Recently, a large group of French scholars and academics got together to reject Wokeism as being antithetical to the French way of life. President Macron, himself, has come out and opposed Critical Race Theory, as well as many others. The French have decided, that they will wholesale reject CRT because it not only is destructive, but it’s a meaningless concept in a culture that rejects the concept of race altogether!
Now let’s clarify what that means. It means that, at least in postwar France, race is not a meaningful category. The French census is taken based upon citizens and immigrants – they do not collect data, at least not officially, about people’s skin color. And this is perfectly in line with the ideals of the French Revolution. And for all that was evil in the French Revolution, the ideals were high and lofty and, I would argue, good. Liberté, égalité, fraternité or Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood are the ideals of the French Revolution and became the official French motto in the 3rd Republic. And these are good things, in fact, I would argue that they are objectively good, even if the way that the French went about getting them and implementing them were corrupted and fell far short of the ideal.
But in that ethos, liberty, equality, and brotherhood, is the absolute legal leveling of the population. When the Bourbon monarchy, or Ancien Régime, fell, class distinctions went with it. There was no longer an Aristocracy. The nobles were just citizens, and they referred to each other as, citoyen, much like in Soviet Russia people were referred to as “comrade”, or tovarisch. To the French mindset, race is not a meaningful category, again, at least not officially. The official motto is that anyone under French rule is French. In fact, in the 1950s when Algeria was trying to throw off French rule, the conservatives loved to say “Algeria is France”. To the conservative French mindset, just because the Mediterranean split Algeria and other French colonies in North Africa from France, and even though North Africans were significantly different, ethnically, from the ethnic French, this made no difference at all. Algeria was France. This idea that you are a citizen or immigrant and there are no other meaningful categories is actually, in my humble opinion, a much more healthy and biblically accurate sentiment than the concepts of Race that we have in America.
Because while the Bible speaks A LOT about nationalities, and even the broad strokes origins of nationalities, and even relationships between nationalities, the Bible does not really recognize “race” as a meaningful category. Indeed, especially when we look at the prophetic books, the distinction is ALWAYS about nations. The Bible doesn’t concern itself with red, brown, yellow, black, and white. The Bible concerns itself with 2 meaningful distinctions between peoples.
First, the Bible’s most important, and really, the ONLY important distinction, is the distinction between saved and lost, sheep and goats, believers and unbelievers. In Christ and Not In Christ is the most important and most meaningful distinction between people.
Second, the Bible’s next most important distinction between groups of people is nationality. Now, I’ve talked about this before, so I’m not going to spend time defending that position, but do a quick search and you’ll find that the word “nation” and distinctions between nations continue to be meaningful in the Millennium and into Eternity.
This means that for a Christian, being American or French or Chinese or Nigerian or Maori or Mexican matters some, but what color your skin is, is a meaningless category. This doesn’t mean that skin color is meaningless – God gives a diversity of skin pigmentation because God loves unity in diversity because God is unity in diversity. Black IS beautiful, as is white, and as is brown, and yellow, and red. But just because black is beautiful doesn’t mean that black is a meaningful category. White isn’t a meaningful category either.
God doesn’t recognize Latin, or Latino, or Latina. Biblically speaking, these are empty words. Mexican, Cuban, Guatemalan, Honduran, Dominican, Puerto Rican these refer to nations, both politically, and to some extent ethnically. Native American isn’t a meaningful category, but Cherokee and Miami and Lakota and Apache and Sauk and Fox and Narraganset are. And one could even argue that perhaps groups of tribes can be considered nations, like the Iroquois nation, made up of 5 tribes, and later 6, because they became a political entity.
The Bible recognizes ethnic nations and political nations. That’s it. Race, as a concept is not a biblically meaningful category. And I know that you may think I’m hammering on this same point and maybe I’m beating a dead horse, but this is important.
Now, here’s what this doesn’t mean. Just because race is not a meaningful category in the Bible, that doesn’t mean that a lot of people don’t live as though distinguishing between black and white and Latino and Asian matter. A LOT of people do believe and behave this way, and so we’ve constructed reality in a way that is sinful. Again, I’m not denying that white people are lighter than black people. I’m not saying that we can’t generally guess someone’s ethnic origin by skin color. You can typically tell apart people whose most recent ancestors were from Scotland than from Uganda. Not always, but generally, if you put a Ugandan and a Scot next to each other you can guess which is which. But that doesn’t mean that race, the way we currently think of it is biblically meaningful.
In the Christian worldview, the ONLY thing that really matters is whether you’re in Christ or not. The whitest, blondest, blue-eyedest Sami reindeer herder who believes in Jesus is just as much my brother or sister and the blackest, curly hairedest, brown-eyed Ethiopian. On a secondary level, God has, and does, and will treat nations, which are political entities, and also ethnic entities, as units. We know that when God blesses and judges nations He blesses and judges them as political and ethnic entities. But nowhere in the Bible do we see a blessing or a judging of “the white race” or “the black race”. The closest we come is Noah’s cursing of Ham, but that’s Noah not God and this is a VERY disputed passage. The other place where there is a possible cursing of a group is when God curses and judges the Canaanites. But here God is cursing a cluster of nations not as a racial entity, per se, but as a coalition of people who inhabit a specific place and who are all descendants of Canaan. And even here, we’re talking about a generally ethnically homogenous group of tribes with a known common ancestor – very similar to Israel or Edom.
While the Bible is UNCLEAR about what constitutes an ethnic nation, it is very clear about what constitutes a political nation: government and borders.
Acts 17:26 says “From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.” (NIV)
I want to note that the Bible is extremely plain that all people are one people, and that nations are meaningful, but sometimes arbitrary distinctions. But what matters here, mostly, is that God has a sovereign plan about political nations – and these, historically, have been ethnic nations, but not always. Rome was multi-ethnic, at her height. The Greco-Macedonian empire was a collection of various Hellenistic tribes. The Persian Empire was made up of the Medes and the Persians, and of course the Medes and the Persians, like the Babylonians, were made up of many various united tribes.
Indeed, there’s really no such thing as a “German” a German is a person who lives in Germany, but Germany came, like Italy, after a lot of small city-states and principalities and mininations joined together. If we look linguistically, there is very little reason why we wouldn’t consider all Germans, Austrians, and many of the Swiss to all be one nation. But we don’t. In the same way that French-speaking Belgians aren’t considered French. Nor are Italian-speaking Swiss considered Italian. And “the French” is an arbitrary concept, because the French are a mixture of Celts and Franks and Bretons and Gauls and Romans and Flemish and Catalans and Basques and all sorts of people – but they all coalesced into a kingdom and a nation.
It seems that God, in the Bible, treats a people as a nation either based upon ethnic group or political identity, but political identity trumps ethnic identity, with the exception of the Jewish diaspora. When people group themselves by ethnic heritage, God deals with nations based upon ethnic heritage. When people group themselves politically God deals with nations based upon political organization.
But again, this flies in the face of the concept of race. Revelation 17 says this:
9 After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. 10 And they cried out in a loud voice:
“Salvation belongs to our God,
who sits on the throne,
and to the Lamb.”
11 All the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures. They fell down on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, 12 saying:
“Amen!
Praise and glory
and wisdom and thanks and honor
and power and strength
be to our God for ever and ever.
Amen!”
13 Then one of the elders asked me, “These in white robes—who are they, and where did they come from?”
14 I answered, “Sir, you know.”
And he said, “These are they who have come out of the great tribulation; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. 15 Therefore,
“they are before the throne of God
and serve him day and night in his temple;
and he who sits on the throne
will shelter them with his presence.
16 ‘Never again will they hunger;
never again will they thirst.
The sun will not beat down on them,’
nor any scorching heat.
17 For the Lamb at the center of the throne
will be their shepherd;
‘he will lead them to springs of living water.’
‘And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.’” (NIV)
When we look at what the most meaningful distinction is in the Bible it’s being in Christ. Those who come out of the Great Tribulation are comprised of people from every nation, tribe, people, and tongue. Or in Greek, it’s: “ἔθνους καὶ φυλῶν καὶ λαῶν καὶ γλωσσῶν”. The order here seems to either be descending or unimportant. And since the order can only be descending or irrelevant that means that not only is there no reason to interpret the word “people” or laos, to means “race” but there is no exegetical basis for it either.
All throughout the text in places where race could be established as a meaningful category for distinguishing people – it is absent. That DOES not mean that people don’t live as though race were a real thing. What it means is that “race” should have no meaning for Christians. That doesn’t mean that we pretend we’re all exactly the same – that’s dumb. But it does mean that the old-line Darwinist theories about “the races” are empty categories that needlessly divide. And that if Christians are to think Biblically about skin color and justice in America we ought to think a little more like the French.