Christians desire the good for human society, but such good eventually can come only through a spiritual revival. We must confess any form of racism in our hearts and pray that the Spirit of God will lead our divided culture to an understanding of God’s tender-heartedness for lost sinners.

I will never forget the revulsive, heart-wrenching image of George Floyd’s face and neck crushed into the pavement and the coldly passive face of the white cop who refused to let him up in spite of his gasping cries for mercy. The whole world, whatever its ethnicity or nationality, is outraged.

Because it was a white cop and a black detainee, the incident immediately raised the race issue in America, once again. While maintaining my distress watching the slow death of George Floyd, I nonetheless felt a certain disquiet as I watched the mayhem in so many cities. Systemic racism was identified as the cause for arson and violence, yet in the televised accounts in many cities, I was puzzled to see that so few black people seemed to be part of the marches. Doubtless, many blacks were deeply hurt by the original incident, but the riots did not seem to show an incensed black community, rising up as one man in racist rage to destroy their own city centers. George Floyd’s brother even publically and passionately called for the end of violence. Accurate statistics are difficult to come by in the dark and chaotic streets of scores of towns. Nevertheless police in certain places reported that 60–70% of those arrested lived outside the state in which they were protesting. Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan asserted that “white men” were responsible for much of the widespread destruction in her town, showing up with crowbars, flares and buckets of gasoline with one purpose: to set cities on fire and hurt people. In other words, it seems that organized, outside groups, not the local black communities or those genuinely and rightfully protesting the murder of Floyd, seized the occasion to create public destruction.

If that is the case, what is driving them? One large graffiti scroll, written on a downtown Minneapolis wall, suggested a possible motivation for the violent side of the riots: “The System is Guilty.” Ex-revolutionary/Marxist, David Horowitz, published an insightful article entitled “It’s Not about Race: The Left Exploits another Black Victim.” Floyd’s death became the catalyst for another crack at bringing down a “guilty system.” Surely, Chauvin’s personal cruelty should be an occasion of self-examination. But we must ask whether Floyd’s own story has been hi-jacked by other, revolutionary issues that turned a peaceful, justified protest into pre-planned, riotous chaos.

What Is Behind the Riots?

Superficially, the struggle has been for political power. This was the case in Minneapolis, where Floyd’s death took place. As Horowitz says, “This national nightmare came out of a deeply progressive city, under the administration of progressives.” The Minneapolis police chief is black; the Minnesota attorney general for the state is black; the vice president of the city council is black; and the congresswoman for the district is black. Chauvin was a bad cop, with a long dossier of misconduct complaints and three killings already on his record. Why did the city administration refuse to discipline him? One of the other four cops involved in Floyd’s murder, Tou Thao, 34, had six previous unspecified police conduct complaints filed against him, five of which closed without discipline, and one of which was still open at the time of his firing. Another of the four, Thomas Lane, had a slew of traffic violations and became an officer despite having a criminal record.

The progressive ideology of diversity in the Minneapolis police department may have already caused a similar incident, when a poorly-trained policeman (a Somali immigrant named Mohammed Noor) killed an Australian woman, who had merely called for help. Such on-going laxness no doubt prepared the terrain for the cops involved in George Floyd’s death. Ironically, the rioters are calling for Noor, a black, to be freed for killing an unarmed white. Though backwards, this is part of the politics of the situation. These cases not only require us to consider issues of justice and police brutality, but also issues of power and ideology. In 2017, Larry Jacobs, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs, observed that “In Minneapolis, we have one of the most liberal activist agendas in the U.S. They are seeking to accomplish at the municipal level what isn’t being done at the federal level.”

Even supposing that Chauvin and his accomplices were racists would not prove Bernie Sanders’s claim of a “grotesque system of ingrained racism” in America. Horowitz asks, “Where is the evidence of ‘ingrained racism in America’”? “Nobody rose up to defend the murderer, no cop, no official, no right wing movement, no politician from the president on down, and no publication rose up to defend the murderer.”  That Chauvin may be a racist would not prove the false claim by Black Lives Matter (a group supported by billionaire George Soros, who wants to bring down America) that the police excessively threaten black men. Against the assertion that we are witnessing the “genocide” of the black race at the hands of the police, as some of the rioters claim, there were in 2019 only fourteen unarmed blacks killed by cops, whereas 48 police were killed in the line of duty.

Heather MacDonald, scholar and fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of The War on Cops (Encounter Books, 2016), who has studied this question at length, states: “A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the criminal-justice system with regard to arrests, prosecution or sentencing. Crime and suspect behavior, not race, determine most police actions.” She shows that in “2018…African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.” Such statistics undermine the claim of Black Lives Matter that justice is unfairly meted out to blacks.

Adding to the non-spontaneous nature of the violent side of the riots, it appears that individuals or groups may have organized the looting and destruction. Police in Kansas City, for example, found pallets of bricks and rocks staged near protest sites around the city. There do seem to be unseen forces helping to orchestrate and encourage a strongly leftist movement to tear down the system entirely. One must capitulate entirely to the all-encompassing notion that white privilege determines the very nature of American democracy. This was the impasse that occurred in a largely civil and interesting conversation between Charlamagne da God—who implied that Rush could not return as a guest until he admitted that white privilege was the rot responsible for every problem in the system—and Rush himself—who would not abandon his definition of white privilege as “a liberal, political construct right along the lines of political correctness…designed to intimidate and get people to shut up and admit they’re guilty of doing things they haven’t done.”

The catalyst in the movement to tear down the system was not a non-white cop killing a black man, nor the hundreds of black men killed in their own neighborhoods by other black men. It had to be a white cop and a black victim.

Two Groups

What has become a revolutionary moment can be explained by two groups of people that were part of the protest. (I am not discussing a third group: opportunistic looters.) On the one hand, those who were genuinely disturbed by the wanton killing of George Floyd have seized the occasion to ask whether the culture has sometimes denied justice to black people and kept them from reaching their full potential. They hope that such reflection, analysis and appropriate action will help heal the nation. The shock of the moment provides impetus to every American citizen to work with and for minorities so they can freely seize their rightful calling as equal, valued participants in the building of a better, more just and unified society.

The other group present at the demonstrations is intent on destroying both the buildings and the meaning of Western culture. It seeks to bring “the system” down.

How Is the System “Guilty”?

Bernie Sanders defines “the system” as “a grotesque system of ingrained racism and economic disparity that now more than ever needs to be ripped down.” Pushing the Democratic Party farther to the Left, Sanders encourages a socialist insurrection that will turn the USA into an American Socialist Republic. Aging radicals from the Sixties, Ben and Jerry (of the famous ice cream company) took the occasion to condemn “inhumane police brutality that is perpetuated by a culture of white supremacy. …Unless and until white America is willing to collectively acknowledge its privilege, take responsibility for its past and the impact it has on the present, and commit to creating a future steeped in justice, the list of names that George Floyd has been added to will never end.”

Behind the scenes, many large corporations support Black Lives Matter. An insightful commentator, Joe Schaeffer, the former Managing Editor of The Washington Times National Weekly Edition, believes that these corporations constitute “a vast corporate alliance with radical foundations and progressive billionaires, to support revolutionary organizations [that have] mushroomed into a profound danger that threatens Western Civilization itself.”

Antifa and Black Lives Matter speak of a guilt-ridden system, irredeemably racist from the beginning, founded by white male capitalists. To change the system, we must adopt secular socialism, “abolish the police” (eventually replacing them with militia proposed by BLM), get rid of the two parent family, eliminate the normativity of heterosexual monogamy (and any limitations on abortion), and abolish national borders, creating sanctuary cities that will allow thousands of left-voting immigrants to swarm into the country to change the system for ever.  This is a hijacking of classic democracy.

Those who seek the total deconstruction and subsequent reconstruction of America as a Marxist society have doubtless been educated in post-Sixties universities. Such a deconstruction is well-exhibited by their favorite text book, Howard Zinn’s, A People’s History of the United States (Harper and Row, 1980). Zinn’s Communist activities came to the attention of the FBI in 1948, when an informant reported a conversation in which Zinn disclosed that he was a member of the Communist Party and attended meetings five nights a week.  His undisguised anti-patriotic text is a full-scale Marxist critique of all the great patriotic moments in American history. Zinn dismisses Columbus as a greedy mass-murderer, and posits that Americans invented racism by creating the cruelest form of slavery the world has ever known. In addition, he sees the American involvement in the Second World War as equally reprehensible in its capitalistic motivations as was Hitler’s in his politics of genocide. Ex-Marxist Horowitz, who saw the massive importance of the Christian faith of the Founders as the great humanizing factor of the American experiment, describes Zinn’s book as “a dishonest, malignant and ignorant work.”

Why is one book important? Zinn’s book has become the text of choice of the left-wing professoriate and is the most widely (often the only) assigned American history book in high schools and universities across the country. Such higher educational materials have naturally caused our younger generations to find “the system” guilty and to feel a great sense of personal cultural guilt (including a certain moral satisfaction for having such a sentiment) for their unjust country. The subtitle of Grabar’s book says it well: “Exposing the Fake History that Turned a Generation against America.” This anti-American mind-set among the intelligentsia appears as professors around the country offer assistance and support to the rioters. Two practicing lawyers were caught throwing a Molotov cocktail into a police car, and some Left Wing mayors and governors justify physical violence and the destruction of property (such as Governor Roy Cooper, mentioned above).

What is behind these riots? Is it a rising ideology of anti-American cultural Marxism, ready to reject the free market of constitutional democracy, free speech (as in contemporary universities) and the free exercise of theistic/Twoist religion? Let us trust that the peace-loving side of the protests wins out and that the classic American system “in God we Trust,” like the British system “God save the Queen,” will survive as political Western expressions of religious Twoism. The rising “raze-the-system” view of culture is religiously Oneist and pagan, and is a genuine threat, as Albert Mohler warns in his book that appeared last week, The Gathering Storm (Nelson Books, 2020). Having a holy God as a separate source of authority and morals, beyond the quixotic power of sinful human beings, is a protection against the inevitable cruelty of state totalitarianism.  Contemporary progressivism, in the name of freedom, naively wants to erase all reference to the Creator, deny anything outside of the human or the natural, in favor of a system based on one’s right to self-define. It makes the fallible human being the source of ultimate truth, just as Marxism has always done. These huge issues are no longer bubbling below the surface of our culture. They have erupted in scores of cities in the form of rocks, cement-filled bottles, two-by-fours, and mailbox bombs. It appears that our nation is being taken over bit by bit by a Marxist revolution that has very little to do with helping black people but is only using them to advance a goal to overthrow our  government structures built on Constitutional democracy.

Christians desire the good for human society, but such good eventually can come only through a spiritual revival. We must confess any form of racism in our hearts and pray that the Spirit of God will lead our divided culture to an understanding of God’s tender-heartedness for lost sinners.

In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. (1 Jn. 4:8-10).

The following words are from Jesus, when he could hardly breathe, as he called out his Father’s name. Abandoned even by the Father, he yet called “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” His message of forgiveness still calls out to racists, fascists, hypocritical Christians, angry shop-owners, hate-filled White Supremicists and ambitious politicians—the whole lot of us!  God our Creator is the humble, condescending lover of sinners who was crushed for our sinful hearts, yet promises purity, hope, change and future life with him on a renewed earth. None of the gods of paganism have these characteristics. Islam and Rabbinic Judaism have no cross, no ultimate sacrifice that will guarantee to sinful human beings a state of ultimate innocence. Surely this message, you say, cannot be true, but it is. The overwhelming God, so great we cannot know his mind (1 Corinthians 2:1; Rom. 11:36) who created everything and rules over everything for eternity surely could not be described as humble and loving, unless the propitiation of the cross was his idea—and it is!

Dr. Peter Jones is scholar in residence at Westminster Seminary California and associate pastor at New Life Presbyterian Church in Escondido, Calif. He is director of truthXchange, a communications center aimed at equipping the Christian community to recognize and effectively respond to the rise of paganism. This article is used with permission.