What’s missing from Peter Hammond’s response?
Peter Hammond issued a response to my article exposing his views on interethnic marriage. Like John Weaver, Hammond tries to position himself as the victim (what else could he do except repent?). But this is not the case. The whole issue has arisen for one reason: Peter Hammond’s own words—unequivocal, clear words. Like Weaver, too, in all of his defense of himself and labeling, he never actually gets around to addressing those words. As it is, his defense is both a defense of himself and a defense of his awful words in which the offense and its countless victims still stands as before.
Hammond immediately attempts to position himself as a victim—allegedly, I “condemn” him as “a racist.” Later, I have “damned” him and others. This is false. As I explained with Weaver, I made sure to distinguish between the person and the views being taught by that person. I called Hammond’s views that interracial marriages are “a betrayal to Almighty God” as racist views. And that is true. Likewise, the attempt to shift the burden to me proving it is wrong not to “intermarry” is fallacious. Hammond made the legalistic and offensive statement. He is the one who needs to prove marrying across the color line is a betrayal of God. He does not touch it.
It is very curious, however, what Hammond seems to reveal in the process. While I did not call him a racist, his choices do need some explaining. There is more than this, but this in itself is curious. Hammond did not publish his defense on his own blog, website, etc. (though he has many). He chose to give it to one specific person to publish, and it was published only there, and then shared to social media by that same person. That website is called “Christ Rules,” and it is owned and operated by Arnold Jagt, someone with openly racist views. That may be my opinion, but you can judge for yourself from recent examples:
I assume we can all agree, that is racist.
Now, given that Hammond has virtually unlimited options when it comes to publishing his responses—he could have used any of his own dozen or so websites, facebook pages, different friends’ blogs, his own personal FB page, the comments section on AV’s page or website . . . anywhere—one has to wonder why the one person he entrusted, and the exclusive one he chose, is openly racist.
I am not one to cry “guilt by association,” but at some point, one needs to ask the obvious question.
When we turn to the actual response Peter Hammond gives, we find several features in common with that of John Weaver. Several readers have already pointed out the self-congratulatory, boastful, emotional, and evasive nature of the response—and all have likewise seen the fallacious heart of it. The arguments all boil down to the same distractions from the actual words at issue:
Interethnic marriage is a secondary issue.
Then why call it “betrayal to God.”I took Peter Hammond’s teachings out of context.
I quoted his own words directly and with the whole context.Peter Hammond has lots of black friends.
So does Hillary Clinton; does that make her views right? (No, I did not just “compare him to Hilary Clinton.”)Peter Hammond has done lots of good works.
So what? I hear the Mormons do great works, too. Since when do we justify false doctrines by a man’s works?African natives agree with Peter Hammond.
Why confirm them in pagan views?Joel McDurmon has never been to Africa.
I am also not a woman. Must I stop talking about abortion, too? Is the truth different in Africa, or only if you’re Peter Hammond?There are a lot of murders in Africa.
There are hardly any in the Netherlands. Does that mean they can interracially marry there?Marxists and the NWO agree with Joel.
They also believe 2+2=4. Shall we disbelieve math now, too?Peter Hammond is teaching nothing different than Confederate chaplain Robert L Dabney.
On this one I must concede he is correct. Some company to keep!
As the reader can easily see for themselves, it does not follow from a single one of these arguments that therefore interracial marriages are a betrayal of God—Hammond’s own words. Such would be absurd.
Can you imagine anyone, let alone a missionary or minister with an international reputation, arguing the following:
I have hundreds of thousands of black friends, therefore marrying across the color line is a betrayal of God!
Or,
Some black African women feel devalued by media portrayals of interracial marriages, therefore marrying across the color line is a betrayal of Almighty God!
Or,
There is a high murder rate in Africa, therefore interracial marriage is a betrayal of God.
I believe anyone can see this is absurd. That it could even be implied or suggested, let alone argued as a defense, from a minister allegedly trained as a “Dr.,” who boasts of writing 50 books and manuals, and who teaches hundreds of thousands of people internationally, should embarrass everyone naming the name of Christ. That even a few other leaders, friends of mine, entertain this nonsense is very discouraging to say the least.
To be clear, without having to address every single polished and carefully-placed word in Hammond’s arguments, they are all invalid and beside the point. Even if they were all true, they would be nothing more than distractions from whether the Bible forbids interracial marriages and whether marrying across the color line is indeed a betrayal of God.
It is however, very instructive that Peter Hammond goes to such great lengths to position himself as a victim of an attack, to say how many black friends he has, to align himself with church history, to name-drop, to label his opponents as “Marxists,” etc., to polish such heightened rhetoric in aggrandizement of himself, and yet not once—not once—address the actual words that he himself said about interethnic marriages: “a betrayal to God.”
It is not only these distractions and the effort put in to making them so attractive (to certain audiences, of course) that is apparent, however, but the reader can also see that the more Peter Hammond speaks, the more he seems to contradict himself. Here we have “he protests too much” merged with “that just doesn’t make sense!”
On the one hand, for example, Hammond wants to assert that interracial marriage issue is a “secondary” or even “tertiary” issue. Yet he then puts up a few paragraphs of passages about Old Covenant Israel as a defense of it, and claims, “All these passages are well known and often taught and quoted in African churches that we minister amongst. We also study the great Creeds and Councils of the Church.”
Well, which is it? Is it a tertiary issue, or is it taught in all your churches right alongside the Creeds and Confessions?
Peter Hammond goes on to describe my view which allows interethnic marriages as “these Marxist standards of the New World Order.” Here is how he sees the problem:
Certainly their Marxist disciples have been so busy and effective in doing so that the secularisation, paganisation and Islamisation of Europe is far advanced. The United States of America is also facing tremendous social and moral upheavals. Multiculturalism and guilt manipulation have played a major role in this revolution.
Is this a tertiary issue, or is it, as Peter later says, the dangerous advance of the Marxists and New World Order? “This revolution” and “far advanced” hardly sounds like a tertiary issue to me!
Honestly, while reading this, I cannot figure out which Hammond to believe. It sounds to me like he really does think this is not only important but crucial to the survival of Christianity and western civilization. To compromise here is to compromise with the radical anti-Christian leftists. But to admit that means he needs to support the full import of his own words attacking interethnic marriages: its “a betrayal to God,” and this is taught in all his churches to “hundreds-of-thousands” of African Christians, right next to the Creeds and Confessions. Indeed, that sounds more like a point of orthodoxy to me. If you call him to be accountable for those words, however, suddenly it’s a “secondary” issue! There’s so much else to worry about!
Despite it being such a crucial issue, Hammond not only tries to downplay and bury it, he actually denies he published it! He says,
Joel McDurmon, you are wrong in declaring that I have published these views on marriage. You can scour the over 50 books and manuals that I have authored in vain to find that.
Then as now, I only linked directly to his own words, on his own website, on the internet, for Google to find, for the world to see, signed by him! What else do you call that?
Then, just as quickly as he denies he published those views on marriage, he admits he did publish it:
What you have declared are our published works, are actually only some counselling letters on an obscure part of one of our websites under Answers to Critical Questions. There are more than 100 such letters dealing with different subjects on that site and you have chosen to quote one of them out of context.
Calling something “actually only” or “obscure” does not suddenly unpublish it. But I do appreciate Peter admitting it is one of his “Critical” questions (i.e., again, not a secondary issue to him).
Further, it is not “out of context.” Click through and read the whole context for yourself. You’ll see it was exactly as I described. Who asked the question and where it was published does not change the meaning of the answer Hammond gave in it.
Again, I cannot grasp whether Peter Hammond is proud of his views, or if he is trying suppress them. Is he defending his views, rejecting the straw man he created, or trying to downplay it all. It is not clear. Sometimes it seems he is willing to support even the more extreme logical conclusions of it. By saying, for example, that his views are no different than Robert L. Dabney’s, I wonder if he had in mind the following:
But while we believe that “God made of one blood all nations of men to dwell under the whole heavens,” we know that the African has become, according to a well-known law of natural history, by the manifold influences of the ages, a different, fixed species of the race, separated from the white man by traits bodily, mental and moral, almost as rigid and permanent as those of genus. Hence the offspring of an amalgamation must be a hybrid race, stamped with all the feebleness of the hybrid, and incapable of the career of civilization and glory as an independent race.
And this apparently is the destiny which our conquerors have in view. If indeed they can mix the blood of the heroes of Manassas with this vile stream from the fens of Africa, then they will never again have occasion to tremble before the righteous resistance of Virginian freemen; but will have a race supple and vile enough to fill that position of political subjection, which they desire to fix on the South.
Dabney firmly believed the “races” must not intermarry. He also thought the “tyrants” in the American North who sought merely to allow blacks to vote were part of a grand leftist conspiracy to stamp out the historic faith of white Christian men, such that eventually “negro equality” would be “negro superiority,” and that the culmination of this effort would be . . . amalgamation!
In attacking interracial marriages as “a betrayal to God,” Peter Hammond truly is teaching something little different than Dabney . . . just a little downstream from him. Given his relationship with men like Mr. Jagt (and there are many more like him following Hammond around social media liking and sharing every totally-not-racist (wink, wink) thing he teaches), one wonders if he’s even really that far down stream.
At the end of his letter, Peter Hammond asks me to care enough to mind my own business. Even if that were not the same argument used all through history to hide shameful beliefs and acts, slave trades, cruelty, etc., Hammond forgets one thing: this is my business. These views are coming to my country, not Africa, and among my friends. It is now my business, too.
It never ceases to amaze me, though, how some men can spend so much time building their image as the tough, fearless, manly crusaders for Christ—even braving bullets, fire, and death—and in the same breath go out of their way to misconstrue rather simple words to elicit sympathy and play victims. A man can cry Marxism and secularization all he wants, but such fear-based name calling will at the end of the day run into the truth. I am sorry if Hammond may feel exposed and in need of defending himself by distracting from what he actually said; but that will not change the fact that he said it and that everyone involved deserves a full disclosure and accounting of his views.
Finally, for your consideration, reader, ask yourself: why won’t Peter Hammond, or John Weaver (or others, for that matter) simply address their own words and what they said directly and openly? Why won’t they simply come out and be unambiguous: do they really believe the words they said? Or do they not believe the words they said? Ask them to please say so, and say it clearly. Either confirm your words, or repent of them.
More importantly, as we await such a response, or not, the rest of us must ask ourselves why we would ever tolerate any person as a leader or teacher who could not openly reject such views without question or hesitation.