Ethnocentrism encourages racism, even as racism is dependent on ethnocentrism to foster its myopic and diabolical agendas for the world. They are both bad apples that, together, have rotted the soul of many a
nation.
But to view the current legitimate protests over racial discrimination solely along racial and ethnic lines is to utilize the “oppressor’s” own manipulative categories. It is to speak the same divisive language and
embrace the same hated discriminatory mindset protesters are keen to change. The acronym BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) is complicit in the very process it opposes. You can’t use a divide-and-conquer mentality to unify and overcome.
Obviously, a different paradigm is needed.
The Human Solution
Yet what new vision does secular society and good-willed humanists have to offer? Their go-to approach relies on forcing change through various outward measures: among them protest and resistance,
changing laws, defunding police, focused education, and good-old social shaming. Although there is nothing inherently wrong with any of these methods and each can lead to long-needed improvements, none gets to the root of the problem. Therefore, none can fully achieve effective and
permanent change.
Humanistic efforts assume that changed laws will magically cultivate and uphold moral values. Yet laws don’t work without the authority to enforce them through a policing and judicial system that has brute force and the threat of violence behind its ability to control and punish law breakers. Guns and jails, not goodwill, make laws work.
Thus, those demanding change are relying on the same power-based system thought to oppress them. If the collective moral compass is broken or askew, laws mandating equality can easily be side-stepped,
misapplied, or simply ignored oft-used strategies that have allowed systemic racism to persist despite long-standing constitutional guarantees meant to abolish it.
That is why the very best efforts now underway in the Black Lives Matter Movement can never fully succeed, no matter how much passion, resolve, and determination gets expressed in the streets of our country or the halls of government. Legal changes are certainly necessary to protect against injustice and move all citizens toward true equality. But they are not nearly enough.
Something vital is missing
Transcendent Faith
Systemic societal change must begin in the inward places of each beating heart. It must stem from an unconventional worldview that transcends race and ethnicity to embrace all of humankind in one
singular family. It requires a vision that allows us to celebrate our differences, while providing the clear understanding that our primary identity lies in our unified standing before an omnipotent God.
Without the transcendent revelation God provides, every effort is destined to get bogged down in whatever is seen to separate us race, socio-economic status, ethnic and national background, and even the oft-appealed to dichotomy of victim-perpetrator. They are all inherently divisive. A flawed starting point can never lead to the desired goal true equality among every human being.
Simply put, morality cannot be mandated. It must be manufactured within every human heart by the Spirit of God working in tandem with each person’s free will.
Christianity’s Distinction
No other religious, philosophical, or political system has the power of Christianity to get the job done. And I am not speaking about the Christian faith as a formal religious institution or system of dogmatic
beliefs. I mean Jesus, the self-proclaimed “Truth,” who lived and died to liberate us all from the sinful nature that births racism and every other destructive pattern of human thought and behavior.
In Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself (2 Corinthians 5:19). He was restoring his own badly tarnished image in humankind the divine image we must learn to recognize in others if racism is ever to be abolished. Jesus is the singular hope that can put an end to bigotry and racism, as well as the animosity that underlies them both.
His is a call to love not only our neighbor but our enemy—to love indiscriminately—and so honor the God who adores each and every living soul. Divine love alone has the clout to permanently dissolve the
divisiveness and hostility that plagues mankind, not only in America but within every seething nation and society around the globe.
Through Christ we become not so much color-blind, as able to see the resilient light of God’s ineffable image within each person. In Him we can find the only legitimate source of our unity (Galatians 3:28), as well as the will-power to love and embrace one another. Such a lofty transformation cannot rely upon mere human effort and good-intentions. They cannot get us to the “Promised Land.” Like the effect of yeast within dough, God can work in us the desire to do good, to love mercy, and to walk humbly
together in his holy presence, honoring him through loving and serving one another.
