Christianity, Darwinism, and Marxism

I was just entering high school when I developed an interest in the “scientific creationist” response to the Darwinian theory of evolution.  By the end of my formal theological education at what is now Providence University College I had become convinced that this response was deeply flawed.   While that may sound like the testimony of someone whose theology grew more liberal over time, allow me to clarify that the flaw that I had come to perceive in scientific creationism was to be found in the adjective and not in the noun.   Creationism is an indispensable part of the orthodox Christian faith.   It is present in the very first affirmation of the two most ancient and sacred Creeds.   “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth” the Apostles’ Creed declares, and lest there be any confusion about the issue, such as that generated by Marcion of Synope and other Gnostics who attributed the creation of the physical world to a lesser deity than the Father God of Whom Christ spoke, the Nicene Creed expands this to “I believe in One God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, and of all things visible and invisible.”   As with all else affirmed in the Creeds, this is the clear teaching of the Holy Scriptures, which are God’s authoritative propositional revelation.  

 

Scientific creationism is the response to the Darwinian challenge to this affirmation that asserts that the evidence of the physical sciences better supports the most literal reading of the first three chapters of Genesis than it does Darwin’s theory.   The question of how literally these chapters should be read is a question of hermeneutics and not one that I am going to deal with at any great length.   Dr. RonDart has recently reminded us that the house of hermeneutics has many layers,of which the literal – the historical, grammatical reading of the sacred text–is the lowest.   He was making the point, quite correctly, that the emphasis on this layer to the exclusion of the others in the post-Reformation branch of the Christian tradition creates an impoverishment in hermeneutical meaning.  All that I will say about that is that in this day, when the truth of the Scriptures at the literal level has sustained relentless attack from every direction for centuries, it is important to remember that St. Augustine identified the literal level of meaning as the lowest layer because it is the foundation upon which all the others are built.

 

The flaw in the scientific creationists' response is that by asserting that the evidence of the physical sciences supports the literal reading of the creation account rather than Darwinism the scientific creationists affirm what is in fact the most questionable element of Darwinism – that that which emerges from the observations, hypotheses, tests and experiments of the empirical method can provide answers to such questions as “why am I here”, “why is there life on this planet”, and “why is there something instead of nothing.”   This confusion of the physical with the metaphysical, is problematic from the standpoint of both ontology and epistemology.   It is, in other words, deeply philosophically flawed.

 

One writer who was particularly influential on my thinking in this regards was Gordon H. Clark, the very Calvinist theologian who was chairman of the department of philosophy at Butler University from 1943 to 1973.   He is probably most remembered as one of the two leading figures in the development of the presuppositional school of Christian apologetics – and for his historical clash with the other, Cornelius Van Til.   Both men were among the circle of conservative Presbyterians that had formed around J. Gresham Machen when the Fundamentalist/Modernist controversy hit Princeton Theological Seminary and who helped Machen organize the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, although the clash between the two began almost immediately after when Van Til led the faculty of Westminster Theological Seminary, the conservative successor to Princeton that had been founded when the latter went Modernist, in opposing Clark’s ordination by the OPC’s synod in Philadelphia over a number of theological and philosophical disagreements that I am not going to get into here.  Clark’s The Philosophy of Science and Belief in God (1964) made a powerful case that since all scientific theories and laws involve contradictions and other logical fallacies and any truth claim based upon science reduces to the fallacy of asserting the consequent, science has only operational and utilitarian value and not epistemic value.   I found his argument to be quite persuasive and was further impressed by the inevitable conclusion to which it led, that the Christian response to the challenges posted by the claims of Modern scientism in general and Darwinism in particular must speak the language of philosophy rather than of science.

 

An excellent and simple illustration of a philosophical response to scientism can be found in C. S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia.   In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which is the third volume in the fantasy series by order of publication, on one of the last islands that Prince Caspian, the younger two of the Pevensies, Lucy and Edmund, their cousin Eustace Scrubb, and the other characters visit in their journey, they encounter an old man named Ramandu who explains to them that he had once been one of the stars in the Narnian sky but had long since retired.   Eustace, whose very progressive parents have been sending him to a very up-to-date school, has only recently begun to escape the trappings of his scientistic and materialistic upbringing.   The following exchange takes place:

 

“In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”

“Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of. 

In other words, while you can produce an impressive and comprehensive description of something by scientific analysis – taking it apart and identifying its components – this will always fall short of answering the question of what that something is.  

 

This approach by contrast with that of the scientific creationist can be likened to the sort of physician who addresses the underlying disease rather than merely treating the symptoms.   Scientific creationists frequently identify Darwinism as the cause of all the problems of the last century and a half – Communism, Nazism, secularism, the erosion of morality, etc.   To do this, however, is to make the mistake of confusing one of the fruits with the tree.  

 

Let us consider the actual relationship between one of the evils mentioned in the previous paragraph and Darwinism.   It makes very little sense to say that Communism, or rather Marxism, the ideology of which Communism is the practical expression, comes from Darwinism, despite the fact that Karl Marx wrote that Darwin’s book contained “the basis in natural history for our view” in a letter to Friedrich Engels on December 19, 1860.  For when Marx wrote those words Darwin’s On the Origins of Species By Means of Natural Selection had only just appeared, having been first published in 1859.   The Communist Manifesto had been published eleven years previously.   Granted, some of the ideas that we associate with Charles Darwin had been brewing in the natural sciences for decades prior to the publication of his book, but then, something similar could be said about Karl Marx and his manifesto.    Moreover, only a year and a half later on June 18, 1862, Marx was writing to Engels, having come full circle on Darwin and denouncing his theory as an embodiment of the sentiments of Victorian era capitalism.   Perhaps, considering that years later Marx would dedicate the second edition of the first volume of the English translation of Das Kapital to Darwin and sent him a courtesy copy, he changed his mind yet again.   Darwin himself, however, although he thanked Marx for the book and the dedication, was on record as being opposed to the use of evolutionary science in support of socialism.   Indeed, while Marx’s initial, and possibly later, attraction to Darwin’s theory is probably best explained by his seeing in it a club with which to bash religion in general and Christianity in particular, which Marx notoriously despised, Darwin repudiated this use of his theory.  

 

The erroneous notion that Marxism is a fruit of Darwinism is a huge stumbling block to understanding the interaction between the two in the twentieth century.   This failure has had some rather ironic theological repercussions.

 

The history of Darwinism after Darwin is the history of the mainstream of the scientific discipline of biology.   It can be said of biology what Clark said about science in general, that it is “always false, but often useful.”   What happens to the utility of a science, however, when its methodology is subverted by the dogmas of a political ideology? 

 

The consequences can be devastating and disastrous.   As it so happens, just such a political ideology – Marxism – went to great lengths to subvert the science of biology in the twentieth century.   This was done in an obvious and overt fashion in the first country in which Marxism had attained control of the state – the Soviet Union.   For a full account of the notorious episode in which the USSR forced biology, and specifically genetics, to submit to Marxist dogma, see Valery N. Soyfer’s Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science (1994).   Lysenkoism also became official dogma in other Communist countries.  The period in which it was the party line in Red China corresponds to the years in in Mao was repeating all of the Soviet Union’s worst mistakes and reaping a similar harvest of famine and death in the “Great Leap Forward”.   For a description of this period that includes a discussion of how bad agricultural techniques, like “close planting” and “deep plowing”, derived from Lysenkoism contributed to the Chinese famine see Jasper Becker’s Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine (1996).

 

Outside the Communist bloc, Marxism never attained this sort of overt power in the state.   It had, however, attained a comparable degree of control in Western academe by the middle of the twentieth century, and this is where most science is done.   In 1959, the Professor of Botany at the University of Pennsylvania, Conway Zirkle, who ten years previously had written a book length treatment of Lysenkoism the year after the USSR officially condemned genetics as a “bourgeois pseudoscience”, published Evolution, Marxian Biology, and the Social Scene, which argued that the ideas which now bear the name of Trofim Lysenko can be traced directly to Marx and Engels themselves, who had cherry-picked ideas from Darwin, wed them to Lamarck in rejection of Mendel, and threw out completely both the Malthus who had influenced Darwin and the Galton who had been inspired by him, to produce an alternative “Marxian Biology.”   While it was only in the Communist bloc where this dominated the biology classroom, Zirkle maintained that the way evolutionary theory was understood in much popular culture and literature, reflected the Marxian version of the theory rather than the Darwinian, because it was pervasive in the Marx-dominated social sciences.

 

Zirkle passed away in 1972.   He did not live to see the controversy of three years later, when Edward O. Wilson, a research professor and myrmecologist at Harvard University published his massive volume Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, a controversy which would have provided him with plenty of material for an expanded edition of his own book.   Wilson’s book, which drew heavily on the elements of mainstream evolutionary biology which the Marx-Lysenko version rejects, explores the relationship between genes, adaptation, and the social behaviour of animals, culminating in the last, and most controversial, chapter on human beings.   Widely reviewed, the book was received well by those within the discipline of biology, but it angered many sociologists, illustrating well the difference between the two schools that Zirkle had highlighted. 

 

In the November 13, 1975 issue of the New York Review of Books published a letter which condemned Wilson’s book for reviving “biological determinism” for the political purpose of providing a “genetic justification of the status quo and of existing privileges for certain groups according to class, race, and sex.”   It completely distorted Wilson’s thesis, of course, with the writer of the letter not hesitating to stoop to inserting an ellipsis into a quotation from Wilson at one point that completely inverted his meaning.   The NYRB had the decently to run a rebuttal letter from Wilson in the December 11^th issue.     The original letter was, of course, guilty of the very thing of which it accused Wilson – smuggling political views into biology.   The letter was signed by sixteen individuals listed in alphabetical order – and accordingly is attributed to Elizabeth Allen, et al, Allen, who was a pre-med student at Brandeis University at the time being listed first.  The signatories were mostly, perhaps entirely, people associated with Science for the People, a Marxist activist group the  raison d'être of which was to use science as a vehicle for the promotion of left-wing political views.   These included a number of biology professors, which would have signaled to anyone paying attention, as Zirkle most certainly would have had he lived to this point, that an attempted Marxist coup within the biology departments of Western academe is underway.   Sadly, not enough people were paying attention.   By the end of the twentieth century, one of those signatories, Stephen Jay Gould, who made little attempt to hide the Communist politics beneath the thin veneer of his science, was widely considered to be the face of evolutionary biology.

 

Indeed, the Marxian takeover of Western biology was by then so complete that when, in the year 2000, Bill Clinton hosted a big party at the White House at which he and Tony Blair, along with Dr. J. Craig Venter of Celera Genomics and Dr. Francis Collins of the Human Genome Project announced the completion of the mapping of the human genome, Venter made a point of declaring that the research illustrates that “the concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.”    In other words, the completion of the most important research project in the history of the very branch of biology which Lysenko rejected, was being used to promote a concept, which originated in the social science departments where Lysenko’s Marxian views prevailed, in this case that of Boasian anthropology.   Although the regime he supported had gone the way of the dodo, Trofim Lysenko had his ultimate triumph.

 

At this point I would like to repeat the quotation from Gordon Clark that “science is always false, but often useful.”   The most obvious utility of a project like the mapping of the human genome is in the area of treating genetic diseases and conditions.   There are plenty of such conditions that afflict primarily or exclusively the members of a single race or ethnicity.   If the influence of Marxist Neo-Lysenkoism has become such in Western biology that the then-president of the private research company competing with the government sponsored scientists in this project, turned such an occasion into a platform for espousing Franz Boas and Ashley Montagu’s Marxist race denial, even going so far as to mislead his hearers into thinking that ethnicity cannot be determined from a gene sample, is this likely to have a positive or a negative effect on the usefulness of this research in treating such diseases?

 

This brings us back to the scientific creationists and their error of regarding Marxism as the fruit of Darwinism, an error unavoidable on their part because of their more fundamental error of attempting to answer the Darwinian challenge to the truth of Creation in Darwinism’s own scientific language thus accepting the same false scientistic premise as Darwinism that science has epistemic as well as utilitarian value.  It brings us back to this point because of the irony of the fact that one of the leading scientific creationists – perhaps the leading scientific creationist now that Henry M. Morris is no longer with us – Ken Ham, wrote an entire book which attempted to read the same Marxist concept that J. Craig Venter espoused at Bill Clinton’s garden party in 2000 into the Bible.

 

The book in question, One Blood: The Biblical Answer to Racism, was co-written with Don Batten and Carl Wieland and suspiciously appeared the same year as the aforementioned party.   It is based entirely upon semantic dishonesty – using the fact that we use the word “race” for both our species as a whole and for subspecies within it, rather than the distinct words we use for other species/subspecies, such as species = dog, breed = cocker spaniel, bull dog, Doberman, etc., to deny the existence of “races” within humanity because we are all “one race”, bad hermeneutics – Acts 17:26 means the opposite of what Ham et al., say it means, and the same sort of fallacious reasoning that secular scientific Marxists use to deny race – there is more genetic diversity within races than between races therefore there are no races.

 

If Ham and his co-authors had thought the last mentioned argument through they would perhaps have been more wary of employing it.  For the obvious response to this fallacy is to point out that the exact same thing can be sad, substituting “sexes” for “races.”   Would they accept the argument as formulated as being valid about “sexes” as well as “races” and declare “sex” along with “race” to be an invalid social construct?

 

Of course not.  When it comes to “sex” Ham and company are as guilty of the “biological determinism” – regarding biology as destiny – that Trofim Lysenko, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard C. Lewontin, and other Marxist biologists accuse hereditarian Darwinists of as the hereditarian Darwinists themselves.   Rightly so, from the standpoint of Scriptural and traditional Christian ethics.   Which is good cause for them to reconsider siding with the Marxists against the Darwinists on other matters.

Race and Scriptural Theology

Gerald R. McDermott, who has just retired as the Anglican Chair of Divinity at Beeson Theological Seminary and is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion, has edited a book which is soon to be released by Acton Books entitled Race and Covenant: Retrieving the Religious Roots for American Reconciliation. The subject is remarkably timely, especially considering that the work on it must have begun long before the death of George Floyd sparked the present racial conflagration that threatens to raze all of Western Civilization to the ground. Will this book be an attempt to extinguish these flames or simply another pouring of gasoline onto the fire?

Judging from an article by McDermott that appeared on First Things website last week, I think there are grounds to expect it to be the former rather than the latter. He begins by saying that while Churches are "rightly trying to respond with compassion" to the death of George Floyd, "many church leaders and parishioners are adopting a race narrative that is empirically and theologically suspect." He then provides three examples of what he is talking about. The first is a letter addressed to the clergy of the ACNA (Anglican Church in North America) which was written by four of that body's clergy and published on the Anglican Compass website. A joint-statement by the presidents of the Southern Baptist Convention and its seminary in New Orleans is the second. A twitter post from the Roman Catholic bishop of Bridgeport, Connecticut is the third. McDermott says regarding these that "White Christians, many influenced by Critical Race Theory, are eager to demonstrate their virtue by confessing their 'white privilege'." He then offers arguments as to why the Critical Race Theory interpretation of Floyd's death, which is being pushed by well over ninety-nine percent of the mainstream media and which many people seem to think they are obligated to accept uncritically - note the irony - is dubious. The arguments are ones that my own readers will be familiar with by now - the evidence that American police are not in fact racist as an institution, the institutional discrimination in favour of blacks known as affirmative action, and that the narrative is harmful rather than helpful to its intended beneficiaries.

McDermott then goes on to say that "there are even better theological reasons to reject the mainstream narrative." The rest of his article is the unfolding of what those "better theological reasons" are.

Unfortunately, while well-intentioned, and generally aiming in the right direction, his exposition of this theology is flawed by numerous factual errors and a couple of serious misinterpretations of Scripture.

It is not true, for example, that "Nations (ta ethne), in the New Testament world were often multiracial." This would be true if predicated of cities and larger polities such as empires, but not of the term he uses here. His mistake seems to be derived from his equation of race with skin colour. These are related but not identical concepts. Race is derived from words that denote common descent, not skin colour, and until very recently this was still the predominant association with the word. This very much was an aspect of what it meant to be a nation. The general North American confusion regarding the distinction between "nation" and "state" undoubtedly also contributes to this mistake. It is extremely misleading to say "both Greeks and Jews came in various colors" in this context, for while this is true, the colours were not the hues that are commonly associated with races today. Indeed, if we were to speak of the ancient Greeks and Jews in terms of the races first identified as such by physical anthropologists but now generally spoken of as genetic populations for purposes of political correctness, both Greeks and Jews as nations, were members of a single race, rather than transracial entities.

The more important flaw, however, is in his interpretation of Scripture.

Take his interpretation of Acts 17:26 for example. He clearly understands it the same way in which prominent creationist Ken Ham explained it in his book One Blood. He says of it "Ironically, Critical Race Theory teaches something similar: that races as we conceive them are not rooted in biology or anthropology, but are socially constructed." This, however, is to torture the verse into meaning the exact opposite of what it says. This verse, which is part of St. Paul's address to the philosophers assembled at the Areopagus, says that God, and not man, is the author of the nations - ethnic groups not states, Who sets their boundaries, physical and temporal. The "one blood" in the verse identifies the material God used to fashion the nations, not the end towards which He was working. He started with one bloodline, and from it made the many nations. We all share in the common blood and therefore are of the race of Adam, but this is not stated in a way that can be rightly interpreted as consistent with Critical Race Theory's claim that the races today are socially constructed. It flat out contradicts it.

McDermott would undoubtedly recognize this to be true if it were applied to the sexes. Are man and woman not both made of "one blood" as well?

Critical Race Theory is a branch of Critical Theory in general, which also asserts that "sex", which it calls "gender", is a social construction. Would McDermott be comfortable with interpreting the Scriptural references to the common humanity of men and women as saying that the sexes are social constructs?

I am certain the answer is that he would not. Yet this directly relates to his main argument which pertains to the Pauline distinction between the old and the new creation. For just as the Scripture states that "in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek"(Gal. 3:28) it also, and in fact in the same verse, says "there is neither male nor female." Are we to interpret this as meaning that the distinction between male and female has no relevance in the new creation?

St. Paul himself didn't seem to think so. He made numerous distinctions between men and women when it came to authority and teaching in the Church. While some dioceses within the ACNA, like the older Episcopal Church and my own Anglican Church of Canada, do not follow St. Paul's restrictions, apparently interpreting them as being culturally particular rather than Catholic, which is the opposite of the Catholic interpretation if we define Catholicity in terms of St. Vincent's canon, the ACNA has not followed these older bodies in taking the elimination of the distinction between male and female to its logical, if absurd, extreme, which is that if there is no male nor female, then there is no reason to oppose men choosing other men, women choosing other women, or each choosing to decide that it is the other, or something else altogether. Sane and orthodox theologians recognize that this is a nonsensical extrapolation from what St. Paul actually said. This means that "there is neither male nor female" emphasizes the unity of the two in Christ, but not in a way that eliminates either the distinction or the importance of the distinction altogether. If this is true of the unity of the sexes in Christ, it is not logical to deny it of the unity of the races in Christ.

It is also interesting to observe what is curiously absent from his discussion. There is no mention of the Tower of Babel, which is the Scriptural account of how God took the one bloodline of Adam and made the many tribes, nations, and races out of it by confusing the tongues. Nor is there any mention of Whitsunday, the Christian Pentecost, on which people of a multitude of tongues each heard the Apostles proclaim the Gospel of Christ in their own, and were baptized into the one body, the Church. Since the former is the account of a judgement of God upon the old creation, speaking about how in the latter the curse of the former was lifted to establish the unity of the new creation in the Church is pretty fundamental to the topic. Especially since it points in the right direction. Since the Church is where the unity of the new creation is to be sought, her task is to invite people to enter that unity by believing and being baptized, not to support activists, let alone subversive radicals, who seek to impose an artificial substitute for it through political force.

The above criticisms having been lodged, McDermott is definitely on the right tack when he says:

As Green and others have noted, the new anti-racism has become a new religion with its own original sin (white racism), baptismal liturgy (confession of whiteness), and new birth (to wokeness). But there is no redemption, and its ethic encourages people to practice what Jesus condemned, “Do not judge, lest you too be judged” (John 7:1). It imputes motives to others based on skin color—bad motives to one skin color and good motives to other colors. This is racism by another name. It is also sinful judgment. (The "Green" to whom he refers is a black political scientist named Derryck Green whose contribution to the forthcoming book, McDermott had just quoted).

The reason this new religion offers no absolution - apart from the fact that it is a false religion and absolution is only to be found in the true religion of Christ - is because it serves the interests of a seditious and revolutionary ideology. Revolutions are the outcome of thinking that imperfection in society and civilization means that the whole thing must be torn down or burned to the ground so something new can be put in its place. Since the imperfection is inherent in fallen human nature, that which is rebuilt will be just as imperfect as what it replaced, and usually more so. Revolutions lead to nothing but needless and pointless violence, hurt, and destruction. In the false religion of wokeness, whites must perpetually abase themselves and give in to a never-ending list of non-white grievances, because the revolution can never achieve perfection, therefore the revolution can never end. This path leads to never-ending racial strife, not to the racial peace and harmony which is the true meaning of us being "one in Christ."

Christian Orthodoxy Versus the Gnostic Heresy of the Suicide Cult

In the seventeenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, St. Paul , after being driven from Thessalonica and Berea, arrived in Athens. He sent away for Silas and Timothy and, while waiting for them, he told people about Jesus in the synagogues and the market place. There, a number of philosophers from the Epicurean and Stoic schools heard him and they brought him to the Areopagus where they could hear him speak at length. His sermon is recorded in verses 22 to 31.

St. Paul began his sermon by noting how religious the Athenians are, how they have altars to various deities all over the place, and even an altar to “the Unknown God”. This became his way of introducing them to the Christian God: “Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you”. He told them about the God Who created and rules over all things. He told them that this God:

hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us (vv. 26-27)

In these verses, St. Paul declares that all peoples on the world are related. This was clear in the Old Testament. Adam and Eve are depicted as the father and mother of all human beings in the first chapters of Genesis, and later all people after the Great Flood are said to be the descendents of the survivors – Noah and his wife, and their three sons and their wives. The Book of Genesis includes a genealogical table showing how all the peoples known to the ancient Israelites were descended from one or the other of Noah’s sons.

While the idea of a common descent for all human beings was not unknown to the ancient Greeks it was far from being the only view on the subject. St. Paul clearly brought it up in order to emphasize that the God he was telling them about was not the god of some foreign people but the God of all peoples.

Some Christians have surprisingly taken to using verse 26 to baptize the left-wing doctrine of racial nihilism. This is surprising for two reasons. First, the authors of the book One Blood (1) are evangelicals involved in creationist ministry. Fundamentalists are not exactly noted for their love of left-wing, progressive, and liberal viewpoints. The primary author of the book, Ken Ham, the Australian born founder and director of Answers in Genesis. His co-authors are affiliated with his ministry. The second reason is that the verse clearly does not support the interpretation Ham has given it.

If all Ham had said about the verse was that it upholds the idea expressed in the children’s song “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world” then he would be obviously correct. He takes his interpretation a bit further than that, I am afraid.

Ham would like us to believe that the statement, that all nations are “made of one blood”, means that racial categories and identities are completely arbitrary and man made with no real existence. The idea of “race” he argues, is dangerous, because it leads to racism and Nazism. The idea of race, he says, is the product of Darwinian thinking and therefore should be considered suspect by believers and followers in the Biblical God.

What, however, is the pedigree of the idea that race is an arbitrary category, a social construct with no real existence?

The first person I am aware of to make this astonishing claim was Franz Boas, the German born father of the American school of Cultural Anthropology. While Boas was a noted opponent of the teachings of evolutionists like Sir Francis Galton, this was hardly born out of a concern for Biblical orthodoxy and a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis. Boas was a progressive with revolutionary sympathies. What he opposed in Galton’s teachings was the idea that man’s inherited nature shapes his behavior – a view that has a lot more in common with Christian orthodoxy than the opposing viewpoint, championed by men like Boas, that human nature is a “tabula rasa”, a blank slate for the progressive to write upon, malleable putty in the hands of the progressive social experimenter.

Boas passed his views on to his students, the most famous of whom were Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Ashley Montagu. Montagu expounded upon Boas’ views at length in his book Man’s Most Dangerous Myth (2) and would later write a report on the subject for the United Nations.

Later, Harvard biologists Richard C. Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould would promote the same idea. Both men were noted for their far-left ideology and their willingness to blend politics with science. They were both associated with the radical group “Science for the People” for example, and Lewontin once said that “There is nothing in Marx, Lenin or Mao that is or can be in contradiction with a particular set of phenomena in the objective world”. Trofin Lysenko felt the same way. In the early ‘70’s, Lewontin published a paper entitled “The Apportionment of Human Diversity” (3) which argued that because a far greater portion of human diversity was to be found between individuals within racial populations, than between different racial populations themselves, therefore race was an invalid biological classification. This argument is pure boloney. It is also true that there is a far greater amount of diversity between individual females or between individual males, than there is between the sexes. Sex is determined, after all, on the basis of a single chromosome out of 46. Does that mean that sex is an invalid biological category?

At the time Lewontin made his famous argument the human genome had yet to be mapped. Later in the century, the American government would fund the Human Genome Project. The HGP and Celera Genomics, a private research organization headed by J. Craig Venter competed against each other to produce the first map of the human genome. Upon the completion of the sequencing in 2000 Venter announced that they had proven that race was “not a scientific concept”. The reasoning behind this irresponsible statement, however, is subject to the same criticism as Lewontin’s.

The idea that race is an arbitrary social construct and not a biological reality began with and was propagated throughout the 20th Century by scientists who held far-left revolutionary ideas (and who were generally atheists) and who did not seem to feel the need to separate their science from their ideology. That a Christian would try to find support for such an idea in the Bible, while at the same time accusing the opposite view (that race exists and is important) of being a “Darwinian” idea is truly astonishing.

The reason for it is not difficult to deduce however. In the post-WWII era “racism” has climbed to the top of the totem pole of sins condemned by Western societies. Ken Ham and his associated undoubtedly wish to show that something so vehemently condemned by the society in which they live is also completely against the teachings of the Holy Scriptures.

Acts 17:26 however, does not prove that race does not exist or that it is important. On the contrary, it establishes the exact opposite. For the verse does not say that God took all the nations and peoples of the world and erased the differences and distinctions between them, making them one people. Rather it says that that He took one blood – that is one blood line, one lineage – and out of it made the many different nations of the world. St. Paul clearly states that God is the author of the nations of the world. How can we call unimportant that which God has created?

“Nations” and “races” are not the same thing, of course. The concepts, however, overlap like the circles in a Venn diagram. Both words, in their root meanings, point to the concept of biological descent. Both words identify groups composed of people with a common ancestry that sets them apart from other people giving them a distinct identity. Such a concept is quite compatible with the common ancestry that identifies people of all races and nations as human. If two people are both Englishmen, indicating a common national identity, it does not follow that they are both members of the Smith family. A nation, is a large people group with a common ancestry, that is distinguished from other groups primarily by cultural characteristics – language, religion, attire, manners and customs, history, etc. A race is a large people group with a common ancestry that is distinguished from other groups primarily by physical characteristics – skin colour, facial structure, etc.

When we talk about “racism” as a sin or a social evil we are not speaking in accordance with Scriptural truth. This is because the recently coined term “racism” is too broad and vague in its meaning. It is used to cover everything from serious racial injustice (genocide, enslaving another race, etc.) to more trivial matters such as telling ethnic jokes, to things which are not sinful at all such as merely distinguishing between races or having patriotic attachment and affection towards one’s own people. The last mentioned is not only not a sin but it is even a virtue.

It would be more in keeping with the Scriptures to condemn “racial injustice”. For while that phrase is no more found in Scripture than the word “racism” the much simpler concept those words represent is clearly against Scriptural teachings. “Racial injustice” simply means being unjust to a racial group, or to an individual because he is a member of a particular racial group. This falls under the category of injustice in general which is condemned in the Scriptures, Old and New Testaments.

In the Old Testament we find that God included a number of regulations, in His covenant with Israel, governing how they were to behave towards “strangers”, i.e., non-Israelites amongst them. They are told not to oppress the stranger and are reminded of their own experience of oppression in the land of Egypt . (Ex. 22:21, 23:9, Lev. 19:33). This was also stated positively as a command to love the stranger for the same reason (Lev. 19:34, Deut. 10:19). There was to be one law for both the Israelite and for the stranger (Ex. 12:49, Lev. 24:22, Num. 15:15-16,29). The stranger was to be provided for along with the poor, widows, and orphans (Lev. 19:10, 23:22, Deut. 10:18, 14:21,24:19-21, 26:12-13). The stranger was to receive justice (Deut. 1:16; 24:17, 27:19) and to have the same legal protections as the Israelite (Num 35:15).

If all of that sounds like a recipe for racial liberalism of the kind that exists today, there are other provisions in the Law that need to be taken into consideration. The “one law” for the Israelite and stranger did not forbid the Israelite from charging the stranger for the use of money lent, although he was forbidden to lend to his “brother” (fellow Israelite) this way (Deut. 23:20) . The stranger in Israel was excluded from the Passover (Ex. 12:43) unless he and all males in his family agreed to be circumcised (12:48). He was not allowed to eat things consecrated on the altar (Ex 29:33, 22:10, 13) and this prohibition extended even to the daughter of a priest if she happened to marry a stranger (22:12) unless she return to her father’s house without child (22:13) . The stranger was not allowed to come near the tabernacle upon pain of death (Num 1:51, 3:10, 38, 16:40, 18:4, 7). He was excluded from ruling over Israel as king (Deut. 17:15). He was expected, while sojourning in Israel, to keep the Sabbath (Ex. 20:10, 23:12, Deut. 5:14), to refrain from eating blood (Lev. 17:12), to keep God’s statutes and not commit any abominations (Lev. 18:26), and to not commit blasphemy (24:16), whatever his own custom may be.

In summary, the Israelites were told to treat aliens among them justly, but this justice did not include full social equality with the Israelites.

The Old Testament law was a covenant that functioned as the constitution for a particular nation. It was not a universal template upon which every nation was to build its constitution and should not be treated as such. That does not mean, however, that it should be treated as irrelevant to the contemporary situation by Christians.

In this case, the passages of the Old Testament law that pertain to the stranger, do not cover the situation created by liberal governments in the 20th Century. After WWII, liberal governments in Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Europe began actively seeking large numbers of immigrants. However much the Torah told the Israelites to treat the stranger well it nowhere commanded the Israelites to actively seek to bring strangers into their midst. Furthermore, 20th and 21st Century liberal governments have been actively recruiting these masses of immigrants at a time when they have established affirmative action policies that give immigrants preferential treatment over people born in their country. While the Old Testament law demanded that the stranger be provided for and treated with justice it never hinted that the Israelites should treat him better than they do their own people. Finally, liberal governments began encouraging mass immigration at a time when domestic fertility rates were below population replacement levels. Those rates have remained low ever since and liberal governments show no indication that they will stop the mass importation of immigrants any time soon. When governments encourage long-term mass immigration at a time when fertility is that low that means they have essentially decided to replace their people. There is absolutely no support for such a policy in the Old Testament.

Nor is there any in the New Testament.

This has not prevented clergy and other Bible teachers from reading support for such policies into the New Testament text. The most common texts chosen for such eisegesis are passages which teach that God is the God of all people and that the Gospel is to be preached to all people, such as the Acts 17 passage we looked at earlier, the Great Commission, and St. Paul’s statement in Romans that the Gospel is the power of God unto salvation “to the Jew first and also the Greek” and passages which teach the spiritual unity of believers from all people groups in the Church and in the Kingdom of God.

Nowhere in any of these passages is there any indication that Christ wants His Church to try to bring about the political and social re-unification of mankind. The statement in Acts 17 that God is the Author of the nations, Who determined beforehand when they would rise and fall and what would be the boundaries of their territory presents an excellent reason why Christians should not support such efforts.

It has been argued that because Christ has dealt with sin once and for all in His Atoning death that therefore all judgments on sin, all curses, in the Old Testament are reversed. The division of the world into the nations in the Old Testament is presented as being such a judgment, this line of reasoning goes, therefore after the world’s redemption in Christ, the curse is lifted and God now desires the union of that which in judgment He separated.

There is some truth in that, like there is in all heresies, but it is only partial truth mixed with a tremendous amount of error.

The account of the separation of the nations is found in the 11th chapter of the Book of Genesis. Prior to this chapter was chapter 10 giving the genealogical table of the nations which follows immediately after the end of the account of Noah’s life in chapter 9. After the Flood God had told mankind to “Be fruitful, multiply, and replenish the earth”. At the beginning of chapter 11 they had not quite done that. They had multiplied but instead of replenishing the earth they had all dwelt in the plain of Shinar. It was there that they under the rule of King Nimrod (10:10) built the city that would become Babylon. In it they began construction of a huge tower. This was done in express defiance of God. They said their tower’s top would “reach unto heaven” and that they were building it “lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth” which they would have to be if they were to fulfill God’s command to “replenish the earth”.

God, the chapter tells us, was not impressed. He paid a visit to their ziggurat and confused their tongues, making it so they spoke different languages and could not understand each other. By doing this God “scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth”.

Is there any indication in the New Testament that God wants this reversed?

Not in the way such Christian teachers who have jumped on the anti-racist bandwagon think. The reversal of a scattering is a bringing together in unity. The New Testament does speak of a bringing together of people from all nations, who have been made one in Christ. This however, takes place not on earth but before the throne of God in heaven:

And they sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation. (Rev. 5:9)

This unity of the redeemed from all people groups in the Kingdom of God in heaven is not a unity accomplished by political efforts upon the earth in the present age.

The Kingdom of God does have a manifestation upon earth in the present age. That is the Christian Church. If there is to be any transnational unity accomplished upon earth in this age with God’s blessing it will be within the Church. Lo and behold, that is exactly where the New Testament locates such unity.

In the second chapter of the book of Acts we have the account of the first Christian Pentecost. Fifty days after the Lord’s Resurrection, ten after His Ascension, the Apostles were waiting in the upper room in Jerusalem, when the Holy Spirit came upon them. Filled with the Holy Ghost that first Whitsunday, they went to the window and addressed the multitude of people, who were present from all over the Roman world in Jerusalem that day. Each man heard them speak in his own tongue.

This event is widely considered to be the official founding of the Christian Church and it is here that we see the earthly manifestation of the heavenly unity spoken of by St. John in the Book of Revelation. Those who heard the Gospel in a multitude of different tongues on Pentecost and believed, were united into one body, the Church. These were all Jews but later in the Book of Acts the Gentiles would be brought in to the Church as well when they too heard the Gospel and believed.

Thus St. Paul would write to the Church in Ephesus about the how in Christ, the Law as a barrier between Jews and Gentiles had been removed, and to the Galatian Church he would write:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.

St. Paul clearly does not mean that these distinctions were to be eliminated altogether. Had he meant that, his instructions to the Church of Ephesus about the way husbands and wives, and masters and slaves, should behave towards each other would be meaningless nonsense, as would a number of other passages in his epistles. What he was saying here is that all believers, regardless of their race, sex, or status, are full partakers in the grace and blessings of God in Jesus Christ to Whom they are united in faith and therefore made one with each other.

There is no mandate there for the Church to try to eliminate these distinctions in civil society or for the Church to attempt to eliminate the political and social distinct identies of people groups.

The Scriptures teach that mankind was created in God’s image, that man fell into sin and was exiled from Paradise, that Christ has redeemed man from sin through His death and resurrection, and that He will bring redeemed man to Paradise once more. That will only be accomplished, however, by His grace in the age to come. The belief that Paradise can be restored to man through human effort has been the fundamental error of every leftist movement throughout history. Attempts to do so result in conditions that resemble Hell far more than they do Paradise.

This is as true of the attempt to achieve Paradise though unity by rubbing out or at least minimizing the importance of the lines between different people groups as it is of any other leftist utopian scheme. Consider the results of anti-racist and multi-culturalist policies in Western countries.

Laws which prohibit racial discrimination on the part of private property owners and businessmen do not produce “color-blind” business practices. They produce affirmative action practices where companies hire a certain number of employees from racial minorities regardless of their qualifications in order that they cannot be sued for discriminatory practices. Laws and government policies that force members of various ethnic groups together in various social contexts do not produce mutual understanding and racial harmony. They produce ethnic tension and racial conflict.

Anti-racism forces people to lie to others and to themselves. It requires people to assert, against all observable evidence, that racial groups differ from each other only in the trivial matter of physical appearance. It recently produced the spectacle, at once comic and tragic, of the world’s most powerful country patting itself on the back because beyond its racial past. What was the event that prompted this round of liberal self-congratulation? The election of the first president in the history of the United States chosen largely for the color of his skin.

Consider the effect of laws against “hate”, which make a crime a hate crime with stiffer penalties if it is motivated by racial prejudice. The relatively small number of such crimes committed by white people are treated as a serious epidemic of hate that needs to be eliminated from society. Meanwhile, the astronomically larger numbers of violent crimes committed against white people by members of certain racial minorities are not considered “hate crimes” even though racial hatred obviously plays a large role in these crimes. Or, consider laws against “hate speech”. Violent language calling for the murder of white people in quite common in certain forms of music and literature. This never seems to be considered “hate speech”. Far more irenic writing than this has caused people to be dragged before Human Rights Tribunals. The atmosphere of self-deception generated by laws like this could have come out of George Orwell’s 1984.

Anti-racism encourages people to behave dishonorably towards friends and loved ones. A person accused of “racism” becomes a pariah and that person’s friends are expected to disown and denounce him or else risk becoming tainted with guilt by association.

Anti-racism produces serious injustice towards a number of different people groups. The white farmers of Rhodesia were the victims of the influence of anti-racism in Western governments as much as they were the victims of Robert Mugabe and his thugs. The Afrikaners in South Africa are currently being murdered at genocidal rates because of the same influence of anti-racism on Western governments.

The worst form of injustice anti-racism produces, however, is ethnic suicide. A tremendous number of nations – all who would fall within the racial category variously called white, European, or Caucasian – are in danger of demographic death due to the combination of low fertility and high immigration over the same long period of time. The anti-racist considers genocide to be the greatest of all sins. Genocide, however, is still genocide even when it is committed against your own people. Indeed, that genocide is far worse than any other kind of genocide because it is a betrayal of people to whom you have specific duties and are supposed to be loyal. (4)

In The New Science of Politics, (5) Dr. Eric Voegelin identified as a characteristic of gnosticism, the ancient heresy against which the leaders of the orthodox, Apostolic, Christian Church contended in the early centuries, attempts to create on earth in the present age, the Paradise promised to the believer in the age to come. To do so was to “immanentize the eschaton”. This Gnosticism lies at the heart of all progressive, utopian movements – including anti-racism and multiculturalism.

Orthodox Christians of all branches of Christ’s Church should reject this Gnostic heresy in its ugly contemporary manifestation.

(1) Ken Ham, Carl Wieland, Don Batten, One Blood: The Biblical Answer to Racism (Green Forest: Master Books, 1999).

(2) Ashley Montagu, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942).

(3) Richard C. Lewontin “The Apportionment of Human Diversity” in Evolutionary Biology 6 (1972), pp. 381-398.

(4) Regarding affirmative action and minority set asides, Dr. Thomas Fleming wrote “Such disgusting and immoral policies are worse than any form of racism I have encountered because they teach us to hate precisely those whom we are most supposed to love”. Thomas Fleming, “The Audacity of Hate”, Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, , October 2008, p. 11.

(5) Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1952).