video and response: calling good what was really evil

There is a lot in this video, and at least at this moment I don’t intend to respond to much of it, but there is one part that I think I can respond to.

To give some context, in the overall video the speaker is talking about what he calls “7 Marks of the Pre-War Consensus”, and by Pre-War he means World War II. The below quote is in the part where he’s speaking about “covenant”, and the time when the quote begins is at 17:20

In the summer of 1872 Chinese workers--they had helped build the transcontinental railroad and once they were done building it they returned to these crowded western towns. The laborers in California, they erupted in fury they were so upset they had placards they were holding up, thing like “The Chinese must go”, mobs sort of driving families away from their homes, but fascinatingly—again we’re in the pre-war world—so Congress listened and on May 6th President Chester A Arthur he signed the Chinese Exclusion Act which was like the first federal law to ban an entire ethnic group by race. See lawmakers openly declared that America must remain a white man’s country or at least America was for Americans and Europeans and extension in that. So they were essentially warning that—they called these people Mongolian at the time—they were essentially unable to assimilate and they really pushed this particular group out. And this was the natural fruit of a covenantal mindset. This is kind of what we talked about in earlier episodes a kind of in-group preference that had defined the nation since its founding.

The speaker admits that Chinese workers played a part in a pretty significant event in the country’s history, the making of the railroad that connected the eastern US to the west. Not a small thing, as it made a journey that had previously taken months by either land or water and turned it into a journey of days. True, even that accomplishment has to a large degree been overshadowed by then future technologies such as airplanes which turned the journey into hours, but at the time it was very important.

My contention against this speaker is this: no Christian can look at the events that happened to the Chinese in the US west during that mid and late 1800s, the exploitation and then driving out, the racial discrimination, the murders and massacres, and then the Exclusion Act, and say that these things represent anything good; rather, they show a pattern of pride and arrogance, of fear, of greed and covetousness (which is a form of idolatry). These actions cannot be legitimized by referring to a “covenantal mindset” and “a kind of in-group preference”, but are still wrong and still sinful. The cry "The Chinese Must Go" is not something a true Christian should have said then, nor is it something any true Christian should commend now. 

I want to recommend some reading to you, so you can get a better idea of what was happening with the Chinese in the mid and late 1800s, the things that happened to them, and how badly they were treated. It’s difficult to sum up such things in a few words, so please use some time to look into it further.

Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans by Jean Pfaelzer

The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America by Beth Lew-Williams

Please look more deeply into this part of US history, so you can understand it better, much better than the speaker in this video.

To counter his spin on the history, we can see some of God’s commands that we broke in how we treated the Chinese people in the 1800s.

You Shall Not Steal: We drove Chinese people from their homes and the communities they had made in their time living in towns and cities in the US. They lost businesses and the stock they needed to run those businesses. They lost money they had earned and things they had purchased.

You Shall Not Murder: Chinese people were killed or threatened in the midst of this race-based hatred.

You Shall Not Covet: One thing that made people want the Chinese to go away was jobs. The people wanted those jobs for themselves and even thought it their right to have those jobs because they were of the acceptable races, while the Chinese were not acceptable.

You Shall Not Lie: So many of the violent actions were based on false ideas of one type of people being better, superior, than others.

Pride: We were proud and arrogant toward the Chinese people, and we treated them in horrible and sinful ways because of our pride.

Oppressing Strangers: Several times, God speaks against oppressing strangers and foreigners;

Deuteronomy 27

19 ‘The one who denies justice to a foreigner, a fatherless child, or a widow is cursed.' And all the people will say, ‘Amen! '

Deuteronomy 24

17 Do not deny justice to a foreigner or fatherless child, and do not take a widow's garment as security. 18 Remember that you were a slave in Egypt, and the Lord your God redeemed you from there. Therefore I am commanding you to do this.

Exodus 23

6 “You must not deny justice to a poor person among you in his lawsuit. 7 Stay far away from a false accusation. Do not kill the innocent and the just, because I will not justify the guilty. 8 You must not take a bribe, for a bribe blinds the clear-sighted and corrupts the words of the righteous. 9 You must not oppress a foreign resident; you yourselves know how it feels to be a foreigner because you were foreigners in the land of Egypt.

Instead of treating them well, we oppressed our Chinese neighbors, we denied them justice, we treated them unfairly.

Loving Our Neighbor As Ourselves: Anyone who wants to hold up this history as a sign of Christian behavior must deal with the fact that the US, a country they want to say was a Christian nation, was violating the command that Christ ranked near in importance to the command to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength; the command to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. We would not want to be treated unjustly by others, we would not want to be driven from our homes by angry mobs, we would not want to be robbed and murdered. We simply cannot say that we loved God when we treated our neighbors so badly. It might be better to finally admit that we weren’t a Christian nation, because no true Christian would act in such ways, nor would any true Christian approve of such sinful actions.

Considering the things the Chinese immigrants in the US experienced, I want to give an example of what I think a truly Christian man would have said if such a man had made a video mentioning the Chinese people in the US in the 1800s.

“Back in the mid and late 1800s, Chinese people came to the US. Many of them came to the American west for the same reason Americans went there from the east, to find gold. But they also came to live. They set up businesses, they formed communities, they worked in many different areas, including on the railroads.

“And many people in the US didn’t like having these strange people here. They took jobs, they looked strange, they wore their hair strangely, they wore strange clothing, they ate strange foods, and since even back then people in the US were arrogant and considered themselves better than others simply because of their skin tone, they didn’t like having these strange people around.

“So, they treated the Chinese horribly. They sinned against their neighbors. Like Ahab and Jezebel lied about Naboth to take his vineyard, we were unjust toward the Chinese in order to take their jobs. Like the violent men in Proverbs who laid in wait for blood, we threatened and murdered Chinese people. Rather than hold up that time as a model for how we today should act, we should rather mourn for the sins of our people, we should repent for how we and our fathers sinned against God and against our neighbors.

“Shall we say that because these things happened so long ago, 150 years ago, that they are not unimportant to us? Is our God forgetful? Did he not bring judgment on Israel in David’s day for a sin Saul committed against the Gibeonites? Did he not send Israel away from the land because of how they would not honor his sabbath years for the land, a sin that must have occurred over hundreds of years? We would be wiser to think that, no, God has not forgotten our father’s sins, and we would be wise to come to Him in repentance and ask for his mercies.

“And after we have repented to God, we should consider how we can show the fruits of that repentance. We cannot go back in time to make things right with the people of that time we sinned against, but we can consider people and situations today in the light of how our father’s acted and how we have repented of their hatreds and pride and greed. We can consider how we should talk about modern difficulties and the people involved in them.

“Let us do justice. Let us judge with honesty and integrity. And where we can, let us be merciful."