The Unbearable Whiteness of Being

Introduction

What happens when someone falls into the error of majoring on minors? One of the first things that happens is the creation of an optical illusion that makes that minor thing seem major, even to those who are hotly denying the error. But the minor thing always remains just what it is—what has become major is the error of making a minor thing major. The error is the issue, not the inflated minor thing. The thing itself stays put.

To illustrate. May I illustrate? Suppose that a graduate of Bison Breath Bible College, newly installed in his first pastorate, makes waves online with a TikTok video claiming that if a church uses anything other than Saltine crackers in communion, the communicants of that church can in no wise be saved. Now as a stand-alone issue, the use of Saltines in communion should be an issue that ranks way low on our list of doctrinal priorities. It is #589 on our list of things to preach on. Turretin says nothing about it. But this man, by making it a condition of salvation, has elevated his error to the level of a major issue. He is endangering his soul (and the souls of others) over the issue of Saltines . . . although it is not the crackers that endanger, but rather the hubris.

Proportionality gives us big things and little things. Lack of proportion seeks to elevate a little thing into a big thing, and fails to do so. It does, however, elevate the lack of proportion into a big thing.

This is why Paul can say that circumcision is nothing (1 Cor. 7:19), on the one hand, and also say that those who make it a condition of salvation are big time false brothers (Gal. 2:4), dogs (Phil. 3:2), and mutilators of the flesh (Phil. 3:2). You can commit huge errors with tiny things.

Something that is not a big deal in itself can always be made into a big deal by those who have no spiritual sense of proportion. And the error swells to ungodly proportions due to two groups of people. The first would be the people who are actually promulgating the error., the false teachers proper. The second group would be those go-along-get-along folks who are a force multiplier for the error—and they do this by refusing to see it for what it is. And this latter error needs to be rebuked with as much vigor as we can muster. May their rabbits all die, and may they be unable to sell the hutch!

These secondary enablers don’t personally believe that Saltines save you, but they will only show their stern face to anyone who manfully resists the error. Invariably, they are the ones who say the opponents of this false gospel are, for some reason, obsessing over Saltines. These were the Revoice for Judaizers at Antioch who thought that Paul was making way too much of a big deal out of circumcision. “Why is it so important to him?” They will tell Athanasius, in his opposition to Arius, that the New Testament only whispers when it comes to the matter of Saltines.

The Problem of Freckles

Let’s bring it a little closer to home, white boy.

Suppose some poor sap of a graduate student in Marxist studies came to believe that the intersectionality vibe was starting to lose its oomph, and that new categories needed to be added to the register of the oppressed. Since he had a significant amount of freckles himself, and had been teased about it as a kid by his sister, he wrote his dissertation on Freckle Power. The thing got picked up by Ball State University Press, and for some strange reason the thing took off, becoming an NYT bestseller. Perhaps it would be better to call such a thought experiment a bestsillier, but still, a lot of copies were flying out the door. Grievance studies sprang up overnight, people began marching, Soros money started to flow, and Congress (our new one) jumped into action, adding the befreckled to the list of endangered and oppressed ethnicities.

Now nothing is more obvious to sensible types (like you and me) that having freckles is not an ethnicity. Neither is not having them. But if two million people start yelling Freckle Power at you, it is certainly something you would have to deal with. And after the violent attacks began spreading across America, would a person without freckles be acting in an un-Christlike way if he took measures to protect his family? They, as it turns out, are as free from freckles as he is.

If he does this, he is not elevating his freedom from freckles into an issue of first importance. He does recognize the madness sweeping the country as an issue of first importance. Freckles? Meh. Other people going crazy? Okay, that’s an issue.

To be sure, there will be others, whose bulbs are dimmer than most, who will buy into the zany state of affairs, and they will start talking as though the lack of freckles is an essential part of being a heritage American. They will start taking an undue amount of spiritual pride in the fact that their faces are free from the mark of Cain. They have done the research. They have done the Bible study. They have read the memes.

The Real Culprits Are the Undulating Squishes

Not to leave you guessing, I now intend to let you know what I am going on about. I now turn away from the darkness of my parables. Saltines? Freckles? Nay. As far as all this uproar concerns the church, the real culprit in our midst is the white evangelical squish. He is full to the brim with moderation and his own good intentions. He overflows with them, and he is standing in the slop. And he absolutely refuses to understand what is going on.

America is in turmoil, but it is not at root ethnic turmoil—it is the turmoil of identity politics. Real ethnic groups, waved across the border by chaos agents, are being used to prime the pump, but the thing they wanted to get started, and did get started, was an inflamed sense of victimhood, oppression, and grievance—in every direction.

The Somalis flood into Minneapolis and they vote as a block. They come with a real sense of group solidarity, and they are a genuine ethnic group. But they come as an alien ethnic group, one too big to be assimilated. The chaos agents behind them, and the evangelical squishes alongside them, tell them repeatedly that people without freckles are the problem. Excuse me. They heap abuse on white people, on whiteness, on white privilege, and on the unbearable whiteness of being. As far as they are concerned, that is the prime evil in the world.

White chumps react to this in ignorant anger, failing to realize how they are buying into the root fallacy. Other white chumps tut tut at the reactionary white chumps, arguing that the only thing that can deal with this kind of white racism is a couple million more Somalis.

Am I speaking in parables again? I beg your pardon. The first set of white chumps would be those who are like unto Joel Webbon. The second set would be those who are like unto David French or Russell Moore. And men of sense would be embarrassed to be the same color as any of them, except that they aren’t ashamed . . . because they are men of sense.

The same thing is going on in Michigan, now the “Arab capital of America.” How many of you thought that we needed to turn Michigan into our Arab capital? What’s next? Texas as the Hindu capital?

This is not cosmopolitanism. This has very little to do with restaurant diversity and the availability of good Thai food. This is not a pleasant sort of mild multiculturalism. This is not an urbane interaction with the occasional foreigner. It is a deliberately fomented war on the American heritage, and unremitting hostility to the culture that has carried the American heritage thus far.

We need to ignore those who do not, cannot, or will not understand the nature of this proxy war. The avowed enemy is whiteness, meaning America, meaning Christian cultural norms, meaning Christianity. As Dylan put it so presciently, you don’t need to be a weatherman to tell which way the wind is blowing.

So it is possible to understand two things together at the same time. The first is that American Christian culture is under assault and is worth defending, and second, that whiteness, as a stand-alone characteristic, is not an ethnicity.

And you can understand that whiteness is not an ethnicity while still understanding that whiteness is under attack everywhere. You can be in a battle, and still keep your head.

You can fight for what is right without turning into everything that is wrong.

Today’s Giveaways

For the next five days the Canon Press free Kindle giveaway is Leadership and the Sin of Empathy by Joe Rigney. You can get that fine book here. And new this year, for NQN Vol. 9, we are also giving away actual books—all you pay for is the shipping. That’s fair enough, isn’t it? Today we’re giving away both the aforementioned Leadership and Emotional Sabotage and its companion Leadership and the Sin of Empathy. Quantities are limited, and you can only pick one free book, so get in line at noquarternovember.com. 

As far as the Mablog Shoppe is concerned, we are giving away Notes for Elders on the Way. This will be free to the end of the month along with the other titles that have been marked down to zero thus far.