Transcript
This transcript:
Recently, I've started taking a break from Twitter on Sundays, really starting sometime on Saturday, Saturday afternoon, Saturday evening.
At any rate, this past week, Saturday, I posted a tweet before taking my sabbatical, as it were, and that tweet blew up.
It got a lot of views, and I want to explain specifically what it is I mean by that tweet and why it is correct, why it is in line with right Christian doctrine.
And for reference, the tweet, verbatim, interracial marriage is tantamount to murder.
Now, it is important to note several things, and so I'm going to go through really four major points in this particular episode.
To start off, we need to distinguish per se and per quod.
Now I've distinguished this before elsewhere in, for example, the Stone Choir episode in which I distinguished per se from per quod, but just to go over it again briefly, something that is per se X is X intrinsically.
Something that is per quod X is X due to other circumstances, due to other facts.
And so it is important, it is vitally important to note at the outset that interracial marriage is not per se sinful.
And so of course that means that it is not per se tantamount to murder.
The issue is per quod.
The issue is that given external circumstances, given the surrounding facts, it is in fact sinful.
It is, as I said in my tweet, tantamount to murder.
The children that are produced from an interracial union are in fact not related to their own parents.
Now it is important to distinguish two senses in which we mean related here, because obviously I am using one and if I were using the other, it would not be true.
Yes, if two people of a different races have a child, that child is descended from them and therefore is related to them in the sense of being descended from them.
But biologically, genetically, according to the DNA of that child, that child is so far distant from his parents that in fact the parents are more closely related to any random member of their own race, of their own nation, than to their own child.
And I'll get into near the end of this episode why that is important, some of the consequences of that and what to do about those consequences.
But in addition to the fact that the child is effectively not related to his own parents, which carries a lot of problems with it, there are also health consequences.
Many times those who are born of particularly distant genetic stock, so parents who are less closely related, this is not going to be something that applies to say a German and a Dutchman or a Dutch woman and a German or a German and a Russian even, which is to say people descended from Japheth, Europeans, whites, that's within one of the overarching ethnic groups being of course the Japhethites, the Hamites and the Shemites.
Now this is something more distant if you have a European and an African, there are going to be health consequences of that union.
The child is going to be less healthy.
The child is going to have more problems than if he did not have such disparate lineage.
And of course this creates problems for medical care because the child is going to require more medical care for one and it is going to be more difficult to render that medical care because we have routines, we have various things set up for those of particular lineage because yes, you do actually have to tailor medicine to the genetics, to the lineage, to the DNA really is what you're doing, the biology of the patient.
In some cases it depends on the type of treatment, but to some degree we have those regimens in place tailored to particular groups.
If someone is effectively sui generis because that person is a mishmash, a mixture of multiple different groups, we don't have those in place.
It's going to be more difficult to treat that person.
Additionally, there are going to be things where you cannot treat that person.
So organ donation, tissue donation, if you try to get a bone marrow donation and you are half black and half white, good luck.
You probably will not be able to find a compatible donor and that is a serious consequence.
That is something parents should take into account because they are putting that on the child.
Parents are supposed to care for their children, not burden them unnecessarily and this is most certainly an unnecessary burden.
Additionally for the child, outside of the biological issues, you have the cultural issues.
This child is not going to belong to any one particular culture because the child is going to be torn between at least two.
It's going to be the father's culture versus the mother's culture and this is something those parents have put on that child.
This is a problem for the child.
That is a consideration because again, parents are supposed to care for their children and in the same vein, the divorce statistics for interracial marriage are significantly worse than those for intraracial marriage, which is to say if you marry someone outside your own race, you are much more likely to get divorced.
Again, this is going to severely impact the child.
We know the consequences for children if they are the product of a failed marriage, if their parents divorce.
Now add on top the other problems that biracial, multiracial children have and you have given this child a significantly harder time in life.
For what reason?
Why did you do this to the child?
But of course that is simply the beginning of this problem.
Let's look at it in the modern context and then we'll look at it in the biblical context second, because of course that is one of the things I am accused of doing is twisting scripture or ignoring scripture and so we'll address those questions.
But in the modern context, we'll deal with that first.
The goal of interracial marriages in the modern context is the destruction of nations.
This is very explicit.
Those who are advocating for interracial relationships, multiracial, biracial, whatever it happens to be children.
The explicit goal is the destruction of the distinct nations.
In particular, the goal of course is the destruction of whites of the white race.
And the reason for this is because historically Christendom has been synonymous with Europe.
Whites have been the bulwark of Christendom in the world for millennia.
And Satan knows this and he hates us and so he wants to erase us.
And this is one way that he can do it, a very effective way, because an interracial marriage destroys the lineage of both parents insofar as that child is concerned.
Now of course, if for instance you have a father from group A and a mother from group B and the child marries into group B and then the child's children marry into group B, eventually you wind up genetically basically back in group B just because of the way the genetic recombination and such works.
However, that only works so long as you have a large enough pool of group B where something like that can be absorbed and effectively bred out over time.
If you have enough people who are crossing that racial boundary with their marriages in a short span of time, you destroy one or both groups involved.
Just depends on the relative size of the groups basically.
In addition to this overtly evil goal, which many admit this is in fact their goal, this is what they want to accomplish with interracial marriage, many of those who are engaged in interracial marriages admit they are doing it for wicked reasons.
It may be a fetish.
It may be they hate their own people.
Of course, that is sin.
That is particularly egregious sin, just according to the plain words of scripture.
It's also something that is of course pushed by our culture and our media.
And as I have often said, as we've often said on Stone Choir as well, look at the origin of an idea or a thing.
Who is pushing it?
Why is it being pushed?
If the person or group pushing it is evil, you can rest fairly assured that the thing itself is also evil.
It is aimed at evil ends because ultimately, of course, it comes from Satan.
And in this case, those pushing it are evil.
Those who are pushing interracial marriage are by and large, atheists, Marxists, communists.
This was a big push from the USSR in order to drive tension and destroy the nation.
It is carried over into the modern context, of course, and it's still Marxists who are pushing it.
Just a different flavor of Marxist, less the Soviet variety, more the Frankfurt.
And as I mentioned, interracial marriage destroys one's race.
It is in fact a repudiation of one's ancestors, of one's parents.
And so of course it is a violation of the fourth commandment because the fourth commandment does not extend just to the immediate generation before you.
It's not just your parents, because of course this can be explained a number of ways.
The simplest one for most people to grasp is going to be this.
You have a duty to your parents under the fourth commandment that is explicit, that is obvious.
Thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother.
And of course there's the blessing with it, which plays into this as well, that it may as go well with you and you may live long in the land or thou mayest live long in the land if we want to use the older English.
But of course you have to look at it generationally.
Your parents have a duty to their parents.
Their parents have a duty to their parents.
And so part of honoring your parents is recognizing their duty to honor their parents and therefore honoring your grandparents, partly through your parents, but also directly, particularly if they're still alive, but also all of those ancestors all the way back.
And part of how you do that is continuing the line they have preserved over a course of millennia, not terminating it for some selfish reason, which it virtually always is in these cases.
We could also mention crime statistics, but I've mentioned that elsewhere, gone over it fairly extensively.
I'll link to it in the show notes instead of going over it here.
And so of course, mentioning the fourth commandment leads us right into the biblical context.
And this is the one that many have attempted to say that I'm somehow violating with my arguments that I am ignoring the biblical context or twisting it, what have you.
And so let's look at some cases.
We will look at five cases.
We'll start with Moses.
There are those who argue that Moses was in an interracial marriage because he married Zipporah, the daughter of the priest of Midian.
What these people fail to mention, and in some cases it may be simply because they're cherry picking or they're looking for something on the internet, they probably Googled it and don't know anything about scripture.
Well, the Midianites are descended from Abraham via Keterah.
And so the Midianites are cousins of the Israelites, of the Hebrews.
This was a cousin marriage.
This is not an interracial marriage.
Now there is one other attempted argument in the case of Moses.
And they will say that when there was the rebellion with Miriam and Aaron, that they said that Moses had married a Cushite and therefore that was the reason, this is what the opponents attempt to argue, therefore that was the reason they were condemning Moses.
Now if you actually read that text, that's not the reason they're condemning Moses.
Now they may have brought that up, but the real problem there is that they were rejecting Moses who was the chosen of God to lead the people of Israel, and therefore in rejecting Moses they were in fact rejecting God.
They were rebelling against God because the rebellion is always against God.
Against you, you only have I sinned.
That's the issue.
The issue was not Moses.
And also Cushite in this context probably just means foreign woman from the region of Cush.
Cush is to the south, so is Midian.
Probably the same woman, even if it was not the same woman.
The issue was still the rebellion against God, the usurpation, which is incidentally why you see Miriam is cursed more heavily than Aaron, because for a woman to attempt to usurp that sort of headship, that sort of leadership, is of course worse than for a man to do so.
And Aaron was in fact a leader of the people as well, just not in the same position as Moses.
And so scripture doesn't actually say anything about this marriage.
We don't have an explicit approval or condemnation.
And so it goes beyond the text if either side really wants to draw anything out of this.
The next person we'll address is Rahab.
Now there's a fundamental problem here, a foundational issue when we are addressing Rahab.
And that is that we don't know if we're dealing with one person or two.
When you translate or transliterate, as the case may be, a name from one language to another, it is often the case that there will be multiple spellings, particularly across different authors.
And here we have two different names.
We have Rahab and Rahab, and that is R-A-A-B or R-A-X-A-B, just to transliterate the Greek characters as it were.
Now we have with the Chi, with the X in Matthew, Rahab, but in the Septuagint Old Testament, and in Hebrew and James, we have Rahab.
Is this the same woman?
Well we don't know.
Scripture does not tell us.
There's nowhere else we are told if this Rahab, as the name is transliterated into English, is two different women or one woman.
And so Matthew, of course, is giving us the lineage of Christ.
If Rahab is Rahab, then we have a Canaanite in the lineage of Christ.
But we have no reason to conclude this.
If Scripture told us that, fine, we can use this argument for whatever purpose, as long as it's in line with the text says.
The text does not say that this is the same woman.
And so neither side can draw any argument from this because it goes beyond the text.
Now those who are on the other side are actually relying on Midrashim.
They're relying on Jewish sources that supposedly exegete this text or carry forward some oral tradition.
That's not Scripture.
That's not binding.
Christians should not resort to it.
And so Rahab does not give an argument for either side.
The next individual in Scripture we will address is Ruth.
This is a similar issue to earlier with Moses and Zipporah.
Ruth was a Moabite.
Well, the Moabites were descended from Lot.
Lot was the nephew of Abraham.
Again, cousins.
This is not an interracial marriage.
This is a cousin marriage.
And again, it just pays to actually know Scripture, to know the lineage of these people.
You cannot make a sound argument.
You cannot make a proper argument if you don't actually know what Scripture says about these individuals.
And so again, Ruth is a cousin.
Moving on, Joseph.
This is one where perhaps we have an interracial marriage.
Joseph married Asenath, the daughter of the priest of On. She may have been a Hamite.
If she was an Egyptian, then she was a Hamite because Egypt is a son of Ham.
The Egyptians are sons of Ham.
Egypt is called in Scripture, the land of Ham.
However, we are not given a lineage of Asenath.
The Egyptians were conquered at least a couple of times in history, perhaps more than that.
By Shemitic peoples.
One in fact was the Hyksos, and that may have played into why the Pharaoh, who was leader of Egypt at the time of the Exodus, hated the Israelites, feared the Israelites.
Because he may have thought that if the Hyksos or some other group of Shemitic origin came in, that the Hebrews, also being Shemitic, would have aligned with them, would have allied with them and fought against the Egyptians.
But of course, some of the leadership, some of the upper echelons of Egyptian society would have been Shemite descended because of these invasions.
The similar things happened in various parts of the world over time.
For instance, we know the Normans came in and conquered parts of Britain, and then you have the Anglo-Saxons, and you have these various groups that conquer other groups and take over the upper echelons of society and intermix over time.
Now in the case, of course, the European case I gave, these are very closely related cousins.
In this case, they're a little more distant because you're dealing with Shemites versus Hamites.
However, again, we don't know the lineage of Asenath.
And so if either side makes an argument from this, it is an argument based on assumption, not based on what is explicitly in the text of scripture.
Even if, let's say, let's say that Asenath was indeed a Hamite.
So this is Joseph a Shemite marrying Asenath a Hamite.
So this is a proper interracial marriage, an actual one in scripture, if we make this assumption.
Does scripture say that this was a wise union?
No.
Does scripture say this was an unwise union?
Again, no.
Scripture does not pass any judgment on it.
Scripture simply relays what happened in this case.
And so if we want to draw out and say that this was approved of by God, this was blessed in some way, we can say that he did indeed go on to found part of a nation, as it were, not a nation unto itself, but a tribe, two tribes, Manasseh and Ephraim.
And so we can say that God did bless him.
However, that God blessed him for this does not mean that this particular union was in and of itself wise.
We could look, of course, to David.
Was what he did with Bathsheba wise?
No, I think we can all agree that stealing another man's wife and murdering him is not something we should call wise.
Did God still give him children from Bathsheba?
Yes.
Solomon in particular, who would sit on his throne, who would be in the line of the Messiah.
Not everything that is recorded in scripture is necessarily something that is wise, something that is praiseworthy.
Some things are left to human wisdom, and we have to be able to make those calls based on the information available to us.
This is, of course, obvious because the most clear cut case, let's call it.
If a woman becomes pregnant as a result of rape, we have to contend with the fact that children are a blessing from God.
But this child is very clearly the product of an evil act.
Can we conclude that because God's blessing of children, God's blessing of a child in this case resulted that the act itself is approved of or blessed by God?
The answer, of course, is no.
And so we have to be careful what sort of conclusions we are drawing from the information from the facts relayed by scripture.
And so even if this is a case of an actual interracial marriage, we are not told by scripture if this is something that is blessed or cursed, if this is something that is praiseworthy or blameworthy.
And even if we go ahead and assume that it is praiseworthy, this was a good thing, it does not mean that it's a general rule.
Again, there are matters that are left to human wisdom.
And so let's look at really basically the only very clear case of mixed lineage that we have explicitly mixed lineage clearly taught by scripture.
And that, of course, is Timothy.
And per Acts 16, Timothy was born of a Jewish or Judean woman and a Greek father.
Now, of course, we could make the argument that technically it does just say Judean and Greek and Greek can just mean foreign and Judean can mean living in Judea.
But I think it is a fair assumption in this case to go with the interpretation in this case that Timothy's mother was indeed an Israelite woman and his father was indeed a Greek in the sense of ethnically, racially Greek man.
And so again, does scripture praise this union?
No.
Does scripture curse this union?
No.
We're back to my initial comments.
Per se, not sinful.
The issue is, per quote, the issue is the surrounding circumstances.
And in our modern context, interracial marriages are basically always sin.
They are a problem for the reasons mentioned.
And I'll get into the consequences now for my last point.
We've finished the section on the biblical context, as it were.
And so let's discuss the actual consequences of interracial marriages.
I already discussed the issue, some of the issues regarding children, the medical consequences, the lack of a real culture, the lack of belonging.
But it really is worse than that, because one of the things that we have to do, according to scripture, according to the fourth commandment, is honor our father and mother.
And again, that that extends beyond just one's immediate biological mother and father.
You are part of a larger culture.
You are part of a nation.
And part of honoring your father and mother is honoring that nation of which you are part.
How do you do that if you are not really part of any one nation?
If your parents are from two separate nations, or worse, if your grandparents are from three or four separate nations, how do you honor your nation properly?
You don't have a nation in a very real sense.
And this is the problem that individuals who enter into an interracial marriage create for their own children, because that child will have to choose to which nation he truly belongs.
Now, of course, the ordinary course of things is that a woman leaves her family and becomes part of the family of her husband.
And so the child would choose his father's nation.
But that is not how it always plays out in the modern context.
And so this is a burden placed by selfish parents onto their children.
And the child has to choose.
This is the reality of it.
This is the recommendation, because this is the best thing the child can do.
The child has to choose the nation to which he will belong.
And that is a terrible burden to put on a child, because for anyone who is born to parents of the same nation, you don't have to choose your nation because it's your nation.
If both of your parents are German, you're German.
If both of your parents are French, you're French.
You aren't having to contend with this additional confusion and burden that your parents in their selfishness and their short-sightedness have placed on you.
But that, of course, is what society wants to do to these children, because society wants to create individuals who are rootless, individuals who do not have any connection to their ancestors, to a greater nation, to anything beyond themselves, because society wants these little atomized individuals who can be shuffled around a board and used as interchangeable cogs in the great machine that we call capitalism in the market.
That is what modern society wants.
It also wants it because individuals who have no greater connection to a larger group will forever be atomized.
They will never be able to organize in pursuit of their own good, of the good of their own group because they don't have that group.
And so those who are in power cannot be challenged by atomized individuals.
They can be challenged by groups who have a shared identity and are willing and able to work towards shared goals.
The best sort of individual that our modern overlords, let us call them, can have is someone of mixed lineage who is also of alternative sexuality, because that person is totally atomized.
That person does not have the natural connections of family, the natural connections of race, the natural connections of nationality, none of it.
That is not part of a greater whole.
That is an individual in the most terrible sense of the term.
And so those who produce children in an interracial marriage are putting this sort of burden onto their children.
And that's sinful.
That is not something that Christians should be doing.
That transgresses the wisdom that God has given us to act properly in this life.
Just because we can do something does not mean that we should do that thing.
Just because something is not per se sinful does not mean that it is not sinful in context.
And so parents who are doing this, individuals who are engaging in this, should not be praised for what they're doing, because out of their own selfish, sinful desires, they are placing zero emphasis, zero care, zero weight on what will happen to their children in the future, what this will do to their children, what this will do to their society.
Because of course, this is one of the things that erodes the bonds in society between and among people.
Parents are bound together in part by their common genetics and by their common history, the common culture, language, all of these various things.
That breaks down when an individual no longer has a connection to these things.
And so again, just to emphasize, one of the biggest problems with this is not actually the sin of the parents.
Yes, it is the sin of the parents that leads to the curse on the children, but it is that curse on the children that should be our greater interest.
Why would we as a society permit children to be burdened with this absolutely, totally unnecessary additional confusion, this lack of belonging, this isolation, this alienation, this atomization, the disconnect from everyone and everything around them?
There's no reason to pursue this.
There is every reason to avoid it.
And so that is the reason that I made the tweet, because it is indeed tantamount to murder.
Because what you are doing is killing your own nation and you are attempting to destroy your children.
They are going to struggle with this.
They may overcome it, but it will be a great deal of effort on their part and they will never fully overcome it.
They cannot fully overcome it because you have burdened them with something that is permanent in this life.
And so that is the thing that those of us who point out these issues want to avoid.
We do not want these children who are burdened in this way.
Life is hard enough for many people and much of the time.
Adding additional complication, additional burdens, additional weight is not what Christians should be seeking to do.
It is not what any good person should be seeking to do.
And so, yes, it is right teaching to tell people to avoid these unwise unions, which do indeed rise to the level of sinful because of context.
And so in summary, interracial marriages are not sinful per se.
However, in the modern context, they are virtually always sinful per quod.
And so it is right teaching for Christians to say that these unwise unions should be avoided.
It's that simple.