To listen to our leftists, to hear the open calls to burn churches, to see them now burning Bibles in Portland, it’s clear they blame slavery, if not the whole history of racism, on Christianity. Which is a howler, really. If these people weren’t leftists, we might expect them to have historical evidence for this particular Christian guilt. Sure, they’ve seen Christians negatively portrayed in decades of Hollywood movies, but I’m talking about actual "evidence" here, not cheap postmodern prejudice.
Fact is, our leftists don’t feel they need actual historical evidence. They don’t know the history of slavery, any more than they know how the West overcame slavery. Their narrative is a lie, but they couldn’t care less.
Much that is now written on slavery is historically myopic in the extreme. Weaponized as a matter of course, such writing seeks from the get-go to demonize either the West, or Christians, or both. But like nearly everything that comes from our left, this anti-Christian narrative is a case of sawing off the branch you’re sitting on.
We must always remember: Slavery arose on every continent where agriculture arose. Slavery was in some respects, at least for agriculturally developed societies, a human universal. Humanity--white, brown, black, yellow--enslaved. Slavery was practiced on every major continent for millennia: Africa, Asia, Europe, the Americas.
The claim that this or that group now owes “reparations” for slavery is absurd. Slavery was abolished many generations ago. The current demands for reparations are nothing but cynical politicking and race-baiting. Such demands, coupled with the left's anti-Christian narrative, are also deeply ironic.
The first major world civilization to articulate slavery's immorality was Western Christian civilization. As everyone who studies the history knows, if it weren't for Christian abolitionists in Europe, Russia and the Americas, slavery would likely still exist as a global norm.
Further: If it weren't for the "all are one in Christ Jesus” doctrine articulated by the Apostle Paul (in Galatians, one of the earliest New Testament writings) slavery would have remained uncontested in the West too.
It was the encounter with Christ, and the insight that encounter awoke, that allowed humanity to overcome slavery.
Yes, it took our Christian civilization a long time to put that insight into political practice, but again: it was only the West that had such an insight to begin with--namely, that there is a fundamental equality and dignity in all human beings, beyond sex, race, or class.
Attacking Christian culture, effacing or burning churches in revenge for humanity’s collective past practice of slavery, is inane. Again, whether these people know it or not, they’re sawing off the branch they sit on.
Why? If our fellow humans are not inherently precious because created in God’s image, then they are, to borrow a phrase, “just clumps of cells”. We saw this logic played out in the previous century. Every last human is a “clump of cells” expendable in the quest for Utopia. And Utopia will never arrive in history, because, as we Christians know, we are all flawed by sin. Any political order will allow greed, disorder, evil to find an outlet.
How did our lefties manage to miss the 20th century? Every single radical project to remake society ended in horrific suffering. But Utopia is what our left still dreams of. This is why they believe a modern society can survive without police. This is why they believe justice can begin with the burning of churches. It is infantile stuff.
No just society can ever be grounded in such thinking. I suspect most of our lefties secretly know this too, but don’t care. They’re not really interested in justice. They’re interested in revenge, in playing Che Guevara, in throwing dirt at all the Daddies.
Our left has serious, serious Daddy issues. They’re letting a private, extended-teenage rage drive them. It would be laughable if there weren’t so many of these spoiled, pissy kids now rampaging about.
And their leaders! Shame on the attention hound Shaun King; shame on the rabid anti-Western ideologues spouting their lies in our now usurped universities; shame on our illiterate SJWs who gulp down this Kool-Aid.
Sane Americans see your your agenda. You seek revenge for wrongs you yourselves never suffered. You use historical wrongs to raise yourself up, to vent your desire for destruction because "things are not right". What is right for you is whatever allows your ego to assert itself, to gain attention. You have allowed yourselves to fill with hate, as this is the easiest route to self-assertion and "action".
Sane Americans see through you. Many of us pray for your conversion, or that you will begin to see your rage for what it is. Still, sane Americans will not sit by and let you destroy a civilization just because you read 100 pages of Marxist dribble in college and are now using it to throw a hissy fit.
Here is the Apostle Paul, writing one of the texts in that now maligned Bible, writing almost two-thousand years ago on how we are actually united. Search history all you like, you will not find any earlier statement of fundamental human dignity.
In Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew nor Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:26-8)
Paul's theological concept of our union in Christ was eventually universalized in the Christian West into what is now the global concept "human rights". For me, as a Christian, the concept remains theological. But for our left? Any notion of "human rights" our left asserts is, unknown to them, ultimately rooted in Christian thought. Thus our left's whole discourse on human rights, especially when it turns to Christianity as somehow the enemy, is deeply incoherent. When forms of slavery reappear, as they well might and as they in fact did under communist regimes in the 20th century, it will be because the concept "human rights" has been cut from its theological root.
It is the encounter with Christ that allowed us to see what unites us. It was this encounter that allowed us to overcome racism, slavery, systemic injustice. Against what unites us, what does our left have? They have hate, race-baiting, division. We must reject them.
Check out my Heretic Days. Writing from the margins of Christianity.
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