Civil Rights 50 Years Later
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00:00:05.000 | This year marks the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
00:00:10.000 | which effectively nullified legal discrimination on the basis of race and put an end to the Jim Crow laws that had mandated segregation for so long.
00:00:18.000 | Pastor John, you grew up in South Carolina in those tumultuous days in the 1950s and 60s, and now you're 68 years old.
00:00:26.000 | What has changed in these past 50 years? How different is the racial landscape in America today?
00:00:32.000 | Not everything has changed. Human nature is still what it is.
00:00:37.000 | Not everything has changed relationally, but there have been stunning changes, many for good, some for ill.
00:00:48.000 | And as I gave thought to this question, I've written down just jotted notes here on 10 things.
00:00:56.000 | Let me see if I can just bullet them for people to think and pray about and celebrate when appropriate.
00:01:02.000 | Number one has to be the president of the United States is black.
00:01:09.000 | If you had told plantation owners 150 years ago or members of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s or white Southerners I grew up with, including me, that this would be, none would have believed it.
00:01:28.000 | It is astonishing and wonderful in itself, quite apart from any moral or philosophical differences we may have with President Obama.
00:01:38.000 | The president of the United States is black, and he couldn't even drink out of the same fountain with me in 1959 at Cress 5 and 10.
00:01:56.000 | Number two, de jure segregation is over. Racism has been successfully stigmatized.
00:02:08.000 | It's against the law to require segregation. It was not when I was growing up.
00:02:14.000 | In fact, the laws enforced segregation, couldn't go to the same restaurants, couldn't stay in the same motel room, couldn't go to the same schools, couldn't drink from the same fountain.
00:02:26.000 | It was appallingly demeaning.
00:02:29.000 | And just as significantly as the overturning of the laws, these Jim Crow laws, is the fact that today, publicly, you can't celebrate racism without incurring almost universal disapproval.
00:02:46.000 | You could when I was a kid.
00:02:48.000 | Now, this doesn't mean it's gone, but it does mean that God, in his providence, has willed to erect this cultural dam against the river of human pride and hate,
00:03:10.000 | to hinder its public expression and in the process, even make many millions of people feel that it is reprehensible.
00:03:20.000 | That's an amazing, not only legal turnaround, but attitudinal and cultural turnaround.
00:03:27.000 | Number three, educationally, economically, vocationally, medically, politically, the gains have been great for blacks.
00:03:37.000 | And the remaining gaps are great.
00:03:41.000 | 75% of blacks adults, for example, had not completed high school 50 years ago.
00:03:47.000 | Today, it's 15%.
00:03:49.000 | 3.5 times as many blacks age 18 to 24 are enrolled in college today as 50 years ago.
00:03:57.000 | Five times as many black adults hold a college degree today as did 50 years ago.
00:04:03.000 | But on average, blacks remain twice as likely as whites to be unemployed and earn less than two thirds the income of whites.
00:04:13.000 | There are many kinds of gaps that still exist that are all out of proportion to the population percentages.
00:04:20.000 | Fourth, family stability has gone backward across the board, whites and blacks.
00:04:27.000 | One indicator in all our communities of this is that the out of wedlock births have skyrocketed in the last 50 years.
00:04:41.000 | This has led to astonishing and painful and disruptive fatherlessness in many of our communities.
00:04:50.000 | For all the gains, few things can make up for the loss of solid home life, whatever the race.
00:04:57.000 | And it is more broken, more fragile today than it has ever been in American life across the ethnic spectrum.
00:05:06.000 | Fifth, the Democratic Party, where most African-Americans feel at home, have felt at home for decades,
00:05:15.000 | is now so morally compromised with the approval of homosexual intercourse and child killing
00:05:23.000 | that blacks with a biblical morality are put in a crisis of conscience they never had before.
00:05:31.000 | It has been maddening to many blacks that political and media leaders have tried to make the approval of homosexual intercourse
00:05:42.000 | equivalent to the approval of black civil rights.
00:05:46.000 | It is a turn of affairs that would have been inconceivable 30 years ago.
00:05:53.000 | And how that's going to shake out ethnically and politically, I do not know.
00:05:57.000 | But it is a remarkable and regrettable turn of affairs.
00:06:02.000 | Number six, another remarkable development over the last 50 years has been the emergence of global multiculturalism,
00:06:12.000 | along with the multiplication of black cultures in America.
00:06:16.000 | In other words, less and less should we think in binary ways like black and white, those two.
00:06:25.000 | And there are two reasons for that.
00:06:27.000 | One is that the whole world, with its endless array of cultures and ethnicities, is at our doorstep.
00:06:35.000 | And the world is vastly more diverse than we ever thought it was.
00:06:39.000 | And the other reason is because of the proliferation of black subcultures in America today,
00:06:48.000 | so that you get people like Ture writing a book, Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness, saying there is no such thing as black anymore.
00:06:55.000 | There's only multiple black cultures, so that the united front that you could think of pretty much in the 60s is no more,
00:07:06.000 | politically or socio-economically, according to these writers.
00:07:11.000 | Seventh, which leads to the recognition that there is still deep and persistent racism that hates this kind of diversity
00:07:24.000 | and hates this kind of multiculturalism in America.
00:07:28.000 | White supremacists are still here.
00:07:32.000 | Just last week, we had one of them go on a rampage and tried to kill three Jewish people and wound up killing three white Christians.
00:07:43.000 | But he was a Ku Klux Klan chapter founder, and that's 2014 we're talking about, not 1914.
00:07:53.000 | And so there is now, there always will be, I presume, evil in the human heart breaking out in these kinds of expressions.
00:08:03.000 | Number eight, there are wonderful outcroppings of theological and spiritual and church renewal in all the ethnicities,
00:08:12.000 | including some remarkable expressions of it in the black culture, like Christian hip hop or the Reformed African-American Network or the Front Porch.
00:08:20.000 | These are the kinds of things that I'm most excited about, and that would not have been really imaginable 50 years ago.
00:08:28.000 | Nine thousands of churches, black and white, remain ambivalent about what to do about multi-ethnicity.
00:08:37.000 | They don't even know if it's worth addressing. They don't know if it matters.
00:08:43.000 | They're uncertain. A lot of pastors are just uncertain what to do about it.
00:08:46.000 | Is it a central biblical issue? If so, what should I say about it? What should we do about it?
00:08:52.000 | And given where we live, it doesn't seem to have the same cloud as it does in Memphis.
00:08:56.000 | And there's just a lot of uncertainty, and a lot of pastors are paralyzed by these questions.
00:09:03.000 | But I hope and I pray that that's going to turn around, because it is a major issue.
00:09:12.000 | And I think we're seeing a wonderful movement like the Kainos movement we've talked about,
00:09:19.000 | where both black and white and other ethnicities are encouraging themselves to be multi-ethnic.
00:09:26.000 | One more. John Piper was once blind, and now I see.
00:09:34.000 | That's the one that comes closest to home to me. The 1960 14-year-old John Piper and the 2014 68-year-old John Piper are not the same person racially.
00:09:47.000 | The self-absorbed teenager who was more concerned about his complexion than segregation and racism has been shown mercy,
00:09:58.000 | and today has repented and turned to walk in the light of Revelation 5-9 and celebrate what God is doing in the kind of triumphs that have come in the last 50 years for the sake of racial and ethnic diversity.
00:10:14.000 | God is kind.
00:10:16.000 | Yes, God is very kind. Thank you, Pastor John.
00:10:19.000 | There's a lot in this podcast to follow up on, and I'll mention just a couple of things as we close.
00:10:23.000 | Speaking of gay rights and civil rights, there's a piece written by Vodie Bauckham that's not to be missed over at the Gospel Coalition website.
00:10:30.000 | His blog post is titled "Gay is not the New Black." Check that out by Googling the title.
00:10:36.000 | And you can follow the work of our friends Thabiti, Louis Love, and Tony Carter over at the Front Porch website at thefrontporch.org.
00:10:44.000 | And finally, Bloodlines is a book on race by Pastor John, which can be downloaded entirely free of charge at desiringgod.org.
00:10:52.000 | We'll be back with an all-new episode tomorrow.
00:10:55.000 | Until then, I'm your host Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John Podcast.
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