We Need to Take Racism Less Seriously
Itβs disfiguring, like acne, but abortion is terminal cancer.
Iβm hesitant to say what I need to convey here. Iβm taking a genuine risk β both pastorally and professionally. But since Great Britain fell to a hostile, anti-Christian dictatorship, with similar regimes clamping down on dissent from Canada to Australia, I canβt keep quiet any longer. Not when our own country is being herded like a lamb to the slaughterhouse, less than three months away from an irreversible takeover by far-left, autocratic bigots obsessed with aborting babies and castrating kids. Not when one of the biggest sticks swung by pro-abortion, pro-transgender, quasi-Marxist activists both inside our churches and out is the fetish of βantiracism.β
The Left has taken the genuine, profoundly biblical truth that racial discrimination is sinful and severed it from the rest of the body of Christian doctrine. In fact, they took it to a lab like a stolen finger, cloned it, and turned it into a cancer thatβs killing every nation to which it spreads.
The pastoral risk is real: I donβt want to scandalize non-white Christians, or do anything whatsoever to suggest that the faith of Jesus Christ is somehow the property of Western civilization, of People of Pallor like me who donβt even tan in the sun but βlobster.β Quite the contrary: The Church was born in the Middle East, is dying out in white countries, and probably will thrive for the next few centuries only in Africa and Asia. I look forward to the election of a faithful African pope β and even published a graphic novel a decade ago depicting such a heroic, black African pontiff. Iβm excited that my own new local pastor is a faith-filled priest from Nigeria. I look forward to befriending him.
The professional risk is obvious: As I wrote here some years ago, itβs probably less damaging to be tarred as a rapist than as a white racist. Indeed, the British government is now literally freeing actual rapists to make room in the prisons for online βracists.β Should Kamala Harris begin to reign from the White House, I expect the same policies to prevail in Texas and Alabama.
Which only goes to prove the point that I must reluctantly make: White racism, while certainly sinful, has been isolated as the most important evil mankind faces around the world. Itβs the third rail, the Ark of the Covenant, the shibboleth and fetish and unhealthy obsession, an evil so unspeakable and appalling that any means whatsoever is justified to uproot it β including (as Megan Basham documents in her new book) the transfer of Christian churches to the control of the abortion industry and the LGBT movement.
A New Inverted Apartheid
Must every European country import millions of immigrants, until thereβs not one single white majority country on the face of the earth, and people of European descent are minorities in a diaspora like the Jews before 1948? Fine, then make it so. Are countries like Japan and China, Rwanda and Somalia, obliged to adopt similar policies so they donβt have majorities? No, of course not.
Only eight years after the Civil Rights Act rightly forbade racial discrimination, our Supreme Court issued Roe v. Wade. Was that a coincidence? Tragically no. In key ways, it was a consequence.
Must white males remain the only βunprotected classβ (as Jeremy Carl writes in his important new book) not covered by civil rights laws β so that theyβre essentially second-class citizens in a new form of inverted apartheid? Fine, letβs make that happen. Whatever it takes. Let companies like Apple and major universities explicitly exclude a racial and sexual group from jobs and promotions, as if they were law firms in Mississippi in 1913 that wouldnβt hire Jews or women. It doesnβt matter. Whatever it takes.
Are Jews Just the Whitest People on Earth?
Iβve seen pro-lifers try to argue against abortion by pointing out the very real racism of Planned Parenthoodβs founders, and the disproportionate death rate of non-white, unborn children. Heck, Iβve done that myself, right here at The Stream. Step back for a second, however, and think about how crazy that is, like the old joke about Baptists opposing adultery because it might lead to β¦ dancing. Theyβre saying that in order to suggest we ban the practice of murdering unborn babies for sexual convenience, then selling their organs for profit, we must show that itβs somehow connected to β¦ (drumroll please) β¦ white racism.
Part of the reason that outright hatred of Jews and yawns at the Holocaustβs horrors are now becoming acceptable on college campuses is that the Left has decided Jews are really just white people, and perhaps even the whitest people on earth. So they donβt deserve protection, and certainly donβt deserve a country where they can be the majority. Liberal Jews are reduced to echoing old claims worthy of the Ku Klux Klan that theyβre not really white, so they do deserve protection.
This is an admission by a longtime member of the Democratic elite that his party sees no valid reason to support Israel. pic.twitter.com/GEuzmrFvXc
β Max Abrahms (@MaxAbrahms) August 15, 2024
How did we get here? I explain that at length in No Second Amendment, No First. After I lay out the very real and hideous history of wicked, eugenicist bigotry pushed by the Darwinist fanatics of Margaret Sangerβs movement, I explain how the Christian Civil Rights movement arose and rightly prevailed:
The civil rights movement was the last true great Christian moment in America. It was the final occasion when we as a society drew on Americansβ common biblical consensus of what man is and how we should treat him: as a dignified child of God, with rights and responsibilities, equally valuable whatever his traits or state in life.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.βs consistent patriotic and biblical rhetoric, grounding legal equality in Americaβs founding and the Church, helped not just disarm but also shame opponents. While many of his allies and rivals for leadership among black Americans looked to Communism or Islam for help, King knew better. He realized that the civic and religious faith of Americans already rejected racism. All he needed was to show people the implications of what they already believed, not win them over to dismal dialectical materialism or an alien religion founded by a slave owner. Itβs a vast blessing for our country that real Christian morals, on this issue, won out over primitive white tribalism and fear. For that fact, we have Rev. King to thank.
Drive Out One Demon, and Seven More Appear
But drive out a single demon, and seven more might very well come in to infest your nation. And thatβs exactly what happened here. Only eight years after the Civil Rights Act rightly forbade racial discrimination, our Supreme Court issued Roe v. Wade. Was that a coincidence? Tragically no. In key ways, it was a consequence.
The Civil Rights movement didnβt remain a force for Christian conscience, as the Christian anti-slavery movement in 19th-century Britain did. Instead, the Left used the moral high ground it had seized by rebuking stupid racial prejudice, and turned it into a sniperβs tower.
The righteous thrill of reforming a nation and changing laws became addictive.
These newly righteous activists went looking for new monsters to slay. Soon the Christians whoβd fought racism began to mix with radicals who wanted to tear down much more. For instance, the antiwar movement quickly went past arguments over the prudence of our involvement in Vietnam. Many activists slid into covert, then overt, support of the Communist aggressors in Hanoi.
Others flocked to a βwomenβs liberationβ grounded in sexual libertinism and false notions that men and women are interchangeable. The loudest demand of such feminism, and still its central tenet today, was legal abortion β to let women walk away from sexual responsibility, as men could do.
Soon the βgay liberationβ movement went beyond resistance to police harassment and unjust treatment, escalating to demands for same-sex marriage, effectively obliterating the very meaning (and even purpose) of a millennia-old institution. The movementβs aim quickly moved from tolerance of homosexuality to insistence on outright approval and active support. For a time, some actually pushed for the legalization of man/boy sex β among them (though this is conveniently forgotten), Harvey Milk, the movementβs βmartyr,β who had an underage boyfriend while in his thirties. Now we have a U.S. Navy ship named for Milk.
The current vogue for transgender madness gets worse by the day, as thousands of troubled children β goaded by school psychologists and online enablers β take doses of dangerous hormones or even undergo surgery, leaving them sterile for life, all to make their poor bodies match the confusions of their minds. Meanwhile, female athletes lose scholarships and risk injury competing with larger, stronger βtrans-girls,β and a father goes to prison in Canada for defying a judge on which pronouns to use with his own daughter.
The Christian heart of the civil rights movement fell by the wayside the moment activists no longer needed it. What replaced it? A hunt for any trace of supposed inequality in society, without any further reference to equalityβs meaning or rational limits. Or why equality even matters. Antiracism and βsocial justiceβ no longer served as mandates imposed by the God of the Bible. They became golden calves instead.
And thatβs what βantiracismβ and other βsocial justiceβ causes are today. They are idols of Baal, and woke churchmen are the priests of that now explicitly demonic cult. Itβs our Christian duty to mock them, to blaspheme their new false religion, which cares no more for the lives and souls of black people than it does for the unborn babies whose organs it traffics for cash. Mock pasty-faced suburban βEvangelicals for Harrisβ and race-hustling leftist clerics who make their churches temples of racial tribalism and separatism β and laud corrupt prosecutors like Fani Willis because of the color of their skin, not the content of their character.
Democratic talking points distributed to churches? Seems like a slightly concerning issue, no? https://t.co/6s2g4QzpAA
β Megan Basham (@megbasham) August 11, 2024
Have the courage, the love for souls, to laugh these pagans to scorn.
John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 10 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.