The Wisdom of the World

In light of the recent discussions of Christian rap and hip-hop and the racial attitudes that plague middle-aged white men who don’t either care for or listen to rap, Ross Douthat has advice for worldlings to which Christians could well take heed:

A fruitful conversation about race in America, then, would require both sides to somehow pick a different starting point. To get a fair hearing from liberals — and, more importantly, from black Americans — the right would need to begin from a place of greater empathy for the black experience, and greater respect for the historical reasons that voter ID laws and Rush Limbaugh soliloquies can raise so many hackles. To get a fair hearing from conservatives, liberals would need to begin by imputing racism less frequently, attacking racially-entangled policies that aren’t remotely like Jim Crow on the merits rather than just calling them Jim Crow, Round Two, and recognizing that (as with Hitler analogies) the sooner you link your interlocutors to slaveowners, the faster they will tune you out.

2 thoughts on “The Wisdom of the World

  1. DGH: There will be no discussion on race because multiculturalism is one of the new fundamentals of the faith, one higher than boring things like inerrancy and substitutionary atonement.

    MLK and now Nelson Mandela are considered good evangelicals, while Dabney and Thornwell are dangerous racist heretics who should be scrubbed from history. Palmer, Peck, and Girardeau must be simply ignored.

    While the Calvinist subculture not added the Belhar Confession in church constitutions, it is applied aggressively in practice. Look at the screaming, apologizing, and acceptance of apologies from some middle-aged. The crime? Daring to disparage rap music before a live microphone. Had they announced a belief in something like hypothetical universalism, nobody would care.

    Here’s the Belar. It reads like something issued from some New Calvinist celebrity preacher:
    https://www.rca.org/sslpage.aspx?pid=304

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