In Ask Pastor John episode 98, we saw over 27,000 plays to the question, "Can a white woman marry a black man?" It's now the most listened to episode of all time, and of course the obvious answer to most listeners is yes, of course she can marry a black man as long as he loves Christ.

And yet for the obvious answer, a lot of people wanted to hear why. Pastor John, what's your take on the popularity of this episode on interracial marriage and why do you think so many people clicked to listen to what should have been a fairly obvious answer? Well, since we've asked that question, Tony, I have been thinking more and more about it.

I've been on three different occasions people have asked me why I think that, and so here's my latest take on this. Number one, your title, I think, was really good. You didn't say in a blah, general, vague way, "What do you think, Pastor John, about interracial marriage?" I think that would not have gotten the traction.

You said, "Can a white woman marry a black man?" That's really specific. So it's provocative in that sense. That's number one. Number two, cultural and legal opposition to interracial marriage in America, black/white in particular, is recent history. When I graduated from high school, 17 states had anti-miscegenation laws, which means you can't.

You go to jail if you marry a black or a white woman across a line, any kind of man or woman interracial marriage. And then in 1967, the Supreme Court struck all those down, and not all of them willingly. So in my lifetime, it was illegal. So this is recent history.

Nearly any 20-something who wants to get married, his grandparents lived during that, maybe even his parents. So the racism that lay behind that and the deep wounds, I mean, can you imagine the woundedness of being in a minority and the majority says, "We won't let our people marry you." I mean, that communicates such dagger assault on a person's sense of humanity that those wounds and that racism are, I think, still alive.

That's number two. It's fresh. Number three, today, it's not just white racism that opposes white/black marriage. Blacks, many blacks, not all, many blacks oppose it for different reasons. This is part of a bigger phenomenon right now of a sense in some of the black community of losing our cultural cohesion that once enabled us to do so many great things in the movement with a capital M in the '60s and so on.

And Toure, that's what he's known by now, his name is Toure Neblett, wrote a book that I've read parts of called "Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness?" And his whole point is there isn't any black cohesive culture anymore, if there ever was. And he means there are lots of black cultures.

There's lots of socioeconomic blacks, there's lots of culturally differentiated blacks, there's lots of religious blacks and so on. And so his point is that idea of there being a black culture to be lost is just not true. And some people feel that is a huge disappointment. In other words, the glory days, as some would say, of the '60s and the '50s are over because we're losing our cohesion.

And when you have a person who thinks that, look at a black/white marriage, they say, "There it goes. There it goes." It's a sacrifice of the black cohesiveness if a black is "selling out" to marry a white person. So that's a piece of this that might make it especially interesting or urgent for some people.

And by the way, it's really not by the way, it's right at the heart of things, this is just a golden opportunity for the gospel, isn't it? As black and white and brown and Asian, as everybody is struggling with the new faces of ethnic identity today, this is a moment for Christ to step in and say, "I'm creating a new humanity from all these ethnicities, and I am your identity." So here's number four.

There is lurking, I believe, in lots of people a remaining sense that the Bible really is against interracial marriage. Because, well, God is sovereign and he ordained that races be, why would we want to start to smooth them out by having people marry and then their children don't look like either of them anymore and you don't have the same integrity of the race?

Wouldn't God be in favor of preserving all those races since he ordained them? And you people are all intermarrying and turning everybody into one generic kind. That's a question that people would have. And the Old Testament forbade Israel from marrying outside Israel, so it looks like God is in favor of ethnic integrity.

So I think, I tried to address those in the original APJ, so I'm not going to do it here, but that's still there when people read their Bible, I think. And the last one is, and this may be the most down-to-earth, on-the-ground practical, parents want their children to succeed in marriage.

They don't want them to get divorced because of irresolvable differences. And everybody who's been married 10 years knows, I've been married 44, knows that all marriage is hard. All marriages, I laughingly say, are cross-cultural. I mean, I married a woman from Georgia, for goodness sakes, and I'm from South Carolina, so that's cross-cultural.

Or, actually, I could describe a lot of other differences, but every marriage is cross-cultural, and when you add a racial divide to that, parents feel inside, "You're making it harder for yourself because they're going to bring these different expectations and different differences," even if they're not opposed to racial intermingling in and of itself.

There's this kind of check in their spirit about, "Oh, you're going to make life harder for yourself," and so there's this resistance, and that can quickly be intermingled with racial prejudice of various kinds. So I think those, at least five so far, in my thinking, Tony, those are the nerves that we touched when we did this.

And I would say one more time, every one of those five are a golden moment for the gospel of Jesus Christ to address all of these things, and that's what I tried to do in "Bloodlines," especially in the chapter on interracial marriage. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast at DesiringGod.org.

You will find the book "Bloodlines" and thousands of other free resources from John Piper. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening. 1 DesiringGod.org Page 2 of 8