So Define Ethnicity for Us

Dear Gavin,

So we have all these different tribes, all over the world, doing their thing. Where does all the animosity between them come from? And what are these distinct ethnicities exactly, between which the animosities arise? How shall we define the ethnoi, in other words?

Let me address the animosity first. There are many proximate causes, but the ultimate one appears to have been a divine design feature. As I argued in my last letter, the Lord was the one who scattered all the nations into their various ethnic enclaves by means of confusing their languages. The reason He did this was to disrupt their ability to work together. The opposite of being able to work together is being at odds with one another, and in a fallen world conflict arises naturally from that. Given the fallenness of man, if there was going to be unity, that unity was going to be deployed in the service of wickedness, and so God put a halt to that.

The good Lord did not want us all to get along, if getting along meant organized iniquity. It was far better that we occupy ourselves by fighting with one another than by fighting Heaven. So that kept us busy for a few millennia, and was the setting for the rise and fall of more than a few Ozymandian empires.

So this brings us to the place where we must define these warring entities. When one ethnic group is set over against another one, what is it that they are seeing across the way? What are they reacting to? Who is “the other?” There is clearly an us/them thing going on, but what are the boundary markers between us and them? Before the fighting starts, what is it exactly that makes us choose up teams the way we do?

This is sort of like asking what separates one country from another, because sometimes it is a river, sometimes, a mountain range, sometimes an ocean, sometimes a canal, and sometimes a line on the map. A line on the map that keeps changing, depending on how the last war went.

Another complication is that ethnic identities can actually stack on top of one another. What are we to make of an Irish-American over against an Irish-Canadian? What is going on there? Or a German family that emigrated to North Dakota while their cousins moved to Brazil? At some point the family reunions will become untenable, or will seem entirely beside the point. Why are we getting together with these strangers again?

All such layered and composite identities make a complicated situation even more complicated. For example, the apostle Paul had varying degrees of loyalty to the tribe of Benjamin (Rom. 11:1; Phil. 3:5), the nation of Israel (Phil. 3:5), the city of Tarsus, no mean city (Acts 21:39), his citizenship in Rome (Acts 22:27), and we can leave out of it the fact that he was a Seahawks fan. Surrounding and encompassing all of it was his loyalty to Christ (Phil. 3:8). This reality necessitates what Augustine called rightly ordered affections—approaching all your loyalties and affections with a spirit of wisdom. It is all right to have all these affections, but you can’t just throw them into a pile without a high risk of becoming an idolater.

As we are seeking to define this thing, this thing with such blurry edges, a good starting point would be this careful observation by Steven Bryan. These things, taken together, create a sense of affinity, and depending on the circumstances, that affinity can be strong, weak, or in between.

This definition gives us a really good starting place. I think this is a truly workable definition. I believe that I take it in different direction than Bryan does, but it is a solid definition. One of the strengths of the definition is that it gives us a glimpse into the problems related to being too specific—how much Tabasco sauce can you put in the curry before it is no longer curry?

For example, I want to argue that American is a distinct ethnos, but it is clearly at a different place on the scale than, say, the Japanese or Laplanders are. If we take the definition above, and we make a bit free with the recipe, we can see that Americans back in the fifties fit under this description very nicely, but we were still way more variegated than the Laplanders were. But the culture wars of the last five decades, and the underlying drivers of those culture wars, have all but blown that fifth criterion to smithereens. Hence the challenges we face.

For example, the recent celebrations of Hamas on college campuses and in places like Dearborn demonstrate just how tenuous everything has gotten. Ask the question this way. Is it possible to move one population into a place occupied by another population, and to do so on a scale as to reveal to an astonished nation the fact that the only thing you did was introduce two large and incompatible groups to one another . . . at close range. I am not suggesting that anybody do this, but if you tied two cats together by the tail and threw them over a clothesline, what you would have is union, but no unity. In fact, I am strongly suggesting that it would be really stupid and cruel to attempt it.

And we should not forget there is more than one way to mess with the recipe. For example, if we apply this definition to the Jews, we see that for most of the last two thousand years, they were entirely missing #2. That changed in 1948 with the founding of Israel, but the Jews certainly had a robust ethnic identity for the centuries they were displaced. And the majority of Jews today still do not live in Israel, and this has not diminished their ethnic self-awareness at all. At the same time, it should be noted that this is one of the more remarkable things about that remarkable people. The Hittites didn’t even come close to pulling that off.

But even at its most stable, the ethnic identity of American was designed to fit more loosely. That name encompasses a Dutch-American dairy farmer in Washington state, a shop owner in one of our fifty Chinatowns, and a grand dame chairwoman of the Daughters of the American Revolution, a direct lineal descendant of James Madison. What are we supposed to do with that kind of range? Well, up to a point, we are supposed to roll with it. But past a certain point, you are not rolling with anything, but rather are jumping off a bridge.

Now large empires can adopt subcultures much more readily than can small mono-cultures. Put another way, mass immigration is going to destroy Germany much more quickly than it will destroy America. This is because of things like our preexisting multi-culture, our large population size, our land mass, and the fact that our influx is largely Trinitarian and not Muslim. But even large poly-ethnic ethnicities have their limit. At some point the Visigoths were running through the streets of Rome, acting like they were fairly disinterested in being assimilated.

This brings me to the issue of skin color. If some of the more cracked proposals were to be adopted, and a boatload of refugees from Gaza are brought over to America and plopped down here, there would be enormous difficulties as a result. But the difficulties would not be skin-coloration difficulties. We wouldn’t even notice that. We already have lots of that color. The problem would be worldview—one that was entirely incompatible with the American ethos, even in our current state of disarray, and one that was not digestible.

So the people who reduce everything to “people of color,” on the one hand, and “white,” on the other, are either simpletons or malevolent. The driver of virtually everything here is culture, not color. And as Andrew Breitbart famously said, culture was upstream from politics. I would affirm this, but only to add that worship is upstream from culture. The way a people worship is the single most important thing about them. Their worship informs everything about their day-to-day lives.

If we return to Bryan’s definition of cultural identity as cited above, we see that there are numerous variables. And one of the things that variables do very well is, well . . . they vary. As they vary, they produce different cultural results—a culture wide equivalent of fusion cuisine. If you try to reduce everything to a simple binary—whites and blacks, say—then you are either selling some political agenda or you are not very smart.

I see that I have brought up whites and blacks right near the end of the letter, and so I have to leave you hanging. Next time. Apologies, and gotta run.

Cordially in Christ,

Douglas