John Piper, who dug-in yesterday with another anti-gun tweet, also surprised many in evangelicalism with a tweet in seeming support of Black Lives Matter.
Black Lives Matter is an international organization advocating against violence done toward blacks by non-blacks (they’ve been virtually silent on black-on-black violence, which constitues 93% of homicides in the black community). The movement grew out of a #blacklivesmatter hashtag during the controversy surrounding George Zimmerman’s legal self-defense shooting while being assaulted by Trayvon Martin. The organization then organized riotous behavior surrounding the deaths of Michael Brown at the hands of a police officer, whom he was brutally attacking, and Eric Garner in New York, who died of a heart attack while resisting arrest. Their protests usually result in violence, destruction of property or vandalism, illegal shutting down of streets and interstate traffic, and generalized mayhem.
The lead founder of Black Lives Matter is Alicia Garza, who reveres a Marxist revolutionary, black panther, cop-killer and conspirator with the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army. A secondary founder, Pattrise Cullors, advocates for a nationwide vast reduction in police department budgets, believing that law enforcement is the chief problem in race relations. A third founder, Opal Tometi, is a “black feminist writer” who equates police actions with Jim Crow lynchings (source link).
Black Lives Matter is essentially a Marxist-driven band of racists who incite violence and property destruction in order to demonize police and defend violent criminals. Yesterday, John Piper was advocating disarming the citizenry, and in the very same day he promoted an organization that seeks to disarm the police. One would think that Piper has taken on an anarchical, societal death wish.
The portion of the website Piper encourages us to read lists the following guiding principles: restorative justice, globalism, being unapologetically black, transgender affirming and queer affirming.
And then, Piper refers to “herstory.” There’s only so much one can glean from a single tweet, but you can click this link and see what that’s all about. Here’s the link to the “Herstory” tab at Black Lives Matter.
The Evangelical Intelligentsia has completely biffed it on race issues in the last several years. From Thabiti Anybwile’s displays of not-so-subtle racism (source link) to The “Gospel” Coalition’s coalescing with nonbelievers to find race solutions (source link) to Russell Moore’s unhealthy race fixations (source link) to Intervarsity’s Urbana Conference promotion of Black Lives Matter just last week, it seems we’re losing focus.
And from the Apple-Doesn’t-Fall-Far-From-the-Tree award, Barnabas Piper (John Piper’s son and SBC Lifeway employee) encouraged criminal behavior as a response to the church shooting in Charleston and even raised money for one guilty of vandalizing public property (source link).
Perhaps Piper didn’t mean his tweet as a promotion. Perhaps he meant it as a warning. But because his trajectory has taken a hard left politically and because on race issues he has sided with the Anybwile wing of social justice, and because he has already repeatedly sided against the police on this very subject (source link), one would be hard pressed to assume it’s a warning. And because evangelical leaders rarely condescend themselves to answer the rest of us, I suspect we may never have clarification.
Whatever is happening to Piper is concerning….very, very concerning.
[Contributed by JD Hall]
