#BlackLivesMatter Is Not Marxist (or Satanic)

I was dumbfounded a month or so ago when I met a Black man online who shared a video by a Black pastor who was claiming that the #BlackLivesMatter movement was that of professed witches. The Black man who shared this video is a Christian. I believe he believes that he’s doing “God’s work” by helping to expose the “evils” of the leaders of Black Lives Matter.

The number of people I’m encountering online who believe in this kind of nonsense is baffling. These are the same kinds of people who fall into the camp that the BLM founders and followers are Marxists. How is it that we live in a world like this? Were people always this detached from reality and social media is just making it easier to see them?

Let’s assume, just for argument’s sake, that the people who founded BLM are indeed people who are “witches” (even typing that sounds ridiculous). So what. The OVERWHELMING majority of people IN THE WORLD, in every civilized country that has access to the internet, use #BlackLiveMatter as a rallying cry. They don’t see it or interpret it to be “the work of the devil.” It’s beyond asinine that we even have to have this conversation.

They also don’t see it as the work of Marxists. Nothing in that term inherently means anything other than the lives of black people matter. And hundreds of millions of people on this planet see it that way. When people use it online, they’re not trying to promote a political ideology. They’re trying to remind the world that the lives of Black men, women, and children have worth and value and should be treated no differently than those of white people.

And there is a need to see it because everyone with eyes to see and ears to hear can see and hear the hypocrisy going on. Kyle Rittenhouse traveled across state lines and shot three people (killing two of them), and TWO police cars drove right by. He wasn’t arrested until the next day. Though a confirmed killer, he was treated with dignity and taken in. (And hundreds of thousands of dollars were raised by a Christian site to put money towards his legal defense fund).

Jacob Black was shot 7 times in the back for possibly reaching for a weapon he MAYBE had. Tamir Rice was a 12 year-old kid killed for playing with a TOY gun. PEACEFUL BLM protestors get tear-gassed, while white militia with assault rifles can take over the Michigan state capital, all because they want to get their hair cuts and drink beer with the fellas again. And nothing happens to them. NOTHING! (Also, you notice that whenever it’s white people with weaponry, they’re “militia,” but when it’s people of color, it’s “terrorists.”)

So when I see Black men like this fighting against #BlackLivesMatter, it breaks my heart. I respect the fact that his faith compels him to speak out because the leaders of this organization allegedly practice witchcraft. But I would hope he would be able to separate that from what #BLM actually means to the majority of the world, and the fight it actually is fighting.

And as I seemingly have to remind so many other Christians—if you judge and denounce an entire movement like BLM (or ANTIFA) by the actions of a small group of people, you had better be prepared to do the same to Christianity. There is literally over a thousand years of murder, maiming, abuse, genocide, slavery, harassment, terrorism, misogyny, and pedophilia in “the Church,” leading all the way up to today. It’s another mark of Christians’ hypocrisy to denounce BLM (a movement that’s less than a decade old) due to the actions of a small percentage of people (actions, by the way, the many would say are understandable after 155 years of oppression since emancipation), vs the acts of Christians over nearly a millennium and a half.

And, with that, I say #BlackLivesMatter.

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Previously published on medium

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