Punching Every Place That Isn’t Christian: The Trouble of Kinism in Christian Circles

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is a concept born out of Critical Race Theory. It is primarily focused on “diversifying” workplaces and cultures in some of the absurdist ways possible. It is, without a doubt, a godless agenda that is focused more on race, ethnicity, and sexuality than ability, prowess, and worth. It should also come as no surprise that it is a politically motivated movement, governed almost entirely by the political left.

What is the Christian to do with such a movement? Well, the answer ought to be obvious. We fight against this godless agenda with the truth of God’s Word. Afterall, “We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5).

We take the theologically and politically liberal to the Word of God to bulldoze their arguments. We turn to places like Ephesians 2:11-14, where we read:

Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called “the uncircumcision” by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands—remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.

We show them that, within the Kingdom of God, ethnicity counts for very little indeed. What matters, from God’s vantage point, is whether we have bowed the knee to Christ; that is to say, He cares about whether we are in Christ or outside of Christ. That’s what determines our place in the Kingdom.

There’s much more to be said on this front, but a concerning development has occurred within elements of the conservative right: A movement towards Uniformity, Inequity, and Exclusion (UIE). This movement, meant to combat what is occurring in the left’s camps, is beginning to creep into Reformed circles. Part of what makes it so troubling is that it is not only reactionary, but it is, like the left’s DEI, based almost entirely on ethnicity and race. It views the dispersion that occurred at the Tower of Babel as both good and instructive for how nations are to operate now, even though Scripture clearly paints a picture that, through the gospel, that which was dispersed is being brought back together in Christ.

Several would-be thought leaders have tried to insist that the conservative Christian can have no ‘enemies on the right.’ The idea is that, as Jesus said, “For he that is not against us is for us” (Mark 9:40). What this fails to consider is that the Apostles actively rebuked Simon the Sorcerer when they discovered that he was attempting to use the name of Christ to simply make a profit (Acts 8:9-24). When we try to fight against the enemies of the Kingdom through unholy alliances and sinful tactics, we may very well succeed in destroying the movement we aimed to take down, while simultaneously creating an uncontrollable monster of our own making.

The Problem of Kinism

The root problem of UIE can be traced to the philosophy behind Kinism. For some, this is a term that is new and strange, while others have been very familiar with the movement for several years. The basic gist of it is the belief that God has intentionally designed the human race to be segregated on the basis of ethnicity – that is, along ‘racial’ lines. Unlike some of the other “Christian” subgroups that have formed over the last century, this particular branch does believe that God can save people of different ethnicities. Typically, it simply insists on the idea that our ethnic kin are to be loved and held closer than our spiritual kin; i.e., my white atheist neighbor is closer to me than my African Christian brother, both on the basis of proximity to my person and ethnicity/culture.

This is a disturbing and unbiblical teaching that has been garnering more attention as of late, and it can function as an entry point into even more disturbing social philosophies. I do not think it is a mistake that many Kinists eventually adapt some form of White Supremacist ideology—if they have not already bought into it.

To illustrate personally, I moved to Pennsylvania when I was twelve years old. One of the first things I can remember when our family moved was driving down the main street of our town and seeing an elderly man dressed in a Nazi uniform, marching down the street with a flag printed with a Swastika. My father turned to me in disbelief and said, “This place is nuts. We’ve got neo-Nazis walking around!”

Over the years, that elderly man turned out to be the least of our problems. We received invitations to join the local Ku Klux Klan and have heard various reports of animal sacrifices being performed in the forest near our home by these groups. I’ve personally had repeated run-ins in Pennsylvania with those who would be defined as Neo-Nazis, White Supremacists, and Kinists. Most would be shocked to read about some of these encounters, but permit me to offer a few brief examples from the past decade.

When I was twenty-two, I was preaching at a church less than an hour from our home. I distinctly remember a young, mixed-ethnicity family sitting towards the front of the church. The wife was black and the husband white, and they had a little boy in the pew with them. Of course, this was unusual: Where I live in Pennsylvania, the population is predominantly white. Nonetheless, they seemed happy and were members of that church.

At the end of the church service, an older couple came over to me and asked me point blank, “What do you think about blacks?” I was confused and asked what he meant. “I mean, blacks and whites marrying. What do you think? It ought not to be. It’s wrong. Sinful. The Bible tells us we should not be unequally yoked.” I explained that the Bible verse in question—about being unequally yoked—was actually about believers not marrying unbelievers, but he would have none of it. “It ain’t right,” he adamantly repeated. “It ain’t right.”

Fast forward a few years, and I was speaking at a church conference in the area against Critical Race Theory. I was explaining why the woke mob had to be fought with the truth of God’s Word and, like above, quoted from Ephesians 2 to explain how, in Christ, we are made one.

I explained that it is not that our ethnic differences vanish in Christ, but rather that our division ceases to be. The differences exist, but the divisions do not. We are one in Christ. The dispersion of Babel is rectified through the Cross and the work of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

After this sermon, a man approached me and said, “I get everything you were saying, but I can’t stand those blacks. They’re like cockroaches. They just crawl out from everywhere. They’re ruining our state.” If this sounds extreme, just know that he said a lot more that I’m intentionally leaving out. The gist, however, was that each ethnic group should keep to themselves.

Most recently, I’ve been contacted by several men identifying themselves as Kinists. They believe in the segregation of the ‘races,’ especially in churches, and were horrified to discover that—despite my being both reformed and conservative—permit different ethnic groups to worship in our church. One visited in person, but quickly left when he discovered this, while the others reached out by email and phone and vowed to never set foot into our church.

It is possible that I am simply residing in highly unusual territory and no one else has seen what I have seen, but I bring up these examples to help the reader understand that what I’m writing about is not merely a social media phenomenon. It is a real movement with real people, and it is causing real problems.

Of course, if the Bible actually teaches Kinism and the segregation of ethnic groups, we should be all for it. The problem, however, is that not only does the Bible not teach Kinism, it actively opposes it and any similar ideas.

The Bible’s Defense Against Kinism

Within the Dominion Mandate (Gen. 1:26-28), God calls upon man to take dominion of the earth by being fruitful, filling it, and subduing it. There’s a very real sense in which man is supposed to spread out upon the earth. However, when we fast forward to Genesis 11, we find that the people are not doing that at all. They are huddling together and, rather than spreading out over the earth, they are building up an idolatrous tower in one centralized location.

God’s response? Confuse their languages and cause them to disperse. We read in Genesis 11:9 that at Babel, “the Lord confused the language of all the earth. And from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth.” This is obviously where we begin to see the rise of different ethnicities or races and cultures.

Now, the Kinist would argue that this is good and right. Races should be separated and segregated. However, when we reach the New Testament, and specifically the day of Pentecost, we find that the dispersion at Babel is reversed in several significant ways. The Holy Spirit fills the Apostles, and they begin to preach in different tongues (Acts 2:4-8)

Through the Holy Spirit, and the gospel, the barrier of different languages is overcome. Those who were separated and segregated by an inability to understand each other are brought together by the power of God to become the one people of God. This is, in a nutshell, a fulfillment of the Great Commission’s charge to go into all the world, making disciples of all nations.

Of course, not everything went perfectly and there were hiccups in the early Church. For example, we have recorded in Galatians an incident where the Apostle Paul rebuked the Apostle Peter for separating himself from the Gentiles (Gal. 2:11-12). Paul obviously saw that separation and segregation between different Christians due to ethnicity is sinful and worthy of rebuke. Such behavior must be opposed (Gal. 2:15-16). And, to be clear, this is not the only place that Paul talks about the abolition of such divisions due to ethnicity. In Ephesians 2:14-22, Paul explains in detail how Jews and Gentiles are brought together in unity into one Body through the salvation offered us in Christ:

For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.

The dividing wall of hostility is done away with in Christ, peace is made between us and others, and we experience unity as the Body of Christ. This is a far more compelling picture of biblical beauty, rather than the Kinist’s insistence on segregating people on the basis of ethnicity. This is partially what Paul is getting at in Galatians 3:28 when he says, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Again, the idea is not that our ethnic distinctions, or gender distinctions, or physical differences go away. God still cares very much whether you’re a male or a female, for example. But while those things don’t just disappear, the division between us and others does as we become part of the same Body, filled by the same Spirit, as citizens of the same Kingdom.

As we enter the Kingdom of Heaven through Christ, we also discover that God now counts us as His very own people. We effectively become part of the true Israel of God. As Romans 2:28-29 tells us, “For no one is a Jew who is merely one outwardly, nor is circumcision outward and physical. But a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter. His praise is not from man but from God.” So, there are still ethnic Jews, but the true Israel of God is made up of people from all over the earth who have professed Christ as Lord and Savior.

The heavenly vision is one wherein a great multitude of people stand together in one accord to praise God. Revelation 7:9-10 gloriously recounts how John saw:

A great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!”

Who Then Are Our Kin?

Clearly, Kinism does not pass Scripture’s own doctrinal test. It simply cannot fit in with the story that Scripture is communicating. But, if there’s one text that Kinism simply cannot answer or account for, it is Jesus’ own teaching in Matthew 10:35-37:

For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.

According to Jesus Himself, the closest affinity for the Christian is not our ethnic, biological kin, but our spiritual kin. Our closest relatives are not necessarily those who share our blood, but those who have been washed in the blood of Christ.

Christians have long understood this. Arguably one of the most famous hymns ever written is Martin Luther’s A Mighty Fortress is Our God. The final verse of the hymn contains these great reflections and reasons for rejoicing:

That word above all earthly powers,
No thanks to them, abideth;
The Spirit and the gifts are ours
Through Him who with us sideth:
Let goods and kindred go,
This mortal life also;
The body they may kill:
God’s truth abideth still,
His Kingdom is forever.

“Let goods and kindred go…” It is difficult, in our modern age, to really do as this hymn implores us to do. We love our stuff, and we love to be comfortable. Is it wrong to love our families? Absolutely not. Is it wrong to love our families more than we love fellow believers we do not know? Again, I think the answer is clearly no. Of course we will love those whom we know before we love those whom we do not know.

However, there is something terribly askew when we think our true and lasting kin are simply those who look the same as us, regardless of their spiritual status in the Kingdom of God. Our true and lasting kin, as Scripture clearly teaches, are those who stand alongside us as citizens of the Kingdom. My church family, in other words, is more of my family than my unsaved physical family members.

Something about Kinism seems to appeal to our base and sinful fleshly desires. But Galatians 5:24 reminds us, “those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” Our great hope is not a segregated Kingdom where we stand apart from those who are different than us, but a glorious Kingdom wherein we stand united in Christ – on earth as it is in heaven! This is far more beautiful and far more glorious than what we have proffered to us in Kinist doctrine. Therefore, with our eyes set on Christ, let us tear down the idol factory of Kinism and live in such a way that we love our brothers and sisters in Christ, regardless of ethnic differences and the colour of our skin. In Christ, the divisions are done away.