The Abdication of Moral Authority

I’m going to write something that apparently all but a handful of the personalities who have appointed themselves the voice of the American church are capable of acknowledging: There is no context, whatsoever, in which it is acceptable to portray a black person as an ape. I don’t care if you also show other black people as other animals. I don’t care if you also show a white person as a different class of primate. At no point is it acceptable to portray a black person as an ape.

Of course, I believe the cadre of talking heads who want to be arbiters of supposed Christian ethics very much know that. It’s not that they don’t understand one of the most recognizable, centuries-old racist tropes of depicting black people as sub-human primates, its direct ties to Darwinian eugenic racism, nor that the current crop of racists within their own ranks genuinely believe black people are genetically inferior. It’s that “Christianity” in the realm of American media has almost nothing to do with Jesus anymore, and everything to do with defending an increasingly indefensible political stake, at any cost to the spread of the gospel.

The American church—and in this I include the local church—has ceded its branding, and ultimately its authority, to people who daily prove they do not actually care about the gospel. If they did, they would show some concern for how they are portraying what it means to be a Christian to, what I think at this point is, the majority of their neighbors who want nothing to do with their behavior. It’s personal to me, because most of the people whom I love, friends and family alike, are not believers. It fills me with a righteous anger to know that this grift fuels my loved ones’ primary perception of my faith, and that the people who push themselves to the front of the line to claim the mantle of Christianity mostly put stumbling blocks in front of them that I have to overcome in my conversations with them. In my view, they are earning their millstones (Luke 17:2).

This false representation of Christ has become so ridiculously commonplace, so accepted within denominations, that nobody but individual Christians, with no ecclesial job to protect, have the courage to take the clergy of the Church of the Podcast to task for their defamation of the gospel. Nobody but individual Christians will rebuke the flailing of the Christian media class to find any excuse imaginable for the President of the United States and his staff, at very best, not possessing the attention span to watch a one-minute-long video to see that it portrays two black people who are Ivy League graduates as apes, nor having the decency to apologize for posting it. They are, in their desperation to prove their side is always right, no matter what, even claiming it wasn’t racist, and denouncing the few Christian media figures, like Russell Moore and John Piper, who unapologetically told the truth.

I’m here to tell you, if you are a genuine believer, it’s okay to reject the American folk religion of politics posing as Christian media. It’s okay to reject that false religion being syncretized into the praxis of the church. It’s okay to reject the disdainful peer-pressure of those who have given themselves to it. It’s okay to walk away from institutions that coddle it, and to seek people and institutions who won’t. It’s not going to get better any time soon, and sometimes the best thing you can do for an addict is to refuse to play along with the excuses they make for their addiction.