One Race

Racial tensions continue to mount in our country, and this always bothers me. People like to point fingers of blame at certain individuals for creating the problem; I have seen some blame the recent skirmishes on President Trump, as if these same instances of murder-by-cop and protests-turned-looting didn’t happen multiple times under the previous administration as well. If we want to blame people, there are a few we can blame.

First, we blame the perpetrators themselves. The ones who commit acts of racism are dead wrong, and no one is to blame for their actions but themselves. Second, we blame Adam and Eve because racism is a result of sin. Every act of evil perpetrated in the name of hatred is the result of the absence of Jesus in a person’s life. We have tried to legislate away racism, but obviously that does not work. Racists need Jesus, just like every other sinner.

But I would also propose we blame Charles Darwin, or as I like to call him, “The Father of Racism.” Before his complete fiction known today evolution, all people were rightly viewed as being one race. Darwinian evolution teaches that humans came from lesser life forms, and the natural result of that way of thinking is to view one race as more evolved than the other. Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton wrote a book based on Darwin’s, and he went a step further, calling for selective breeding of people to eliminate the less desirables (Darwin praised his book). Influenced by both Darwin and Galton, Ernst Haeckel introduced Darwinian evolution and Galton’s “judicious marriages” into Germany. He championed a German colonialism that viewed Germans as being at the top of the evolutionary ladder, while what he called “wild races” (the “negroes”) were in between primates and people. This is the Germany into which Adolph Hitler was born, and his holocaust was the natural result of this mindset. (By the way, Margaret Sanger was also greatly influenced by this way of thinking, and she founded Planned Parenthood as a way of “exterminating” the “undesirables” that were produced by lesser races)

Amazing, isn’t it? Society wants to “cancel” George Washington because he was racist, but we teach Darwin’s theories to our children. Charles Darwin has done more to promote racism than any single person in history (not including Satan, of course).

The reality is we are all part of one race—the human race. We are all homo sapiens. There are no evolved races and wild races. We are each fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of God. Whether male or female, African, Asian, or American, we are each more than 98% identical, and the major difference is in the amount of pigmentation in our skin. The difference in our skin goes back to the Tower of Babel, not to an imaginary rung on the ladder of evolution. We need to love each other as God loves us, as Jesus called this the second greatest commandment: “There is a second just like it—You shall love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:39).”