Ibram X. Kendi visited a church to say this:
“The heartbeat of being an antiracist is the ability to confess.”
And this:
Just like one is seeking to really sort of . . . allow God and sort of Jesus to save their souls, they first have to state, “I need my soul to be saved,” right? Because there is something wrong or there is something that I’m doing that needs to be washed clean. You have to admit that you were raised in many ways to be racist before you can even begin the process of being antiracist.
Translation: repent of the collective, “implicit” sins you committed solely by virtue of existing as a “white person” in society so that you can enter the Ibram X. Kendi covenant of works and try to redeem yourself by becoming the sort of committed “antiracism” activist his ideology demands.
Of course, he will never specify how much “antiracism” work you will need to do to before he will consider you sufficiently anti-racist. Because the only sufficient amount is more.
There is no grace here. Only guilt.
Of course, all of this is beside the point because Kendi is not making a sincere theological argument. He is cynically exploiting affinity for the Gospel message of Christianity and twisting it for his secular, ideological ends.
And the ideology he is pushing is the same self-serving nonsense grievance hustlers like him always push. It assumes without evidence that there can only ever be one explanation for unequal outcomes, however they are measured and wherever they are found. And that sole explanation is the “systemic racism” he declaims. This view ignores a mountain of scholarship from much smarter and more honest analysts—Walter Williams, Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, among many others—who frame the issues differently. Kendi simply waves off these competing frameworks, or worse, accuses those who take them seriously of racism for the convenient reason that they don’t unconditionally support what he insists is the single acceptable framing.
This is not a serious analytical framework. This is a cheap rhetorical parlor trick.
This is not intellectually honesty. This is intellectual fraud.
And of course the “antiracism” he demands is just a more overt and patronizing version of the “bleeding-heart,” statist paternalism that has trapped people—black and otherwise—in cross-generational cycles of poverty and underperformance for decade after decade. Ideologues like Kendi claim to care but all they ever manage to deliver is deeper dependency on the largesse of a political party.
But back to theology: Compare Kendi’s false gospel to what the Apostle Peter shares in Acts 10, when the good news was being extended to the Gentiles (emphases mine):
Acts 10:34–37 (ESV): Truly I understand that God shows no partiality, 35 but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.
And
Acts 10:42–43 (ESV): And he commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one appointed by God to be judge of the living and the dead. 43 To him all the prophets bear witness that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”
And
Acts 10:44–45 (ESV): 44 While Peter was still saying these things, the Holy Spirit fell on all who heard the word. 45 And the believers from among the circumcised who had come with Peter were amazed, because the gift of the Holy Spirit was poured out even on the Gentiles.
And
Acts 10:46–48 (ESV): Then Peter declared, 47 “Can anyone withhold water for baptizing these people, who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” 48 And he commanded them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ.
And later, recounting these events to the other apostles:
Acts 11:15–18 (ESV): 15 As I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell on them just as on us at the beginning. 16 And I remembered the word of the Lord, how he said, ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ 17 If then God gave the same gift to them as he gave to us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could stand in God’s way?” 18 When they heard these things they fell silent. And they glorified God, saying, “Then to the Gentiles also God has granted repentance that leads to life.”
The power of confession lies in God’s grace, not in Kendi’s ideological formulations. It has nothing to do with race or which group you identify with.
God’s grace is open to all who believe. It has nothing to do with what is being peddled by Ibram X. Kendi.