Written by Terry L. Johnson |
Friday, August 12, 2022
So it is with our sexual nature. God made us for heterosexual, monogamous marriage. That is the physiological and biological reality. That alone is the context in which sexual expression may safely take place. The lifelong union of one man to one woman alone is suited to our design. The sexual act is a procreative act. It has other dimensions, but that is its fundamental meaning, its basic biological meaning. When we make other meanings primary, or when we move sexual expression outside of marriage, we pervert it. When we “exchange the natural for the unnatural,” to use the Apostle Paul’s language, we do harm to ourselves, as when we pretend to have gills or wings (Rom 1:26,27).

How can a secular society make moral distinctions? How can it separate right from wrong? This is more of a problem than most people realize, especially in the realm of sexual ethics. A generation of “everything is normal” sex education, mixed with “everything is desirable” Hollywood sit-com and cinema seductions has morally disarmed our civilization. Politicians frame the issue as, “the freedom to love whom you choose,” which it is not. Of course we can love whomever we choose. We may love our parents, our children, and our neighbor’s children. However, we may not have erotic relations with them. The language of freedom and equality, as in “marriage equality” has added to the confusion. Can we say that any form of sexual expression, any form at all is wrong? Or must we say, as it seems we must, that various lifestyle choices are merely a matter of personal preference lying outside the categories of moral judgment? After all, who can be against freedom and equality?
Human nature
The traditional Christian view is that humanity has a God-given nature. There are those things that are consistent with human nature (e.g. breathing air with lungs; walking with feet) and others that are inconsistent (e.g. breathing underwater; winged flight). Humanity has a given design, purpose, and nature. We ignore that nature at our peril, as when we try to breathe under water or flap our arms as we leap from tall buildings.
So it is with our sexual nature. God made us for heterosexual, monogamous marriage. That is the physiological and biological reality. That alone is the context in which sexual expression may safely take place. The lifelong union of one man to one woman alone is suited to our design. The sexual act is a procreative act. It has other dimensions, but that is its fundamental meaning, its basic biological meaning. When we make other meanings primary, or when we move sexual expression outside of marriage, we pervert it. When we “exchange the natural for the unnatural,” to use the Apostle Paul’s language, we do harm to ourselves, as when we pretend to have gills or wings (Rom 1:26,27).
Christian-influenced civilizations understood this for over a millennia. The west was never in doubt – until recent times. “Everything is normal” sex education, has given us “anything goes” sexual ethics, with dire results.
Are homosexual acts natural or normal? Of course not. They are physiologically unnatural. They are “contrary to nature” (Rom 1:26). As such, they are “shameless acts” driven by “dishonorable passions,” and a “debased mind” (Rom 1:28). Again, western civilization understood this for the better part of 1500 years, and its legal systems were designed to discourage this form of human degradation.
The campaign to normalize homosexuality has been successful. With the acceptance of the “gay” way, a wall came crashing down that may never again be rebuilt. What wall? The wall separating the moral from the immoral. We warned years ago that if and when homosexuality was normalized our ability to make sexual moral distinctions would vanish. Many scoffed at the suggestion.
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Beginning on the very day of Livingstone’s death, the British naval patrol was instructed to prevent the export of slaves from the eastern coastal ports. Just five weeks after his death the great slave market at Zanzibar was permanently closed. Less than two years later “all conveyance of slaves by land under any conditions” was also outlawed, dealing a final death blow to the East Africa slave trade.

David Livingstone is best known as a renowned nineteenth century missionary and explorer in Africa. Another vital aspect of his ministry career was the crucial role he played in exposing and helping bring about the abolition of the slave trade in southcentral and southeastern Africa in the latter half of the 1800s. To follow is a summation of his important part in that epic accomplishment.
Throughout his first eleven years of missionary service in Africa (1841-1852) Livingstone heard of and witnessed instances of Boers oppressing and even enslaving Africans beyond the borders of Cape Colony in southern Africa. The Boers were Dutch farm families who had emigrated by the thousands in the 1830s and 1840s, resettling north of Cape Colony in order to avoid being under British rule there. Eventually a Boer militia attacked a group of tribes to whom Livingstone had been ministering and ransacked his residence at Kolobeng, destroying his personal property valued at more than 300 British pounds (then equaling over 1,500 American dollars, likely worth at least thirty or forty times that amount today).
In 1851 Livingstone came in contact with and began ministering to the Makololo, a powerful marauding tribe that had settled in the area between the Chobe River and the upper reaches of the Zambesi River. The Makololo had subjected a number of other tribes living in that same region, which was several hundred miles further north than Livingstone had previously ministered. Those tribal groups, including the Makololo, had a long history of attacking neighboring tribes and carrying off livestock and people as slaves. In addition, Portuguese traders from Angola to the west, assisted by African Mambari tribesmen, entered that region and carried away scores or hundreds of slaves each year.
Livingstone spent two and a half years seeking to determine if a river transportation route could be established from either the west or east coast of Africa, to effectively and affordably transport missionaries and supplies to the inner area of the continent. In doing so he became the first European ever to make a transcontinental journey across Africa. As he approached and stayed for a time at both coasts, Portuguese officials were uniformly supportive of and helpful to him. But he noted that a number of those officials were themselves involved in slave trading to help supplement their income.
While back in Britain during 1857-1858, Livingstone wrote his first book, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa. In it he exposed and condemned the different types of slavery he had seen practiced by the Boers, various tribes and the Portugues. In his many well-attended speeches given throughout Britain he put forth a plan to bring Christianity and legitimate commerce to inner Africa, which would in time destroy the slave trade there. He accepted the British Government’s invitation to head the Zambesi Expedition in exploring the Zambesi and its tributaries. The expedition’s further objectives, which were clearly and repeatedly stated in official documents, correspondence and public speeches, were to promote commerce and Christianity to the tribes of that region, with the intention that doing so would help Africans in various ways—economically, spiritually and by putting a stop to the slave trade.
The Zambesi Expedition explored: the lower portion of the Zambesi; the Shire River region and Lake Nyassa (modern Lake Malawi) north and northeast of that part of the Zambesi; the Rovuma River east of Lake Nyassa. Portuguese slave traders, operating with the knowledge and approval of their regional Governors, were found to be active in the Zambesi and Shire regions while Arab slavers prosecuted their trade at Nyassa. Not a few tribes in those areas eagerly participated in the slave trade, selling into slavery people they had captured from other villages or sometimes even the undesirables of their own clans.
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One of the banes of liberalism in our time is the unwillingness to criticize bad ideas honestly for fear of being misconstrued as a bigot; the assumption of the lowest possible motive when assessing these criticisms is the other. Together, they constitute a strait jacket—they make progress impossible.

A review of Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America by John McWhorter. Portfolio, 224 pages. (October, 2021)
If you had told someone a decade ago—after the election of the first black president, and in anticipation of the first black female vice president—that race relations in the United States would devolve into hysteria and incivility, it might have seemed like the counter-historical fantasy of a satirical novelist, in clear violation of the arc of history that, Martin Luther King assured us, “bends toward justice.” Today’s anti-racist activists, in that sense, are not progressives (although they claim to be). They are anachronists who fail to faithfully acknowledge and inhabit the spirit of their time.
In his new book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, John McWhorter demonstrates that there is far more Martin Luther than Martin Luther King in today’s anti-racist movement. McWhorter, a linguist and a professor at Columbia University, is a critic of luminous intelligence, and his book’s apparently oxymoronic title plays on Robin DiAngelo’s (equally oxymoronic) Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm. DiAngelo’s dubious contention is that white progressives are often more injurious to the cause of racial equity than skinheads or bedsheet bigots, because their racist transgressions are the result of well-meaning ignorance. McWhorter asks the corollary: can even those supposedly enlightened and self-appointed champions of anti-racism (whom he calls “the Elect”) think and act in ways that harm black America?
McWhorter identifies three waves of anti-racist activism in the United States, the first of which was the fight against slavery and legalized segregation. The second was the struggle against racist attitudes, which sought to instill the idea that racial prejudice was a moral defect. The current strain of anti-racist activism constitutes a “third wave,” and like any movement in an advanced stage, it is characteristically decadent. The Elect’s ideology, like so much contemporary social justice, is a grotesque contest of elite moral exhibitionism, inordinately preoccupied with policing speech and regulating behavior. It is fundamentally performative and, above all, pretentious, in both the etymological sense of the word (to pretend) and in its common usage (attempting to impress).
This approach to battling racism tends to appeal to well-educated white people afflicted by a guilty conscience. The only remedy for them—the load-bearing pillar of white America’s new moral responsibility—is a declaration of one’s own “privilege.” This, McWhorter assures us, is not progress or even compassion, it is a form of self-help. “The issue,” he writes, “is not whether I or anyone else thinks white privilege is real, but what we consider the proper response to it.” [Italics in original.] Privilege is indeed real, and making oneself aware of it is morally important, but when employed as a cudgel, it becomes a monstrous prop.
Encouraging black people to see themselves as perpetual victims, while assigning to white people the task of becoming enlightened enough to recognize their own inherent and irredeemable racism creates a culture of soft-bigotry, furnished by polite lies and low expectations. “White people calling themselves our saviors,” McWhorter writes, “make black people look like the dumbest, weakest, most self-indulgent human beings in the history of our species, and teach black people to revel in that status and cherish it as making us special.”
This endless condescension is writ large in DiAngelo’s work, and we can see it in the training seminars now required by many companies, in which things like “logic” and “punctuality” are ascribed to “Whiteness.” Do the people running these seminars really believe that black people can’t be rational and on time? Do they think that science and math are things that only white kids are good at? And, McWhorter asks, if black students perform poorly on standardized tests, is it fair to assume that the test is racist, and should therefore be discontinued, as the Elect now propose? Would it not be better to ensure that those students have access to resources and tutoring? Far from helping anyone, these distortions of essence and aptitude actually hurt the advancement of what is now commonly referred to as “racial equity.”
The goal of third wave anti-racism is ostensibly concerned with “dismantling” racist “structures,” but it is actually an attempt to narrow the discourse and limit the range of honest thought in pursuit of a phony consensus. This is achieved through a ruthless evangelism, which McWhorter manages to condense as follows:
Battling power relations and their discriminatory effects must be the central focus of all human endeavor, be it intellectual, moral, civic, or artistic. Those who resist this focus, or even evidence insufficient adherence to it, must be sharply condemned, deprived of influence, and ostracized.
For support, McWhorter offers a spate of scandals and PR nightmares that would signal, to an alien observer, a kind of collective insanity or Salem-esque panic. One of the salient and most stupefying examples is the case of Alison Roman, a (now-former) food critic at the New York Times. Roman ran into trouble when she criticized two of her contemporaries—model and food writer Chrissy Teigen, and life coach Marie Kondo—for their hypocritical commercialism. Despite coming from different ethnic backgrounds and cultural milieux (Teigen is half-white and half-Thai and was born in America; Kondo was born and raised in Japan), both are assimilable as “people of color” according to the progressive Weltanschauung, so Roman’s criticism placed her under suspicion. What reason could a white New York Times journalist have for criticizing two non-white celebrities, other than sublimated bigotry?
A few days later, singer Lana Del Rey responded to criticisms of her music’s use of sexual themes by pointing out that plenty of other artists, including Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé, also sing about sex. Del Rey was immediately attacked by social media mobs, who denounced her in an endorphin-rush of self-righteousness. These two cases make the Elect’s devotion to rooting out racial bias seem like a protean neurosis, which sees racism even when it isn’t there.
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