Jesse Helms, rest in peace. Jesse was not like George Wallace and Strom Thurmond; he never changed. “Helms operated as though African-Americans didn’t vote,” said Merle Black, a political science professor at Emory University in Atlanta. “He was unlike other politicians, who tried to expand their original basis of support. Helms never did that.” The Washington Post called Helms “the last prominent unabashed white racist politician in this country.” Those were the good old days when one seldom encountered “the idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone, all centuries but this, and every country but his own” (The Mikado).
It seems that Mormons still have a long way to go. “We recommend that people marry those who are of the same racial background generally, and of somewhat the same economic and social and educational background (some of those are not an absolute necessity, but preferred), and above all, the same religious background, without question.”
Which is worse - outrage over “Negro savages who are roaming about at liberty in our society” or outrage over the King of Great Britain, who “has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions”? When will another group of racists write another Declaration of Independence for us?
As Pastor James Manning restores faith in God among his people, he is also succeeding in restoring faith in his people among my people. Just listen. This one too. Such a sensible man. I couldn’t imagine a better role model if I were a young black man. (And here’s another impressive black man, a Jamaican.) Manning is telling his people exactly what they need to hear, and we applaud him, just as we applaud the few men who are telling our people what they need to hear.
Here’s what MLK would have sounded like if he had been James Manning.
Our people are almost wholly gnostic and pietistic. Evangelicalism has become a cult that appeals only to “seekers,” meaning those who are impenitent or who want to call themselves Christians but are repulsed by God’s law. Those who are deepest in the cult, like the “Willow Creek” crowd, have found that programs and entertainment don’t satisfy their most loyal members, but the advice is always to turn further inward; to cuddle up to God as you would a pillow and write love notes to Him in a journal. Sanctification, to these cultists, is not loving Him, and thereby loving your neighbor, by keeping His commandments (John 14:15), but merely loving yourself. They call it “growing in the Lord,” or some such nonsense. It’s a custom fit for the “rugged individualist” American Christian who is cast in the mold of Chuck Finney. Where are we to turn when sensationalism makes us feel progressively worse? Further inward, ever inward.
Our “racist” Christian forefathers demonstrated their love externally, to God and their neighbors, as the law requires, and would have considered any of today’s evangelicals as queer. Their politics, as we’ve said, was not an end in itself. Today, the navel-gazing cult of inward contemplation manifests a politics that constantly seeks Change, for the sake of nothing else but Change. Just listen to Obama, a mulatto bastard who is the perfect choice to lead a mulatto bastard non-nation. The word “change” is his bread and butter. His motto is “Yes, We Can,” which sends cultists into paroxysms of joy. Once again, we see that the racial problem is at root a religious problem. All social quagmires result from what the Bible calls grieving, quenching, and suppressing the Holy Spirit of God.
And let’s face it; our people are almost wholly Pelagian too. Pelagianism is an old heresy, which means that our people are almost wholly heretics. But we stand or fall with no others. And this is where the chicken-and-egg discussion of race vs. faith takes an interesting turn. We Kinists reject the gnostic appeals of various lying preachers that eternal savation, and not temporal salvation, is all that should matter to us. We likewise reject all accusations that we rely on IQ, color of skin, or anything else under the sun to effect this salvation. Wealth and IQ are both interesting topics, and both happen to be correlated. While neither is in any way the basis of our salvation, it turns out that the Bible has quite a lot to say about wealth. Proverbs 30:8 tells us to pray for not too much or too little of it, and if we could do the same for IQ it might not be a bad thing. In churches, for instance, it is common to see the simple carried away with every wind of false (sensational) doctrine while the great and powerful are carried away with every wind of false (esoteric) doctrine. The poor have Todd Bentley and the rich have John Spong.
I feel the need to take a cue from Manning and tell my people very plainly and harshly that they are never going to change - not until something like this happens to their own daughters, and probably not even then.
Leave a Reply