What You’ve Been Searching For

What Do Christians Get Wrong About Racial Reconciliation?

New studio, new topics. As I talked about last week, we have some new research in our new studio that we’re transitioning to this week. We have another biggie that’s probably going to anger some people, offend some people, but it has to do with what you’ve been searching for. So hopefully you’ll watch comment, subscribe, all those things you’re supposed to do. I’m Joel Fieri. This is what you’ve been searching for. Stay tuned.

All right. As I mentioned in our opener, we have another big question from our new research that we’ve done here at Christian Podcast Central on what you, the Christian podcast listener, have been searching for, questions and topics. If you caught last week’s or our last podcast, we talked about the Christian position towards people who are pressuring us to accept them, whether it be gay people, other religions, atheists even, and what our response to them should be.

Today, I want to talk about another big question that comes to us through our research. And that is, what do we get wrong about racial reconciliation? Like I said, we’re talking about the big issues that are facing the church today. And this is definitely one of them, if not the biggest, it’s one of the biggest.

So I’m going to take the question the way it is first. What do we get wrong about racial reconciliation? Okay. We, again, I like to define the terms here. It just comes to us as that question. Now if we want to define what we as Christians or we as a society, the thing that I think we get wrong about racial reconciliation is we forget what we got right about racial reconciliation.

Now, what do I mean by that? I’m a baby boomer. I was born in 1960. So if you do the math, I’m 61 years old. My entire life has been lived in this cultural moment of heightened racial awareness. My early years, my childhood, high school, into college and into adult, I lived out, came of age during the time of the civil rights movement. From as long as I can remember, racial issues, civil rights, all these things were very much a part of popular culture, politics, and my upbringing, my education. Back then, it was for things like voting rights and the right to sit at a soda counter, the right to get on a bus and not move to the back, all those things.

So my earliest memories are of these issues coming up and our culture deciding how we’re going to stand on this. We always did have a certain stance on it and things were changing. The people leading this change, the people advocating for civil rights were led by people like the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. And notice I said, “Reverend.” That’s how he was known his whole life. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. And tellingly, we’ve kind of taken the Reverend off, but his whole motivation for his work in civil rights was his identity as a pastor and as a Christian. He saw it as his duty.

Christians have always been the ones that have led the fight for racial justice, if you want to call it that. From the very beginning of our country, a lot of people say America was founded as a racist country. Actually, you could argue that it wasn’t. From the very founding of our country from the time of the Constitution, almost half the states outlawed slavery. The Founding Fathers really dealt with this idea. They’re the ones that came up with the idea that all men are created equal. They’re the ones that really put that into practice. Well, right away, they had a very big issue, a very big contradiction with slavery, and they knew it. So they were trying to figure out how do we, as this nation that’s founded under God, one nation under God, how do we deal with this obvious contradiction? And it led to things like the very, very bloody Civil War, the end of slavery, reconstruction, all the things in our history that led up to the civil rights movement, where I came along.

And I consider myself actually blessed to have lived through that time, to have been brought up and come of age in that time of the civil rights movement. The civil rights struggle we had, and it was a struggle. It was ugly at times. What I happened to do was do a little bit of research, find out how ugly things were when Martin Luther King and other people started challenging this notion that African Americans or Blacks or whatever you want to call them were somehow second class citizens. It was bloody at times. It was brutal at times.

I’ll tell you one thing, it was inspiring. It was glorious. It was something, like I said, that I’m consider myself blessed to have lived through a time when the nation really took stock of itself, faced these issues head on, led by Christians. Again, this has always been a Christian-led idea. Abolition was also. So like I said, this idea of all men created equal. And we got it right, folks. In fact, around the time I was in high school going into college, we got it right.

But something happened, at the point where the country had finally come to grips through a lot of struggle, but again, through a lot of really inspiring effort and soul searching, we came to the point where we really did deal with most of our systemic racism. We really did, but there were certain people that couldn’t have that. There was too much money to be made and political hay to be made by continuing this idea of America being a racist country.

And then as I moved on in life, my 30s, 40s, and into recent times. As grateful as I am that I grew up in the civil rights movement, I’m really pained that in the latter part of my life, I’m having to see all that work kind of undone. I’m having to see us forget what we got right. So that’s what I would say we’re getting wrong is we’re forgetting what we got right. What we as Christians, how we as Christians and our ancestors and our forefathers led this country in racial reconciliation.

Now, as Christians, we’re being led by people who don’t want to really see racial reconciliation. There’s too much advantage to there being this idea that we’re still a racist society. The best person to listen to on this subject is, I mentioned him before, is a pastor named Voddie Baucham. And he does a YouTube sermon on Christians and racial reconciliation. And we’ll put a link to it below. Everybody needs to watch this. What Voddie does is he goes through Ephesians 2, and talks about, he says, we don’t need to work on racial reconciliation. It’s already been done. Jesus did it. The idea of racism is an illusion and a lie, anyways. We’re all the human race. We’re not a different race, just because we have different color skin or different characteristics or different cultures. We have different ethnicities, yes. Different cultures, yes. But we’re all the same race. And that’s not just a pie in the sky idea. It’s really true.

The real division, and Voddie gets into this, and he does it brilliantly, is those in humanity who are far away from God and those who are near to God. And what Jesus did through his death on the cross is he took those who were far away and made a chance for them to come near to God. He said, that’s really the only division that we have. Jesus did the work. We don’t have to take anyone else’s, again, as I said, in my last video, we don’t have to take the lead from the world. We don’t have to take anybody else’s definition or description of us. Christians have always been the leader in reconciliation. We’ve led in racial reconciliation because we have that unique perspective of there really is no racial divide. The divide is between those who know God and those who don’t, those who have been brought near and those who are far away. And it’s our job as Christians is to show those who are far away how to come near to God.

So like I said, we’ll put that link in the description as a must see, especially if you’re struggling with this issue, as I know a lot of you are. But this is another thing we need to get. The question is what did we get wrong? We’ve gotten a lot wrong. But we also did a lot right, and that’s what we need to remember. And we need to get this one right, folks. And the best way to do that is to stop accepting the world’s definition of what the issue is, and knowing as Christian what the real issue is. And we need to have the message of, this is how we all, who are far away, have been brought near and that’s the message we need to stick to.

So I hope that’s helpful. Again, another controversial, big topic. I know you guys out there have opinions on this. Am I right? Am I wrong? How am I dressed? I don’t know. Give some kind of comment, give me some kind of feedback on this video. Like at the like button, subscribe, please subscribe to our YouTube channel, and most important, go to Christianpodcastcentral.com. That’s where you’ll find a lot of other videos and topics just like this. It’s what you’ve been searching for. I’m Joel Fieri. Thanks for listening.