When not to say "sorry"
The England team has been ‘taking the knee’ to highlight racism in sport. Whether such a gesture will diminish or increase racial tension generally is debatable. What is less debatable is the tension it will increase in any England player (especially one who happens to have white skin) who is reluctant to do so. Such reluctance will likely be met with accusations of racism and insinuations of lurking white supremacy.
On the website of Black Lives Matter (to which ‘taking the knee’ has become inseparably attached) one can read the following exhortation to white people:
White communities are used to consciously and unconsciously maintaining the racist policies and practices … as white people, we must speak out against those policies and practices. When we remain silent and on the sidelines, we are complicit in maintaining these unjust systems
There is the key word – complicit. White people who do not speak out (or, in the case we are addressing, take the knee) are complicit in racism. But is this accusation justified? Is it justified to expect white people to take ownership of the sin of racism in this way? Is it right for white people to do so?
The central problem is the assumption of moral high ground from those taking the knee. It is not unreasonable to ask, however, who made BLM our judge? Why do Black Lives Matter get to decide what does, and does not, consistute speaking out against racism?
Long before Black Lives Matter, the famous Christian Apologist, C S Lewis, wrote of a not disimilar situation back in 1940. Lewis observed young Christian intellectuals (as a professor at Oxford, Lewis was very familiar with these) who ‘confessed’ and ‘repented’ of national sins. They claimed that such national sins were responsible for, amongst other things, causing the First World War.
In our day and age, the sins in question are racist ones - sins which led to the wicked slave trade and, allegedly, the systemic racist attitudes that exist to this day. The argument then was that English people needed to take ownership, and repent, of the sins of ‘England’, the argument today is that white people of today need to repent for the white people of yesterday.
Lewis questions, however, the propriety of such ‘repentance.’ He observes that ‘England,’ as such, cannot commit sin. Sins are committed by people. The sins of ‘England’ for which these English intellectuals were ‘repenting’ were, in reality, the sins of the British Government. Their ‘repentance’, therefore, was not repentance at all but denunciation – for true repentance is acknowledging our own sin, not the sin of another.
Lewis does not argue that rebuke and denunciation is never justified - if laws and attitudes rooted in racial prejudices exist then such things should be denounced and rebuked. Lewis, however, observes an ever-present danger for those who do. As he puts it:
A group of such young penitents will say, ‘Let us repent our national sins’; what they mean is, ‘Let us attribute to our neighbour (even our Christian neighbour) in the Cabinet, whenever we disagree with him, every abominable motive that Satan can suggest to our fancy*
Lewis observed that the denunciation of the young intellectuals rather suggestively coincided with real sins which Lewis observed himself - cynicism of authority, self-righteousness and a failure to honour parents. We must beware when our denunciations, or even our confessions, conveniently coincide with our hates.
Lewis gives the example of a man who rebukes his mother who is committing a serious sin. A man who loves his mother will find this a painful but necessary act of obedience to Christ (who taught us that we must hate our mother in comparison to our love for Him). If, however, the man has demonstrated disdain for his mother previously, and so gleefully rebukes her when the opportunity presents itself, then his rebuke is not noble but merely the ugly overflow of his hatred for her.
True confession of sin is a costly and humbling act, and righteous denunciation should be also. If it is not then far from killing sin it indulges it. Our so-called ‘protest’ against evil, may merely be a manifestation of our own.
To come back to where we started. Taking the knee may be a sincere expression of protest against racist attitudes and practices. But it may, just as easily, be an expression of self-righteous hate and/or a manipulative tool for social coercion. The upshot is that we mustn’t excuse or accuse others based on appearance alone. Let the person who takes the knee, take the knee as they feel is right before God, but let the person who does not take the knee, likewise do so before God. Let everyone be convinced in their own mind. Only then can we hope to gain true harmony and freedom.
*https://blacklivesmatter.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/BLM_Trayvon_toolkit_english.pdf
*C S Lewis, God in the Dock, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2014), 206.