God's most highly favored prophet had these words of wisdom today in an article where he talks about race. Never in my life have I read anything as astounding as this! God truly worked miracles when he created Crackpot Bob's brain. This dude is supercharged with intelligence!
- Many people live in countries where their race dominates. They learn various lessons.
- Some people live in countries where their race is highly discriminated against. They learn various lessons.
- Some people live in countries more accepting of multiple races. They learn various lessons.
- And there are variations among those scenarios, which partially result in learning various lessons.
On September 28, 2026, while the Churches of God were at the Feast sites and while most of the planet was busy being a planet, Crackpot Bob of the improperly named "Continuing" Church of God published "Why different races, different hair colors, etc.?" It is not new. It is the same "Mystery of Race" lecture he has been giving for years, now re-upholstered for the Feast of Tabernacles season like a motel bedspread that has seen one too many self-appointed prophets.
The argument, boiled down until the bones show, is this:
- Evolution is a lie because a suntan is not heritable and Jeremiah 13:23 says a Cushite cannot change his skin.
- All humans come from Adam, Eve, and then Noah's three sons and their conveniently color-coded wives.
- Cush means "black." Some of Phut's kids are also black. Ambassador College said so in 1968, and 1968 Ambassador College is still the gold standard of physical anthropology if your laboratory is a Pasadena basement and your peer reviewers are already dead.
- No race is spiritually superior. Salvation is for everybody. Variety exists so that in the Kingdom we can all love each other more creatively. Different heights, hair colors, and melanin levels are God's way of assigning unique homework before eternity.
It is the theological equivalent of saying "I'm not racist, I have a Black friend who will be in the first resurrection too, just not from the same tribe that got the birthright."
Armstrongism did not invent racial taxonomy. It inherited it when it co-opted British-Israelism - the 19th-century parlor game that decided the lost tribes of Israel packed up after the Assyrian conquest, wandered around Europe, and eventually became the British, the Americans, the Canadians, the Australians, and whoever else needed a prophetic participation trophy. Herbert W. Armstrong turned that parlor game into a multimedia empire.
Old Worldwide Church of God teaching held that God "does not want the different races to mix socially or to intermarry." Social mixing starts in school, they warned. Ambassador College was late and reluctant to admit Black students. Congregations were often de facto segregated. Black members in Chicago and elsewhere recalled being told, as children, that whites sat at the top of a biblically ordained hierarchy and that even heaven would keep the seating chart. Herbert himself wrote that Jesus had to be of "the original pure racial strain, even as Noah was." "Perfect in his generations" was read as a genetics certificate. Our minister in Dayton mentioned many times that when the millennium started, everyone would go back to their ethnic nation of origin, which meant blacks would return to Africa and ethnic South Americans would return to South America, and Asians back to Asia.
None of this required shouting slurs. It only required a prophecy chart that mapped physical blessings onto specific modern nations and then treated everyone else as supporting cast. You can love the extras and still write the script so that Ephraim and Manasseh keep the best lines.
Crackpot Bobl has spent years insisting he is not that. He is "predominantly Gentile" himself, he says. Salvation is not a racial issue. He is not Christian Identity. He just happens to still publish an entire book called Lost Tribes and Prophecies that assigns the English-speaking world the starring role in end-time catastrophe and, later, in the Millennium's administrative class. He still quotes the 1968 Ambassador College race booklet as if it were a primary source instead of a period piece. He still needs Cush to mean black so the Table of Nations can do the work that genetics and archaeology refuse to do.
The spiritual-equality paragraphs are the insurance policy. The tribal identification is the product.
Today's article performs the familiar two-step:
- Deny evolution with a verse about skin color that was never written as a genetics paper.
- Affirm that God likes variety the way a collector likes different stamps - then immediately sort the stamps back into Shem, Ham, and Japheth drawers.
"You cannot change your race," Crackpot Bob writes, as if anyone in 2026 were trying to file an amendment. The sentence is doing pastoral work. It reassures readers who grew up being told that certain unions were "against God's law of kinds" that the old categories still have divine backing, even if the pastor now adds a disclaimer about the Kingdom being a big, loving potluck.
The purpose of racial difference, we are told, is so that people learn different lessons in this life and can therefore contribute unique flavors of love later. It is a charming thought until you remember the institution that produced it once taught that some of those "lessons" included knowing your place in a hierarchy that just happened to look like the American 1950s.
Armstrongism has always been better at announcing that racism is over than at noticing the architecture it left standing. Thiel's version is the polite remodel: same floor plan, new paint, a plaque that says "All Welcome" next to the genealogy chart that still has the good parking spots reserved.
The piece is not really about hair color. Hair color is the decoy. The real subject is continuity. A tiny church that claims to be the Philadelphian remnant cannot admit that one of its founders' central interpretive keys - the physical identification of modern nations with ancient tribes - was a racialized 19th-century hobby horse that caused real harm to real people in the pews. So the lecture returns, year after year, like a relative who will not stop bringing the same casserole.
Critics have been calling this out for decades. Former members, Black and white, have described the quiet ranking, the intermarriage panic, the Millennium as a place where the nations stay in their lanes. Crackpot Bob's response is always the same: those people are scoffers, the Bible is clear, and anyway he has a video.
The video is 22 minutes long. It asks whether one race is superior and answers no. It does not ask why a church that spent fifty years acting as if some nations were prophetically more important than others still needs a 1968 booklet to explain why some people have darker skin.
Armstrongism's racial problem was never only the occasional ugly sentence. It was the system that made ancestry destiny, then called the destiny "prophecy," then called the prophecy "love." Crackpot Bob has sanded the edges. He has not replaced the machine.
The latest post is not a breakthrough. It is a man standing on a stack of his predecessor's books, pointing at the same wall chart, and announcing that variety is beautiful - as long as you remember which branch of the family tree you came from, and which blessings were promised to which branch, and which branch is currently being punished for forgetting the Sabbath.
Some things, as Jeremiah might have said if he had a blog, a Cushite cannot change. And neither, apparently, can a church.
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