Favoritism: God Hates It

Favoritism: God hates it. The Bible says that God is not a “lifter of faces.” (Leviticus 19:35, Acts 10:34, Luke 20:21, Romans 2:11, Ephesians 6:9, Colossians 3:25) God doesn’t check your face first to see what color or gender or economic class you are, or to see if you are on a preconceived friends or enemies list. Or as Dr. Martin Luther King put it, God judges not by the color of one’s skin, but by the content of one’s character.

The Law of Moses says in Deuteronomy 16:19, “You shall not pervert justice. You shall not show partiality. And you shall not take a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise, and subverts the words of the righteous.” The evil here is whatever favors we may use to change what people say or to change what they see.

What a scripture for today! From today’s crony capitalism, to “good-old-boy” (or “good-old-gal”) systems in the church, to judges who fail to recuse themselves, to countless other conflicts of interest, the issue of favoritism or partiality is intensely relevant in an age like ours where who-you-know matters more than the merits of your case. Issues of bias and preferential treatment abound in the workplace, in the halls of government, in the community, and in the church.

It is scary. I see bias and favoritism in myself, and I struggle to resist it. What scares me more is the ways I may be blind to it. I also see the same evils in self-proclaimed social justice warriors who claim to crusade against them.

In the political world, it’s amazing how the sultans of spin change their tune, depending on whether the public figure has an R or a D behind their name. Those rich, evil One Per-Centers are evil only if they are Big Oil or Wall Street, not if they have names like Amazon or Google. Recently, interviewees on the street who were asked about the new tax cut thought it was wonderful when they were told that the plan came from Bernie Sanders, but terrible when told it came from President Trump. (http://www.breitbart.com/video/2017/12/22/watch-liberals-approve-of-gop-tax-plan-disguised-as-bernie-sanders-plan/) Allegations are automatically true if you are Roy Moore, but automatically excusable if you are Ted Kennedy or Bill Clinton.

Is the difference a matter of the content of their character, as I am sure someone will argue? Or are these really glaring examples of the evil of favoritism, checking people’s faces first?

Or what about the recent furor over the claims that President Trump called certain nations an obscene name for cesspools? Well, what about Lyndon Johnson’s reported claim that his efforts would have “(a censored term for African-Americans) voting Democratic for the next 200 years”? It is objected that those reported words of LBJ cannot be verified. But Trump and two senators at the meeting in question also deny what Trump is claimed to have said. Both deserve the benefit of the doubt.

The real issue is whether there was racism driving the point the President was making. It’s funny how only a week ago, the nations to which Trump was referring were supposed to be so bad that it would be cruel to send refugees back home to them. Now, all of a sudden it becomes an outrage to call the evil what it is. Make no mistake, God loves the people who live in the nations we are talking about, but don’t tell me that God loves those cesspools of corruption and injustice that have driven so many people to flee from them. Don’t be like the mother who claims to love the child, but doesn’t hate the dirt on the child’s face. I am reminded of Tony Campolo’s line where he says his audience will be angrier at him because he said “S–t” than at the fact that so many people go to bed hungry.

So the issue becomes why the President singled out nations of color. Part of the answer is that he should have pointed to immigrants from India and China rather than Norway as points of comparison. The other reason why he cited these nations is because that’s where the crises happen to be. Why the evils of corruption, injustice, and resulting poverty are so prevalent in certain places is a scandal regardless of color. And it is a subtle form of racism to excuse these evils.

Why is the murder rate so high among urban African-Americans? Is it racism to point out the obvious? No, I would argue that to excuse or ignore this evil is to do the work of the Klan for them. That is truly racist. It is using the color of one’s face as an excuse for evil.

Or remember when a former Attorney General refused to prosecute clear cases of voter intimidation in Philadelphia?  The reason he gave was because he said the intimidators were “my people.”  He once publicly stated that his race was more important than his position as Attorney General.  Sounds like someone who would check my face first before deciding whether to protect my civil rights.

Avoiding the evil of favoritism – to call an evil what it is, without checking the face for race, gender, economic class, or political party – is notoriously difficult. Nobody said justice was easy. Instead of branding everyone we disagree with as a racist or sexist or deplorable, we need to first root out the evil within ourselves. God is not a “lifter of faces.” Neither should we be.