Hans Fiene: Solomonic wisdom for today

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Wednesday, June 4th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast. Up next, the proverbial “splitting the baby.”

WORLD Opinions contributor Hans Fiene says Christians would be wise to apply the lessons of Solomon to modern problems.

HANS FIENE, COMMENTATOR: The story of Solomon and the two mothers is a fascinating example of the king’s wisdom…but also his great compassion…for both women. He knew that replacing another woman’s child with the corpse of her child was not the act of a woman who just desperately wanted to be a mother again. It was the act of a woman enslaved by the bitterest of despair—a woman who thought the only way to survive her sorrow was to foist it on someone else. Her grief took a child created in the image of God and turned him into a flag to be captured and withheld from the woman she saw as the enemy.

We would be wise to hear the wisdom and compassion of Solomon today. 

In April a white high school student named Austin Metcalf was killed at a track meet in Texas. People began giving to a GiveSendGo account—not to show support not for Metcalf or his family, but for the family of Karmelo Anthony. He’s the young black man charged with stabbing Metcalf to death. Numerous donors left vile comments on the fundraiser page. They weren’t giving to ensure that Anthony received adequate representation or a fair trial. They just wanted to reward Anthony and his family for allegedly killing a white man. Many donors essentially suggested: “For too long, black Americans have been forced to suffer, but now Karmelo Anthony has helped us toss our suffering onto the head of Austin Metcalf’s family. As long as his parents don’t get a living child, the flag is ours. We win.”

More recently, a white woman started her own GiveSendGo after another race-related conflict. Shiloh Hendrix claims a young black child tried to steal from her, and she responded by calling the child a racial slur. After a Somali immigrant named Sharmarke Omar uploaded a video of his subsequent argument with Hendrix, Hendrix set up her donation page. She insisted she did nothing wrong and claimed she needed funds to find safety after her social security number, address, and phone number had been leaked. 

In response, people gave heartily, many seeing it as an opportunity essentially to steal the flag back from those supporting the Karmelo Anthony fundraiser.

In a recent video, conservative commentator Matt Walsh articulated a kind of pragmatic defense of the Hendrix fundraiser. He says he doesn’t support Hendrix’s behavior, but the only way to disincentivize leftist mobs is to show them that “instead of getting their targets cancelled, they might accidentally make them rich.”

The problem with Walsh’s argument is that he fails to account for the spiritual nature of the problem. Those who cheer Karmelo Anthony do so because they want the baby divided in half. Certainly, Christians should be cautious not to downplay the differences between the Hendrix and Anthony cases. Anthony, if guilty, belongs in prison for stabbing an innocent young man to death. Hendrix and her family don’t deserve death threats and danger simply for uttering an ugly word.

However, the difference between the actions of Hendrix and Anthony is one of degree, not nature, as Christ taught us when He declared, “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment.” Many Pharisees likely sneered at these words of Christ, convinced He was making ugly words equal with the most vicious of sins against your neighbor. It’s worth remembering, however, that these same Pharisees who wouldn’t turn from the lesser sin of anger at Christ soon found themselves conspiring to murder the very same son of God.

Even if the leftist mobs and the anti-white crusaders invented the game where they turn human beings into inanimate objects through the “capture the flag” race war game, we should avoid playing along. Wisdom tells us that dismissing the verbal assault of children and dismissing the terminal assault of teenagers are not as far apart as we might think.

I’m Hans Fiene.

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