“To destroy a people, you must first sever their roots.”[1]
The above quote is from one of the twentieth century’s greatest truth tellers—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008). Born in Russia, Solzhenitsyn studied mathematics, philosophy, literature, and history at the university level. He was thrice decorated for personal heroism as a Russian Army Officer during the fight against the Nazis in World War II. In 1945 he was arrested for criticizing Stalin in private correspondence and sentenced to an eight-year term in a labor camp. From that experience he wrote One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich which was published in 1962, the first of many books. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1974, he was stripped of his citizenship and expelled from the Soviet Union whereupon he moved to Vermont with his wife and four sons.[2]
I have taken time to briefly describe Solzhenitsyn’s background because his experiences and quiet words in defense of truth from such a man speaks far louder than the din of lies shouted by Black Lives Matter and their toadies including spineless politicians, the corrupt media, universities in name only, complicit mega-corporation billionaires, ranting Hollywood leftists, self-proclaimed “intellectuals,” and many corrupt voices/false teachers in the Church. Such lies cannot long stand against the timeless truth of which God is the author and finisher.
Regardless of their self-professed good intentions, the devil-doing of those leading and promoting Black Lives Matter is exposed by its own words on BLM’s official website[3] with regard to its beliefs and true objectives.
Black Lives Matter Beliefs and Goals
A thoughtful examination of just three of BLM’s goals gives a clear and frightening understanding of the damage that is being done in the war against the soul of American life and liberty including the culture at large and the average American family, black or white.
1. “We are self-reflexive and do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk, especially Black trans women who continue to be disproportionately impacted by trans-antagonistic violence.”
BLM wishes to dismantle cisgender privilege. The term “cisgender” means “of, relating to, or being a person whose gender identity corresponds with the sex the person had or was identified as having at birth.”[4] Although the word may be unfamiliar to many, the concept that the two sexes equate to two genders is obvious to the vast majority of Americans and needs no label to explain it unless one is of the “woke” crowd.
Carla A. Pfeffer expands on Merriam Webster’s definition: “I grew up in a family with a cisgender and heterosexually identified mother and father of the same race (White) who had 2 children when they were well into their late 20s and early 30s and after they legally married with the full support of both their families.”[5]
For BLM, cisgender privilege has been transformed to be equivalent to white privilege. Such privilege cannot be eliminated without suppressing the carriers of this disease (privilege) by denigrating their belief systems. Therefore, the supposed evil that adherents to BLM ideology desire to dismantle are the dominant Judeo-Christian beliefs in the nuclear family, heterosexuality, marriage, and monogamy from which “white privilege” supposedly arises. However, the fatal flaw of BLM’s ideology regarding cisgender families is that the very nature of these beliefs is color-blind. To the contrary, the strength of cisgender families (of whatever color) rests on the universal truth of the values, beliefs, and structure of Judeo-Christian families.
2. “We foster a queer‐affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual (unless s/he or they disclose otherwise).”
Now we come to “trans” by which is meant transgender and defined as “of, relating to, or being a person whose gender identity differs from the sex the person had or was identified as having at birth.”[6] And trans does not mean just male and female but a whole alphabet of identities such as LGBTQ+. However, deny it as they might, it is one’s biological sex that determines gender, and there are just two. BLM calls this belief being in the “tight grip of heteronormative thinking.”
3. “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.”
BLM wishes to disrupt (disorder, upset) the nuclear family structure by supporting (replacing) it with extended families and “villages” (also infamously promoted by Hillary Clinton). This group care for children promises to limit such care “to the degree that mothers, parents, and children (what about fathers?) are comfortable.” Tell that to parents who have unsuccessfully objected to the things taught in their child’s classroom that made them uncomfortable (e.g., transgenderism).
History reveals the fatal flaw of BLM ideology with regard to the nuclear family, marriage, monogamy, and heterosexuality.
1. Nuclear family, marriage, and monogamy
Daniel Patrick Moynihan retired from the United States Senate (Democratic Senator from New York) in 2000. Near the beginning of his career he was an assistant Secretary of Labor in Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. At the time of his retirement, the senator was asked to describe the biggest change he had seen in his forty years of government service. Articulate and intellectual, the distinguished public servant, having served both Democratic and Republican presidents, replied, “The biggest change, in my judgment, is that the family structure has come apart all over the North Atlantic world” and had occurred in “an historical instant. Something that was not imaginable forty years ago had happened.” Author of the 1965 Moynihan Report officially known as “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action”, Moynihan knew that of which he spoke.[7]
Enormously controversial at the time of its release, the report continues to be a topic of debate in the twenty-first century. The report characterized the instability of the black families in America and the importance of the family unit in providing that stability.
At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro Family. It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time…The role of the family in shaping character and ability is so pervasive as to be easily overlooked. The family is the basic social unit of American life; it is the basic socializing unit. By and large, adult conduct in society is learned as a child…the child learns a way of looking at life in his early years through which all later experience is viewed and which profoundly shapes his adult conduct.[8]
Writing shortly after Moynihan’s perceptive summation of the condition of the family structure, William Bennett noted the deep concern of Americans with regard to the family. Bennett pointed to the general instability of the American family and the contributing factors such as the decline in the status and centrality of marriage in society, substantially greater percentage of out-of-wedlock births, and the significant increase in co-habitation. With the decline of social perception and necessity of matrimony, children are less valued, more neglected, more vulnerable to non-family influences, and have less resources devoted for their care and benefit. Bennett wrote that, “Public attitudes toward marriage, sexual ethics, and child-rearing have radically altered for the worse. In Sum, the family has suffered a blow that has no historical precedent—and one that has enormous ramifications for American society.”[9]
Two decades have elapsed since Moynihan’s diagnosis of the disintegration of the family unit as the major modern affliction of the Western world and Bennett’s reporting of Americans’ purported concern for the survival of the family. It is no longer the problem of the black population. The deterioration of the family unit is pervasive and crosses all ethnic, socio-economic, and religious lines although the poor and disadvantaged bear a greater portion of the misery. Yet, there has been no public hue and cry to reverse the decline, no urgency or sense of crisis in dealing with the problem, no new series of government studies explaining the situation, and no investigative reporting or meaningful media attention regarding the most profound change in society that has had no historical precedent. Why is this so? The answer is that the solutions to reverse the decline and devastation of marriage and the family unit stand as polar opposites of the prevailing and pervasive humanistic worldview of which Black Lives Matter is the current purveyor of this cultural carnage. Its own website condemns it.
2. Heterosexuality
Heterosexual marriage is the central organizing concept in society. By contrast, homosexuality is a disorganizing concept with regard to human relationships and ultimately disorganizing in building stable, enduring societies. Heterosexual marriage orders the soul whereas sexual intimacy outside of marriage, co-habitation, divorce (apart from infidelity and willful desertion), and homosexuality (with or without benefit of a civil union) are inherently disorderly and destructive. History and human nature attest to these assertions for according to researchers, heterosexual married life as opposed to all other similar social arrangements provides greater financial security, better health and sex, and a longer and better life.[10]
Bennett called marital love that rests upon a foundation of unconditional commitment as “…safer, more enduring, and more empowering that any sentiment yet discovered or any human arrangement yet invented.” He credits these attributes to the basic heterosexual complementarity of man and woman joined together as one in marital love. The complementariness of the relationship is based on the differences, not just the physical but also the emotional and psychological. As the physical differences make sexual union possible, so too do the emotional and psychological differences of the marriage partners complement and complete each other.[11] The union becomes stronger than its parts.
In the longer term, homosexuality and same-sex marriage undermine society. The central cultural vision upon on which the nation was founded was based on biblical Christianity and its understanding of the nature of man and his origins. The truth of the Christian worldview of marriage as being between a man and woman is supported by the fact that it is a cultural universal imprinted on human nature and common to all people groups, all cultures, and all ages in history. Heterosexual marriage is the well-spring of civilization, and its centrality in the human experience is indisputable. Humans have fashioned numerous methods by which to organize their societies, but the common link to all is the family unit—a father, a mother, and children living together in bonds of committed caring.
God created heterosexual marriage as a cultural universal, and the strength and unity provided by this universal is the foundation of a strong and enduring society. Where traditional marriage is in broad disarray, as it is in most Western societies, it does not disprove the truth of the heterosexual marriage universal but rather speaks of the ravages caused by the ascending humanist worldview. Where traditional marriage declines, so do those societies decline that allow it to occur.
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During the turmoil in America of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Russell Kirk wrote The Roots of the American Order, a book of exceptional scope and insight into the origins of America. Summarizing the words of Simone Weil, Kirk states that “…order is the path we follow, or the pattern by which we live with purpose and meaning. Above food and shelter, she continues, we must have order. The human condition is insufferable unless we perceive a harmony, an order in existence.” Kirk identified two roots of this order: the order of the soul (moral order) and the order of the republic (social order), and they are intricately linked and dependent on each other. Disorder of one leads to disorder of the other.[12]
The American order that was established by the founders was not an “ideology” nor a “thing” created for the moment. Rather, the American order is a living culture whose roots have grown over millennia and were watered by the sound principles of moral and civil social order arising from eternal truths and the revelation of God to the Hebrews and the first century Christians. America was established on these eternal truths and the revelation in which the Founders believed, and upon these pillars they built the greatest nation in the history of the world.
Kirk’s roots of order are the same roots of which Solzhenitsyn spoke in the quote given at the beginning of this article. BLM is attempting to sever those roots along with America’s cultural norms, traditions, beliefs, and even our history and that of Western civilization. Those severed roots are to be replaced with a humanistic cultural Marxist society whose citizens will be subject to machinations of an autonomous socialistic state and its evil overseers. Such a society will be devoid of the three essential elements of the good society: divine order, justice, and freedom.
Do not fool yourselves by blithely dismissing the challenge of BLM. Our present struggle is an existential war of the highest magnitude between good and evil, and the conflict is spreading around the world. What must Americans to do who love this nation and its history? For the answer we look once again to the wisdom of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in which he gives us both the diagnosis of our plight and a prescription for preserving America’s Judeo-Christian cultural heritage and its attendant freedom.
“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it (evil) will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers . . . we are ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”[13]
“The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world.”[14]
Larry G. Johnson
June 19, 2020
[1] “Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,” AZQuotes, https://www.azquotes.com/author/13869-Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn (accessed June 18, 2020).
[2] “Biography,” The Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center, https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/his-life-overview/biography (accessed June 18, 2020).
[3] “What We Believe,” Black Lives Matter, https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/ (accessed June 18, 2020).
[4] “Cisgender,” Merriam Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cisgender (accessed June 18, 2020).
[5] Ibid.
[6] “Transgender,” Merriam Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/transgender (accessed June 18, 2020).
[7] William J. Bennett, The Broken Hearth, (New York: Doubleday, 2001), pp. 2, 85.
[8] Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy, (Cambridge Massachusetts: M.I.T. Press, 1967), p. 3.
[9] Bennett, pp. 1-2.
[10] Ibid., pp. 14-188.
[11] Ibid., pp. 186-187
[12] Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order, (Washington D. C.: Regnery-Gateway, 1991), pp. 3-5.
[13] Solzhenitsyn, AZ Quotes.
[14] Ibid.
