Preamble to All This
I much prefer to speak about ethnic relations in terms of ethnicity, and not in terms of race. But when you fly to Europe, sometimes you have to use Euros to buy things. So in this piece I will sometimes use the word racism the way it is commonly understood. By reasonable people, I mean, not by fanatics. Bear with me.
In addition, over the last week or so, a lot of questions about ethnicity have come my way. In order to address as many as possible, it will be necessary for me to meander a bit. This is purposive and intentional, and no reason to think I am losing my grip. There may be other reasons for thinking I am losing my grip, but this would not be one of them. Or maybe I am not losing my grip at all, people.
So Which Cat Laid This Dead Rodent on Our Doorstep?
In a recent Twitter thread, Alistair Roberts said this:
“As a movement, Christian Nationalism has real problems with, e.g., racism and antisemitism, but these issues are not integral to it . . . Reflection upon the sociology of the movement and some of its tenets should, however, make clear there are reasons why it is peculiarly susceptible to such issues. Susceptibilities to such issues aren’t sufficient arguments against positions, but are grounds for caution.”
When wolves are among the sheep, it is the duty of shepherds to fight them. Academicians may want to discuss whether this is happening because snow in the mountains brought these wolves down to the valley, or whether lousy manufacturing of the sheep pens were the draw. I do have opinions about the causes, which you all will find out about shortly, but the first duty is to fight the wolves.
Secondly, as we do so, it is important to distinguish wolves, who say certain things because they love to maim and destroy, and mangled sheep, who often say those very same things because they are in the process of being mangled and destroyed. There are many mainstream evangelical leaders who freak out over what some of the mangled sheep are now saying, when they have been for decades unconscionably silent over the howling of the wolves. What do I mean?
I mean they go into berserker mode when some guy tweets a racially insensitive meme from the Republic of Eli, located in a trailer park in Arkansas somewhere. They react strongly, yelling that this meme bodes ill for democracy indeed. And yet at the very same time, they put up with, and support, the welfare policies of the last half century that have absolutely destroyed the black family. If Eli were a lot more powerful, and was filled with a lot more venom, he could only hope to accomplish a fraction of what these Enlightened White Marauders were able to do. So this issue lies at the root.
As grateful as we might be for the judicious balance demonstrated here by Alistair (e.g. “not integral to it”), he still represents a dangerous misunderstanding of the state of our current affairs. I think it is certainly true that CNs are susceptible to racism and antisemitism, which is why I have been going on about it the way I have. I take my responsibility to police our own ranks seriously.
But are they “peculiarly susceptible” to it? Not a chance. They are obviously more susceptible to the politically-incorrect forms of it, but this is simply a blowback reaction to the last half century of politically-approved race-baiting, race-jiggering, race-haranguing, and so on. After we have read a certain number of think pieces in The Atlantic that urge us to consider whether or not brushing our teeth is white supremacy, you start to not care very much about being called a racist. And when that happens, a door to all sorts of bad things really is opened. But it is worth pointing out that it was opened and propped open by the do-gooders, bed-wetters, and commies. I have been called a racist by them so many times, I kind of have a callus there now.
The CN movement came into existence in a world that was already ethnically inflamed, and it was somebody else who inflamed it. The people who inflamed it are smart, and entitled, and have Ivy letters after their names, and they vacation at Martha’s Vineyard. And it doesn’t matter how many times you show them the smoking debris field they created, because they, unlike others, don’t have to live in it.
Okay, Boomer
When from time to time I have had difficulty with some technical aspect of one of my Apple devices, it is more often than not that the rescue mission is conducted by a millennial. And in such moments, I do not begrudge whatever merriment ensues. And if the phrase okay, boomer were to be used in a context such as that, it is used in the spirit of give and take. That is why the phrase okay, boomer needed to be coined. Most necessary, most fitting. Proper, in fact.
This is all good fun, but we need to recognize that we are up against some serious challenges as a people, all generations. Our life is not going well for us in the land that the Lord our God gave us, and this is because we have neglected to honor our fathers and mothers (Eph. 6:2-3). In this I include, in the spirit of the Larger Catechism, our actual fathers and mothers, our extended kin, our American Founders, and the doctors of the Reformed Church. The command to honor father and mother in the Old Testament uses kavod for honor, and it is a term that has the connotation of giving weight to them. This is precisely what the Christian nationalists are seeking to do . . . with the one notable exception from some of heeding our Reformed fathers on the subject of the Jews. For more on that, see below.
So the pathologies of our era, particularly when it come to ethnic relations, require us to find a place to apply and honor the following:
“Likewise you younger people, submit yourselves to your elders. Yes, all of you be submissive to one another, and be clothed with humility, for ‘God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.’”
1 Peter 5:5 (NKJV)
But this must be done in a way that rejects the idolatrous and secular follies that were established and entrenched by the boomer generation. Those secular idols really do need to be toppled, and young Christian nationalists need to do the toppling. Great. Have at it.
“And might not be as their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation; A generation that set not their heart aright, and whose spirit was not stedfast with God.”
Psalm 78:8 (KJV)
“Might not be as their fathers.” But is there any danger at all in rejecting the stubborn rebellion of your fathers? Why, yes, there is. How can we protect ourselves from that kind of overreaction? By listening to wiser fathers. It is important to avoid the error of Rehoboam, who listened to the advisors who all graduated the same year he did, and not to the wiser heads, who tried unsuccessfully to keep him from wrecking everything (1 Kings 12:6-11).
Look just a few verses earlier in Ps. 78.
“Which we have heard and known, and our fathers have told us.”
Psalm 78:3 (KJV)
The key is to listen to your wiser fathers, and to reject the ways of your idolatrous fathers. You cannot escape from stupid fathers by chasing after stupid sons. You escape from the stiff-necked boomers by listening to the members of their own generation who opposed them long before it was cool to do so.
So in the next section, I am going to talk about the Jews. And in my considered opinion, there is no way that a young Christian nationalist can navigate the convoluted question of Israel and the Jews without relying on the postmillennialism of the Puritans, without a love for the Jews as exhibited by our Reformed fathers, loving them as the apostle Paul did, and without preferring Samuel Rutherford over Nick Fuentes.
This emphasis started early enough, with Bucer and Beza. I don’t have space for a complete roster, but let me just fill out this paragraph with snippets: “It shall come to pass that when the Jews come to the Gospel, the world shall as it were come quicken again, and rise up from death to life” (Geneva Bible, notes); “Hence I gather that the nation of the Jews shall be called, and converted to the participation of this blessing” (William Perkins); “the gospel [to be] propagated throughout the world, the Jews called, [and] the fulness of the Gentiles brought in” (Westminster Larger Catechism, 191); and “in taking into his kingdom the greater sister, that kirk of the Jews” (Rutherford). If time permitted, I could probably cite references to this effect until the conversion of the Jews—John Owen, Thomas Manton, John Flavel, David Dickson, Jeremiah Burroughs, James Durham. Richard Sibbes, Increase Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Boston, John Newton, Charles Hodge, and Robert Haldane. I could even go on and quote my own commentary on Romans, but modesty forbids.
I did not learn this take on the Jews from The Anti-Defamation League, The International Coalition of Christians and Jews, or The Cosby Show. So I will put it to you simply. Unless you learn to love the Jews in a Pauline way, you remain a significant part of the problem. You are reacting, not acting. You are not helping.
Defining Antisemitism
So there is no real way to define antisemitism unless we define the Jews first. The true Jew is one who is under the covenant of Sarah, and this would include what we would call ethnic Jews who have believed in Christ. The genuine Jew is the one who is circumcised in heart, by the Spirit (Rom. 2:28-29). The group we commonly call Jews are cultural and ethnic Jews, and they have overwhelmingly rejected Christ as their Messiah. They are consequently under the covenant of Hagar (Gal. 4:24-26). Paul describes it as a covenant of bondage, and there is no indication in the text that this covenant was going to evaporate over time. Chains can be struck off, by faith alone, but they don’t evaporate. The veil will remain (2 Cor. 3:15) until the promised time for their restoration arrives (Rom. 11:24).
So . . .
“A Jew is someone who has a shared ethnic and cultural heritage with other Jews, going back to the time of Abraham. Proselytes have been grafted in during that time, but as mentioned above, this does not alter the covenantal connection. With this as their shared experience, Jews differ widely among themselves with regard to what they believe—there are secular Jews, Reformed Jews, Conservative Jews, and Orthodox Jews. Not to mention others.”
In sum, a Jew is not someone who assiduously follows the Talmud. That group is very small. So the Jews are an ethnic group defined by certain physiological features, last names, observable cultural habits, and a widespread rejection of Christ as the Messiah. In an odd quirk, rejecting Jesus is more important to them for maintaining this Jewish identify than it is to retain a loyalty to Moses or to God Himself. It is far easier to be a Jewish atheist than a Jewish Christian. The Jewish Christians usually get assimilated into the larger Gentile church. The Jewish atheists get assimilated, according to their design, into the Void.
With this as my backdrop, what is antisemitism then?
“Anti-Semitism is the idea that Jews are uniquely malevolent and destructive in their cultural, economic, and political influence in the world. As defined elsewhere, ethnic sin is either malicious, vainglorious, or separatist, but the anti-Semitic forms of it usually tend toward the malicious.”
Christians generally have a good grasp of the fact that we are supposed to preach the gospel to every nation. The Christian faith is an outgoing, evangelistic faith. Why would the Jews be exempted from this? The lure of antisemitism can be effective because people have been taught that the Jews already had their chance, and rejected it. Our job is therefore to shake the dust off our sandals and go preach to somebody else. That being the case, some Christians have drifted into a mentality that wants to scapegoat the Jews, blaming them for all sorts of dirty deeds. “Wrecking the world, that’s what they’re doing.”
But this is to be the victim of a massive optical illusion.
“For many reasons, too variegated to go into here, the Jews are a high performance people. This means that when they are bad, they are high performance bad. And when they are productive contributing members of society, they are high performance fruitful and good. Anti-Semites frequently point to the high preponderance of Jews among the Bolsheviks, say, or pornographers, or the Frankfurt School. What they don’t do is point to the counterpart phenomenon when we are talking about violin masters, or patent holders, or Nobel Prize winners, or the Austrian School of economics.”
If we really had to deal with a series of James Bond supervillains, I am sure that a disproportionate number of them would be Jews. But if I had to go have brain surgery, and I was checking out all my options, I am sure that a disproportionate number of the prospective surgeons would be Jews also. Now what?
The Gospel and Regular Old Racism
The corruption of our culture is a corruption that is powered by the world, the flesh and the devil. It turns out that this trio has black people by the throat. White people too. Jews are not excluded. Asians . . . Asians are down for the count. All have sinned, the Bible says, and have fallen short of the glory of God.
All what? Is Paul saying that all individuals are sinners, the way that all triangles are three-sided? That is an implication of what he says, but it is not what he said. The all in that statement in Romans 3 is talking about Jews and Gentiles. All Jews and all Gentiles have sinned. The Jews are the worst, except for the Gentiles. The Gentiles are the absolute pits, if it hadn’t been for the Jews. In the great intersection of sinful depravity, the pile-up in the middle of that intersection included all the cars, and all the passengers. No one is righteous, not even one. Outside the gospel, to compare one ethnic group to another in a virtue competition is like declaring one leper the healthiest because to date he has had the fewest fingers fall off.
Now as it happens, the demented spirit of this sinful age has taken on an institutionalized form. If the problem is not a particular ethnicity, as I insist it is not, what is the problem? The source of the problem of course is the wickedness of every human heart. But that wickedness presents an opportunity to those who want to see that wickedness instantiated in culture. They want a statue of a giant phallus in the quad of your state university. “You’re crazy, man! That hasn’t happened yet.” “Sorry! Was I prophesying again? My mistake. Apologies, everyone.”
And the movement that wants this kind of thing is the progressive left. Call them what you want to. Marxists. Socialists. Commies. Critical theorists. Democrats. And what ethnicities do we find in this pirate crew? All of them. Commie whites and commie blacks and commie Jews. And what ethnicities do we find fighting against this madness? Again, all kinds.
But the conservative resistance has to date been fighting at a real disadvantage. This is because many of them are trying to fight without a transcendental foundation. The answer to the chaos is Christ, and far too many conservatives either can’t name Christ, or for some bizarre two-kingdom reason won’t name Christ. They are trying to fight the final stages of secularism from secular premises. They are spooked by a phrase like Christian nationalism because they don’t have a gospel big enough to apply to a nation, let alone all of them. They have a gospel that can cover a human heart, but remember how tiny those are. And there always seems to be a limited supply, and so we can only go one at a time.
By way of contrast, the gospel that is presented to us in Scripture has a far grander design than that of getting some pietist’s white little hinder parts into Heaven when he dies. Not to exclude him, because he really is saved, and does mean well, but his confusion is still great. A tsunami of grace is coming toward the shores of our sorry and rebellious planet, and quite a few Christians think that this is so they might be equipped to take a spit bath.
To quote the title of a John Piper book, which he got from somewhere good (Ps. 67:4), let the nations be glad. The gospel of Christ applies to nations. Nations are summoned. Nations are to be baptized. Nations are sinful and must repent. Nations have a responsibility to decide whether or not Jesus rose from the dead. And because He did rise from the dead, they have responsibility to decide the right way.
This is all free grace, which helps explain some of the opposition to it. You can’t monetize free grace. You can’t buy BLM mansions with it. We are talking about grace, not grift.