Panel: The State of Racial Reconciliation in America

I've got some great friends here with me that we're gonna have a conversation about the state of racial reconciliation in America on the far side for me is da Horton he's the national coordinator for urban student missions at the North American Mission Board right next to him the be Dianna boule who's a church planner in the Washington DC area his church Anacostia River Church is launching next week next to him is dr. Robert George he's the McCormick's professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University he also serves on the US Council on International Religious Freedom and has been a part of the u.s. Civil Rights Commission as well and then of course our president Russell Moore were y'all thank him for that great message he just brought a minute ago we want to talk about the landscape of race in American we can think back in recent times to 2012 with the death of Trayvon Martin or other prominent tragedies that have happened in America including Eric garner and the Ferguson situation with Michael Brown and there's just been a natural conversation that's emerged in our communities all around us on the basis of these issues and dr. Moore I want to start with you as you look back at especially the last six to nine months and some of these issues have unfolded how would you assess the state of racial reconciliation in America what what has been revealed to us about where we're at in light of our response as a country to these issues well it's like anything else I think that we can we can be unduly pessimistic in the sense that we can forget the sorts of issues that we're not having to argue about right now or we can be too overly optimistic and assume well everything is taken care of everything is fine these are just isolated situations when in fact they're not but I think what is happening is that perhaps what the Lord is doing in several of these situations is enabling those of us who are in the church to start listening to one another I tell people all the time that one of the one of the conversations that I had one time that sticks with me all the time was from a pastor a friend of mine african-american pastor in California who was going to be with us this week but he couldn't because of a scheduling problem but he and I were talking this was after the death of Trayvon Martin and he called me and we were just talking about these issues and he was talking about preparing college applications for his son to go to college and he said that as he was doing that he was praying that his son would not get into certain places because he was afraid that that might be a dangerous place for his son as a young african-american male and I realized I've never had to think about that for any of my five sons there there are other things that I have to pray about and worry about but that's not one of them and so it could be that what's happening is that the Lord is enabling us to be able to listen to one another and to bear one another's burdens through this now I know da after the events unfolded in Ferguson you had the chance to visit there and be with some of your friends who have minister in that area tell us a little bit about what that experience was like and and I specifically want you to talk about a very interesting comment you made in an article you wrote after that about a trend that you are noticing about absentee churches so talk a little bit about your experience in Ferguson and what you mean by that concept of absentee churches yeah so I was invited by some good friends of mine thizzle in a pastor Kenny petty at the gate Church in st. Louis and we met at a church in West st. Louis not too far from Ferguson but it's in North County where you have a conglomerate of the city that's moved out Ferguson represents the new urban the brothers like the haughty Lewis Leonce Crump and I've been talking about that it's that gentrification and ghetto fication mix and so while I was there that evening the whole the whole theme of the event was to allow church leaders and pastors and Shepherds to Shepherd the community through all that was going on details were still coming out the family was hurting people were one to just ride on you know that evening and so we had a line of people making comments the first two people came and actually had some questions we gave some answers and then the third person changed the whole trajectory the evening he said no offense to y'all but I want to talk to my people and he turned his back to us and he began to just propagate his heart grief to the people and then after that one by one for the next 20 or so people that's the conversation excluded the church if you will in leadership minority leadership from the conversation and after the fact some black Hebrew Israelites were there and because of gospel deficiency cults like that and other movements thrive in those communities with as a gospel deficiency a lack of healthy ecclesiology and to be candid with you a lot of men trying to build their own kingdoms in those cities under the auspice of the lord's Brides name and so when you have that reality i said they were not talked to over a dozen Millennials african-american Millennials and i talked to some older seasoned individuals who are part of the civil rights movement and there was a dichotomy in their eyes and the civil rights movement individuals they had hope they have been through some things and then to my generation if we didn't have immediate justice as we subjectively individually define it then we were completely disconcerting with any conversation if the outcome did not match our individual perspective and so what i saw from that and what i gleaned from that was because of gospel deficiency a lot of the individuals from my generation who are ethnic minorities I call them indigenous urbanites from the hood from the trap they look at the church they look at Christ they look at the Bible and they say okay after you get off your pulpit and your soapbox now let's talk about how we don't change this thing so it's not even post Christian it's pre-christian it's introducing them to biblical narratives but the issue and the answer is found in longevity of ministry and so you have a lot of church planters that are going into cities and if they fail within two to three years what does that say to the community outside of the fact that we're gonna mark you off the list without the other church failures they try to come through and talk a big game but never produced anything and so what I believe is the my generation looks at churches like the absentee parent there was not resident in their home so when they try to intersect with their life in a crisis moment it's like man get out of my face you were never there for me you ain't gonna be there for me now I have to learn how to survive on my own so I don't need your Jesus I don't need your Bible I show don't need your church and you ain't gonna get my tithe and so as we look at that it's the reality of recalibrating the hearts of people to go into the communities we're on from where Kenny petty servant and brothers all around the nation and saying stick to the community stick to the gospel stick in the face of opposition express compassion Express mercy tangibly live out the implications of the gospel and plant your life and your family and show them what longevity is because as the winds of false doctrine come and go the gospel planted in that community will produce the supernatural change that our community needs dr. George and your role on the u.s. Civil Rights Commission what helped us think through as churches and as communities when we see a racially charged event happen whether it's a news story breaks or you see video footage like in the case Eric garner in New York what what some counsel you have for how people can react and not overreact in those situations well that's the key it's to react but not overreact so you've asked exactly the right question but before I address it I need to fulfill an obligation that I undertook all right as my friend Russell knows I regularly teach with my beloved friend and teaching partner professor Cornel West and we were doing our seminar yesterday evening wonderful discussion of Kierkegaard's fear and trembling and he learned that I was going to be coming down to this event he asked me in particular to send his warm regards to everybody who's here and to congratulate Russell on convening this very important meeting so I want to pass that along for a month from professor West the whole problem in life not just with respect to the issues that we're addressing today but just about every other issue is being honest and telling the truth usually we know the truth or at least have some pretty good idea of what it is but we worry about speaking it out loud in public sometimes just because we're intimidated because telling the truth is gonna make a lot of people mad sometimes it's not that sometimes it's that we lack the faith in other people in our interlocutors to handle the truth properly so we may fear when an incident happens a racially-charged of potentially racially charged incident happens we may fear if we tell the truth in all its complexity or if we tell the truth about the limits of what we know right now and the need to know more that will be used by people we don't trust against us against what we believe if we tell the truth that you know what young black men are very often singled out improperly for detention and questioning that might feed into the hucksters and the demagogues who will then use it to depict the whole country as irredeemably racist and to blacken the reputation of the police whom we have to rely on for our own safety or on the other side if we tell the truth that the hands weren't up then the racists and the bad guys will use that to say that racial incidents like this don't really happen they're always just pumped up fictionalized accounts of things meant to play into a racial narrative that lack of truth-telling willingness to tell the truth and to trust the truth trust the power of the truth trust the illumination of the truth is our fundamental problem and very often it's rooted in a lack of courage it's not just the lack of faith though it is that it's a lack of courage to tell the truth so I think what we need Phillip our courageous people courageous men and women who are willing to tell the truth and very often the truth is not going to fit in neatly to anybody's preconceived narratives so maybe it's time that we back off of the preconceived narratives and just let the truth itself shine forth by our willingness to tell it at the BT you've written a lot in the last few months about race issues as several these events have unfolded you've helped churches think through these issues and I'm curious to get your take as you look back on the last few months what are some things that have been encouraged you about the way the church has responded and what are some things that have discouraged you about how the churches responded well I'm sitting here discouraged having to speak between these two brothers between the preacher and the philosopher I got nothing to say tell the truth things are discouraging things that are encouraging I'm greatly encouraged by the number of people who are mustering courage to have the conversation and the number of people who are as they must be courage confessing really hard things to confess but are demonstrating some commitment to the truth I absolutely agree that apart from a robust truth-telling and the courage that it takes to not only tell it but then as my brother was saying be modified by it there's not much hope for significant progress apart from that so I'm really encouraged by that I'm encouraged by the leadership of some pastors and churches and and leaders like Russ who are brokering this kind of conversation given visibility to these sets of issues and leaning into these sets of issues with hope and with faith much to be encouraged by I think the thing that's been discouraging to me has been a discovery of how to put this charitably the discovery of what I can only characterize as continuing lingering racist sentiment some of it it seems to me self-conscious some of it a more benign form you know sort of a unawares kind of reaction to things that that sentiment which seems to me to be a Hydra headed kind of monster it finds ways of of hiding beneath other things that that sort of impart a kind of legitimacy to this thinking that that's discouraging among Christian people in particular among professing Christian people in particular I'm discouraged with the inability that some people have the inability to disagree without demonizing that that's that's difficult you know so that's at times discouraging but on the whole Christ reigns the gospel is this power to say sanctification is Russell saying in his talk a moment ago it's slow right and yet we have the promise of Philippians 1:6 that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus we don't ultimately have any reason for despair in these conversations we can be the most real people in this work because we know that Christ is at work in these conversations and so there's discouragement on the one hand but but many signs of great hope that we should we should give God praise for any other panelists things that you've been encouraged by or discouraged by along the way well you should read my mail that's discouraging to see that there are still there are still sentiments out there that are so gospel unformed that they could have been written in a pamphlet for the white Citizens Council in 1964 Mississippi by people who are members of churches who sing hymns every week that's discouraging but at the same time I'm really encouraged to see see what God is doing in churches in some really unusual ways where I can go into places I was in a church plant in Senatobia Mississippi which in my home state is is of course a state that that lived through many bloody moments and I was expecting one sort of reality in Senatobia and i walked into a room filled with white people and black people who loved each other who were on mission together with the gospel and you realized the Holy Spirit is alive the Holy Spirit is at work and so I'm encouraged by that well I want to stay with you dr. more your friend rod drea wrote an article recently about Ferguson after the Department of Justice report came out I want to read a quote to you and get a reaction from you to see what you think about what he said he says the frustrating thing about Ferguson is that it long ago ceased being a real place except for the people who live and work there and instead became a pseudo place through which our competing narratives about race in America are vindicated so what do you think he has in mind what what are the competing narratives at play here and how can the church help to reconcile those narratives and get our communities on the same page well there's some truth to that but there's truth to that with any area where there is a moment of conflict one could say that that Selma becomes a competition of narratives as well so of course that's true but what he's talking about I think is the fact that when it comes to the initial situation in Ferguson or when it comes to something as recent as the Department of Justice report from Ferguson we see the way that typically speaking with exceptions black people and white people tend to read those things differently based upon their experiences so immediately after the Department of Justice report came out for instance most of the white people that I was hearing from are saying see look Michael Brown didn't have his hands up so hands up don't shoot isn't an accurate portrayal of that situation most of the african-american people that I know are saying look at what the Department of Justice report is saying about the situation on the ground with what was happening with the police department in Ferguson which was a which was a train wreck was awful and I think that's because we we look at it on the basis of our experiences or lives that were that we're living which is why I say we need to be living our lives together where we do have some framework of understanding how these things apply to one another so it's true that any situation right now in American life it doesn't matter if it has to do with this issue or anything else can become a staging ground simply for people to enact their little culture wars on Facebook that's true but if we get behind that and we say what does this moment how can we use this moment as a teaching opportunity to think through to stand up what I did after Ferguson was to say I didn't know what had happened in in Ferguson except that I knew that Michael Brown had been shot I knew that I knew that the situation was very tense and I knew that we have unarmed black kids getting shot too often in American society and so to stand up and say look we don't know what happened necessarily in this situation but this is why Ferguson is so raw for our african-american brothers and sisters in Christ so white people need to understand that at the same time to be able to say we're not able to come in and give perfect clarity on what happened in this altercation between these two but we do know that there's a lot of history behind this conversation and we need to be aware of that it's interesting I you know I've come to load the term narrative in the last few months it gets used pejoratively by people in a way that people use liberal and conservative pejoratively think if you're talking about the other and yet I think there's something profoundly important about the idea of narrative right because really the the conversation between African Americans and white Americans in this country it has really always been about how to tell the story of what's happened between us you know how to tell the story about slavery how to sell story about Jim Crow segregation how this whole story about reconstruction and that narrative is carved in the landscape quite literally so Fitzhugh Brundage wrote a book a few years back called the southern past and part of what he talks about is is how you know there's this there's this conversation going really between white southerners and black southerners and white southerners are are usually by sort of Confederate memory organizations setting up monuments and and only you know the sort of historical marker signs that's one way of telling a narrative and african-americans following a Carter Woodson and others are having Negro History Week which becomes African American History Month it's a counter-narrative we are not going to see progress if we don't know how to use words the main way we're going to minister to each other on this issue of reconciliation is by speaking to each other and that speaking is only going to be fruitful if we can embrace complex narratives multi-perspective multi levels of analysis and they sort of get all of that in a conversation that yeah feels threatening but but that is the work we're not going to be able to make progress without speaking to each other and so in my reaction to that comment is yeah there are things that become symbolic that become larger than the particular place in space and people we shouldn't reduce it to merely symbol as if that place in people don't matter but we've got to recognize it's tapping into this bigger conversation that simply hasn't been had food fully for 300 some odd years I want to piggyback on what pastors saying because Gordon Allport introduced there the contact hypothesis which basically says and his theory is the fact that a lot of prejudice will go away and be dispelled when the two individuals who have a presupposed idea about the other person or their ethnicity or their background or socio economic reality when they get together and have interpersonal dialogue it will it was is the most effective way to dissolve that reality and that's exactly what what you're saying but even within the body of Christ we bear that responsibility because the moment that we embrace Christ we were baptized spiritually into the body of Christ but at the same time when we said I do to Christ that doesn't mean I'm done with all those over there all those over there and all those over there and so often I think back to what Warren wears be said man he whenever one spouse says to the other I never knew you felt that way that's a tangible reflection that excommunication took place a long time ago in the marriage and so in the body of Christ we bear that responsibility we need to be the one leading the conversations we need to be the leading the ones leading the reality of this is my life history and people who got jumped by people of this ethnicity need to express that and become vulnerable and then be embraced nothing deep down inside God has wired us to be known and still be loved and within the body of Christ there is no reason why we should not afford what by God the Holy Spirit to unconditionally bathe the affection of God on individuals who have those presupposed realities and then thinking through that looking at the young man who was on that video for the SAE you know for a fraternity and and when his narrative came out and people began to see the closed circuit of privilege that he was raised in a lot of people begin to dissect that said he probably never spent a day in a hood he probably don't you know and so we all start throwing our presuppositions into the conversation but it is that reality where individuals don't have interaction and equally as I judge someone who I haven't had interaction with and I can just presuppose based on how they look how they dress how they talk the same thing is done to me we break down that wall of opposition by sitting down and as much as possible and having those conversations but not just the one and done that's the thing it's gonna take time to consistently unpack to say dang I disagree with that and we've got to be comfortable by saying I I represent and I disagree the scriptures say this and we both have to take our disagreement and make it subservient to what the Word of God says one of the things has been injected in the conversation especially through the Ferguson Missouri situation are the two phrases hands up don't shoot and then the theme of black lives matter now the Department of Justice report is very clear that that there was no hands up there was no call for don't shoot that's there but that's really been a polarizing phrase that's developed through this and the black lives matter theme has flowed out of that so how should we think about that if if hands up don't shoot is built on something that the Department of Justice report says didn't happen is that still a valid theme or mantra to have in conversation is the black lives matter theme that's that's kind of been birthed out of that what how should we think about those phrases that can sometimes be polarizing but might also in some ways be helpful who wants to give us some thoughts on that I'll start it off the reality of what took place with Mike Brown and the Department of Justice and what was reported again like what dr. Moore said wherever your presupposition landed you were more probable to either agree or disagree and leverage the Department of Justice findings as ammunition in your arsenal for your argument but when I look at the reality of black lives don't matter you know dr. Anthony Bradley of King's College and the Accident Institute had a phenomenal article that he wrote in December of 2014 where he basically said black lives matter but we need to answer the question why why do they matter and so just that that phrase right there now ostracizes if you will individuals from other ethnic backgrounds to say oh so what Mexican lives don't matter right don't Asian Native American Middle Eastern but I think when we honestly assess the reality of our nation our nation is you know a few years shy or being what 250 years old right and then but I think there's been a systemic well-planned and executed attack and complex matrix to hold down blacks for almost 400 years predating the founding of our nation when the first slaves arrived from Africa and Jamestown and so when you look at that systemically when the animal is a ssin of the black man and black woman became a reality feed them like hogs work them like mules beat them sell them like trade them they were not considered individuals to me the black lives matter hashtag when it is not kept in 140 characters but when it is unpacked to the reality of reestablishing the dignity as being an image-bearer of God - the conversation takes it further I think that it's the reality of saying okay here's what we have we see that there is some systemic issues that need to be addressed one in particular the eugenics aspect of black lives in America when when the 2010 census came out and reported that African American population was less than 13% but African American women had thirty five point four percent of our abortions for our nation in two 9 that's a problem but we could say well why well there's accessibility to the abortion clinics when Planned Parenthood is targeting African American and Latino communities where the population of those demographics are 50% and above you'll find well between 62 and 70% of Planned Parenthood surgical abortion centers in our communities so there is an intentional assault on black lives so it's not saying other lives don't matter but I think it is contributing to the fact that man we need to restore dignity to a people who have been dehumanized when when ministers in the south would say that they don't have any souls they're like a dog they'll never get to have it when you talk about the Great Awakenings in the histories and and enslaves were put behind the pulpit they were not able to convert in the pen with the slave masters that's a problem so when we say black lives matter it's not saying other lives don't it's saying can we at least try to restore dignity to a people who have had been stripped from them for well almost 400 years in our nation well I think this sort of hashtag activism we see both the limits of it and it also becomes indicative of the difficulty we just have in having conversations right so I was a little bit surprised for example when a lot of folks pushed back on me on Twitter if I had a little tweet with black the hashtag blacklivesmatter I saw why should I have to defend them why should I have to explain that why why do you assume that if I affirm black life about denying other life right it's kind of like wow we got a lot of conversating to do if we can't even at the level of tweets sort of assume the best of one another and engage one another so I think we see that the limits of of Twitter activism but but we're also seeing as all speech does the the revelation of the heart right so so we we know what's in the heart the out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks right and so we're seeing in the reactions and counter reactions to something in my mind I thought as simple as a hashtag we're seeing what's happening in people's hearts there and and it Ferguson in the events around Mike Brown shooting Darren Wilson shouldn't Mike Brown in particular that particular incident as much as any other incident that's happened in the last several months the messiness of it I think has been sort of used by the Lord to expose the heart I had a good faithful brother asked me he says I don't understand why the country did not erupt around the shooting of Tamir rice but it rubbed it over Mike Brown here's to me a rise 12 years old that seems so clear or even Eric garner that seems clearer to me that looks like a case over there why why do people blow up with Mike Brown him when he first asked me I don't know I sort of closed up in the secret counsel of God but when I reflected on it when I reflected on I thought you know what it's the messiness that makes us have to dig into what we think makes us have to dig into what we feel it's the messiness that dredges the heart and pulls up all those things that have been buried in a way that you don't have to do if you looking at a case that you think is open-and-shut right and so I think God providentially has had Ferguson in an in our in our view and and It's Made hands up don't shoot and black lives matter growing up out of the Ferguson movement I think God is given at a prominence providentially in our lives because he's he's just digging in the heart he's just dredging the heart and he's pulling up stuff that we haven't looked at in a long time and and as a consequence we're having to face ourselves which is a part of that courage and that truth-telling that that we have maybe been reluctant to do for too long dr. George I want to come back to a comment you made earlier you made a reference to the way that it seems like there's clear evidence that effort and Americans are incarcerated at higher rates when we look at the Department of Justice report in Ferguson it talks about how african-americans make up about two-thirds of the Ferguson population and yet in many of the statistics whether it be how many what percentage of people get pulled over or taken to jail or fine those kind of things oftentimes the african-american community was over 90 percent in those statistics even though they only make up two-thirds of the population so my question for you is it is are these types of rates and other things that we could look at in minority communities indicative of something systemic going on in American society and how should we think through that issue well here again is where my brother's point becomes very relevant it's messy that statistic about incarceration mass incarceration the gross over representation of blacks black men mm-hmm right that's messy everybody wants to make something neat and tidy up mm-hmm either they want to say man knocked down evidence overwhelming racism you know the the power structure has decided to put black men in jail and they're doing it on a massive scale that's why its narrative in there the other is well you know blacks overwhelmingly disproportionately commit but black men disproportionately commit the crimes they're then out in jail just on you know trumped-up charges being framed that's a simple case of the statistics work out the way they work out because that's where the crimes are committed now that's a narrative too but neither one wants to deal with the messiness of the reality race does have something to do with it history does have something the history that you talked about that dehumanization does have something to do about that and then lots of other factors some of which I'm going to talk about in my remarks in just just a little while so I'll just hold them for right now contribute to that messiness but somebody's gonna have to have the courage to say to people who are making that argument on both sides you're oversimplifying if you you're oversimplifying it here we got a problem here we've got to think think about it in a much more serious disciplined way now on on black lives matter and then here again messiness and we got to deal with the complexities if black lives matter in Ferguson and they do then black lives matter in the womb like my brother over here says and black lives matter in Chicago that's right that's right where black young men are killing black young men and sometimes little black children are caught in the crossfire and killed that matters to those lives matter too and that's got to be addressed now sometimes there is frankly if I can be very frank with you a power structure that doesn't want a story to be told when a few people in New York City got together and pulled a little bit of money to put up some billboards around the city simply calling attention to the statistics that you mentioned the over-representation of black women in the abortion statistics the placement of those clinics in black and Latino neighborhoods they put him up and within days they were forced by the politicians the local media the whole New York power structure which prides itself on being so liberal oh we're not racist the racists are those other than evangelicals those people in the south they're the ones who made all those billboards come down it made it impossible for them to put them back up they didn't want the truth to be told about those black lives mattering in the wound so we got to speak some truth to power in our last few minutes together I want to think about another dimension about the way that racial reconciliation and race issues permeating the culture and I want to start with youth OBT as LGBT advocacy gains traction in America and we see the march of same-sex marriage with with the culmination potentially coming here in June with the Supreme Court ruling one of the ways that LGBT advocates will press for gay rights is by appealing to it as a civil rights issue of our day and appealing to what african-american communities and other minorities experienced in the past and how their experience the same kind of things in the same way that we sought to to give those other communities their rights gay gay and lesbian people in our communities should receive those same types of rights but for you as a black man when you hear that argument how do you respond to that what how should we as church members think about that when the culture raises that argument to press for LGBT rights I'm not happy that something that's dear to me that seemed to me to be a righteous struggle is hijacked for something that seems to me to be an issue of morality morality right so when we're talking about pressing for civil rights typically historically the categories have been sort of categories of being by African American so ethnicity gender disability and so on when we're talking about the addition of gay marriage or sort of Rights for homosexual persons persons practicing homosexual lifestyles I think we're mixing categories right so there's a basic question to ask and it is what what exactly are we talking about when we talk about the sort of public endorsement of homosexuality homosexual lifestyle homosexual marriage and so on and there again our narratives are in play right so my my friends who are gay and lesbian would say well we're talking about the affirmation of our ourselves as persons we understand at this orientation if you want to use that language is intractable immutable and that is that it's natural that it's good and it ought to be affirmed as such that the ability of two persons to love one another and to commit to each other in in that relationship ought to be protected for all that's that's one narrative and I want to say as an average eloquent Christian is a Christian who believes the Bible and believes the morality of the Bible to be essential for the flourishing of human society even in broader categories that that would allow other folks to understand that morality without necessarily even subscribing to Christianity as someone who believes that that's a good picture of human flourishing I won't say no actually there's a nice little shift that happened over the decades in the gay rights struggle that shift the discussion from the the morality or immorality of the sex act itself to the sort of partnered love relationship and who can be against love to the rights conversation and I want to go back to the first question about the morality of that and should we endorse that as as a picture of human flourishing and what's good and right and should we did endorse that is something that I would teach my children for example in public schools that I fund with tax dollars and all of that's been kind of bypassed and and bypass really quickly by a really skillful association with the civil rights movement and I think it's an illegitimate Association a lot of the Association is being made at the level of interracial marriage well there used to be laws against interracial marriage those laws we would all I think agree we're morally wrong and ought to be legally done away with so therefore we ought to have same-sex marriage the problem is no one ever denied that so-called interracial marriages were in fact marriages I mean they're the very reason that they were outlawed is because the power structures knew they were marriages and they knew that these were marriages that could bring about offspring and they didn't want that that they wanted to do do away with it what we're having now is the redefining of what marriage is the very institution of marriage itself now the problem there is the same sort of problem that we had in in all of these other struggles except from the other side the idea that the state can come in and claim to minion over areas that God has instead embedded in creation I mean that's the issue God gave humanity dominion over creation but not dominion over one another and so just because I say you are an inferior race and therefore you must work for me that does not make it so and just because I say you and you your families should be split up so that you can work for me and she can work for him that does not give me the authority to do that nor does the state have the right to say that this institution of marriage that God has created and God is embedded in creation ought to be redefined into something else and so I think the analogy just doesn't work at all yeah the things are moving in opposite directions to Martha so if you talk about civil rights movement of African American classic classically defined you're largely talking about the removal of unjust laws if you talk about the sort of gay marriage movement being largely talking about the sort of redefinition of humanity long institutions and and the sort of positive promotion of of things that again I would want to argue we need to have a conversation about in terms of the its depiction of what's flourishing and the morality of business might there be a book on what marriage is that we could read I think there is I think there is and it was written by Sherif Girgis Ryan Anderson and some other guys available in paperback inexpensive we wanted to start this panel our conversation today by by assessing the state of racial reconciliation American figuring out what is the landscape that we're seeking the minister in will you join me in thanking our panelists for this great conversation

Channel: ERLC

Views: 11,095

Rating: 4.5438595 out of 5

Keywords: 2015 Leadership Summit, Gospel, Race, Social Issues, Russell D. Moore, Phillip Bethancourt, Ferguson, Eric Garner, Robert P. George

Id: hbCvYCAjIsI

Length: 41min 16sec (2476 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 01 2015