The centurion was a student of death. Taking life was his craft. He knew the signs. He ordered the spear plunged into Jesus’ side. He watched the blood and water gush from the wound. He looked on as Jesus breathed his last and lowered his head in death. He saw his chest stop rising. He saw Jesus wounds stop bleeding as his heart stopped beating. And when the centurion saw how Christ died, he concluded, “Truly this man was the Son of God” (Mark 15:39)! The centurion knew that Jesus truly died and that he truly died for him! 

On May 4th, 1865, Abraham Lincoln’s body was laid to rest at the Oakridge Cemetery in Springfield, IL. But his initial interment was anything but restful. In the years that followed, the crypt was disturbed 17 times for various maintenance and security reasons. So, in 1901, Robert Lincoln ordered his father’s coffin be encased in a block of concrete, permanently sealing the crypt. But before the concrete was poured it was decided that the body needed to be identified. As the casket cracked open, a foul cloud wafted over those gathered. They crept forward to behold the familiar face of the 16th President. The beard on his chin was as black as the day he died. He was wearing the same suit he wore at his 2nd inauguration, now finely frosted with yellow mold. One of the spectators, J.C. Thompson later told reporters:
As I came up, I saw that top-knot of Mr. Lincoln’s. His hair was course and thick, like a horse’s, and it stood up high in front. When I saw that, I knew that it was Mr. Lincoln… His features had not decayed. He looked just like a statue of himself lying there.
Suppose I knew the exact location of the tomb in which Jesus was laid to rest 2,000 years ago. Suppose we went, like Indiana Jones on a torchlit quest, into the Jerusalem countryside or a secret underground chamber. Suppose we rolled the great stone away and entered the crypt. Do you know what you would smell?
Nothing.
There would be no shriveled corpse. No bones. No ashes. Nothing is there, because Jesus is not there. He is risen! He has conquered the grave.
But did you know that more than 1 in 4 people on earth don’t believe that Jesus actually died on the cross? Central to the Islamic teaching on Jesus is their denial of his crucifixion and death. With some Jewish and liberal protestant theologians, they insist the man who died on the cross was a body-double, a stunt savior. Others believe that Jesus merely swooned on the cross, only to be revived later.
Three That Testify
To prove that Jesus truly died, Mark calls upon three witnesses. He begins with Joseph of Arimathea, “a respected member of the council, who was also himself looking for the kingdom of God, [who] took courage and went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus” (Mark 15:43). It was Friday evening, the Day of Preparation before the Sabbath which would begin at sundown. But there was a problem: three bodies were on crosses on a hill outside Jerusalem. To a people whose religion revolved around ritual purity, blood and death were ceremonially defiling contaminants which had to be removed before Sabbath. 
Knowing this, Joseph asked Pilate for permission to bury Christ’s body. Like Nicodemus, Joseph was a leader of the Jews who trusted in Christ as his Savior and was “looking for the kingdom of God.” As Mark says, Joseph’s request “took courage,” because it aligned him with Christ, an enemy of the state. But Joseph found freedom from his fear. By fixing his heart on Jesus’ death for him, Joseph was able to live courageously for Jesus. Considering Christ’s valiant love for you on the cross will make you bold for him, too.
Next, Mark offers the testimony of the centurion. When Pilate heard that Jesus had already died, he was surprised (Mark 15:44). The Greek literally rendered means “awestruck.” Why? Because death by crucifixion was designed to be slow. Even the word “excruciating” is taken from the Latin, ex cruciatus, or, “out of the cross.” Victims were left tied or nailed to their cross, exposed to the elements and wild beast, until they were overcome with exhaustion and expired.
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“While it is good to see the Biden administration acknowledge that these attacks are a problem, they must do more,” Perkins states. “The Biden Department of Justice has so far largely ignored these growing attacks on churches and that is creating an environment of lawlessness around the country.” “Christians must not live in fear. We must not be intimidated,” concludes Perkins. “We must continue to stand upon the truth of God and defending the freedom of all to live out their faith.”

A Christian leader has blasted the Biden administration for “creating an atmosphere of lawlessness” by ignoring attacks on churches and houses of worship nationwide, which have nearly tripled over the last four years, according to a startling new report.
These assaults ranged from deadly to defacing, covered every region of the country and denominational background, and often sprang from pro-abortion domestic terrorism or other forms of left-wing enmity against biblical morality.
Offenders committed at least 420 acts of hostility against 397 separate churches in the United States between January 2018 and September 2022. These cases include everything from arson and gun-related violence to vandalism and bomb threats, the copiously documented, 84-page report specifies.
The attacks show the comprehensive nature of anti-Christian violence. Assaults against churches occurred in 45 states and the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C. Victimized congregations span the theological gamut from evangelical, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, mainline Protestant, non-denominational churches, Seventh-Day Adventist, to Unitarian-Universalists and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (formerly known as Mormons). Assailants targeted parishes primarily attended by white, black, and Asian (specifically Korean and Taiwanese) Christians, as well as multiethnic congregations.
The report documents one homicide, numerous arsons, bomb threats (real and fake), and a pervasive desecration of holy items. Vandals regularly smashed crosses, statues, and headstones in cemeteries; vandalized carvings of the Ten Commandments; set fire to a Nativity scene; and smeared feces on a statue of the Virgin Mary. They tore up a Bible and desecrated an American flag in a Primitive Methodist church in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Denver’s Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Catholic Church suffered two drive-by shootings this August. Smashed windows and spray-painted doors became ubiquitous. The number of assaults peaked this May through July but has remained elevated compared to historical figures, which usually number in the single digits.
Each individual act of violence or vandalism could cause tens of thousands of dollars in damage to the local congregation.
The annual pace of hostilities against churches, the author warns, is only increasing. “The first nine months of 2022 saw more than double the number of reported acts of hostility against churches that occurred in the entirety of 2018,” notes Arielle Del Turco, assistant director of the Center for Religious Liberty at Family Research Council.
The spike in anti-Christian hate crimes cannot be dismissed as an anomaly of one report, since the FBI counted 240 anti-Christian hate crimes in 2021, up from 172 in 2018.
The report found these destructive, often-violent assaults against houses of worship are often precipitated by political upheaval, typically on the Left.
“Within the past few years especially, outpourings of political anger have sometimes correlated with vandalism and other acts against churches,” says Del Turco. “When faced with such blatant violence and disrespect against churches (and religion more broadly), our response must be to condemn these acts and reaffirm the right of all people to worship and live out their faith freely—including the freedom to live without fear that they will be the next target of such an attack.”
The report cites two major motivators: the still-unsolved leak of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling overturning Roe v. Wade on May 2 and the “Black Lives Matter” riots over the killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. But radical pro-LGBTQ activism, support for COVID-19 church closures, secularism, Satanism, Islamic fundamentalism, and anti-Americanism also wrought havoc in parishes nationwide.
Abortion: By far the most destructive of these was liberal opposition to the Christian Church’s 2,000-year history of opposition to abortion, which reached a fever pitch after the Dobbs leak.
In the first nine months of 2022, pro-abortion extremists carried out at least 57 attacks against Christian houses of worship—an 1,140% increase over the past four years. Between 2018 and 2021, only five abortion-related attacks took place against churches, with zero in 2018.
Days after the Dobbs leak, vandals covered a Roman Catholic church and school in Armada, Michigan, with Satanic symbols and “messages calling for the death of Republicans.” The same week, protesters spray-painted pro-abortion messages on the doors of Holy Rosary Catholic Church in Houston, interrupted Mass in Los Angeles dressed as characters out of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and harassed a Franciscan friar at a Basilica in New York City.
Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., co-chair of the bipartisan Congressional Pro-Life Caucus, accused abortion radicals of waging “a kind of war on the advocates for life” on “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” in June.
Black Lives Matter/Canadian Schools ‘Mass Grave’ Hoax: The report found that 10 church attacks emanated from riots precipitated by the Black Lives Matter movement. This September, vandals wrote “Kill MAGA/Pigs,” BLM,” and “Antifa” on a Unitarian-Universalist building in California.
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There is a difference between CRT as an explanatory paradigm (remember, the “T” stands for “Theory”) and racism as a reality. Classically understood, racism is a kind of group bigotry. CRT, by contrast, looks at power structures in cultures to explain why that bigotry and the inequity it causes exist and how they operate within social structures. It may be that CRT fails as a theory when closely examined. That does not mean racism doesn’t exist, though, but only that CRT does not describe the dynamic of racial oppression well.

The newspaper headline read, “Critical Race Theory Coming to a School Near You?” The paper was The Conejo Guardian,1 the monthly publication of Conejo Valley—the quiet, diminutive basin where I make my home in southern California, just beyond the teeth of the LA sprawl.
The article was a warning.
Critical race theory (CRT) is coming to a school near you—to your high schools, to your middle schools, even to your elementary schools (the universities have already been thick with CRT for years).
Critical race theory is coming to your public schools, and to your private schools,2 and has even stolen into some of your Christian schools and churches.3 And it’s coming to your workplace, too (if it hasn’t already), in the form of “inclusion” or “diversity” training.4 And, generally, it’s not optional—in school or on the job.
The indoctrination rapidly penetrating all levels of society is controversial, contentious, and divisive—aggressively pitting one group of people against another. It’s also thoroughly political, with the current federal government championing CRT—and legislatively backing it—lock, stock, and barrel.5
Regarding the aggressive education efforts in California (and in other parts of the country where CRT is penetrating the educational system), Anna Mussmann warns in The Federalist:
Parents need to understand that behind the waterfall of vocabulary is a militant ideology. When kids are taught to subject all of life to “critical consciousness” in order to find the “oppressor” and the “oppressed” everywhere and at all times, they are taught that the only ultimate meaning in life is power.6
As with other efforts with a totalitarian impulse, disagreement is not welcome. Dissenters are frequently treated with disrespect, harassed, and bullied:
Critical race theorists want students to accept the assumption that anyone who fails to swallow these rules wholeheartedly is a tool of oppression. Ultimately, it’s a highly effective way of preventing dialogue and pitting students against students.7
The attraction of CRT for people of conscience is its emphasis on “social justice” as an answer to racism. But CRT isn’t your parents’ (or your grandparents’) civil rights movement.
Not MLK’s Civil Rights
I was a senior in high school when Martin Luther King was murdered. It’s a vivid memory for me, as are the civil rights efforts of that time. The movement was a flashpoint for change in a long, ugly, brutal chapter in the American experiment, a test to see if the noble ideals of the Founding Fathers and of the Declaration of Independence would be enjoyed, finally, by all Americans.
That is how Martin Luther King Jr. understood civil rights, since he referred to those documents frequently. As a preacher from a long line of preachers, he also based his stand on Scripture. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” he cited the Bible liberally.
In King’s celebrated “I Have a Dream” address delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, he envisioned a nation where people “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
This famous line reflected a commonsense, liberal (in the best sense), and biblical ethical principle. The most important element uniting every human being—more significant than any differences that divide us—has nothing to do with any incidental physical characteristic. What ought to unite us is our shared and noble humanity.
“Now is the time,” King said, “to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.” He based his dream—his vision of a just America for every human being—on the reality that we are all brothers fashioned in the image of God.
Frederick Douglass, the eminent 19th-century black abolitionist, wrote these words to his former slave master in September 1848:
I entertain no malice towards you personally. There is no roof under which you would be more safe than mine, and there is nothing in my house which you might need for your comfort, which I would not readily grant. Indeed, I should esteem it a privilege, to set you an example as to how mankind ought to treat each other. I am your fellow man, but not your slave.8
Note Douglass’s moral kinship with King. A licensed preacher, Douglass understood that the theological “solid rock” of any appeal to racial justice was that we are each other’s “fellow man,” equally precious in God’s eyes. We are also, I will add, all equally broken at the foot of the Cross.
Keep these two things in mind—our universal intrinsic value as one race of human brothers and our universal moral guilt—as we explore the hazardous world of CRT. They are central to everything we need to know when dealing biblically not only with racism, but with all forms of human oppression. They trade on the notion that genuine justice is always grounded in truth, not in power.
King’s principal thrust during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was undoing segregation—whether on buses (the bus boycotts and the “Freedom Riders”), at lunch counters (Greensboro, North Carolina sit-ins), in public schools (Little Rock Central High School), and in higher education (the University of Mississippi).
Those days are over.
Today’s fight against racism lacks King’s noble intention to judge people by their character. In fact, rather than de-racializing our country, the current effort is to re-racialize it. Segregation is everywhere now—in graduations, in classrooms, in clubs, in adoptions—systematically endorsed and promoted by the new anti-racism movement.
There’s one significant difference, though. People of color are not the ones disqualified, disenfranchised, or demonized now. Rather, the ones currently disqualified, disenfranchised, and demonized by CRT advocates are white people. And males. And “hetero-normative” people. And “cisgender­normative” people. And, of course, Christians.9
The consequences are already tragic. At the moment, racial tensions are the highest they’ve been in the 21st century and continue to intensify.
Ask yourself this question. Regardless of your race, or color, or national or ethnic origin, do you feel, as a result of the events of the last 15-18 months, more comfortable amid the ethnic diversity of your community or less comfortable? The trend does not bode well.
What is going on?
Word Games
A sage once observed, “When words lose their meanings, people lose their lives.” Proverbs 18:21 instructs us, “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.” In short, words matter.
In 1984, George Orwell’s 1949 classic (and oddly prescient) dystopian vision of future totalitarianism, the manipulation of language is a powerful tool of distortion and deception. Orwell calls it “Newspeak” and “doublethink”—deceptive vocabulary that the citizens of Oceania were socialized by peer pressure to adopt. Some refer to it as “doublespeak”—clever efforts to purposefully distort, obscure, and euphemize ideas, masking their otherwise objectionable, unappealing, or even vile qualities. Orwell’s Animal Farm slogan, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” is a case in point.
In both works, Orwell was lampooning Soviet totalitarianism. Journalist Rod Dreher reminds us of “the Marxist habit of falsifying language, hollowing out familiar words and replacing them with a new, highly ideological meaning.”10
The Third Reich did it, too. Segments of the population who were “impaired” were described in German as “Lebensunwertes Leben,”11 literally, “life unworthy of life.” Thoroughly cleansing the European continent of Jews was called the “Final Solution.”
There is a lesson here for us that we have not learned well, especially the younger adults in our communities: beware of deceptive political euphemisms.
In its current course towards totalitarianism, the Left has shown itself a master at manipulating language. “Antifa,” for example, despite its members’ fascistic behavior, stands for “anti-fascist.” Who could argue with that? The noble name “Black Lives Matter” makes the organization virtually unassailable regardless of its views. “Social justice” is, well, justice, isn’t it?
“Liberals today,” Dreher observes, “deploy neutral sounding, or even positive, words like dialogue and tolerance to disarm and ultimately defeat unaware conservatives.”12
The manipulation of language is characteristic of totalitarian movements. This is especially true with the retooling of “connotation” words—words like “tolerance” or “racism” that have a certain feel to them. Their rhetorical force remains even when the words themselves are subtly redefined and pressed into service for different ends.
To that point, a significant shift has taken place between the civil rights language of the 1960s and the rhetoric of today’s “anti-racism” and “anti-white supremacist” CRT movement. That shift in language also signals a shift in substance.
The operative words sixty years ago were bigotry, racism, prejudice, discrimination, and segregation. Each had a particular meaning, a commonsense definition that resonated with ordinary moral intuitions. Each was connected to the others in a series of cascading vices terminating in terrible injustice: treating our human brothers made in the image of God in a way that denied their inherent dignity and value.
Bigotry was the first step, which Webster’s dictionary defined in 1965 as an individual character flaw of “intolerance toward those who hold different opinions from oneself”13 (“intolerance” here means “unwilling to grant equal freedom and protection especially in religious matters or other social, political, or professional rights”14). Bigotry festers into an unreasonable contempt or even hatred for members of a group based solely on amoral qualities or characteristics like skin color, ethnicity, or gender.
Bigotry is an ugly vice in individuals—a kind of personal pride or arrogance, an I’m-better-than-you conceit—but it’s deeply dangerous on a wider cultural scale, where it often develops into racism.
Racism was a familiar term in the 20th century—indeed, it was national policy for two great powers—Germany and Japan—that dragged the world into global war. It’s “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race” (emphasis added).
In racism, then, one “race” is above the rest—Aryans and Japanese, to give two classical examples—being superior (allegedly) in extrinsic capabilities, and therefore having superior intrinsic value. All others are inferior.
Racism is bigotry writ large. It is deeply vile and degrading, denying the intrinsic value of every human being based on irrelevant extrinsic differences between groups of human beings.
The sense of racial superiority in racism becomes the breeding ground for prejudice, a “preconceived judgment . . . without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge . . . an irrational attitude of hostility directed against an individual, a group, or [a] race.”
Prejudice is evil because it ascribes vice to others based on factors unrelated to anything genuinely moral. A Jew, for example, was “pre-judged” as vermin in the Third Reich simply because he was Jewish, completely unrelated to any individual vice. In America, blacks were demeaned, judged by the color of their skin rather than by the content of their character—the antithesis of King’s dream.
Racial prejudice inevitably results in discrimination against those groups considered ethnically inferior. The root concept merely means “to distinguish between” and could be a virtue or a vice. Practiced properly, discrimination is benign (consider the thoughtful “discriminating” person). It’s an evil, though, when one discriminates “to make a difference in treatment or favor on a basis other than individual merit.” This is invidious discrimination—an arbitrary and irrational bias that disenfranchises whole groups of people without legitimate justification.
Segregation, the “separation or isolation of a race, class, or ethnic group,” is an application of invidious discrimination and the final consequence in this chain of civil rights abuses. It is racism in action, bigotry in practice. “Whites Only” policies of the early 1960s and before, for example, regulated patronage in restaurants, seating on buses, the use of bathrooms, and access to housing and education according to whether one was white or black. These are just a few of the disgraceful discriminatory practices of the time.
Bigotry, racism, prejudice, discrimination, and segregation made up the chain of social inequities that civil rights activists addressed in the 1960s. Individual bigotry led to corporate racism that resulted in a generalized prejudice against blacks. The result was illicit discrimination against them, not treating them equally under the law. Instead, they suffered the indecency of segregation.
Breaking that chain was the program of a bygone era of civil rights activism. That quest for racial justice is now behind us, and a new quest has replaced it, one bearing little moral kinship to the noble efforts of the past. Many of the original words remain, but they have been invested with new meanings and endowed with new values.
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Notes1. The Conejo Guardian, May 2021.2. city-journal.org/the-miseducation-of-americas-elites.3. firstthings.com/article/2021/02/evangelicals-and-race-theory.4. heritage.org/civil-rights/report/critical-race-theory-the-new-intolerance-and-its-grip-america.5. https://spectator.us/topic/biden-critical-race-theory-schools-department-education.6. https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/05/californias-ethnic-studies-opens-door-to-critical-race-theory-indoctrination-throughout-public-schools.7. Ibid.8. watchtheyard.com/history/fredrick-douglas-letter-to-slave-master-auld.9. https://christopherrufo.com/revenge-of-the-gods.10. Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies (Sentinel, 2020), 119.11. Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors—Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (Basic Books/Harper Collins, 1986), 21.12. Dreher, 119.13. All definitions in quotes are from Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, 1965. I’ve used an older source not influenced by current rhetorical trends.14. The current postmodern understanding of intolerance is significantly different. See str.org/w/the-intolerance-of-tolerance.