This year marks the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 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. Pastor John, you grew up in South Carolina in those tumultuous days in the 1950s and 60s, and now you're 68 years old.

What has changed in these past 50 years? How different is the racial landscape in America today? Not everything has changed. Human nature is still what it is. Not everything has changed relationally, but there have been stunning changes, many for good, some for ill. And as I gave thought to this question, I've written down just jotted notes here on 10 things.

Let me see if I can just bullet them for people to think and pray about and celebrate when appropriate. Number one has to be the president of the United States is black. 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.

It is astonishing and wonderful in itself, quite apart from any moral or philosophical differences we may have with President Obama. 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. Number two, de jure segregation is over.

Racism has been successfully stigmatized. It's against the law to require segregation. It was not when I was growing up. 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.

It was appallingly demeaning. 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. You could when I was a kid. 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, to hinder its public expression and in the process, even make many millions of people feel that it is reprehensible.

That's an amazing, not only legal turnaround, but attitudinal and cultural turnaround. Number three, educationally, economically, vocationally, medically, politically, the gains have been great for blacks. And the remaining gaps are great. 75% of blacks adults, for example, had not completed high school 50 years ago. Today, it's 15%. 3.5 times as many blacks age 18 to 24 are enrolled in college today as 50 years ago.

Five times as many black adults hold a college degree today as did 50 years ago. But on average, blacks remain twice as likely as whites to be unemployed and earn less than two thirds the income of whites. There are many kinds of gaps that still exist that are all out of proportion to the population percentages.

Fourth, family stability has gone backward across the board, whites and blacks. One indicator in all our communities of this is that the out of wedlock births have skyrocketed in the last 50 years. This has led to astonishing and painful and disruptive fatherlessness in many of our communities. For all the gains, few things can make up for the loss of solid home life, whatever the race.

And it is more broken, more fragile today than it has ever been in American life across the ethnic spectrum. Fifth, the Democratic Party, where most African-Americans feel at home, have felt at home for decades, is now so morally compromised with the approval of homosexual intercourse and child killing that blacks with a biblical morality are put in a crisis of conscience they never had before.

It has been maddening to many blacks that political and media leaders have tried to make the approval of homosexual intercourse equivalent to the approval of black civil rights. It is a turn of affairs that would have been inconceivable 30 years ago. And how that's going to shake out ethnically and politically, I do not know.

But it is a remarkable and regrettable turn of affairs. Number six, another remarkable development over the last 50 years has been the emergence of global multiculturalism, along with the multiplication of black cultures in America. In other words, less and less should we think in binary ways like black and white, those two.

And there are two reasons for that. One is that the whole world, with its endless array of cultures and ethnicities, is at our doorstep. And the world is vastly more diverse than we ever thought it was. And the other reason is because of the proliferation of black subcultures in America today, 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.

There's only multiple black cultures, so that the united front that you could think of pretty much in the 60s is no more, politically or socio-economically, according to these writers. Seventh, which leads to the recognition that there is still deep and persistent racism that hates this kind of diversity and hates this kind of multiculturalism in America.

White supremacists are still here. 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. But he was a Ku Klux Klan chapter founder, and that's 2014 we're talking about, not 1914. And so there is now, there always will be, I presume, evil in the human heart breaking out in these kinds of expressions.

Number eight, there are wonderful outcroppings of theological and spiritual and church renewal in all the ethnicities, including some remarkable expressions of it in the black culture, like Christian hip hop or the Reformed African-American Network or the Front Porch. These are the kinds of things that I'm most excited about, and that would not have been really imaginable 50 years ago.

Nine thousands of churches, black and white, remain ambivalent about what to do about multi-ethnicity. They don't even know if it's worth addressing. They don't know if it matters. They're uncertain. A lot of pastors are just uncertain what to do about it. Is it a central biblical issue? If so, what should I say about it?

What should we do about it? And given where we live, it doesn't seem to have the same cloud as it does in Memphis. And there's just a lot of uncertainty, and a lot of pastors are paralyzed by these questions. But I hope and I pray that that's going to turn around, because it is a major issue.

And I think we're seeing a wonderful movement like the Kainos movement we've talked about, where both black and white and other ethnicities are encouraging themselves to be multi-ethnic. One more. John Piper was once blind, and now I see. 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.

The self-absorbed teenager who was more concerned about his complexion than segregation and racism has been shown mercy, 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.

God is kind. Yes, God is very kind. Thank you, Pastor John. There's a lot in this podcast to follow up on, and I'll mention just a couple of things as we close. 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.

His blog post is titled "Gay is not the New Black." Check that out by Googling the title. And you can follow the work of our friends Thabiti, Louis Love, and Tony Carter over at the Front Porch website at thefrontporch.org. And finally, Bloodlines is a book on race by Pastor John, which can be downloaded entirely free of charge at desiringgod.org.

We'll be back with an all-new episode tomorrow. Until then, I'm your host Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John Podcast.