris. And for the record, the ordo amoris is good and right. We have to order our loves biblically. We are finite creatures who cannot love infinitely like God, and therefore we must prioritize. A man who does not provide for his own household is worse than an unbeliever (1 Tim. 5:8). So we are required by God to love Him and our neighbor, and our closest neighbors are our families and our literal neighbors.
But the gospel really does reorient this duty. (Notice that I did not say obliterate or abolish.) Even pagans know that a man must care for his family first, but pagans don’t know that the church must be woven into this ordo amoris. I’m not saying that’s easy, and there really are some hard calls along the way, but a black Ethiopian Christian whose parents legally immigrated here 40 years ago is my neighbor, my countryman, and my brother in Christ. The ordo amoris is not pixie dust that you get to sprinkle over your folly and call it wisdom.
The Lust for the Same
A certain kind of infatuation with similarity, desperately wanting your grandkids to “look like you,” is yearning for a form of incest. If you really want them to look like you, you should marry your sister or your mom. It really is pretty gay. And yes, I’m talking about the silly lapel pins – but I also mean it literally: It’s a lust for the “same,” and that is the very same disordered desire at the root of sodomy: love turned inward on itself, refusing the God-given otherness that makes fruitfulness possible.
The homo-globalists are bad enough, but you can’t put up a meaningful resistance by becoming a bunch of homo-nationalists. I’ve been happy to sign on to Christian nationalism because I insist that the adjective “Christian” do all the heavy lifting: defining what a nation is, how it functions, and so on. But I appreciate the warnings of friends who have insisted that the pagan roots of “nationalism” will swallow up the “Christian” part, which is exactly the liberal play being attempted here.
Covenantal Realism
The Bible recognizes nations, and guess what the word for “nations” is? It’s ethnos, from which we get the word “ethnicity.” But you don’t get to insert into that word whatever you think it means, like those sick “doctors” pumping estrogen into teenage boys.
The based bros’ favorite verse here is Acts 17:26, where Paul says God determined the times and the bounds of every nation’s habitation. Amen. But read the first half of the verse: God “hath made of one blood all nations of men.” The same sentence that establishes the nations grounds them in a single blood. That was Voddie’s point. Paul is preaching against the proud Athenians, who boasted that they had sprung from their own soil, and he levels them with the rest of mankind before he ever mentions their borders. We’re far more alike than different.
What binds ethnicities together in God’s world is covenant. Covenant includes blood, but it is far more than blood. It includes oaths and promises; it includes marriage and children; it includes places and land and customs and history. And the Bible clearly teaches that these different ethnicities are real but also highly permeable. I guess I’m a “covenantal realist.”
Time Would Fail Us
God’s covenant with Abraham explicitly included the foreigners in his household: the sign of circumcision was given to every male “bought with money of any stranger, which is not of thy seed” (Gen. 17:12–13). When Israel left Egypt, a “mixed multitude” went up with them (Ex. 12:38), and Moses himself married a Cushite woman, whom Aaron and Miriam objected to, dabbling apparently in proto-Kinism (Num. 12). God struck Miriam white with leprosy for it, which is kind of funny if you think about it.
Even in the conquest of Canaan, as evil as the Canaanite tribes were, Rahab the harlot and her family were saved, and she became the mother of Boaz. It was not genetic or biological markers that were passed down through those Canaanite tribes; it was moral, covenantal rebellion. It was the sin of Adam that flows in all our veins. And of course there was Ruth the Moabitess, who became the great-grandmother of King David, and time would fail us to tell of Caleb the Kenizzite, Jael the Kenite, Uriah the Hittite, Ittai the Gittite, the Queen of Sheba, Naaman the Syrian, Ebed-Melech the Ethiopian, Darius the Mede, the Ninevites who repented, the Magi, the Samaritan woman, and the Ethiopian eunuch.
The point here is not that God doesn’t recognize different nations, with biological similarities that tend to develop over time, different cultural expressions, and different tendencies to sin or righteousness. He does, and they do. Did you catch that? He does, and they do. But He does so by virtue of His covenants. Nations relate to Him as covenanted peoples: covenanted in Adam, covenanted in Noah, and then through a myriad of other covenantal dealings, including marriage and family covenants, national and economic covenants, and so on. This is not “pure nature” (whatever that is); this is covenanted nature, everything relating to the Triune God personally, either pleasing Him or not. And that is the decisive thing. That is what all of those foreigners in Israel’s history show us: the key thing is repentance and faith in Christ.
And no, regeneration does not obliterate ethnic differences or put them all into a blender. Not all cultures and ethnicities will work well together immediately. But true conversion means they are on that path.
Neither Jew nor Greek
Finally, the attempt to shove ethnic difference into the same category as sexual difference is like trying to put diesel in your unleaded engine. That dog won’t hunt. And this really is the clearest example of the inverted liberal exegesis at work.
The liberals took a verse about the equality we share in Christ, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28), and said, look, slavery and racism are abolished, therefore so are sexual differences, and presto: egalitarianism! And thoughtful, Bible-believing Christians said, wait a minute, the same Paul who wrote this also said that wives must submit to their own husbands and that it is shameful for a woman to speak or exercise authority over men in church. But the homo-nationalists, apparently listening to the liberals intently and scribbling notes furiously, said, wait a second, that means slavery and racial divisions are good too!
Both sides have accepted the same premise: that the three pairs in Galatians 3:28 are the same kind of thing and must stand or fall together. The liberals knock all three down; the homo-nationalists prop all three up. This is what’s known in middle school logic classes as the fallacy of false equivalence.
But these are three different kinds of divisions.
Sexual difference is permanent and rooted in creation. God made them male and female before the fall, and when Paul teaches male headship, he never grounds it in culture or custom but in the order of creation: Adam was formed first, then Eve (1 Tim. 2:13; 1 Cor. 11:8–9). Christ redeems creation; He doesn’t abolish it. So in Christ, men and women are equally heirs of the grace of life, and men are still men and women are still women.
Slavery is a product of the fall. Scripture regulates it, restrains it, and condemns its worst forms (manstealing is a capital crime in Ex. 21:16 and is listed among the lawless in 1 Tim. 1:10), but God never instituted it. Paul tells slaves to gain their freedom if they can (1 Cor. 7:21) and tells Philemon to receive Onesimus back “not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved.” The gospel slowly leavens that institution out of existence.
Ethnic difference comes through Babel and the scattering of the nations, a judgment that was also a mercy. And in Christ, ethnic difference is neither erased nor ranked; it is redeemed. At Pentecost, the curse of Babel is reversed, not by making everyone speak one language, but by every man hearing the gospel in his own tongue (Acts 2:6–11).
So those are three different kinds of divisions. You are not a Bible-believing “anti-egalitarian” simply because you found a church father sounding like biology is a significant factor in destiny. You might actually be an anti-realist while calling yourself a “race realist.” What I mean is that race is as real as God says it is, and not a bit more.
Conclusion
There is no room before God for white pride or black pride. There is no room for white masochism or black masochism. America has murdered more than 60 million babies and counting, and the Supreme Court justice who has most consistently and vehemently condemned that atrocity is a black man. Blood never saved anyone, except the blood of Jesus. But blood can certainly damn – and Adam’s has.
But the blood of Christ is what is gathering the nations. John saw the end of history: a great multitude that no man could number, “of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues,” standing before the throne and before the Lamb (Rev. 7:9). Their differences are still visible. They are not ranked, and they are not erased. They are singing (in harmonies we cannot imagine). That is what “race” is for, and that is where all of this is going. Any “realism” that can’t sing that song isn’t realism at all.
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