Talking about race

Dear Editor,

I was saddened to see Paul Lusk’s letter (en December 2020) and Duncan Forbes’ article (en October 2020) promoting the book We Need to Talk About Race (SPCK 2019) by Ben Lindsay. While his title is not wrong, the content of this book is partisan and less than Biblical.

Lindsay’s book owes far more to the liberation theology of James Cone and his modern ‘woke’ disciples such as Anthony Bradley and Duke Kwon than it does to Scripture, and to modern critical race theory than to the Civil Rights tradition of Washington, Douglass or King. To ‘woke’ evangelicals, facts, rational argument and even Biblical categories must give way to the ethnic gnosticism (Voddie Baucham’s assessment) of the ‘black experience’. Thus, in this book, key Biblical doctrines such as sin, justice and repentance are redefined: instead of being an intentional thought or act, the sin of racism becomes the phantom menace of ‘systemic racism’ for which Biblical repentance is inadequate, even impossible. Paul asserts that ‘love does not keep a record of wrongs’, but the woke even keep records of imagined slights, feelings of discomfort and perceived ‘funny looks’. And the records return to the tenth generation: you are guilty of your ancestors’ sins. Your only recourse is the modern equivalent of indulgences – reparations, by which you may hope, not to release your ancestors from purgatory (as in the medieval example), but to free yourself (perhaps only temporarily) from the burden they bequeathed to you: your inescapable ‘whiteness’. There is a caveat here and there in the book, but Lindsay’s is essentially the standard woke message.