The movement known as Black Lives Matter (BLM) is not morally neutral. It makes certain claims and takes positions on theological and philosophical grounds that Christians must evaluate from Scripture. In this way, it is not merely an American issue. What are the claims made by this organization?
The most central claim is to fight for the freedom of Black people. Yet it is a miserable and justly angering reality that while highlighting a few high profile cases, BLM ignores the greatest sins and violence against black people.
1. Black babies do not matter to Black Lives Matter.
BLM fights when a drug-using armed robber is tragically killed, but they are silent as the entire black population is reduced by 50%. Catherine Davis and Bradley Mattes report,
According to U.S. census data, there were 18,871,831 black American citizens in 1960. Since Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in 1973, abortion has killed an estimated 20 million black babies — more than the entire black population of 1960.
If all the deaths of black people from all causes in a single year were added together, the murdered bodies of black babies destroyed in the womb would still be more numerous. Abortion clinics are commonly placed within walking distance of black areas.
During the 8 minutes and 46 seconds while Derek Chauvin was kneeling on George Floyd, 5 black babies were murdered with the peaceful silence of BLM approving the blood shed.
Further, BLM finds space on their website to promote the destruction of the nuclear family (under the “About, What We Believe” tab), and their editors had to make sure that they publicly support men who call themselves women (same tab), but curiously, BLM just ran out of words before it was able to defend the wanton taking of these apparently disposable lives.
2. Black men murdered by other black men do not matter to Black Lives Matter.
Each year thousands of black men are murdered by other black men, and a statistical handful by the police. Overwhelmingly, these murders take place in liberal cities where government policies have formed a steep incline preventing success and even tumbling blacks backward. It is commonly reported that there were far more two-parent homes in 1940 among the black community than today. Government policies have paid the most vulnerable people to perpetuate and even pioneer the most self-destructive practices such as single mother homes.
Incidentally, this is why Christians must study Scripture and history so that they might be able to speak biblically about politics. The conditions of society set up by the political system have far reaching consequences in the habits of our every day lives. Those habits, in turn, produce the character that forms our lot in life.
BLM does not mention character. It does not have anything to say to the thousands of dead young black men. By shouting so much against the few cases it highlights, it has lost its voice when telling black youth what they might do to avoid the great risk of violent crime by improving their own character.
But in some ways the most egregious examples of BLM overlooking the murders of other black men are the murders of black police officers and other civilians killed during the recent riots. If a black man enters a home illegally, uses drugs, threatens to murder a black woman and her baby, and yet is killed by a police officer, he becomes a hero. Yet if a black thug murders an innocent black man protecting his own property, it is ignored.
Conclusion
White and black people who have no character will support BLM because it is far less painful than weeping and working to end the river of blood that BLM conveniently ignores.
Objection:
“Abortion and criminal homicide may be problems, but that does not mean we should ignore police brutality.”
If two men were embezzling from your company, the one stealing $100, and the other stealing $100 million, it would be wrong, sinful, and totally unjustifiable to ignore the greater and shout about the lesser. Until BLM shows any concern for the murder of hundreds of thousands of black people, we will refuse to follow their twisted logic when they profess to believe that black lives really do matter.
Until BLM opens its mouth about the great tragedies of abortion and black victims of homicide, we are under no obligation to believe their religious propaganda. BLM has an agenda, but defending black people is not germane to it.
