October 12, 2018
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
“White Supremacy,”
Egalitarianism, and the Collapse of Christianity
Friends,
I
pass on today my latest published essay, “ ‘White Supremacy,’ Egalitarianism,
and the Collapse of Christianity,” which has appeared at The Unz Review, October 12, 2018:
“White
Supremacy,” Egalitarianism, and the Collapse of Christianity
BOYD D. CATHEY • OCTOBER 12, 2018
Recently,
a friend shared with me the correspondence he had had with a former female
classmate now an Episcopal priestess in New York, over what she called “white
supremacy” and “toxic masculinity,” and asked what I thought. After reading the
exchanges, my response was very simple: given the ideological assumptions real
discussion of those issues with her was probably not possible, barring some
Road to Damascus conversion.
Of
course, the views of my friend’s acquaintance are widely held among Christians
these days, and not just among more leftist Episcopal, Presbyterian, and
Methodist clergy, and their respective congregrations. The Catholic Church,
once the unbreachable bastion of theological and social traditionalism, has in
large part, certainly since Vatican II (1965), succumbed to a leftward
march—with some notable exceptions (e.g., Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the
Society of St. Pius X, The Remnant newspaper, etc.). And even among
Evangelicals who are thought to be conservatives not only in theology and
cultural matters but in social polity, wide fissures have occurred.
I
remember a news item from two years ago that brings all this into focus, that,
in fact, is emblematic of what infects much of contemporary Christianity. Back
on September 29, 2017, a few weeks after the Charlottesville incident, an
article appeared in the press, announcing the formation of
an organization of Evangelical Protestant leaders, “Unifying Leadership”. This
group of Evangelicals had issued an “Open Letter” to President Donald Trump.
Spearheaded
by prominent Southern Baptists, including Dr. Steve Gaines, President of the
Southern Baptist Convention; Danny Akin, President of Southeastern Baptist
Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina; and controversial Baptist
Russell Moore, the group urged President Trump to condemn the so-called
“Alt-Right” movement, racism, and “white nationalism.” Co-signed initially by
thirty-nine leaders of American Evangelical Protestantism, an equal number had,
by October 3 of that year, added their endorsements, as well. At least ten
members of the Southeastern Theological faculty had co-signed, and various
other Evangelical Protestants, including leaders of the largely-black National
Baptist Convention, had also added their signatures.
In
addition to addressing theological and moral questions, there is nothing
unusual about religious leaders speaking out on specific social questions.
Indeed, arguably, it is imperative that on social and political issues which in
some way affect or touch religious practice and belief, there is a requirement
to do so. Certainly, there is a long history of Christian leaders addressing
questions of justice, morality, and equity in a social context, based both upon
Scripture and the continuous historic teachings and traditions of the Church.
During
the past four decades, to cite one horrific example, orthodox Christians have
spoken forthrightly on the issue of abortion, but not just in its moral context
of unjustly taking a human life, but to the fact that it is the polity—the
state, or more specifically, the legal system, that perpetrates, protects and
perpetuates the practice. Thus, the boundaries between church and state are
often profoundly blurred, and necessarily so.
The
dictum of John Henry Cardinal Newman rings true: “At the base of all political
issues, there is a religious question.” Religious truth must undergird and
inform any state that seeks to rightly mete out and administer justice to its
citizens. From the Church Fathers forward, from St. Augustine and St. Thomas
Aquinas there is the understanding that human society is governed not just by
the ordinances of Natural Law—nature’s arrangement, regulation and settlement
of our physical environment, but also by Divine Positive Law, whether from the
Decalogue, the immutable doctrines found in Holy Writ, or by successive
teachings of the Fathers of the Church, the Ecumenical Councils, and the
incorporation of those truths socially and, eventually, politically.
The
absolutely necessary requirement for any pronouncement or declaration grounded
in this understanding must always be that its basis and essence be contained
within Holy Scripture and within the continuity of Sacred Tradition, taught
immemorially from the time of the Apostles and codified subsequently in the
orthodox confessions and professions of faith and in practice.
Misunderstandings
in either theology or history have led even the most well-intentioned advocates
astray, into error and the eventual undermining of the Christian gospel,
itself. The history of the Christian church is filled—replete—with examples of
those whose reasoning floundered on the shoals of faulty premises, a lack of
comprehension, or, even, personal and overweening pride.
The
“Open Letter” to the president appeared in its origin to be motivated by good
intentions: a desire to “condemn” a “hatred” based specifically on
ethnicity. Certainly a foundation for such condemnation is contained within
historic Christian teaching. Yet, there are in the “Open Letter’s” text very
significant problems—applications of faulty reasoning and demonstrably false
premises—which vitiated and, ultimately, undermined the statement, and, more
seriously, demonstrated its assumption of a rhetorical expression and
ideological sentiment that owe more to historic Marxist theory than to historic
Christianity.
First,
let us examine the language employed. The immediate observation is that these
Evangelical notables, in their condemnation of the “Alt-Right,” “white nationalism,”
and “racism,” failed to provide clear and unmistakable definitions of what they
were condemning. Were they saying, for instance, that having pride in one’s own
race or in one’s ethnic heritage equals racism? Were they denying the
historically incontrovertible, preponderant role of white
Europeans in the creation and governing of the American nation? In quoting
author Jared Taylor, “that race is a biological fact and that it is a
significant aspect of individual and group identity and that any attempt to
create a society in which race can be made not to matter will fail,” were they
denying the historical existence of race and the debate that continues about
whether there are significant inherited and distinguishable biological
characteristics that differentiate the races in varying degrees?
None
of this—none of these points—necessarily implies “racism,” that is,
the belief that one particular race is superior or better than another race.
None of this discussion necessarily implies or should imply
“hatred” by someone of one race against those of another race. Differences,
of whatever form, whether just skin deep or genetic, or social, or cultural, or
historical, do not imply hatred, or even discriminatory sentiments.
What
did the authors of this letter mean when they employed the term “Alt-Right?”
From appearances they focused on what they term “the white identity movement”:
“the KKK, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists.” But, then, they continue on and
declare: “It concerned many of us when three people associated with the
alt-right movement were given jobs in the White House.”
Obviously,
the intended reference here included Steve Bannon (who has since left the White
House). But there is a serious problem in this not-so-veiled attack, a serious
failure on their part of the required Christian virtue of Charity, not to
mention Prudence and basic rationality. The grave injustice, the ideological
legerdemain they commit is, essentially, to assume that the
tendentious and nebulous accusations and character assassination mounted by the
Mainstream Media against Bannon (and others like him) are true, without the
proper and due investigation that honorable men, in justice, must pursue.
They
implied, thus, that Bannon is: a racist, a white supremacist, potentially an
anti-semite, and that he “associates” with Klansmen and Nazis. And they did so
without proof, without anything but the assertions of punditry and publicists
who work, broadcast and write for a Mainstream Media that is demonstrably and
unabashedly pushing a cultural Marxist narrative, and for whom anyone to the
right of Bernie Sanders is, ipso facto, a “rightwing extremist, a
“racist,” or a “white supremacist.” The rather cavalier use of such “devil
terms,” thrown about with abandon by supposedly scrupulously moral Christian
leaders, is both scandalous and repulsive. Not only does it weaken their
arguments, it makes a mockery of their feigned Christian concerns.
The
document is also fraught with problematic assertions historically. Midway
through their excoriation of the “Alt-Right,” the authors wrote, somewhat
gratuitously: “Alt-right ideology does not represent constitutional
conservatism. The Constitution promotes the dignity and equality of all
people.”
As
a statement of history that is simply not true. The Constitution of the United
States, as confected by the Framers, does not speak of “equality of all
people.” Indeed, it enshrined inequality and left untouched the rights of the
individual states to legislate amongst themselves on such questions as voting,
religious tests, and slavery. That was the stated intention, the open wish, of
the Framers, and had it not been so, there would not have been an American
republic.
And,
indeed, even the Declaration of Independence, with its much quoted (and
misunderstood) words about “equality” is referring explicitly to a narrow and
demanded “equality” between the former American colonists and their erstwhile
English brethren represented in parliament, not an equality of opportunity or
condition between individuals living in the new republic. A clear reading of
the documentation—the correspondence, the broadsides, the speeches leading up
to and during and after the Declaration’s issuance—abundantly illustrates that,
as the late Mel Bradford (in his study, Original Intentions), Barry
Alan Shain (in his exhaustive, The Declaration of Independence in
Historical Context), and others have shown, the document is clearly not a
proclamation of the “universal [equal] rights of man,” similar to the French
Revolutionary proclamation. (A good summary of Bradford’s arguments may be
found in his lengthy essay, “The Heresy of Equality,” published
in Modern Age, Winter 1976, at ).
But
there is another, perhaps even more grievous, problem inherent in the “Open
Letter”: Its assertion that an egalitarianism of not just opportunity but of,
implicitly, condition is consistent with historic Christian theology and
teaching. An historical consideration and analysis of this statement of belief
belies its truthfulness as traditional Christian teaching.
The
most illustrative means of demonstrating this come from Holy Scripture, itself,
as well as from the its interpreters throughout the history of the Christian
church. Perhaps one of the best examples, following the gloss of several of the
Fathers of the Church and the exegesis of historic figures such as St. Thomas
Aquinas and others, can be found in St. Matthew’s Parable of the Talents (Mt.
25: 14-25) (also found in St. Luke 19:12-19). Three servants are entrusted by
their Master with, respectively, five, two and one talent, and directed to
invest them properly. On the Master’s return, he finds that the servant
entrusted with five talents has doubled their value, as has the second with his
two talents. But the third has done nothing with his one talent but bury it in
the ground. To the first and second servant the Master declares: “Well done,
good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you
over much. Enter into the joy of your master.”
But
to the servant entrusted with only one talent, he states:
“Wicked
and slothful servant, thou knewest that I reap where I sow not and gather where
I have not strewed. Thou oughtest therefore to have committed my money to the
bankers; and at my coming I should have received my own with usury. Take ye
away therefore the talent from him and give it him that hath ten talents. For
to every one that hath shall be given, and he shall abound: but from him that
hath not, that also which he seemeth to have shall be taken away. And the
unprofitable servant cast ye out into the exterior darkness. There shall be
weeping and gnashing of teeth.” [verses 26-30, Douay-Rheims Version]
We
are not judged by God on what others do, we are not judged by
what others have or make from their investments in life. We
are judged by the satisfaction of our own potential, living up to
our own very unique God-given model. That is our measure, not the social status
or economic condition of our neighbor—or of Bill Gates or the Sultan of Brunei.
I may have the “right” to vote when I turn eighteen, but not before; it is
conferred on me by the Constitution of my state, not by God. The sixteen year
old and the convicted ex-felon do not enjoy equal rights. And the Christian
faith does not demand that they do.
The
nature of humanity—the nature of things—is that inequality is the norm,
inequality in wealth, inequality in the different aspects of our intelligence
and abilities, inequality in the respective rights and very opportunities that
may exist for us, and these are natural, part of the order ordained by God in
Creation.
And,
again, as the Parable indicates, it is not necessarily the man who is poor in talents
who will gain the favor of the Master; indeed, it was the servant with five
talents who fulfilled his mission and gained election. While the inequality of
great wealth and superior position can well be an impediment—the difficulty of
threading the eye of a needle—they aren’t necessarily exclusionary by any
means.
The
modern egalitarian idea does not come from traditional Christianity, nor from
traditional Christian teaching. It is a proposition emitted from the fevered
minds of 18th century Revolutionaries, taken over by more
zealous advocates of 19th century Liberalism, and finally,
utilized by 20th century Marxism as an attractive myth—a
shibboleth and talismanic slogan to both subvert and convert Christians to a
faith that is only a disfigured and fatal mirror image of its teachings
That
it is employed by contemporary church leaders should not be that surprising,
but that it be used by supposed conservatives and Evangelicals demonstrates
just how far and just how deep the radical transformation and disintegration of
traditional Christianity has progressed.
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