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 Remnantnewspaper,
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, “thatrace 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 ownpotential, 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.
