Terry Crews has just committed the unforgivable sin by not giving unquestionable allegiance to #BlackLivesMatter.
Crews, the well-known African-American actor of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, who describes himself as a “Lover to my wife, father to my children, friend to my friends, and servant to my Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ”, posted on Twitter the following social justice blasphemy:
The back lash—or maybe that should be, ‘black-lash’? —against Crews has been immense, with many people already calling for him to be “cancelled”. But just notice what Crews does and does not say. He begins by saying that regardless of one’s race, creed and ideology, if a person is a “child of God” then he regards you as family. As someone who identifies as a Christian this obviously implies a certain exclusivity (see Acts 4:12; John 14:6). But that is not what has gotten people upset.
No, it’s that he dared to caution people that the noble ideal of valuing the lives of black people didn’t “morph” into racial supremacy. And for that, Crews is being condemned. Peter Liethart makes the following insightful observation:
Antiracism has become, as John McWhorter pointed out in 2015, America’s new religion. It has its holidays, its saints and martyrs, its liturgical processions and gestures, its symbols and sacraments, its Scriptures and sermonizers, its modes of confession and almost-absolution, its eschatological hope that America will, somehow and someday, fix racism once and for all.
As is now commonly known, Patrisse Cullors, one of the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement, is a “trained Marxist”. And this was the concern that many people have had with the organisation all along. Christians, in particular, respect that everyone has been made in the image of God (Gen. 1:26-27) and that the Gospel undercuts any claim to one race being more superior than another (see Gal. 3:28). What we are seeing played out now, though, is a socio-political movement which is completely at odds with those things.
A classic illustration of this is Dr Priyamvada Gopal, the Cambridge professor who provocatively tweets that, “White Lives Don’t Matter”. In response, rather than censoring her, the university actually had her promoted to a full professorship.
Crews is absolutely right in warning against racial supremacy, because not only are we already seeing signs of reverse racism—such as white women being forced to bend the knee or the elderly being callously pushed over,—but the militant hatred response against him only further proves it. And we should all be able to agree that this is completely unacceptable.
But in keeping with Marxist ideology, what this demonstrates is that none of this is about equality, but power. And rather than producing greater cultural unity it will only flame the fires of racial animosity and division.