Why I Am Not A Kinist

Few topics today are more confused and mishandled than race. Some make race an obsession, considering it a primary interpretive grid for the intersectionality of supposed oppression by supposed white supremacists. Others deny that race exists entirely. A dominant mainstream position recognizes race to exist but considers it a matter of total indifference, as if all people are blank slates and there are no systematic differences characteristic to different races, except when they are positive attributes of non-whites. Machiavellian politicians find racial patronage useful, recognizing the simple effectiveness of pitting groups against one another and offering perks to their favored groups. Historical narratives about slavery and the Holocaust serve to cut off serious conversation about race, causing most conversations to be either heavily coded in humor and irony or avoided entirely.

Meanwhile, the media seems to aggressively push for interracial marriages, both overtly and through product placement. Journalists coin “whiteness” as a term to mean a bad person who oppresses others by their sense of superiority and domination. Illegal foreigners are imported by the millions by government or NGO-funded operations and in some cases shielded from criminal consequences for the most violent crimes. In Europe this problem is even worse, to the point that so much as vocalizing opposition to this is a criminal offense that carries more serious consequences than an immigrant who rapes a child.

The luxury of ignoring the problem cannot last much longer. Race carries such obvious significance in our day, yet we cannot even agree on whether it exists, much less what is ideal, reasonable, or worth acting upon. People do not know even the most basic facts about crime statistics, immigration rates, IQ, racial and cultural differences in sexuality, marriage, or representation of races in industries and are incredulous when you point to the most milquetoast and mainstream sources of data, rushing to wild rationalizations to avoid dealing with the most basic inconvenient facts.

The Spectre of Kinism

Of particular interest is the way race is handled within the church. Ignoring liberal churches entirely as fake churches who are not Christian, Bible believing and ostensibly conservative churches are apparently overwhelmingly egalitarian on all matters of race, to the point that the strictest, most conservative, and most confessional denominations that I am aware of, without exception, are strongly skeptical of any form of racial consciousness. It is such a sensitive issue that even liking or sharing articles that deal with race will provoke cabals of people to contact the elders of your church with the intent of provoking disciplinary sanction, in a type of moral panic.

On theological grounds, this behavior, to put it charitably, is odd. None of the historic creeds or confessions of the church address race and ethnicity in any significant way. If there is a “Christian position,” it involves building the case systematically and dealing carefully with clear definitions and caveats, which is precisely the behavior that is off-limits. Instead, they tend to label all frank conversations about race to be “kinism,” and declare kinism a heresy.

It is rare in the first place for anyone to self-identify as a kinist, and in the few cases where people do, they often espouse a weak form that fails to distinguish itself from fairly mainstream views on race. Labeling kinism a “heresy” implies that it strikes at the fundamentals of the Christian faith, such that a kinist is necessarily a false Christian and under damnation, yet even in the strongest form of kinism, it’s hard to understand what makes this error cross the line into heresy. Plenty of errors are serious, even serious enough to warrant breaking fellowship over, without being heretical. Why this error is uniquely assumed heretical is suspicious to say the least.

Defining Kinism

Kinism is the theological belief that God desires and requires significant separation between the human races in our spheres of life, and especially in marriage, such that interracial marriage is forbidden. We can call this “strong kinism,” where “weak kinism” would be the idea that people should exercise caution when mixing human races in our spheres of life, and while interracial marriage is not forbidden it is often unwise.

Based on these definitions, the claim that either one constitutes heresy is tenuous at best. Nothing about holding either view would preclude a genuine saving faith in Jesus Christ, repentance of sin, robust Trinitarianism, or confession of the cardinal doctrines of the faith like the Resurrection. One might claim, for example, that the kinist view is sinful because it takes the Lord’s name in vain, by ascribing to God a commandment he never made, and that may be true enough, but should we apply the same standard to the Christian who claims that a single sip of alcohol is sinful, when the Bible explicitly permits it? Would we call a teetotaler not merely one in error, nor a sinner, but a heretic? Surely not.

Now let us move on to discredit weak kinism. Matters of wisdom are by definition questions of judgment and application of truth to circumstances and particular cases. Thus warnings about caution and wisdom with respect to integration of race is hardly a distinct position. Hopefully everyone affirms that everything we do should be done with caution and wisdom, from riding a bike to baking a cake. The fact that some think racial interactions require more or less special attention for that wisdom is a question of degree, not of kind. Plenty of people in actual interracial marriages would offer the same words of caution. When a special term is employed to describe a wide range of general views, the term is useless. Weak kinism should be disregarded entirely as a distinct position, and so we will consider “strong” kinism to be the only kinism from here on out.

Interracial Marriage

The main litmus test for kinism is interracial marriage. If one believes that God forbids interracial marriage in and of itself, that person is a kinist. This is a hard view to maintain considering that the origins and taxonomies of races are themselves difficult to define rigidly. Nevertheless, the Bible does recognize races of people, and the Old Testament in particular features dozens if not hundreds of examples of ethnicities considered, addressed, and judged as distinct and identifiable groups. Whatever challenges of taxonomy, the Bible successfully distinguishes different ethnic groups.

The Old Testament Pattern

In the Old Testament, races were defined primarily in terms of ancestry, such that the descendants of a man would be reckoned as that ethnicity. Modern taxonomy of races is somewhat different but follows a similar principle. We have broad umbrella categories like, white, black, Asian, or Indian, but we also recognize subcategories by country (like British) or tribe (like Saxon). In the Old Testament, the umbrella categories were earlier generations, like Canaan and Egypt (both sons of Ham), with subcategories like the Amorites, Hittites, and Jebusites. For our purposes, we can consider race basically synonymous with ethnicity, but with race usually referring to the higher umbrella categories.

Under the Old Covenant, Israelite law made clear distinctions between foreigners and native Israelites. God was uniquely in covenant with Israel in a way he was not with the other nations, and this had legal implications within their nation. God had made a promise to Abraham to make him a father of many nations through his offspring. Part of the drama of the Bible is the tension between the physical and the spiritual side of this promise. Were the promises to the offspring of Abraham those ethnically descended, or spiritually, who shared the faith of Abraham? The answer is complicated and has multiple layers of fulfillment. The most important one is that Jesus is the true son of Abraham ethnically and spiritually, and he brings many sons to glory from all nations and tribes. However, in the Old Testament the covenant was defined by those who were ethnically from Abraham, received circumcision of their males, and adopted the law, though foreigners could join this nation under certain conditions. The Israelites were notoriously unfaithful to the covenant and so were disciplined by God until ultimately expelled from the land.

Prior to their entry into the promised land, God portioned out their inheritance by tribe, and in the long run, all land bought and sold in Israel eventually was to be legally restored to its ancestral owners. Despite some occasional peaceful interactions, the people of God were forbidden from mixing with foreigners, especially the Canaanites or Egyptians. This is taught both explicitly in terms of intermarriage, and implicitly by virtue of the cleanliness laws designed to symbolize separation from the world, like laws about food, clothing, and farming. Clearly, the prohibition has religious fidelity in mind, namely, to isolate them from temptation to idolatry and sinful practices and raise godly offspring, but the external form of the law occurred on an ethnic basis. Israelites were not permitted, for example, to claim, “I know the spiritual purpose of the law and thus I can ignore obeying it literally.”

Translating to the New Testament Context

We have seen that Old Testament Israel was far from a “colorblind” or ethnically indifferent place, and that this division was built into the divine law. The Israelites were not motivated by supposed bigotry to divide racially. This was divine command given with logical reasoning attached. Thus we cannot condemn racial consciousness itself, or the idea that there may be legitimate ethnic considerations and distinctions in running a nation without condemning God in the process. Racial distinctions are legitimate to make, and nations need to deal seriously with the reality of ethnic differences for the greater good. However, the transition to the New Covenant clearly changed a lot.

The original promise to Abraham was that he would be the father of many nations, not just the one nation of Israel. God’s purpose in designating Israel was to be a light to the nations so that the nations would repent and turn back to God. Ethnic Israel failed in that task, and so Jesus came as the greater and true Israel to fulfill their mission and fulfill God’s promise to make Abraham the father of many nations.

In the New Covenant, Jesus explicitly dissolved Israel as a political entity and with it, abrogating their national laws. Secondly, the cleanliness code was abolished by virtue of the fact that the priestly system it regulated was fulfilled and abolished by the priestly offering of Jesus, thus all foods were made clean. The spiritual interpretation was that the Gentiles, that is, the foreign ethnicities once forbidden, were welcome into the covenant by faith in Jesus and baptism. All of these points are made explicit in the New Testament.

Ephesians 2 gives a summary statement of what Jesus accomplished by comparing it to tearing down a dividing wall of hostility between the Israelites and the nations, and making a new holy nation, a nation that is not ethnic, but spiritual. Consider this in the context of Old Testament laws against Israelites marrying foreigners. In the New Covenant, it applies to the spiritual nation, the kingdom of God, hence the instruction in 1 Corinthians 7:39 that an unmarried woman is at liberty to marry anyone she wishes, “only in the Lord.” Thus a believing Jew would be forbidden from marrying an unbelieving Jew, but not a believing Jew or Gentile.

Natural Considerations in Marriage

As we considered earlier, “strong” kinism is really the only kinism. For kinism to be true, we would need to believe that marrying outside of one’s race or ethnicity is inherently sinful. If we are at liberty to marry in the Lord apart from ethnic concern we can reject kinism altogether.

Still, membership in the one holy nation of God does not abolish one’s race or ethnicity. This is obvious from basic personal observation, but it is affirmed in the Bible. Even after Jesus tore down the dividing wall of hostility, characters in the New Testament are described by their ethnicities. Within the church, disputes still would arise on ethnic lines, like the dispute over food distribution to widows in Acts 6 or the debate over whether Gentiles needed to be circumcised. Citizenship in one’s own nation was still a concern as evidenced by Paul’s invoking of his Roman citizenship, which he gained by birth.

Granting that we are at liberty does not mean that all choices permitted are equally good. Racial, ethnic, and cultural factors will still have significant impact on the spirituality and happiness of the home, and the effect size is stronger the further you get from the mean. Consider a White American from the Midwest. Midwestern culture is distinct from Southern or Western culture, and they will find that there are certain expectations about relationships, manners, and family that are unspoken but differ significantly, to the point that people will find one another rude over what they consider normal. These differences would be stronger with white Europeans, but still more commonalities than a black or Asian American, most likely. As one gets further from one’s native racial and cultural population the differences get stronger.

One might argue that these differences are of less importance than the fundamentals of a shared faith and morality, which is true enough, but consider that the majority of marriage and family is sharing culturally mediated mundane activities like eating, speaking, working, educating, and traveling. While these differences may be possible to overcome, it is a stressful life to be constantly overcoming what comes naturally to you.

In one sense, the whole debate about interracial marriage is only possible by the presence of unnatural conditions. For most of history, people were simply geographically laid out as a matter of fact, with nearer of kin being located closer, but a common broader race radiating outward by a few hundred miles in any direction. Apart from expats, missionaries, sailors, or explorers, there was simply no reason for people to live in contact with foreigners for most of the world. There have always been cosmopolitan pockets of diversity in empires but it has never been integrated at the size and scope that it is today.

There is not a long track record for the types of interracial marriage common today, so in large part people are just figuring it out as they go along. For what it is worth, I wish them well.

With the prevalence of globalization, multiculturalism, immigration, and racial integration most of the Western world is left to figure out what to do about the fact that our native cultures are gone, the impact has not made our homelands better places, and our existing political and religious institutions have not effectively addressed the problems it has posed. It is easy to understand in this context a certain revulsion people may have to interracial marriage as a sort of reservation to ones fate and participation in your peoples’ demise. For such people, it rings hollow to hear that it does not matter because hypothetically all that matters is that they are both members of the kingdom of God.

In practice, there is not a great influx of foreign Christians marrying native Christians, but a lot of dysfunction breaking apart once-intact communities, and people being scolded for vocalizing it. In an environment where the topic is so off-limits, it is difficult to expect that people have fully-formed and well constructed ideas about race, and understand why perhaps an overstatement of the case against interracial marriage would stir up unnecessary controversy and strife. When multiculturalism, immigration, and integration were new, the most vocal opponents were demonized and their legacies remain tarnished to this day, despite their predictions coming true. Now that the situation is much more dire, the taboo associated with these ideas is beginning to slowly wane. Conservatives have been late to catch on and so are responding by fighting what they see as the emergence of a theological heresy, without any real answers to the actual problems.

Like most of these situations, people are talking past each other because we are reacting emotionally, rather than patiently thinking and working out the issues carefully with one another in discussions. The problems we are facing are not going away by themselves and so much as labeling them as problems invokes unwarranted images of lynching and death camps. I don’t think that America is a step away from a white uprising, but we can only expect more dysfunction and violence as society deteriorates and people are gagged from speaking out.

My hope is that this post will breathe some fresh air into the room and shine some light on the nature of our issues, such that we can work them out productively without factions, outrage, and division.