Daily Verse | Exodus 23:2
Do not follow the crowd in doing wrong.
I wonder if God thinks, “Thank me it’s Friday!” at the end of every week.
For those of you who are reading through the Bible in a year, how’s it going? Sticking with it? Staying on track?
Remember that the reading plan is just a guide to get through the Bible in a year. It’s like the pace car at Indy. It keeps you steady, in your lane and not too fast, not too slow.
But there’s no rule that says you must get through it in a year. If you find yourself falling behind the plan, just ignore the date and keep going. So what if it takes you until June of 2022? Same if you find yourself ahead of plan. The point is to be regularly reading through the Scriptures.
If you missed it at the beginning of the year, you can download the custom Bible reading plan below and pick it up at the current week.
I wrote about my friend Laurie Higgins yesterday and I’m pleased to report that she’s out of Facebook jail. No one is sure how that happened, but it looks like they let her off with time served. Again, it’s frightening to see how historical definitions of hatred, violence and incitement are now being applied to words that have been, up until a minute ago, considered non-incendiary expressions of language.
Another frightening thing is the development of Critical Race Theory or CRT. Another friend sent me a video of Charlie Kirk discussing CRT with James Lindsay, President of New Discourses.
I thought it was such a helpful, understandable and brief explanation of what CRT is that I wanted you to see it. It’s just under four minutes long and completely worth the minimal time investment.
What Lindsay is describing is a worldview built on a specific assumption about reality—namely, that racism is the natural (or “ordinary”) state of affairs in society. What that means is that the question is no longer “Did racism take place?” but rather “How did racism manifest itself in that situation?”
The answer to the first question is always “Yes” and therefore doesn’t need to be asked. Racism is simply assumed. Here I quote (with my emphasis) from an article by Lindsey on his New Discourses website.
That is, [Critical Race Theorists] assume racism is present in everything and look for it “Critically” until they find it. Importantly, this is assessed subjectively according to the “lived experience” of racism and does not depend upon there being any evidence of racism.
This is partly why it’s so difficult to have a discussion about racism in our modern era. Someone can be charged with racism without a shred of evidence because the accusation is entirely subjective. Such a philosophy undermines our entire legal system and the use of reason, which is based on the presumption of “innocent until proven guilty” and requires a case to be built on objective evidence.
The answer to the second question, “How did racism manifest itself?” is situation-dependent, and Lindsey gives the hypothetical situation of a white store owner having to decide which of two customers he’s going to serve first: a black man or a white man.
He then goes on to describe a no-win situation for the store owner. If the owner chooses to serve the black man first, that’s considered racist because it shows he doesn’t trust the black man to be alone in his shop. If he chooses the white man first, that’s considered racist because he’s giving his own race preferential treatment and making the black man wait.
The store owner is racist if he does and racist if he doesn’t, even if he himself isn’t “racist.” CRT has labeled him—and all whites—as inherently racist. In any other era this philosophy would be considered unreasonable.
Unfortunately, we live in a fallen world where people in their natural state tend to look out for themselves. In the situation Lindsey describes, it’s not just the owner who’s in play, but both of the customers. According to the Bible, both the black man and the white man should consider the other man better than themselves and invite him to be served first.
Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.
(Philippians 2:3-4)
And the store owner should not favor one over the other, for “if you show favoritism, you sin and are convicted by the law as lawbreakers” (James 2:9). All three bear responsibility for treating the others with love and respect.
Lindsey’s brief summary of CRT doesn’t even touch on the concepts of “white supremacy,” “white privilege” or the doctrine of “systemic racism,” all of which he addresses on his site. I’d encourage you to browse the articles.
In a world that is changing, it’s a necessity to understand current developments and apply the scriptures to it.
Have a good weekend.