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NEW CLASS ON CHRISTIAN PRIVILEGE GETS IT ALL WRONG
TOM LAMPRECHT: Harry, just four days after Easter, George Washington University decided they would host a training session for students and faculty that teaches “Christian privilege” — that Christians receive unmerited perks from institutions and systems all across the country.
DR. REEDER: It seems a premise that, in this country, Christians enjoy a privileged status and benefits simply by being Christian. Here’s what I think, actually, the workshop ought to be focused on: privileges produced by Christianity for everyone.
In this workshop, one of the principles was the founding fathers were all Christians, weren’t they? And, of course, the answer is no. The point isn’t whether all the founding father were Christians, but the point is did the Christian world and life view affect what they produced as founding fathers?
CHRISTIANITY LED TO FAIRNESS AND WISDOM OF CONSTITUTION
Go look at the Declaration of Independence. What is the dominant worldview that is being expressed in terms of the rights of liberty that were unalienable by those that God gave, not the government. The Constitution, Lex Rex, that was a Christian world and life view. The true king of a nation should not be any individual or any individuals — so no to oligarchies, no to monarchies and no to democracy and yes to a representative government that’s: the king is the law and that the law is the king.
The Bill of Rights, in which the free practice of religion and note the nation could not pick and choose winners since everyone had the inalienable right for the free practice of religion, the government’s job was not to pick the religion, but Christianity had influenced the formation of a government that simply defended the rights to the rights to the free practice of religion.
Christian privilege? Then why would the Christian president, first president, write a letter to a Jewish synagogue that is framed to this day and hangs in that synagogue, in response to their question would this nation — clearly Christian influence, the Jewish congregations saw the influence of Christianity — so they asked the question: Would they be allowed and free to worship within this nation? George Washington, in reference to our founding documents, said yes. Then he corrected them, “You won’t be tolerated. Your right to worship is affirmed.”
Therefore, are there Christian privileges? Yes, if what you understand is not a nation that had a document designed to privilege Christians, but a nation that had documents — founding documents from founding fathers — influenced by a Christian world and life view that produced privileges for citizens of this country, no matter who they are, that were untold in other nations.
OUR HISTORY IS RICH WITH CHRISTIAN INFLUENCE THAT HAS FLOURISHED
Clearly, the festering boil was the inability and/or refusal of the founding fathers to address the evils of chattel slavery although, when you read the founding fathers, they were convinced by what they had established that slavery could not last within this nation. They were pretty sure the founding documents would sound the death knell.
Look at how Abraham Lincoln quoted the founding documents and the founding fathers to oppose slavery. Two of my great heroes, Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver, continually quoted from the Constitution as well as Biblical principles.
We have just commemorated the horrific death of Martin Luther King by assassination in Memphis 50 years ago. He not only quoted Scripture, but note how often he confronted the injustice of Jim Crow laws from the quotes of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as he would confront those unjust laws in a very powerful manner of debate and protest, claiming the rights of protest that had been built into the Bill of Rights by Christian forefathers and the equality of all citizens and that would include no partiality for racial or ethnic background that everyone was to enjoy those rights as citizens.
Therefore, yes, if you want to have a workshop that says Christianity has produced a nation with an imperfect track record but extraordinary privileges for all of its citizens that have never been known in other nations, I would attend that workshop but, obviously, the point of this workshop is that we have a nation in which Christians are privileged.
CHRISTIANS HAVE LESS PRIVILEGE AS THEY ARE LITIGATED
Well, that would be my second analysis, Tom. You have a hard time selling that premise to some Christian bakers and Christian photographers who are now being told that they are to use their skills and their gifts to support sexual practices that are sinful and destructive in which they cannot, in obedience to the Lord and free practice of religion, support. Talk to Christian counselors who, right now, labor in states that tell them your Christian counseling that identifies sexual promiscuity and sexual perversion as sins from which people can be forgiven through Gospel counseling and set free from Gospel transformation — now they’re in a nation that tells them they cannot give Christian counseling for issues such as sexual anarchy, sexual sins and sexual chaos.
I would suggest the right premise of the class should be what are the extraordinary privileges that the influence of Christianity have brought for all the citizens of this nation, even as you make an honest assessment of the imperfect protection of all of the citizens of this nation that should have been protected under our founding documents by our founding fathers who were influenced by a Christian world and life view?
IS THIS JUST A TACTIC TO DENY CHRISTIANS RIGHTS?
TOM LAMPRECHT: Are they truly thinking that there’s Christian privilege or is this merely a cover because Christians are being targeted?
DR REEDER: Right. This is justifying the targeting. The way that you get rid of Christian privilege is to target Christians and to not simply remove their privilege, but to remove their inalienable rights to practice their God-given rights that should be protected.
Tom, it’s abundantly clear that, in the undaunted and relentless sexual revolution, there is one religion that cannot be tolerated and that is Christianity. Every time you find a Christian speaking to those issues — of course, you and I experience it on a daily and regular basis with this program — there will be profanity, there’ll be name-calling, there’ll be an attempt of shaming one’s Christian ethics.
What we need to do in our generation is to continue to labor for the privileges that everyone can be blessed by and with when a Christian world and life view is applied to public policy. That is something that we labor for and long for. And I think we have to understand that workshops like this are really designed to marginalize Christianity and to silence Christianity within the culture.
And to, finally, this particular workshop grows right out of the textbook of the tactics of Cultural Marxism: you try to create a fractious society, various types of class warfare — whether it’s economic, racial, or religious — in order to elevate the power of the state over its citizens, thereby removing their rights and a limited government which is supposed to protect those rights into a government that will choose to give rights to any group it wants to and, thus, the cultural elite can then control society to the secular progressive sexual revolution anticipated utopian worldwide movement.
SAME TIRED PLAYBOOK, SAME SOLUTION IN CHRIST
But, Tom, there’s nothing new here. Whether it was Assyria or Babylon or Mato-Persian or Egypt or Greece or Roman or Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, there have always been these attempts at various types of empires. Right now, the attempt is based in an ideology that uses governments in order to control people.
What we just need to do is to keep giving ourselves to that glorious, unstoppable and ultimately triumphant movement of the kingdom of God with the Gospel of Jesus Christ as we win men and women to a personal relationship with Christ and disciple them so that they not only think with the mind of Christ, but they live with courage and compassion out of a heart for Christ and a life that is like Christ, who would speak the truth in love.
Dr. Harry L. Reeder III is the Senior Pastor of Briarwood Presbyterian Church in Birmingham.
This podcast was transcribed by Jessica Havin, editorial assistant for Yellowhammer News, who has transcribed some of the top podcasts in the country and whose work has been featured in a New York Times Bestseller.
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