Why Is Interracial Marriage Such a Hot Topic?
00:00:00.000 | In Ask Pastor John episode 98, we saw over 27,000 plays to the question, "Can a white
00:00:10.800 | woman marry a black man?"
00:00:13.360 | It's now the most listened to episode of all time, and of course the obvious answer to
00:00:16.760 | most listeners is yes, of course she can marry a black man as long as he loves Christ.
00:00:21.920 | And yet for the obvious answer, a lot of people wanted to hear why.
00:00:25.920 | Pastor John, what's your take on the popularity of this episode on interracial marriage and
00:00:29.920 | why do you think so many people clicked to listen to what should have been a fairly obvious
00:00:33.680 | answer?
00:00:34.680 | Well, since we've asked that question, Tony, I have been thinking more and more about it.
00:00:40.240 | I've been on three different occasions people have asked me why I think that, and so here's
00:00:45.440 | my latest take on this.
00:00:48.760 | Number one, your title, I think, was really good.
00:00:55.000 | You didn't say in a blah, general, vague way, "What do you think, Pastor John, about interracial
00:01:03.480 | marriage?"
00:01:04.480 | I think that would not have gotten the traction.
00:01:06.740 | You said, "Can a white woman marry a black man?"
00:01:11.240 | That's really specific.
00:01:13.400 | So it's provocative in that sense.
00:01:15.360 | That's number one.
00:01:16.360 | Number two, cultural and legal opposition to interracial marriage in America, black/white
00:01:25.080 | in particular, is recent history.
00:01:29.000 | When I graduated from high school, 17 states had anti-miscegenation laws, which means you
00:01:36.680 | can't.
00:01:37.880 | You go to jail if you marry a black or a white woman across a line, any kind of man or woman
00:01:47.440 | interracial marriage.
00:01:50.000 | And then in 1967, the Supreme Court struck all those down, and not all of them willingly.
00:01:56.480 | So in my lifetime, it was illegal.
00:02:00.120 | So this is recent history.
00:02:02.120 | Nearly any 20-something who wants to get married, his grandparents lived during that, maybe
00:02:08.360 | even his parents.
00:02:09.680 | So the racism that lay behind that and the deep wounds, I mean, can you imagine the woundedness
00:02:17.680 | of being in a minority and the majority says, "We won't let our people marry you."
00:02:23.560 | I mean, that communicates such dagger assault on a person's sense of humanity that those
00:02:31.880 | wounds and that racism are, I think, still alive.
00:02:37.360 | That's number two.
00:02:38.640 | It's fresh.
00:02:39.640 | Number three, today, it's not just white racism that opposes white/black marriage.
00:02:48.920 | Blacks, many blacks, not all, many blacks oppose it for different reasons.
00:02:56.920 | This is part of a bigger phenomenon right now of a sense in some of the black community
00:03:02.960 | of losing our cultural cohesion that once enabled us to do so many great things in the
00:03:12.960 | movement with a capital M in the '60s and so on.
00:03:17.360 | And Toure, that's what he's known by now, his name is Toure Neblett, wrote a book that
00:03:24.920 | I've read parts of called "Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness?"
00:03:29.940 | And his whole point is there isn't any black cohesive culture anymore, if there ever was.
00:03:37.960 | And he means there are lots of black cultures.
00:03:41.440 | There's lots of socioeconomic blacks, there's lots of culturally differentiated blacks,
00:03:45.920 | there's lots of religious blacks and so on.
00:03:48.120 | And so his point is that idea of there being a black culture to be lost is just not true.
00:03:55.840 | And some people feel that is a huge disappointment.
00:03:59.320 | In other words, the glory days, as some would say, of the '60s and the '50s are over because
00:04:08.040 | we're losing our cohesion.
00:04:10.640 | And when you have a person who thinks that, look at a black/white marriage, they say,
00:04:14.520 | "There it goes.
00:04:15.520 | There it goes."
00:04:16.520 | It's a sacrifice of the black cohesiveness if a black is "selling out" to marry a white
00:04:26.160 | person.
00:04:27.440 | So that's a piece of this that might make it especially interesting or urgent for some
00:04:33.920 | people.
00:04:34.920 | And by the way, it's really not by the way, it's right at the heart of things, this is
00:04:38.320 | just a golden opportunity for the gospel, isn't it?
00:04:42.020 | As black and white and brown and Asian, as everybody is struggling with the new faces
00:04:50.960 | of ethnic identity today, this is a moment for Christ to step in and say, "I'm creating
00:04:57.400 | a new humanity from all these ethnicities, and I am your identity."
00:05:03.000 | So here's number four.
00:05:06.400 | There is lurking, I believe, in lots of people a remaining sense that the Bible really is
00:05:12.200 | against interracial marriage.
00:05:14.200 | Because, well, God is sovereign and he ordained that races be, why would we want to start
00:05:20.560 | to smooth them out by having people marry and then their children don't look like either
00:05:26.400 | of them anymore and you don't have the same integrity of the race?
00:05:30.000 | Wouldn't God be in favor of preserving all those races since he ordained them?
00:05:34.240 | And you people are all intermarrying and turning everybody into one generic kind.
00:05:41.000 | That's a question that people would have.
00:05:42.720 | And the Old Testament forbade Israel from marrying outside Israel, so it looks like
00:05:48.600 | God is in favor of ethnic integrity.
00:05:52.280 | So I think, I tried to address those in the original APJ, so I'm not going to do it here,
00:05:58.960 | but that's still there when people read their Bible, I think.
00:06:01.980 | And the last one is, and this may be the most down-to-earth, on-the-ground practical, parents
00:06:09.060 | want their children to succeed in marriage.
00:06:12.660 | They don't want them to get divorced because of irresolvable differences.
00:06:17.860 | And everybody who's been married 10 years knows, I've been married 44, knows that all
00:06:25.740 | marriage is hard.
00:06:28.220 | All marriages, I laughingly say, are cross-cultural.
00:06:30.620 | I mean, I married a woman from Georgia, for goodness sakes, and I'm from South Carolina,
00:06:35.700 | so that's cross-cultural.
00:06:36.700 | Or, actually, I could describe a lot of other differences, but every marriage is cross-cultural,
00:06:42.600 | and when you add a racial divide to that, parents feel inside, "You're making it harder
00:06:48.140 | for yourself because they're going to bring these different expectations and different
00:06:53.020 | differences," even if they're not opposed to racial intermingling in and of itself.
00:06:58.900 | There's this kind of check in their spirit about, "Oh, you're going to make life harder
00:07:03.020 | for yourself," and so there's this resistance, and that can quickly be intermingled with
00:07:10.300 | racial prejudice of various kinds.
00:07:14.060 | So I think those, at least five so far, in my thinking, Tony, those are the nerves that
00:07:21.260 | we touched when we did this.
00:07:26.540 | And I would say one more time, every one of those five are a golden moment for the gospel
00:07:32.780 | of Jesus Christ to address all of these things, and that's what I tried to do in "Bloodlines,"
00:07:38.980 | especially in the chapter on interracial marriage.
00:07:41.780 | Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast at DesiringGod.org.
00:07:46.700 | You will find the book "Bloodlines" and thousands of other free resources from John Piper.
00:07:50.740 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:07:52.020 | Thanks for listening.
00:07:52.620 | [End of Audio]
00:07:53.120 | 1
00:07:54.120 | DesiringGod.org Page 2 of 8