The Christian Tendancy Toward Prejudice

    I posed this question at the end of my last post: “God doesn’t lie: doesn’t that mean I shouldn’t either?” (see post here: In Defense of Lying (Biblical Examples)). While this post does intend to answer that question, I realized that biblically justifying righteous lies is just a branch springing from the tree of the real issue. The real issue keeps coming up and I’ve mentioned it before as well, but the fact is that Christians love to make standards that are stricter than God's Word.

    Many people would just say “yep: legalism is always a temptation” and leave it at that. But even that’s not really the issue, because the bible doesn’t have explicit standards for all times and all situations. It has plenty to say at all times and all situations along with a multitude of principles to govern our lives, but it also leaves room for wisdom, context, and experience to determine the best course of action (say, choosing an education for you children, where to live, what prices to charge for a product you’re selling, etc.).

    So Christians have to make standards that speak where scripture is silent. That’s simply part of living in the real world. And there is even such a thing as biblical prejudice. Adultery is always a sin. I don’t need to justify my distaste of some guy whose sleeping with someone who’s not his wife: scripture is very clear on the unlawfulness of such an act. But that’s not the type of prejudice I’m talking about here. I’m talking about the sin of prejudice, and I’m using the very scholarly definition of “prejudging someone” (ie “judging someone based on your own preconceived notions” or, more accurately defined by dictionary.com, “any preconceived opinion or feeling, either favorable or unfavorable”).

    Prejudice occurs when anyone judges a person based entirely upon their own preconceived standards without consideration of the individual’s situation. It is a prejudgment. Not to beat a dead horse but it bears repeating that this is not necessarily wrong (again, “anyone who commits adultery has sinned” is biblically justified prejudice). The sin arises when we judge someone against an extrabiblical or unbiblical standard that gets it wrong.

    Being Reformed, I love picking on the Catholic church. Their doctrine of divorce is one such example of an unbiblical standard. Having made marriage an enviable sacrament, all biblical grounds for divorce are removed from the table. The Protestant Reformation recovered and restored divorce as a lawful option under certain biblically justifiable circumstances. But I’m not just picking on the Catholic church: the problem is that a majority of modern Evangelicalism agree with the Roman Catholic Church on this issue. I still remember when James White’s daughter Summer (of “Sheologians” fame) caused a controversy because she remarried a different man after getting a divorce.

    This is the exact picture of the type of prejudice Christians have. The argument goes, 1) Divorce is not ideal and, even if it is lawful, it is only lawful in extreme circumstances (unfaithfulness, desertion, etc.), and 2) those circumstances never happen. Then, taking it a step further in the case of remarriage, the response becomes 3) and even if I did agree with you about the lawfulness of divorce in a particular situation, remarriage to a different man after the divorce is adultery. So in seeking to honor God, Christians abstract the situation out of the world (try to look at it from a perspective disconnected from the material world and their own flesh), assume their universal standards are what God requires, and then judge everyone in accordance with their own ideal vision of reality.

    I may be putting the cart before the horse as I’ve given several examples now before actually making my point, but I wanted to set the stage before getting into the particulars. It’s easier to see played out than it is to describe. But the sin of prejudice happens like this:

First, I make a standard big enough to account for everything.

Second, I hold everyone else accountable to my standard (I’m no harder on you than I am on myself).

Third, I never reconsider my ideal position because I arrived at it through careful scriptural study.

    Once again, I’m not going to spell these ideas out. Instead, here’s a small sampling of the types of enviable standards I’ve tried to keep or heard from others:

“Be Nice (the 11^th commandment).”

“God doesn’t lie, so you shouldn’t either.”

“Choose to sin: Choose to suffer (Harvest Bible Chapel’s most popular axiom).”

“A husband should never have a reason to rebuke his wife.”

“Women are natural followers: if you are good to your wife, she will follow you.”

“Yelling at your kids is always sinful.”

“Acting in anger is always sinful.”

“The person who starts the fight is always guilty of the sin of strife/division.”

“All entertainment/music should be gospel centered (or at the very least contain nothing offensive/questionable).”

“All representations of magic are evil (except Aslan and Gandalf of course).”

“Christian fiction shouldn’t contain profanity.”

“Don’t walk on the devil’s grass! (because soldiers who take shortcuts are the ones who will get you killed).”

    Sorry, that last one wasn’t explicitly Christian. I may have lied with the title because the sin of prejudice and legality is an extremely human issue that everyone descended from Adam struggles with.

    I’m sure I could go on and I’m sure anyone reading this could think of their own mountain of such examples if they put their mind to it. But my point is that none of the above statements are true. They are more restrictive than the biblical standard requires and all of them are built on some presupposition not found in Scripture. Scripture contains profanity. Scripture contains excerpts from pagan sources. Paul quotes Greek playwrights. Rahab lied and is commended by God for it. Battalions of soldiers trample devil’s field every morning at 6 doing PT: it is not sacred ground and the grass is always dead; walking on the sidewalk couldn’t matter less. Moses was a wizard. There is nothing inheritantly wrong with anything condemned above, especially trampling on the devil’s grass in devil’s field.

    And the thing is we all know our enviable rules are wrong. So we make exceptions. “Well I can understand divorce in the case of adultery,” we say. “But,” many would add, “I’d hope to stay and work things out as a beautiful picture of the gospel if something like that ever happened.” And so the exception given in one hand is taken away with the other, because the “higher calling” is always the one that everyone should take. “There are some women who simply will not respond to her husband rightly when he leads in fath,” we say. “But,” all add, “those are the rare examples. Women are natural followers, so that’s probably not your actual problem.” Nevermind the fundamental temptation of Eve being a desire to rule over her husband: women are only tempted that way rarely. “Yes, some children are just problem children,” we say. “But,” most add, “It’s definitely something you did wrong that caused it in the first place and you’re probably still causing it now.”

And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” -John 9:2

    And in asking the disciples had already rejected the reality of the situation in favor of their own preconceived notions of what caused the man’s blindness. The reality was "for the glory of God to be revealed." There was no room in their theology for that. I mean, Samson was blinded as a judgment for his own faithlessness after all: that’s not something that happens to good people without a reason. The exceptions of a prejudiced mind are only as real as the abstract ideology that shaped their idealized vision of reality in the first place. Which is to say, not real at all. Those exceptions don’t exist and if they ever do happen, those exceptions are surprising, unexpected, and unpredictable.

    You could call one form of this tendency “Ungracious Assumptions.” It’s one thing when someone on a podcast or book makes the point that these exceptions are rare (because they may very well be in the broad context they’re speaking into). It’s another thing entirely when a friend just assumes you’re not that exception because those exceptions are too rare for it to be you. We (this modern American culture: Christians included) operate on a “guilty until proven innocent” system: “You say that you did nothing wrong, but I’ll be the judge of that.” You can see what I’m talking about in the abuses of the #metoo movement, or the stupidity of “Believe all women.” Heck, CJ Mahaney was run out of ministry by that and there hasn’t been a word on what actually happened since.

    But the best (and easiest to find) example of these ungracious assumptions are found in the book of Job. Job was not sinless in the encounter with his 3 friends. But, in hearing the words of a grieving father, his three friends took on the role of his enemies. They began accusing him of hiding his sin and seeing proof of that hidden sin in every word he spoke. They assumed God would not strike a righteous man. They had no room for exceptions. So they found what they were looking for in Job’s less than perfect speeches. They were wrong. And they became representatives of the devil himself, who, giving up on arguing his case before God, was fully content to let those three take it directly to Job. In their zeal for God they became the accuser of a man God had already declared to be righteous. And a stupid prejudice combined with ungracious assumptions was exactly how that happened.

CONCLUSION

    So, (to answer the question from the previous post) in a perfect world, no one would need to lie. So no one should have a reason to lie, right?

    Be very careful how you think about it, because we don’t need Pastors in a perfect world either. Does that mean we shouldn’t have them now?

    "But God hates lying."

    He also hates divorce.

    Sometimes the reality of the world demands hard answers that no one wants to give. And even then the people who are willing to speak the hard/unpopular words are few and far in between. Because sometimes the answer to the question isn't grace and love and peace. Sometimes the answer is excommunication, deception, or even execution. And it's not just the world that hates God's law because of it: Antinomian Christians think I'm evil for believing that the death penalty is just. When you start to see this prejudicial tendency, you'll see it everywhere you look.

    All of this scatter-brained post has been written to say this: Christians are prejudiced because we’re lazy thinkers. That’s it. We have our standard and we're sticking to it. This is true of all people of course, but it’s especially problematic in Christians because we tend to think we think a lot which then justifies the brain-dead conclusions we come up with. We stop at prejudice because it’s easy. And sometimes we’re right. But other times (like Job’s friends) we become representatives of Satan because we hold our own theological presuppositions at the same level as the very Word of God, never imagining that we could be wrong.

    When I talk about “Piatism” or “Piatistic tendencies,” I’m usually referring to this sinful form of prejudice. It really is the worst kind of legalism, because it masquerades so easily as “a simple understanding” that has diluted complicated truths down to a practical, memorable principle. Yet it so easily hides the most insipid poison, waiting for the right opportunity to destroy lifelong friendships and years of trust. Rightly did the Prophet say “The venom of asps is under their lips.” It’s always there, always lurking, a seed of destruction just waiting for the right situation to spring up and destroy everything. God save us and others from our own stupid prejudices, because we can’t even save ourselves.