When we were children, we understood the meaning of the playground mantra, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” We recited it as a spine-stiffening retort to counter a bully’s taunts, meaning, “I am resolutely unaffected by your taunting.” Of course, we still felt the injurious effects of the insults. Then, Sigmund Freud’s psychotherapeutic heirs spoiled this taunt-nullifier by psychologizing the idiom: “Yes, sticks and stones hurt, but those wounds will heal with time. However, the scars inflicted by words may never heal.” The self-esteem movement’s ascendancy rendered the proverb obsolete. “Victimization” as virtue replaced the refusal to be bullied by insults. Now, “Words are violence” is the Newspeak mantra that governs newspapers, spoken media, public school education, and the playground, not to counter oppositional speech but to stifle it.
Some words, phrases, and idioms fall out of use because they are banished by bleeding-heart altruists. Like tires, other words and phrases wear out with use. Trendiness threatens the longevity of some words and phrases. “A perfect storm,” derived from the movie (2000), should be sunk in the sea of oblivion! And shouldn’t “gaslighting,” derived from Alfred Hitchcock’s movie (1944), have burned out by now? Overuse tends to expand many words, disconnecting them from their original proper meanings.
Of the many words that have exponentially expanded to indict people for innocent speech and actions, “racism” and “racist” may be the most devious and venomous. Both have become elastic words matching the ever-expanding concept of racism. Because real racist actions and speech occur so rarely, the guardians of protected classes politicized these words by expanding their ranges of meaning to indict all light-skinned humans with “systemic racism” for benefiting from a system allegedly saturated with White Privilege. To protest, we are told, proves one’s guilt. Thomas Sowell rightly affirms that “the political overuse” of the words destroys their “effectiveness as a warning against a very real danger.”[1] Crying “Racism!” when the word does not fit the situation is like crying “Wolf!” where none is.
1. Thomas Sowell, Race and Culture: A World View (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1994), 154.
Word Meaning Elasticity: The Destructive Manipulation of Language
Owing largely to psychotherapeutics throughout the past generation, many words—abuse, bullying, trauma, prejudice, racism—have become so elastic that they mean anything, thus meaning virtually nothing. Conor Friedersdorf called attention to this in “How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm” (The Atlantic, April 2023). His article popularizes Nick Haslam’s essay, “Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology.” Haslam contends that concepts like abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice “now encompass a much broader range of phenomena than before” with an expansion of “an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm, reflecting a liberal moral agenda” where “concept creep runs the risk of pathologizing everyday experience and encouraging a sense of virtuous but impotent victimhood.”[2]
2. Haslam’s own essay exhibits “concept creep” with numerous uses of his annoying “politically correct” expression, “human kind” where “human” more than suffices.
Haslam credits a thirty-year-old essay I read when it was first published. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote “Defining Deviancy Down” (1993) to explain how our society has become accustomed to alarming levels of criminal and destructive behavior. Society then wrongly normalizes certain cases of deviancy, which then makes these cases of deviancy no longer defined as deviant because the goalposts have moved. However, Haslam never mentions Charles Krauthammer’s essay, “Defining Deviancy Up,” published later in 1993, which complements Moynihan’s.
Krauthammer demonstrates that a corresponding social phenomenon occurs with “defining deviancy down.” He correctly observes that with the normalization of deviant behavior, invariably, what is “normal must be found to be deviant.” Krauthammer’s complementary coinage, “Defining Deviancy Up,” assists in understanding how our culture has wrongly “Defined ‘Racism’ Upward” by expanding racism to include innocent speech and actions, which in turn, exponentially multiplies racists to include everyone with light skin, particularly folks of European descent.
Following the sexual, racial, and feminist upheavals of the 1960s, our Western world has sustained radical social and cultural changes. About a third of the current U.S. population witnessed the cultural decline of that era. Of various accountings of the culture’s alteration throughout the last generation of the twentieth century, Senator Patrick Moynihan’s “Defining Deviancy Down” deserves attention but is largely ignored today. Among the many cogent points he makes, two stand out.
First, he persuasively reasoned that the lessened enforcement of morality (some call it “moral deregulation”) that came in the wake of the sexual and racial revolutions of the 1960s ignited an explosion of deviancy in family life, criminal conduct, and public exhibitions of psychosis. Moynihan argues that since the social revolutions of the 1960s, deviant behavior has overwhelmed our American society so immensely that “we have been re-defining deviancy so as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatized, and also quietly raising the ‘normal’ level in categories where behavior is now abnormal by any earlier standard” (12). Succinctly stated, “defining deviancy down” is the normalizing of the abnormal. For example, deinstitutionalizing the mentally ill exponentially increased homelessness, posing an altruistic opportunity for politicians with access to taxpayers’ money to identify a new perennial election campaign issue, lack of “affordable housing.”
Second, Moynihan compellingly argues that “defining deviancy down” presented an opportunistic situation to do good, but only nominally. The exponential increase in deviancy made it possible not only to transfer monetary resources but also “prestige to those who control the deviant population”—for example, psychologists, social workers, and public policy makers. Their prestigious and lucrative roles “would be jeopardized if any serious effort were made to reduce the deviancy.” Thus, vital for sustaining them in their profitable careers was the nimbleness to normalize deviancy by strategically redefining deviancy “as not all that deviant, really” (13).
In Charles Krauthammer’s complementary essay to Moynihan’s, he demonstrates that a corresponding social phenomenon occurs with “defining deviancy down.” With the normalization of behavior that was previously condemned, invariably, speech and behavior that are praiseworthy and “normal must be found to be deviant.” Krauthammer correctly states, “Large areas of ordinary behavior hitherto considered benign have had their threshold radically redefined up, so that once innocent behavior now stands condemned as deviant.” The intended effect is to demonstrate that deviant speech and behavior flourishes not only among criminals and the pathological but also among conventional American families.
So, the normal, intact, traditional family has become exposed as the real source of abuse, misogyny, racism, violence, and an index full of deviant thinking and behavior. The list of deviant thinking and behavior is too expansive to itemize, but for our purposes, two that are interconnected stand out: (1) the sprawling “politically incorrect speech” and (2) the expansive trivializing redefinition of racism to include everything from lynching to the slightest innocent ruffling of racial sensitivities of hypersensitive people. The result of this expansive definition is that real racism is trivialized. If everything is racist, nothing is racist.
“Defining Racism Upward”: Universally Spreading the Guilt of Racism
3. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Talkin’ That Talk,” in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., “Race,” Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 403–404.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. (nicknamed “Skip”), a prominent black intellectual, expansively defines racism upward: “Racism exists when one generalizes about attributes of an individual, and treats him or her accordingly.” He offers a few examples: “Skip, sing me one of those old Negro spirituals,” “You people sure can dance,” and “Black people play basketball so remarkably well.” “These,” Gates insists, “are racist statements.”[3] So, whether one innocently extols distinguishable qualities about an ethnic group or another person screams savage and contemptuous racist insults to deride and ridicule the same group, “diversophiles” equally condemn both as racism.[4] Though at its worst, the former may be poor etiquette, and at its best, the latter is still ethnic hatred, today’s “Political Correctness” moralists condemn both as expressions of racial discrimination and demand apologies for both. Their commitment to “Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion” (DEI) erases proper discrimination of goodness from wickedness because the DEI ideology is rooted in relativism and committed to enforcing its holiness speech code.
4. The term was coined by Peter Wood, Diversity: The Invention of a Concept (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003).
Many evangelical leaders, regardless of skin color, have adopted a definition of racism that is superficial and defines racism upward, like Gates’s definition. His definition perpetuates racial division by putting an innocent faux pas of etiquette in the same category as lynching—a sin against God and man, and an actionable and punishable crime. Such a broad definition is worse than inadequate. It is evil, and it perpetuates among whites a condescending paternalism based on skin color. When defining “racism,” our society needs clarity, distinction, and proportion.
Thomas Sowell provides such a definition: “The most straightforward meaning of racism is a belief in the innate inferiority of some race or races” (Race and Culture, 153). Evangelicals should learn from Sowell, Shelby Steele, and others who address racial issues with clarity, distinction, and proportionality. Raleigh Washington, pastor of Rock of Our Salvation Church, and Glen Kehrein (d. 2011), founder of Circle Urban Ministries, both in South Chicago, wrote Breaking Down Walls: A Model for Reconciliation in an Age of Racial Strife (Moody, 1993). Sadly, clarity, distinction, and proportionality are absent from their definition of racism, which engages in stereotyping and shows no realization that their definition of racism also trivializes real acts of racism by defining racism upward. They write,
When African-Americans use the term racism, the word covers a broad spectrum. Any action on the part of whites that is different because it is directed at a black person can be racist. And any attitude that lessens a black person’s ability is racist. For instance, to assume that a black man wearing surgical scrubs and walking through a hospital corridor is an orderly and not a doctor—that’s racist. . . . But white people use the word racism for only extreme actions. They agree that when the Ku Klux Klan burns a cross on a person’s lawn or threatens a lynching, that’s racist. Such actions are also rare. Actions short of that, however, typically are labeled in graduated terms from bigotry down to misinterpretation. . . . For African-Americans, racism is racism; degree differentiation is only a trick to avoid facing the reality.[5]
5. Raleigh Washington and Glen Kehrein, Breaking Down Walls: A Model for Reconciliation in an Age of Racial Strife (Chicago: Moody Press, 1993), 13-14.
Though a stereotype may be statistically accurate but not universally valid, Washington and Kehrein use stereotyping in the least suitable place to do so, namely, in working out a definition of racism! Their definition stereotypes both black and white folks, dismissing their stereotyped “white definition” in favor of their stereotyped “black definition.” They contribute to “concept creep” when they equate any misinterpretation by a white individual as racism, dismissing a wide range of actions “from bigotry down to misinterpretation” by equating them all with racism.
This “defining racism upward” is not only wrong and unhelpful; it is a pernicious lie that begets relational strain between whites and blacks. Like the definition that dominates our culture, theirs tempts blacks to complain of perpetual racism because they are authorized to judge awkward manners as ethnic contempt based on skin color differences. Whites are tempted to walk on eggshells for fear of voicing the slightest statement that might be perceived as a micro-aggression. And if a white person mistakes a black physician for an orderly and this goes public, the white individual’s employment may be terminated even though no real racist words or actions took place. Washington and Kehrein’s definition of racism aids and abets equating a social slip up with the overt bigotry of vulgar ethnic slurs. Their definition rightly condemns hateful demeanor and speech. However, their definition also fails to expose and condemn benevolent condescension, a more subtle and seductive form of white racism. The truth is that white condescension that coddles blacks with benevolence has become the acceptable form of racism within our culture that President George W. Bush identified as “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
Condescending benevolence is no less prejudicial than righteously condemned condescending violence. Both forms of condescension are evil, defrauding paternalized recipients of their God-given individual dignity and agency as if they were minor children. Hence, when Clarence Thomas was the head of the EEOC, he rightly stated, “The most devastating form of racism is the feeling that blacks are inferior so let’s help them. What we had in Georgia under Jim Crow is not as bad as this. This racism is based on sympathy that says that because of your race, we will give you excuses for not preparing yourself and being as good as you can be.”[6] Hence, Thomas’s enduring opposition to “affirmative action” inherent to President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” agenda that supplanted derogatory condescension with sympathetic condescension.
6. Charles J. Sykes, A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character, 1st ed (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 201.
As Washington and Kerhein expand on their definition, confusion and contradiction emerge. They claim to reject the notion that only people with the power to oppress others can engage in racism. Yet, they embrace “institutional racism,” also called “systemic racism,” which derives from the presumption of a societal power differential. They claim, “Racism takes many different forms, but probably the most prevalent is ‘institutional’ racism that affects agencies and organizations” (203). Despite their claim, the presumption of “systemic racism” informs Kehrein’s admission: “I could never grovel enough to redeem the past sins of the white race” (204). Again, the same governs this affirmation, “For me to repent of racism and ask forgiveness of my black brothers and sisters means that I assume my fair share of the responsibility for a debt. And, as a white person, I need to repent whether or not my black brother approaches me with an attitude of forgiveness” (205).
Likewise, as with other evangelicals captured by the diversity agenda, missing from their attempt to define racism is any appeal to the crucial Scripture passages. Especially lacking is any consideration of the warning against favoritism in James 2:1–13, which expands on this truth found in Leviticus 19:15: “You shall do no unrighteousness in judgment nor shall you show partiality to the poor, nor shall you defer to the powerful, but you shall judge your neighbor with righteousness” (emphasis added). Washington and Kehrein show no awareness that racism is the sin of showing partiality, judging fellow humans on superficial aspects of being human. Furthermore, their definition reflects another distinguishing feature of our society. Lacking a sense of proportion leads them to regard both lynching a black man and mistaking a black physician as a hospital orderly as racist without degrees of differentiation. The latter, when verbalized, is a regrettable error that warrants a sincere “I’m sorry”; the former is a grievous and heinous sin and crime calling for (1) a profound work of God’s grace to bring about repentance and (2) the full measure of punishment criminal law allows.
They commit the same error as all other “diversophiles” who congratulate themselves as virtuous for patronizing a whole group of people after categorizing them and singling them out for “special treatment” based on skin color. True, their categorizing does not end in lynchings and mass murder, but even if well-intended, God’s Word condemns as sin their categorizing of people based on ethnicity for the purpose of “special treatment.” It is immoral and bears evil consequences to those individuals so categorized.
The Loss of Proportionality
Washington and Kehrein would have done well to learn from others who understand the issues much better than they do, like Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn. Concerning the notion of systemic racism, she writes,
The notion of incorrect attitudes—stereotypes—both expands and diminishes the extent of the problem. No one is truly guilty here—no one is actually at fault—because it is society that breeds wrong attitudes. Yet everyone must be subjected to self-examination, because everyone harbors these attitudes. Thus any distinction between a racially motivated act . . . and a passive misconception one might have about a group one has never known intimately gets lost. This focus on attitudes of nebulous origin, and the misleading assumption that they are universal and as lethal as racist acts, comes from a loss of judgment and proportion. This loss of proportion and inability to distinguish among wrong acts rests on the idea that stereotypes are responsible for racism, not individuals.[7]
7. Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution [Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001], 160.
Lamentably, Washington and Kehrein succumb to our culture’s loss of proportionality by defining racism upward. Because they relativize the sin of partiality (racism), they regrettably and unwittingly accept an aspect of cultural and ideological relativism. Without adequate consideration, they yield to postmodernism’s popular notion that perception is reality. They legitimate what have come to be called “micro-aggressions” and “micro-inequities.” Mary P. Rowe of MIT Sloan School of Management asserts that for “affirmative action” to be effective, it must address “micro-inequities.” “Subtle discrimination . . . made up of covert, ephemeral or apparently trivial events . . . frequently unrecognized by the perpetrator and often not evident to the person injured by them. . . . These ‘micro-inequities’ interfere with equal opportunity by excluding the person who is different and by interfering with that person’s self-confidence and productivity.”[8]
8. Mary P. Rowe, “Fostering Diversity: Some Major Hurdles Remain When the Playing Field is Tilted,” Program Manager 24 (March-April 1995), 16.
The “diversity” and “self-esteem” movements barreled through our culture on parallel tracks fueled by the same objective: to sensitize everyone to absorb the expanding politically correct speech code as second nature. Both exploit and intensify hypersensitivity, a base aspect of fallen human nature. Christians, of all people, should seek to eradicate this quality rather than cultivate it, for Scripture instructs us that it is godly to bear patiently with others and not to be swift to take offense at their faults, especially when the offense is born from one’s mere perception. “Good sense makes one slow to anger, and it is his glory to overlook an offense” (Prov. 19:11). Forbearance, the Holy Spirit’s fruit that replaces resentment and retaliation, is becoming a rare character trait, even within the church (Eph. 4:31; Col. 3:13).
Restoring proportionality to our discussions of racism is long overdue. Good manners, which derive from being made after God’s likeness, have cultural aspects. Offending the cultural sensibilities of one’s host by mistakenly using a dessert fork to eat a salad does not call for falling on one’s face before God in repentance. Murdering one’s host with a salad fork requires repentance and accepting the just punishment the law warrants. If we evangelicals do not restore within our churches biblically grounded proportionality by discriminating between the sin of ethnic partiality and an inter-ethnic social faux pas, we will lose proportionality concerning all sins. All sins will become tolerated as normal, and bad manners will be criminalized by private organizations and the government, which is already occurring.
Repentance is Long Past Due
Evangelicals were late to engage in these in-depth racial considerations. Now that they have, many prominent evangelicals have uncritically floated on our culture’s currents concerning how churches and Christian colleges should both speak and conduct themselves regarding doing right in inter-racial relationships. Christian colleges and universities led evangelicals down the wrong path by embracing “diversity as a goal” thirty years ago. Lamentably, warnings administered to evangelical pastors and churches concerning the perniciousness of the “diversity agenda” went largely unheeded, if not deliberately rejected.
In both the academy and church, many have suffered retribution for thoughtfully challenging the “diversity agenda” with its underlying anti-Christian worldview. This worldview has seduced college administrators and pastors to presume uncritically and sinfully that speaking against “diversity as a goal” opposes the presence of diverse ethnicities. Thus, many devout Christians are accused of racist speech. To the degree that “diversity as a goal” has already flooded Christian academies and churches, to that degree evangelicals have already made enormous concessions to the godless culture with its destructive worldview. Repentance for embracing the worldly agenda and for excoriating Christians who objected is long past due.
Our Lord Calls Us to Be the Salt of the Earth and the Light of the World
Our Lord calls on us to be “salt” and “light” (Matt. 5:13–16). Light exposes what darkness conceals. No matter by whatever label the world promotes its “diversity agenda”—Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion, Critical Race Theory, or some other new coinage—concealed within are evil and seductive qualities that ape the Christian gospel. To shine a light on, identify, rebuke, and correct racism in whatever form it shows itself, we evangelicals need to define racism properly as the sin of partiality, which Scripture condemns: “But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors” (James 2:9). The gospel of our Lord obligates us to expose the sin of partiality.
The world’s doctrine concerning racism entails the sin of prejudging based on ethnic superficialities. Injustice invariably results whether condescending favoritism or condescending contempt. We must confront the truth’s subversion that many evangelicals have embraced, and we must do so unambiguously and courageously. The truth compels us to expose the evil being achieved by self-anointed moralists who calculatedly normalize mentally unstable behavior, perverse conduct, and lawlessness while at the same time, they redefine wholesome, even godly behavior as deviant by expanding the definition of racism to include innocent words or actions.
Jesus also calls us, his disciples, “the salt of the earth.” He has in view salt’s preservative quality. Our Lord has appointed us to be preservers of what is good. God gave us the gift of language. Hence, we are to be guardians of that gift and its use. This means that we are obligated to expose any and every deliberate manipulation of God’s gift for evil purposes. Nimble wordsmiths who engineer words and phrases to serve their evil agenda must be rebuked and corrected. To administer proper reproval and corrections, we need to understand the assumptions and presuppositions that undergird the worldview that drives their agenda. Lamentably, evangelical pastors, teachers, and scholars have been put to shame because many, if not most, of the best critical commentaries on the “diversity agenda” are written by individuals who do not overtly identify themselves as Christians. We must learn from them.
We must denounce the sin of partiality in every form, including the sin of “protected class paternalism” that has sneaked into our churches by wearing the garb of apparent grace but is still the world’s diversity doctrine simply baptized with Christian jargon and “gospelese.” “Defining racism up” by refusing to distinguish awkwardly acted and spoken manners from bigoted acts and speech as ethnic prejudice is an assault upon God’s gift of language. When Christians do this, our Lord’s appointing us as “salt of the earth” obligates us to expose their error of being seduced by cunning and scheming evil wordsmiths. “Concept creep” is a reality that we need to recognize, resist, expose, and correct, and do so with great urgency when it enters Christ’s church.
