I have had heartbreaking discussions with people on more than one occasion who felt alienated from their church bodies by the infiltration of this modern racial and identity-based zeitgeist.

I can speak for myself here. I am a children of two different types of “PoC” minorities. On one side, my family has experienced the evils of communism, as abhorrent and detestable of an ideology as any I can conceive of. I am part-Asian, part-Hispanic, but, as I naively believed as a child, 100% American. I watched churches bring people together from vastly different backgrounds. As a child, my parent’s friends included a young couple who were a short black Jamaican man who married a tall South American woman; I never thought about their races or even heights. We were friends in Christ and I got along well with them and their child. There were many other such “mixes,” including my parents, all in a Southern church.

My wife is white. By most measures, though I had a middle class upbringing with some difficulties, I was more “privileged” than her by every metric. We are an interracial couple who is joined in Christ, and our races rarely occurs to me except as a joke.

I am fortunate that my current church body is silent on the issue of race, in spite of being maybe only half-white, and very significantly black.

However, I know people who live in much larger cities, and hear about the nonsense they are subjected to. White people in tears apologizing to “people of color” for privilege. Long meditations on difference (which serves to divide) and identity (which is, frankly, almost indistinguishable from hubris in modern dialog, and should have no place in a church). And other interracial couples I know are either hurting in their marriage or have left their churches over this.

It is in a way a microcosm of culture. But I reflect on earlier years and it never felt this way. It felt like a haven, like a joining of different people and a place for families to be built up. I look at the current landscape and feel bitterness.

And most of all, I think of my own family. My wife is precious, and is guilty of no crimes against me or anyone else. Any attack on “white people” is an attack on her and potentially my future children. Any dogma about “privilege” is an attempt to destroy my family in several different directions (it will not succeed, of course, but it also requires me to retreat from people and institutions that once gave me comfort). And the church is soon to offer no shelter from this. In fact, very soon, there will be nowhere to go. Every institution, even the most sacred, simply appears to be decayed.

And it becomes harder to preserve my Christianity as I see it, not because I’m euphoric and enlightened by my own intelligence or because the precepts make less sense to me, but because virtues like mercy are being drowned out with frustration towards this zeitgeist, its unmitigated ascent, and the rending of relationships that were once strong.