“Blue on black
Tears on a river
Push on a shove
It don't mean much
Joker on jack
Match on a fire
Cold on ice
A dead man's touch
Whisper on a scream
Never change a thing
Don't bring you back
Blue on black” Blue on Black, Kenny Wayne Shepherd
Color is a funny thing. It’s funny because colors, despite having objective and measurable value, don’t appear objectively to our eyes. Our eyes can play tricks on us. For instance, there’s the well-known trick of complementary color magic. To do this trick, take a yellow highlighter and draw a circle, with a small blank hole in the middle. If the paper you draw the highlighter circle on is clean white, then the inner circle left blank should appear purple. Even though colors are objective, our ability to evaluate colors isn’t.
And every person who’s gotten dressed in the dark has learned this lesson. You put on your socks in the morning, thinking they’re black – but they’re navy! Gasp! And here’s the funny thing about blue and black, you can’t tell that navy’s navy by putting it against a white backdrop – unless you have a very well-trained eye – most of us mere mortals have to see navy against black, not white, to tell navy from black. Because against white, navy looks black.
And this is a principle with some fairly serious theological implications. You see, when we make moral judgments, all too often we as Christians are trying so hard to be “nuanced” that we compare navy to black. And so we can come up with 50 shades of grey, all the while forgetting that if white is the standard, the comparison between navy and black creates a distinction without a difference. The standard is white (morally speaking) and anything that is not white is tainted, even the faintest grey. The difference between blue and black is irrelevant.
But that’s not what we’re being taught by Big Eva (Big Evangelicalism). Big Eva is doing backflips and getting out the color wheels to try to let everyone know that there are differences and nuances and distinctions. Big Eva is showing us a billion swatches, and we’re seeing every shade of blue from prussian to periwinkle, and we’re being told that blue isn’t black and that we need to “meet people where they are in their cerulean ways”, that, “we have no right to judge turquoise; cyan isn’t black, afterall!”
But it ain’t white either. And white is all that matters in this analogy. Because the standard isn’t “be slightly better than the world”. The standard is “be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect!”
Here’s the deal. The pastors of the American Church are compromising themselves every which way they can in a desperate, craven, and cringing attempt to be woke enough to please the Wokeists, so that hopefully, maybe, perhaps, when the Bolsheviks take power we won’t be liquidated along with the Mensheviks. Good luck with that one.
How are they compromising themselves? By going in on CRT, for instance. Saying that Critical Race Theory is a tool that can be used in service of the Gospel – which is odd, since CRT is a theory that is fundamentally, root and branch opposed to the Gospel and the entire Christian worldview.
How else? In their mealy-mouthed attempts to not be excoriated for being Fascist Nazi Trumpists, they have denounced pretty much everyone to the right of Mitt Romney…which is pretty much everyone on the right…Trump voters are racists and you can and probably should vote for Joe Biden, so says Big Eva, because Social Justice. Now, I think there are a lot of reasons you should not have or should not in the future vote for Donald Trump. But to try to make an objective moral equivalency between the policies of Joe Biden and Donald Trump requires such a fundamental reordering of…morality…that it’s hard to understand. To say that the contemporary Wokeist is morally equivalent to a contemporary, MAGA-supporter, and to try to sustain that argument from the Bible requires such a distorted hermeneutical process that it’s hard to understand how someone could properly interpret anything from the Scripture. If you don’t want to vote for Trump – then best not vote at all, because none of Trump’s moral failings were absent in any significant way from Joe Biden’s personality. And at least Trump opposes murdering babies. And in the moral equivalency game of paper, scissors, murder babies, murder babies always trumps whatever moral evil you’re comparing it to.
How else? By refusing to make a hard, united, unequivocal stand against female genital mutilation now being advocated via “gender reassignment” treatments and surgeries being done to small children. The heroes of Big Eva are ready and willing to come up with a nuanced view of why riots are ok, why you can support BLM and why we may need to get rid of police – but is anyone out there speaking on female genital mutilation? I reviewed Christianity Today, I looked through the table of contents on every issue going back to October 2019 – you know how many stories in the TOC were dedicated to the issue of transsexuality? I’ll give you a hint, it starts with “z” and rhymes with “hero”. Admittedly, CT is really just Relevant Magazine for people who use their middle names. And, admittedly, The Gospel Coalition, is doing a better job of dealing with the crisis issues of the day. But the fact that CT did not have a single cover story over the past 16 months that dealt directly, clearly, and firmly with what the Christian stand is and must be on transsexuality and especially as transsexuality is affecting children seems, to me, to be highly indicative of the overall direction of CT. And CT, is a pretty efficient weathercock for where the cool-kid-pastorate is and is heading. CT did not have a single cover story devoted to Critical Race Theory – or anything listed in the TOC. Gospel Coalition has had plenty of stories. First Things has too. But CT doesn’t want to write against the Woke because they are terrified of them, or they secretly side with them.
All this is to say that the Evangelical Aristocracy are doing a very fine job of pontificating about inequity and injustice and racial tensions and White Christian Nationalism (read CT!). Big Eva is really good at telling us how the culture wars were foolish adventures and we should have listened more – which is ironic coming from people who repeatedly refuse to listen to their parishioners who say they’re tired of hearing about CRT and how Trump voters are Nazis, but that’s another issue altogether.
The cool-kid-pastorate is very talented at helping us negotiate all the subtleties and niceties and nuance of various kinds of abominations. They seem to be doing a very poor job of holding our degenerate culture up to the light of the glory of the gospel of God and condemning the evils of our age.
Of course, there are pastors who won’t surrender the gospel. They preach against sin and they call sin sin – they call the sins of abortion, and genital mutilation, and racism sins, just as they call greed, and intolerance, and Trump-worship sins. I know several men like this. Men who, fallible though they may be, they do their best, by God’s grace, to preach the whole counsel of God, and place particular emphasis on the most pertinent messages from God’s Word, as it speaks to our culture today. There are a lot of very good pastors still out there. In fact, I would argue that the majority of Evangelical pastors and a good number of main-liners and Catholic priests are preaching and teaching against the evils of this corrupt generation despite the seemingly ceaseless attempts by the guys with the big megaphones to normalize sin and get us to focus on distinguishing blue and black instead of holding our culture up against the transfigured robes of Christ that are whiter than any fuller can bleach them! When we compare the compromised blue to the condemned black, blue looks pretty different. Hold it up to the inapproachable light in which God dwells and it looks as black as sin.
I’d like to end with this small observation. In the book of Jeremiah, and all the prophets, incidentally, when we see the priests and prophets who tried to compromise with idolatry or to syncretize Baalism and Yahwhism, nowhere, ever, do we get told which of the compromisers were actually still real believers, they were just wrong on this issue. They receive blanket condemnation.
Now, I’m not prepared to offer blanket condemnation of those pastors and leaders who are compromising the gospel by trying to syncretize it with Wokeism. But I wouldn’t feel very confident. Because here’s the thing – I don’t care how Trinitarian you are; I don’t care how orthodox you are; I don’t care if you can give a word-perfect recitation of the ecumenical creeds in Greek and offer a perfect apology for them; I don’t care if you believe in salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, according to the Scriptures alone for the glory of God alone. I don’t care how evangelical you are. If you find ways to defend child murder and genital mutilation, if you find ways to support homosexuality, if you find ways to support transvestism and transsexuality , if you find ways to support the view that only white people are racist and that truth is relative and that logic and reason are white-man’s epistemology, if you support the destruction of the family and the expansion of a hostile government that seeks to make everyone Secular Pagans, if you do those things, I don’t care how evangelical you are, I think your faith is false. I don’t care if you’re garments are blue or black – they’re not white. And in the end, only those robed in white will be eternally with the savior – everything else are just different gradations of lostness.