There’s a new doctrine on the loose these days that, while small, has the potential to be a serious problem for the Church. This would be the doctrine of Kinism and, as one might expect from a new doctrine, it’s terrible. We’ll go into why it’s terrible, but first we need to define it. Thankfully, that’s not very hard.
Kinism is the belief that it is sinful for Christians to marry, worship, or associate outside of their race, because God separated the races. They teach that, while members of any race can be saved, members of different races shouldn’t mix.
On a strictly technical level, this isn’t white supremacism, since it at least gives lip service to the equal value of all people. That said, it’s also blatantly unscriptural and has no place in the church. Galatians 3:28 comes to mind. We are Christians first, anything else second, and that unites us more than anything else would divide us.
This should be enough to settle the debate, but Kinists would claim to believe this, even though they deny it in practice. Thus, we need to refute them in detail. Here goes.
The first and most obvious flaw in Kinism is separating people into different races, usually based on superficial appearance e.g. skin color. Since all humans are descended from Adam, this simply doesn’t hold water, as any division is purely arbitrary. Why skin color and not, for example, eye color or hair color? This doesn’t even comport with their favorite ‘proof’ text, Genesis 11:1-9, where God confuses people’s languages at Babel. Language and ‘race’ are not the same thing. Race, as it is used today, is not a biblical category, and the Babel narrative doesn’t indicate the creation of different races.
What is detailed in the Babel narrative is the division of the human race into different ethnicities, in this case based around common languages. An ethnicity is simply a group of people with strong commonalities such as language, as at Babel, cultural practices and other strong similarities.
It is natural for humans, whether believers or unbelievers, to group together with people who are similar to them, more than with people who are different. Indeed, some divisions, such as different languages, make grouping together functionally impossible. This is fundamentally where we get nations, from the grouping together of similar peoples in a geographic area under a shared government. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with people grouping together based on meaningful similarities, and it reduces conflict between sinful people.
While separate nations are indeed a part of God’s design to limit humanity’s ability to sin, it does not follow that it is a sin for ethnic groups to intermix. I don’t deny that inter-ethnic conflict exists, but what Kinists won’t address is the cause of inter-ethnic conflict: sinful human nature. The reason for different ethnic groups (for example, the French and the English) fighting each other is not because Frenchmen and Englishmen ‘shouldn’t mix’, it’s because sinful Frenchmen and sinful Englishmen will typically resort to sinful means to settle their disputes because they’re sinful. It’s the same case with any inter-ethnic conflict; unregenerate sinners aren’t going to love their neighbors as themselves, because they’re unregenerate.
However, this is not the case among Christians. Because we are regenerate, we can love our neighbors as ourselves especially when those neighbors are other Christians. We are Christians first, and anything else second; whatever inter-ethnic struggles are going on in the world, we should not bring them into the Church. If, for example, a black Christian has trouble getting along with white Christians he doesn’t need to find a black church, he needs to repent and grow in grace. You can swap in any pair of ethnic groups here. An Arab Christian who can’t get along with Israeli Christians needs to repent, as would a Hutu Christian who can’t get along with Tutsis. The reason for inter-ethnic conflict isn’t ethnicity, it’s sin; and we shouldn’t be making allowances for sin in the church. In what is perhaps the height of irony, Kinists make a big deal about caring for ‘your own people’. What they apparently don’t realize is that ‘your own people’ are other Christians, not others of your ethnic group. As much as Kinists love to cite Paul’s love for his fellow Jews, they conveniently forget Galatians 2:11-14, where the same Paul rebukes Peter for favoring Jewish believers over Gentile believers. The reason that Peter was in the wrong is that he was showing partiality to some believers over others, in this case along ethnic lines. It’s not wrong to love people like you, but it is wrong to love some believers more than others because they are more like you, or to refuse to associate with other believers because they are not enough like you.. That is the sin of partiality. Kinism, just like the social justice movement, is an attempt to divide Christians based on characteristics that ultimately do not matter.
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