I spent my late teens and early 20s – more than six years – in discipleship ministry to young people. They were mostly refugees from Africa, racial minorities, and Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders. I poured everything I had into these kids. I was privileged to know them better than most.
Me, the whitest guy on the planet, and these young people shared our lives. This really was my life.
So it’s been difficult to stomach the avalanche of accusations off the back of my social media commentary these past few days. Accusations that I’ve never listened to minorities, or worse, that I don’t care. To those accusers, forgive me a moment of raw honesty: you have no idea to whom you are talking when you make those allegations. When I write this stuff, I have the black and brown faces of people I love and still pray for most days in my mind’s eye.
This is the reason I hate the victim narrative. I have seen its destruction. Up close and personal. I have felt it. I have been brought to tears over it. I have worked in the middle of it. It immiserates all whom it touches.
I saw the cultural Marxist dogma infect the minds of kids and make them fall into an entrapment of resentment and anger. I saw its overwhelming tendency to paralyse into hopelessness; to make them stop trying, to give up, to fall back.
I saw promising young men and women going from strength to strength, improving their grades, winning awards, desiring a better life. Then, I saw them go to high school or university and hear the voices of their Marxist educators. It sapped the lifeblood, the energy, and the purpose right out of them.
And it made them angry.
I saw it destroy families, too. It took away the will of parents to break their drug habit, to pursue their wayward children, or even try to get beyond Centrelink because they believed that this was their destiny as victims of society. It’s a tragedy that keeps you up at night.
Not only that, but it gave young people excuses to do as they pleased. As victims, they were innocent. They heaped up for themselves sins and transgressions, and were driven away from the desire to repent, because they didn’t believe they needed to.
Victimhood and cultural Marxism are wicked, insidious evils. I hate them.
It is an ideology of concealed racism. It makes victims out of races and keeps people down in festering hopelessness. Its all-consuming degradation of a person’s psychology makes them into its slaves.
I am not the only one who has seen this. Dr Ben Carson, Candace Owens, Larry Elder, Morgan Freeman, Warren Mundine, Thomas Sowell, and many more are wise people of colour who sound the same alarm.
The book of Jonah ends with Jonah sitting still, in a hopeless despond. From his seat in the dust, he cries out to God, “I do well to be angry!”
One of Jonah’s problems was that he believed he was a victim.
God gave him a green plant for shade. Jonah only knew about his sunburnt head. God saved Jonah’s life. It made Jonah miserable and resentful. God commissioned Jonah to bring salvation to an entire city. Jonah was upset by the personal inconvenience.
Basically, He couldn’t see God’s riches in goodness all around him, because he had become convinced he was victimised – an unwilling evangelist to people he did not like, with a lot of disadvantages in his life.
You don’t need a skin colour to fall into the victim trap. Every one of us can find a way, because every one of us has disadvantages and setbacks in life. That’s the human condition.
But so long as Jesus lives, you are no victim. Not only do you have all the blessings of God’s common grace each day, but He offers you everything, no matter who you are, when you deserved nothing, no matter who you are.
Like I keep saying, the God of the universe offers each one of us the greatest equality in the world. All of us need to get out of our seat in the dust and realise that.
I recently wrote about the diametric opposition between the crippling Marxist creed of Black Lives Matter and the liberty of the gospel. I don’t just know by explanation that this is anti-Christ. I know by first-hand experience.
