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Real Answers™
tf63
Copyright: © 2009 Tom Flannery
750 words

IS RUSH A RACIST?  AND GOD, TOO?

By: Tom Flannery

With the election last year of Barack Obama we were told that we were at last entering a post-racial period in which race would no longer be the polarizing issue that it has been in this country for far too long.

Sadly, that has not turned out to be the case.  These days, though, the tables have been turned and it is the charge of “racism” that is being used to batter and bruise.  This has become the scarlet letter of our age — and if you doubt it, just ask Rush Limbaugh.

No sooner was it announced that Rush was part of a group making a bid to buy the St. Louis Rams than his political enemies spread racist statements attributed to Rush which he never made, including a fabricated “quote” about the positive effects of slavery.  

To listen to those who see impure race-based motives everywhere they look, it is clear that they believe the great culprit on the issue of race throughout human history is Western civilization.  But it doesn’t stop there.

The scandalous charge of racism is being used by ideologues of all persuasions to “make their case” by eschewing honest arguments or actual evidence in favor of smearing the subject of their attacks with the “R” label.  It’s often a far more effective strategy, which is perhaps why it is not limited to either political debates or even to mere mortals.

With the rise of the so-called New Atheists and a slew of best-selling books they have written (Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion,” Christopher Hitchens’ “God Is Not Great,” etc.), God Himself is now being routinely skewered as an intolerant bigot.  And as with the scurrilous attacks against Rush, God is being slandered as a proponent of slavery because of some Scripture verses regarding the proper treatment of slaves.

These critics ignore the fact that slavery was always part of the human condition, a product of the Fall of man.  It was not something God instituted, but something He recognized as part of our fallen world.  Furthermore, not all slavery was the enforced oppression of one group or race of people over another.  It often took the form of indentured servitude, where people sold themselves into slavery for financial reasons, or fell into such servitude to pay off debts.

In the New Testament, we have the Apostle Paul writing to a Christian brother named Philemon about a slave named Onesimus who had robbed Philemon and fled.  Paul informs Philemon in his letter that Onesimus has become a Christian and is returning to him, but Paul doesn’t stop there.  He not only offers to personally repay any financial loss to Philemon but also urges him to receive Onesimus as “no longer as a slave but more than a slave — a beloved brother” (Philemon 16).

This biblical concept of slave as a Christian brother and therefore an equal to all others completely revolutionized thinking on the issue of race and ended up changing the world for the better in myriad ways.

And what of the Western world with its Christian underpinnings?  On that, history is clear.  Whereas slavery always existed, it was recognized for the evil that it is and abolished in the West long before any other cultures even thought to question it, much less end it.

As the great writer Thomas Sowell, who is black, observed:  “The anti-slavery movement was spearheaded by people who would today be called ‘the religious right’,” adding that the anti-slavery ideas which spread throughout Western civilization “pitted the West against Africans, Arabs, Asians and virtually the entire non-Western world, which still saw nothing wrong with slavery.”

Here in America as in England, most abolitionists were committed Christians, and contrary to what New Atheists would have us believe about the Bible, they were all somehow inspired by Scripture to actively and adamantly oppose slavery.

In his book “What’s So Great About Christianity,” Dinesh D’Souza explains this was due to the biblical notion that all are equal in the eyes of God:  “From this spiritual truth [Christians] derived a political proposition:  because human beings are equal in God’s sight, no man has the right to rule another without his consent.  This doctrine is the moral root of both abolitionism and democracy.”

Now if we can just start treating each other as human beings and putting away both the racist sentiments on the one hand and the false cries of racism on the other, we will truly and at long last have entered a post-racial period in America.

"Real Answers™" furnished courtesy of The Amy Foundation Internet Syndicate. To contact the author or The Amy Foundation, write or E-mail to: P. O. Box 16091, Lansing, MI 48901-6091; amyfoundtn@aol.com

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