Tuesday: celebrity television presenter John Torode is dropped by the British Broadcasting Corporation, after an investigation concluded he used an offensive racist term on the set of Masterchef. He maintains that he has no recollection of the incident, and deplores the use of racist language under any circumstances.
(It’s interesting to note that the BBC, which is happy to routinely broadcast material that is highly offensive to religious and socially conservative people, does know the meaning of the word ‘offensive’.)
Thursday: the British Member of Parliament Diane Abbott is suspended from the Labour Party for arguing that there’s a difference between the type of racism suffered by people on account of their skin colour, and racism for other reasons, such as against Jews and travellers.
Sunday: the English women’s football team defender Jess Carter withdraws from social media due to being bombarded with racist abuse. The Football Association has defined it as a ‘hate crime’.
Clearly, racism is a huge problem in modern society. But there’s disagreement over how to tackle it, and even how to define it.
As you’d expect, the Bible neatly defines the problem and prescribes its cure.
A lawyer once asked Jesus Christ what is the greatest commandment, and he replied: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself’ (Luke 10:27).
Those two commandments form the basis of any principle of behaviour for the Christian, including on the matter of racism.
1. You shall love the Lord your God. All people are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). It follows therefore that all races are of equal status. This is not universally accepted. For example Charles Darwin believed that white people are more highly evolved than black people and therefore racially superior. We now know that this isn’t true: Homo sapiens are a distinct species, and none of its members are any more or less human than any others. The Bible said this all along: ‘He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth’ (Acts 17:26). If you love the Lord your God, you will not abuse people who are made in His image.
2. Love your neighbour as yourself. The lawyer went on to ask what Jesus meant by “loving your neighbour”. In reply Jesus told a story in which a Jewish man’s life was saved by a Samaritan (Luke 10:30-37). The Samaritans were the Jews’ neighbours, whom the Jews despised as an inferior race. A clear message of the story is that we are all each other’s neighbours, even people who are very different from us, and we should therefore show love to each other.
Racism is an ugly and intractable problem in our world. It’s good to know that it will end, one day soon, when Christ returns to establish the Kingdom of God. At that time, the world will finally be united:
All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD, and all the families of the nations shall worship before you (Psalm 22:27).
Chris Parkin