Reconsidering Interracial Marriage: The Christian Case for Intra-Racial Marriage, Part Five

This is the final installment in the Interracial Marriage series.  I will soon release a PDF of the entire work.

Previous installments in this series:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Providence and Race

The multiracial nature of God’s Church is undeniable in Scripture.  Perhaps the most explicit passage featuring this truth is found in Revelation 7:9-12:

9 After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands;

10 And cried with a loud voice, saying, Salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb.

11 And all the angels stood round about the throne, and about the elders and the four beasts, and fell before the throne on their faces, and worshipped God,

12 Saying, Amen: Blessing, and glory, and wisdom, and thanksgiving, and honour, and power, and might, be unto our God for ever and ever. Amen.

There are several additional obvious conclusions from this passage.

Race, language and nation are eternally significant.  They are not part of our salvation of course, but they remain recognizable features of our identity forever in Heaven.  God could have made man of one race, one language and one kindred.  Yet, Scripture shows us that Providence is opposed to this, explicitly commanding and causing the fragmenting of the human race at Babel.

The clear racial distinctions in heaven demand another conclusion: if there are many races in heaven, then that implies a relatively low level of interracial marriage, as interracial children would not clearly belong to either race of their parents.  Those who claim that most humans will be of mixed race in the coming centuries are going against the grain of Providence.  While limited mixing has occurred throughout history, it is likely that racial distinctions created by Providence in the past will continue well into the future, even into eternity.

Interracial Marriage and Gender

Another interesting facet of interracial marriage’s impact is its effect on gender balance among ethnic groups.  Among the races, it is much more likely to find a black male / white female couple than a white male / black female couple.  Similarly, white male / Asian female couples are much more common that Asian male / white female couples.

In a 1997 article in National Review[1], author Steve Sailer reports on the frustration experienced by African-American women and Asian men on the one-way distribution of interracial marriage among their respective ethnic groups.  As a result, both groups face a shortage of marriageable mates with few options for a compensating interracial union to offset the imbalance.

The following figures quantify the imbalance:

Sailer finds a surprising link in his research between natural physical differences between the races that result in asymmetrical attraction between opposite sexes of different races.  To simplify, it appears God has fashioned the male and female traits of each race to be proportionate to the other within the same race, but these proportions do not hold outside of the race.

For example, one way in which men and women differ (and thus find each other attractive) is in the area of body fat percentage (a high inverse correlate with testosterone levels in both genders).  Men are attractive to women in part because of man’s higher proportion of muscle and lower proportion of fat, whereas men are attracted to the relatively softer and rounder features of women.  This pattern holds for all races:

Blacks are generally more muscular than whites, and whites more so than Asians.  This measure is a rough approximation of “maleness” and “femaleness” in body chemistry. Thus, while it is very easy, for example, for a black man and Asian woman to potentially find each other attractive along this vector, it would be much more difficult for a compensating couple of an Asian man and black woman, as their healthy body fat percentages differ by only 1% despite their being of opposite gender.

These endocrine differences between the races are God-ordained and God-created.  In fact, if you look at the diagonal in the chart above, we see perfect symmetry among the races, a consistent 7% difference in body fat between men and women of all races, showing the fingerprints of a Creator who precisely fashioned the body chemistry differences within each race to optimize attractiveness.

The implications of this chart may be hard for whites to appreciate.  As the race “in the middle”, there are ample opportunities for interracial marriage consistent with the natural grain of male-female attraction.  However, while some whites may benefit from this arrangement, the losers of interracial couplings are inevitably black women and Asian men.

Asian men, despite earning higher incomes and showing fewer anti-social qualities than either black or white men (as the group least likely to be incarcerated), find themselves less able to marry as white men take Asian wives, while natural differences in masculinity make them less physically attractive, on average, to white women and black women.

But perhaps the greatest victims are black women, who already must suffer the highest rates of single motherhood and struggle with the welfare state’s destruction of the black family from the 1960’s onward.  A good proportion of black men are dead or incarcerated by marrying age, leading Sailer to estimate that for every 14 black women there may be only 10 employed black men.  Sailer illustrates this frustration with a revealing anecdote:

Black women’s resentment of intermarriage is now a staple of daytime talk shows, hit movies like Waiting to Exhale, and magazine articles. Black novelist Bebe Moore Campbell described her and her tablemates’ reactions upon seeing a black actor enter a restaurant with a blonde: “In unison, we moaned, we groaned, we rolled our eyes heavenward . . . Then we all shook our heads as we lamented for the 10,000th time the perfidy of black men, and cursed trespassing white women who dared to ‘take our men.’”

Similar to the unintended consequences of welfare, is it possible that mainstream universal support for interracial marriage is itself a manifestation of white liberals’ insensitivity to its true impact on the cultural cohesion and marriage prospects of others?

Is it possible God’s design of complementarian gender diversity is intentional among and between races and perhaps ought to be preserved as a norm?

Race and Family

Much of the dialogue about race is inextricably linked to questions of racial superiority or inferiority.  These are political questions that are ultimately unanswerable, as there is no objective way to measure a complex creation like a human being to rank one group as absolutely superior or inferior.  The truth of things is that each race is superior to every other race at being itself, as each has been gifted with God with certain remarkable abilities.

Subjectively, however, man must always prefer his own.  My family is not “superior” to any other family, yet I prefer it just the same.  I like the way my children look, talk and smell in a way that I will never like anyone else’s children.

As a father, I simply prefer that my grandchildren look like me, just as I look like my grandparents.  I do not know where this preference comes from, but I know it is there and I find no Biblical evidence that it is sinful.  If I heard a person of another race express the same sentiment, I would not feel offended or belittled.

Much of the dialogue about interracial marriage tends to cast it as an issue of parental authority, and in many situations interracial marriages are made despite the objection of parents.  However, this may not be the best way to look at it.

A new study from Poland[2] conducted by Durham University (UK) has produced some shocking results, finding that women with high-quality relationships with their fathers are more likely to select mates who look like their fathers.  Conversely, women with absent, detached or abusive fathers were more likely to marry men who look less like their fathers.

Christian parenting manuals have taught for years that the opposite-sex parent is essentially a model for the child’s sexual imprinting upon future mates.  In a healthy family, it is simply normal for sons to want to marry women like their mothers and daughters to want to marry men like their fathers.

For parents concerned about the issue of interracial marriage, the primary preventative measure is a quality, healthy relationship with your children that will naturally result in your children choosing mates similar to their parents.  If we communicate our wishes on this issue as part of that loving relationship, along with the reasons for our opinions, it is likely our wishes will be respected.

Absent that loving relationship, our expressed wishes, especially since they go against the grain of media influence, are more likely to result in rebellion than compliance.

Interracial marriage, then, can be seen in the aggregate as a referendum on the quality of parental relationships.  For a child who has been ignored or abused, perhaps the most natural thing in the world is to seek a mate as unlike their family in culture and appearance as possible.

Practical Conclusions

There are a number of possible positions one can take on interracial marriage.  From aggressive to tolerant, they are:

1. Interracial marriage is a positive good and ought to be outright encouraged in the Church.  Those who would advise against interracial marriage for moral or practical reasons have violated the “Law of Love” and should be shunned and excommunicated from our fellowship.
2. The Church ought to remain neutral on extra-Biblical considerations of marriage and leave liberty of conscience to families and their children on the issue of interracial versus intra-racial marriage.
3. The Church should by analogy encourage the Biblical pattern of respect for tribal and ethnic boundaries and encourage a norm of intra-racial marriage, while being careful to tolerate and love those who choose otherwise.

My hope is that churches will resist the temporal political pressure of our age and default to a position of #2 or #3.  There are a number of legitimate reasons for parents to support intra-racial marriage that are not based on sinful motivations of hatred:

• The Bible places great emphasis on considerations of tribe and ethnicity in the Old Testament.
• Many recent expositions of purported examples of interracial marriage in Scripture may be post hoc projections of those with a preordained multiculturalist agenda, and without any real basis in historical Christian and Jewish scholarship or tradition.
• God Himself commanded ethnic distinctions, proving at least that such distinctions are not necessarily sinful.
• The principles of conservatism, a corollary of the fallen nature of man, should guide us with caution in considering major changes to human society.  Man tends to evil instead of moral progress and thus the burden of proof should be upon the proposed change, not the status quo.  Interracial marriage represents a huge break with historical practices.
• Survey data from the CDC show that interracial marriage is a divorce risk greater than or equal to cohabitation, sexual relations before marriage and religious incompatibilities.
• Crime data from the FBI definitively show that white racism, while always a sin for an individual, is not an overriding factor in American society relative to the racism of other races.  Special efforts to increase interracial marriage despite known risks to compensate for supposed white racism is not only morally vacuous but factually without basis.
• Numerous recent studies, among the first of many likely to come, show that interracial children suffer higher risk factors for various metrics of mental and physical health.
• Due to God-ordained differences in body chemistry among the races and between genders, interracial marriage has a disparate impact upon the marriage prospects of Asian males and black females.  While individual whites may feel they benefit from increased opportunities, the impact upon these two groups is real and verified by Census data.
• Since parents are the models for opposite-sex relationships, interracial marriage can be seen as an inverse proxy for the quality of familial relationships.  This implies that a norm of intra-racial marriage is the God-ordained outcome of healthy sexual imprinting upon children, if children have a positive relationship with their opposite-sex parent.

Let us not judge the motives of others or infringe the Christian liberty of parents to teach wisdom in marriage practices according to their sphere of authority.  For those who support interracial marriage, let us agree to disagree without resorting to ad hominum attacks or competitive displays of political correctness to please the world.

For parents who find my arguments in agreement with their own reasoning or natural instincts, may I encourage you in the notion that your wanting the best for your children in marriage is not hate or racism.  Your wisdom is real and your authority is legitimate.  Do not be browbeaten or made to feel guilty about your convictions by the politically correct spirit of our age, and be silenced or shamed on this important issue.  Be afraid of no man as you seek to raise your children in wisdom and truth.

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1. Daddies’ Girls Choose Men Just Like Their Fathers, Science Daily, 6/13/2007. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070613071240.htm

2. Available online at: http://www.isteve.com/IsLoveColorblind.htm