Rod Dreher has a piece today titled “Whiteness And Godliness”.
Lisa Robinson, a black Evangelical Christians, offers “Some Questions I’m Asking While Off To My White Evangelical Church.” She says that yes, it’s true that white Christians have historically been complicit with injustice against black Christians, and though things have gotten better, there’s still a ways to go with racial reconciliation. But these days, she says, church circles are buzzing with talk of overthrowing “white supremacy” in the church….
Robinson goes on to say that the jargon of this movement — whiteness, white supremacy, oppression, marginalization, colonization — is designed to put you into a hostile mindset, to teach you to start seeing your white fellow churchgoers with suspicion. And if you try to question any of this language, “you will be branded as endorsing whiteness and maybe even treated like an enemy…like them.” She asks what it does to her to start seeing the white people in her church as potential threats instead of fellow believers.
Dreher fails to recognize the implicit whiteness of those Benedictine Options which care about Western Civilization and the traditions thereof. He writes:
A white Evangelical friend of mine dropped out of a racial reconciliation group in his city — a group he joined because he’s serious about it — because it turned into a weekly ritual denunciation of Whiteness… If that’s what the encounter in church between blacks and whites comes down to, then there will never, ever be racial reconciliation. If facing the legacy of racism in the church in a healing way can only be done by whites hating themselves for being white, then all you will get is bitterness and defensiveness…
Christians ought to find this easier than most, given the faith’s teachings about humility and mercy. But we don’t. This is our failing, but this is also our challenge. To bring in the SJW rhetoric and categories into the church, though, is pure poison.
So, is it the whites in church who are being irrational and close-minded on issues of race? Or is it, empirically speaking, the non-whites? If the latter, as I suspect Dreher would reluctantly acknowledge, then what should the rational response be from the majority-white churchgoers? If such a church blindly accepts into its fold non-whites with this ‘irrational’ racialist attitude, then insofar as there is any sort of democratic accountability in the church, over time the demographics-is-destiny rule takes over. (Ah, but the Church isn’t really a democratic institution, is it. It’s more like a monarchy or tradition-based authoritarianism.)
Formerly white nations (e.g., Europe and the U.S.) are just such ‘Churches’. The retreat of whites to whiter areas of the country (an organic process), such as The Villages in Citrus Hills FL, is a secular version of the Benedict Option.
To willingly displace oneself demographically, vis-à-vis an idealized version of pathological altruism, is racial (and cultural) suicide.
As a prime example of his notion of the Benedict Option, Dreher cites the Bruderhof settlements in NY’s Hudson River Valley. These settlements appear to be socially stable and reliable.
What sort of racial demographics do you think we’d find there?
