Today, I gladly cede my column to Star Parker, an African-American woman I greatly admire. She is a veteran in the culture wars and continues to fight in the frontlines of the war with gusto despite many scars. She is one of the few successful African-Americans who challenges others to overcome adversities rather than pat them on the back and talk down to them with words that imply: I made it, but I don’t expect you to do the same, because Blacks simply cannot surmount the racism in America. That constitutes what’s been called the “ soft-bigotry of low expectations.”
Star Parker’s past, as she tells it, is marked by welfare dependency, multiple abortions, fornication and drug use. She says nobody told her there was anything wrong with that lifestyle. The turning point came when she heard an African-American pastor challenge his church members to live by Biblical values. She turned away from her wicked ways, went back to school and has become a much sought-after speaker at conferences and a commentator on TV, radio, the internet.
The first time I met her at a conference we hit off like old friends. That’s how it is when kindred spirits meet.
She is the kind of speaker I wish more churches in America and Nigeria would welcome in their churches. Time for us to cast down vain arguments (2 Cor 10:5) with Scripture, Tradition and Reason and contend for universal and time-honored values that almost all religions and societies have lived by for eons.
I love the survival messages on prosperity, healing, faith, prophecies etc, but if we do not defend traditional moral and ethical values, the platform to deliver those survival messages would be destroyed by articulate so-called progressives who seek to take us way past the Dark Ages—where no society has gone before. We might even defeat terrorism by upholding those sound traditional moral values.
