A Multicultural Bible Church

by Douglas Mercer

IT LOOKS like both a brouhaha and a kerfuffle are brewing over in the tony precincts of McLean, Virginia. Apparently a White, young, and self-righteous pastor is getting on his God-given high horse about the issue of race. He wants his White congregation to rub their faces in the dirt for the fact that they are White, and some of his congregants are objecting — though they too “disavow racism.” They just don’t want to be so showy about it.

The conflict at McLean Bible Church is significant not only because of the congregation’s size and influence — with several thousand attendees and a prominent place in the DC church landscape — but also because the incident marks the latest salvo in an ongoing clash within American evangelicalism.

A quick look at the pastor in question, David Platt, of McLean Bible Church, and you can see that in a better day and age he could have been one of those blue-eyed sons of the Aryan race that we so desperately need today. In another age he could have been a yuppie go-getter on Wall Street sharking on the people. But in ours he’s manifested as one of those bland mercenary megachurch leaders who has discovered a moral obsession that is as fashionable as it is fallacious. You see, Jesus Christ told him a secret: White people are bad.

You can see a video of one of his sermons where he said he wants to give up his “White privilege.” As he begins to talk he frankly sounds, and starts to look, retarded — and at several points he chokes up and nearly cries, so moved is he by his plaintive cries for “racial justice.” He says “I am part of the problem” (amen to that) and “I want to sacrifice more of my preferences as a White pastor.” He also wants Christ to be exalted by the increased diversity of his church. And finally he claims that White pastors like himself eschew the prophetic parts of the Bible that deal with race.

It’s a thoroughly sickening display; it’s worship as abasement, not in front of his imaginary Lord, but in front of the rank and festering and really rather shabby shibboleths of his time and class.

And I’ll give you a prophecy: If we don’t rid ourselves of punks like David Platt and send them scurrying from high places of power, the White race is dust in the wind. If we do, there is no telling what we will accomplish.

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McLean Bible Church is one of the most influential churches in the United States. It sits in what can only be described as one of America’s elite areas.

The largely conservative northern Virginia church across the Potomac from Washington had grown from a group of five families in the 1960s to a congregation of more than 10,000 spread across several campuses, attracting politicians and business leaders to the church’s evangelical message and values.

The long-time pastor of this church was Lon Solomon. With a name like Solomon you begin to wonder, but no, is it really possible that a long-time pastor of a conservative Virginia Christian church founded by five families could be Jewish?

Yes, sir. It’s not only possible — it’s true.

Lon Solomon was born and raised in a Jewish home in Portsmouth, Virginia. Solomon earned a Th.M degree in Hebrew and Old Testament from Capital Bible Seminary in 1978. In 1980, Solomon became the senior pastor at McLean Bible Church in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC. Solomon has been on the board of Jews for Jesus since 1987, where he now serves as chairman of the board’s executive committee. Solomon taught Hebrew and Old Testament at Capital Bible Seminary from 1975 to 1980.

When the key figure of your Jesus-loving church is a Jew for Jesus it’s no harbinger of fine future.

But it took anti-White wonder boy David Platt to bring it to its knees.

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David Platt turned a blind eye to his staff marching in a Black Lives Matter event in Washington, DC. It took repeated requests from a few conservative Elders to take down Facebook photos of staff holding BLM signs.

Blind eye? I think not. He looked upon it with beaming pride. Why, all those White people groveling before the Negro; it was enough to give him proof positive that God was in his heaven and all was right with the world.

Apparently this race nonsense he’s peddling and purveying from the pulpit has been brewing for some time, but the flashpoint in the last year included a “special course” on “social justice” called “The Gospel, The Church, Justice and Race.”

We do grieve over the existence and effects of racism, and to the extent that we are part of a larger group of people guilty of racism, we appropriately confess corporate sins of racism and take appropriate steps of repentance, much as we do when the Holy Spirit convicts us of any corporate sin. We are zealous in the present not to prolong or replicate in any way racial injustice from the past. We recognize the need to examine each of our hearts humbly and continually with the help of the Holy Spirit and the encouragement of brothers and sisters who enable us to see sin in us and sin’s effects around us in ways that we might not see ourselves.

Be humble in your hearts, White men! The Holy Spirit will help you get rid of that invisible knapsack of privilege, God’s loving mercy will teach you to live on your knees before inferior peoples. Jesus Christ himself will descend from the clouds and smite you, divesting you of your race pride, and all the archangels will teach you to say you’re sorry.

This is what they teach in seminaries today. If they get their way much longer, it’s what they’ll teach in Sunday schools, if they don’t already.

My child, you are White. But God will help you overcome.

One of America’s most influential pastors is facing a crisis. No, it’s not the crisis of personal scandal. It’s the crisis of church division — over race.

What happened is that Platt recommended some elders and the congregation balked. Then Platt bigfooted the congregation with some high-handed procedural moves and got the elders installed. This was apparently too much for the moderate wing of the “anti-racists” at the church.

The elders dispute was not about the race issue per se, but functioned as a proxy for it to determine who will have power in the church — a harebrained self-loathing lunatic, or a mildly conservative bland bunch who want no part of White identity, they just don’t want their faces rubbed continually in Blackness.

Platt has claimed that the church is trying to fight off a hostile takeover and that Satan is trying to divide the church.

The dissenters argue that the solution to the race problem in America is “more Bible.” They say that while the resource starts out well, contending that ‘we are not fundamentally defined by our ethnic backgrounds’ and that the gospel is the solution for issues of justice, that’s essentially where the ‘good part’ of this resource ends.

The good part? What race problem? You mean feral Negroes running wild? God help us when even the people who object to Platt’s White self-loathing and his recommendation of the same to us also agree that there is a race problem and the race problem is “White racism.” They, too, agree that we are not fundamentally defined by race and that when it comes to White racism the solution is simple: more Bible. No need to bring in your heavyweight Marxist theoreticians; God Himself by his lonesome will do quite nicely to bring them to solemn contemplation, if not their knees, the next time a Black thug lies dead on a city street. The things Platt’s adversaries believe constitute a recipe for our destruction, too. With friends like this, who need David Platt?

The congregants object to what they perceive as a pastoral embrace of critical race theory, and they assert that the Bible alone contains teaching sufficient to address America’s race problems.

It never occurs to them that it is the Bible itself that engenders the real race problem, in that its meek “turn the other cheek” philosophy has left far too many White people marinating in self-doubt and self-hate; has convinced them that an almighty Providence is designing to bring their race low. If we are “all equal in the eyes of God,” then, they believe, maybe we should renounce any last vestige of the love of our race — and so generations of church-goers have been thus bamboozled by a “teaching” that was geared originally toward the most horrendous rabble of a decaying empire. (And what do we have today? Decaying empire; check. Horrendous rabble; double check.)

“I saw one email from one of the main leaders in this group using race to say that MBC is no longer McLean Bible Church that it is now Melanin Bible Church,” the egregious Platt said. “That is not acceptable for the Body of Jesus Christ. That language has no place whatsoever here. I hesitated to share it because I know it is so ugly and painful to hear but I want to point out the approach being used by people giving leadership to this group in these meetings.”

Nah, it’s not ugly or painful, it’s actually pretty funny. His umbrage is ridiculous, but these Great White Fathers take upon themselves the White Man’s Burden as they White Knight for their poor helpless pickaninnies. I’m sure that after he read that joke, a small tear rolled down his cheek just like that famous tear which rolled down the face of that actor playing an Indian in that commercial. Then he dropped to his knees and took on the entire load of corporate sin of all White people everywhere, and, just like they say happened to Cromwell when he was in a particularly fervent prayer to his imaginary deity, drops of anguished sweat dripped from his brow into a sacred puddle on the floor.

Without restating all the contents of these lengthy documents, they include complaints that Platt and his MBC colleague pastor Mike Kelsey marched in a Christian Black Lives Matter march and that Kelsey has endorsed the CRT concepts of systemic racism and white privilege.

If David Platt is the establishment’s go-to guy when they want a “respectable and prominent” White man to toe their line advocating that erasure of White people, then Mike Kelsey is their raving and righteous Black man who unleashes unhinged and Jerimiah-like tirades and diatribes meant to sear the souls of White folks. Take a quick look at him and he looks like Urkel all grown up, so the blasts are faintly ridiculous. But he makes them like he’s an avenging Kang always ready to roll: “Totally honest, being angry about the situation but it is difficult for me sometimes not to just torch all white people particularly white evangelicals and Christians.”

A year later, Platt and African American McLean pastor Mike Kelsey participated in a Christian march following the death of George Floyd, which was construed by some as support for the Black Lives Matter organization. McLean stated in a Q and A on its website that Kelsey’s son held a poster that read Black Lives Matter to God.

As the great H. Millard might say, God no longer cares about Black people, he realizes that they were one of his sad cul-de-sacs that will just spin its wheels fruitlessly and continue to exist only on the (foolish) sufferance of others. No, God’s torn that page from his playbook, and his exclusive focus now is on us.

Mike Kelsey co-preached a sermon that could, in fact, have been co-preached by Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. In this sermon, titled “Unity in Diversity,” they pushed the idea that diversity is one of the primary objectives of the Church and that the gospel demands the Church pursue it relentlessly.

As for militant-Black-in-the-guise-of-Jesus-worshiper Kelsey, he could be seen not too long ago marching in a parade called “The Christian Response to Racial Justice” right beside his co-conspirator Platt and that ever-preachy former asset-stripping barracuda Mitt Romney, who high-horses his “morality” on race but in terms of the morality of economics his attitude is the little people be damned.

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We will not apologize for our increasing diversity or our commitment to humbly address racial issues from God’s Word as we unite together on a glorious mission.

A disparity exists. We can’t deny this. These are not opinions — they’re facts. It matters in our country whether one is white or black. Now, we don’t want it to matter, which is why I think we try to convince ourselves it doesn’t matter.

Ah, here’s the ever-present rub of the matter: Disparities exist. Of course they do! You take a people who stagnated for millennia in the stone age, who never had the thought travel through their heads, “Maybe I should try to figure things out” — who rutted and ate and defecated in somnolent stasis, and were content to simply live off the land in squalor; well, they are not going to integrate into a hyper-advanced civilization and rise to a high level of achievement. For them, “disparity” means some “wrong” has been committed, otherwise they’d have to admit that their genetic endowment is inferior, and they’re not about do that. If they did, how could they live with themselves?

A sad sight to behold is the trajectory that David Platt has been on over the last several years as the Evangelical racial reconciliation movement — a movement rooted in Marxist Critical Race Theory — has consumed him in nearly every aspect of thought and decision.

The racial reconciliation frame is dominant in the white evangelical subculture in which most multiracial evangelical churches are embedded.

Leaders in the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) unanimously affirmed that racial reconciliation is a biblical mandate, according to the February Evangelical Leaders Survey. The majority of the respondents (69 percent) also said they have preached, taught or heard a sermon on racial reconciliation in the last year.

That’s really it; these White men have lost their collective minds. These Christian leaders have become so thoroughly imbued with the dogma of the “evil White race,” have themselves and their congregations drowning in it, as if they think the only way forward in a mixed-race America is to repudiate everything about their past, that the only way now to salvation is to nail themselves to the cross of “anti-racism,” feet above head of course.

McLean Bible Church released a draft for a discipleship resource designed for church members and leaders which is basically a baptized version of Critical Race Theory. The resource, titled THE GOSPEL, THE CHURCH, JUSTICE, AND RACE, basically lays out how McLean Bible Church intends to define and state their positions on issues of justice, particularly racial justice.

The discipleship resource goes deep into the rabbit hole of Critical Race Theory and suggests that it is the duty of white Christians to identify how they are beneficiaries of systemic racism and flee from it.

No wonder the congregants are rebelling. Your average somewhat conservative church member believes in the basic tenets of not being “racist”; that is, they just want all people to be equal. This is its own kind of gullibility, and leaves them defenseless against the overwhelming assaults on their own kind and their own (somewhat) good sense. Their objections are a good sign, but only a small start.

We work to repent of all intentional expressions of racism and to recognize how our actions can unintentionally either express racism or contribute to the effects of racism. Further, we work to recognize and resist any way in which racism around us (from our family upbringing to our surrounding culture) has influenced our thoughts, feelings, words, or actions regarding different groups of people.

This is pure lunacy. It’s the hair shirts of the Middle Ages, or the monks who would pay to have themselves whipped in the hope of purifying themselves from a contagion of spiritual pollution.

We honestly examine any advantages we may have because of our race and we steward any such advantages for the sake of people who are disadvantaged because of their race. We work to understand the needs and defend the rights of anyone whose poverty is in any way due to race.

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Whatever value Christianity once had for the White race (and it was always minimal and a mixed bag at best, and always contained the seeds of our destruction) is by now long gone. The membership may be hesitant, but the big-wigs, the grand pooh-bahs and grandmaster “intellectuals” of the religion are around the bend on the issue of race. They say they believe that the time is up for White people, and that’s a good thing.

A new antiracism initiative at Princeton Theological Seminary has everyone from the Executive Council to faculty, staff, students, and the Board of Trustees looking inward through open, honest discussions on topics like implicit bias, White privilege, and power. The initiative also has the Seminary looking outward, as it affirms that antiracism education is inseparable from its mission of preparing students to serve Jesus Christ in the world.

Our seminaries now are literally the new “holy” avatars of the burners and the looters and the rapers.

Jarvis Williams, a professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is the author of Removing the Stain of Racism from the SBC. He teaches that white supremacy is ingrained and inherent in every facet of our society and the only way to remove it is to perpetually participate in acts of penance by tearing down perceived racial hierarchies.

So this is what the next generation of pastors in America will learn. And the next generation of congregants. And from there to the ears of little chilren.

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In 2017, Robert P. Jones came out with a book distilling this perverted zeitgeist: The End of White Christian America, the last chapter of which is called “A eulogy for White America.” You can bet every dollar you have that this eulogy was no panegyric.

Beyond 2016, the descendants of White Christian America will lack the political power they once had to set the terms of the nation’s debate over values and morals and to determine election outcomes. Looking ahead, Jones forecasts the ways that they might adjust to find their place in the new America — and the consequences for us all if they don’t.

The End of White Christian America won the 2019 Grawemeyer Award for religion.

Not having been content with taking one clear shot aimed at White people, Jones paused and reloaded and took aim again.

Robert P. Jones’ new book White Too Long is a relentless and uncompromising examination of Christianity’s role, as a social institution, in perpetuating harmful racial doctrines throughout American history.

White Too Long is an urgent plea for the American church to interrogate it’s deep entanglement with white supremacist thinking. “American Christianity’s theological core has been thoroughly structured by an interest in protecting white supremacy.” Robert P. Jones holds a Ph.D. in religion from Emory University, an M.Div. from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary,

“As the nation grapples with demographic changes and the legacy of racism in America, Christianity’s role as a cornerstone of white supremacy has been largely overlooked. But white Christians — from evangelicals in the South to mainline Protestants in the Midwest and Catholics in the Northeast — have not just been complacent or complicit; rather, as the dominant cultural power, they have constructed and sustained a project of protecting white supremacy and opposing black equality that has framed the entire American story.”

Within the past few weeks the paperback edition of this horror book came out and he took the time to send out a message reminding everyone that in the 2020 election “White supremacy” was most certainly in play, most obviously in the “mob” at the Capitol.

As for White supremacy being on display in the 2020 election it’s salutary to recall that in the second debate, law-and-order tough guy Donald Trump turned to Joe Biden and took him to task for supporting the 1994 Crime Bill which was designed to bring young Black “superpredators” to heel.

Jones also took the occasion on Twitter to retweet the following from the Equal Justice Initiative: “On this day in 1916, police in Louisville, Kentucky, arrested three Black people allegedly involved in interracial relationships, and launched a full investigation into other local cases. To overcome racial inequality, we must confront our history.”

He also saw fit to give a a big White-hating “shout out” to one Anthea Butler on the arrival of her big new White-hating book called (wait for it) White Evangelical Racism from the UNC Press.

Butler posits that: “Most recently, evangelicals supported the Tea Party, a Muslim ban, and border policies allowing family separation. White evangelicals today, cloaked in a vision of Christian patriarchy and nationhood, form a staunch voting bloc in support of white leadership. Evangelicalism’s racial history festers, splits America, and needs a reckoning now.”

They’re never going to let this rest — until they’re arrested.

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The people at the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship on the campus of the Calvin Theological Seminary are so used to being on their knees for Jesus they figured they might as well stay there for Negroes:

We lament and grieve the indefensible and tragic deaths in 2020 of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery even as we continue to lament and grieve the indefensible and tragic deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Rekia Boyd, Emmett Till, and the thousands of anonymous victims of lynching, genocide, and violence perpetuated against Native Americans, African Americans, Latinx, Asian Americans, Middle Eastern Americans, and other people of color, each made in God’s image.

If that’s God’s image, I want no part of it.

David Platt obtained a M.Div, a Th.M. and a PhD from the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

He learned his lessons only all too well.

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