RACISM — STRAINING A GNAT AND SWALLOWING A CAMEL

Let’s be honest. No one whose church is comfortably segregated gets to lecture the world on morality. You don’t get to thunder about holiness while quietly maintaining racial boundaries and calling it “tradition” or “culture.” That kind of “faith” may be tidy, but it isn’t Christian.

If you’ve been a Christian for years and the only place you feel at ease is around people who look exactly like you, something has gone wrong. The Gospel doesn’t just save souls; it shatters walls. Jesus didn’t die to create gated religious communities. He died to form one new people, drawn from everywhere, bound together by grace, not skin tone.

I once attended a school that wanted me to sign a pledge. No secular music. No movies. A neat little checklist, designed to keep everyone visibly clean. I refused to sign it. And here’s the thing: the entire time I was there, I never saw anything but white faces. Not in the classroom. Not in chapel. Not in leadership. The rules were strict; the fellowship was narrow.

That’s when it hit me. This is exactly what Jesus was talking about.

The Gospel record Jesus calling out religious leaders who obsessed over tiny details while ignoring massive moral failures. He said they strained out a gnat and swallowed a camel. They were meticulous about the small stuff and blind to the big stuff. External compliance had replaced internal transformation.

Policing playlists and clothes and movies and someone’s language while ignoring prejudice is distraction—not holiness.

Jesus said the world would know His followers by their love, not by their rulebooks. Love crosses lines. Love makes room. Love doesn’t hide behind purity codes while refusing to sit next to people who don’t fit the preferred mold. When a church can enforce behavior but can’t reflect the diversity of God’s creation, it’s not protecting the Gospel; it’s shrinking it. It is mocking it, intentionally or not.

Racism is not a side issue. It’s not “political.” It’s a Gospel problem. Every person is made in the image of God. Period. A faith that can’t see that clearly is already compromised, no matter how clean its hands appear.

Jesus didn’t come to make us respectable. He came to make us new. And sometimes the most dangerous thing in the room isn’t the music someone listens to or the movie they watch, but the quiet, unchallenged sin everyone has learned to live with.

Strain the gnat if you want. But don’t pretend you’re righteous while the camel is still sitting in your throat.

BDD