I don’t know how to talk about this in any kind of organized way, so I am going to talk about it in a disorganized way. Do you remember when Jesus had this conversation with the religious leaders of his day?
Jesus said, “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.”
40 Some of the Pharisees near him heard these things, and said to him, “Are we also blind?”
41 Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say, ‘We see,’ your guilt remains.
This is the illness that white supremacy is, because by definition, white supremacy is a great evil that claims to be an ultimate good. The way this plays out in daily life, however, is a lot more subtle. It is the ultimate form of gaslighting.
Why are so many white people so fragile? Why are so many white people obsessed with comfort and think they have a right not to feel bad about genocide, and slavery, etc.? Why do white people leap to defend themselves against every slight, but when it comes to admitting the heinous crimes that happen TO EVERYONE, they defend abusers, and chastise victims for not being kind enough to the predators that bite and devour them? Why do white people say, if you weren’t doing anything wrong, you would have nothing to fear? Why do white people bend over backwards to defend the status quo, to defend the morally compromised, to bail out their wicked and failing institutions, to pretend that this is the way things have to be? Why do white people refuse to look the worst evils of their society squarely in the eye while simultaneously pretending that the root of all evil is a lack of civility? That if we would be nicer to each other, i.e., not criticize the powers that be, we could really make progress? Why do white people fixate on the least important aspects of culture and social morality but go full ostrich when it comes to admitting the evils of authoritarianism, capitalism, imperialism, and the everyday violence inflicted on the many by the relatively few and powerful?
Why is it that so many white liberals do this just as often as white conservatives or white fascists? Why are people constantly trying to defend the ignorance and beliefs of people who revel in violence and hatred for those without power? Why would you actually want to be on intimate terms with people who defend bigotry, concentration camps, pedophiles, and the billionaires’ economic rape of the middle class? Who, in their right mind, would continue to be invested in a series of relationships, networks, and communities, that while superficially claiming to benefit humanity, really work to enslave and impoverish both the material and spiritual conditions of anyone they can get away with, all so rich people can get richer and wealth be consolidated even more into the hands of the fewer and fewer?
Who would continue with affection and complacency in such an environment? If you were sane, you would run screaming from all of these things.
Now, it’s not really about whiteness, because race is made-up and other ethnicities do this too, to the extent they can imagine themselves as part of the “master race”. (Which is why black people aren’t fooled by this in the United States. Turns out when you’ve been categorically enslaved and oppressed by the “master race” for centuries, you don’t want to see yourself as part of it.) This is about empire and being the child of empire. But white people are the rightful heirs to the empire in the United States and in Europe, and they do not seek to repudiate their parentage.
So, I have something to say to white Christians, because even those of you who are watching the news right now and know you are seeing a great evil done, it is highly unlikely that you know that truth deeply enough. You cannot serve both God and mammon. You cannot be a child of the American imperial capitalistic war machine and a child of God. You should have already had to choose between them. If the American church weren’t an colossal failure in teaching you anything useful to have an identity in Christ apart from this world, you would already have had to choose.
Unfortunately, most of American conservative religion has always been too deeply indebted to white supremacy to know the difference between the church and the world. Which is why American evangelicals obsess about superficial matters of sexual purity and identity, but are totally incapable of challenging the corruption of power, greed, or violence, particularly sexual violence. The real altar that American evangelicalism worships at is the cult of the family—the paterfamilias. They have worshipped what is male, white, and authoritarian more than the God of Israel, Isaac, and Jacob. Any idol becomes a demon.
I don’t think the liberal church worships whiteness any less than conservatives do. Whether it is because they barely trust God at all, or their version of religion is fundamentally less cruel and obsessed with violence, or a combination of the two, I don’t know. What I do know is that the liberal church, while not selling its soul to fascism, is still greatly hampered by an addiction to comfortableness and a genuine inability to side against the status quo. I don’t think its an exaggeration to call the liberal church morally and spiritually useless, but maybe it is too unkind to call it totally useless. A fine distinction between mostly dead and dead.
There will, of course, and thanks be to God–be people who surprise you in all this. There will be conservatives, or totally politically and religiously disengaged people who will put everything on the line, because despite them being really dumb and complicit, they have clung to the most important thing—loving one’s neighbor. There is always a genuine possibility for this. You can believe every lie in the world as a naïve fool, but throw your body in front of a bullet. I don’t recommend taking that route, but it is possible and worth far more than any words I could say.
Anyway, back to my message to the fascist-apologist Christians who are wringing their hands about the violence happening right now, but still don’t want to see clearly enough to identify the spiritual source of all of this. This is my message: you people are crazy. This is an insane choice. It is insane to side with your oppressor or be torn about it. It is insane to side with the Gestapo or not want to hurt people’s feelings about their actual Nazi politics and political action–not to mention their political theology. It is insane to not be able to unequivocally reject what is happening now, and to coddle and feel sorry for the people who are doing these terrible things.
Now, it is possible to have genuine compassion for a villain. Jesus did, famously, for one of his executioners. But Jesus, unlike you, was crystal clear on who his enemies were, what right from wrong was all about. He set his face like flint against Jerusalem because Jerusalem was the damn problem. I’m not sure you have the luxury of coddling a superficial sentimental sorrow towards these wicked systems that are feasting on your soul. You need to repudiate them. Get some distance—run for the mountains. Then you can have compassion on those who refused to flee.
You Christians who refuse to repudiate the evil powers at work in the world—the ideas, the institutions, the money, the communities, the churches, the political powers, your family members—you folks who will not give up these things. You are Lot’s wife. When you were given an ultimatum from God to flee for your lives—you kept turning around and looking back at the thing that was trying to kill you. If you are not careful, you will be ensnared in a destruction that you can no longer avoid. The time is now short.
This is also why Jesus said that he came bringing not peace, but a sword to set people against each other. Because you can’t have peace from God and peace with these evil systems of the world. You ought to know by now that when Trump, or any of these lying conciliatory voices say they want peace, THEY ARE LYING. You can’t have the false peace of the world at the same time you have the peace that comes from the fruit of the Holy Spirit.
It is sad to me that most people do not know the difference between good and evil things because they do not want to. I cannot really understand being so lulled into a false sense of safety and security that you think you can get away with not knowing who your enemies are. This is why the white liberal church fails to make disciples of Jesus, and are so ineffective at everything. At best, they are so secure they think nothing bad can happen to them. But it already has. You have already been so spiritually neutralized you are barely alive—you are certainly blind to what dangers are actively coming for you. At worst, these people are traitors–they betray the cause and the faith, whenever it personally costs them anything, or they think the other side is winning. This is the Democratic party, too, right? They are so focused on winning what’s winnable they don’t even think about what battles they ought to be committed to no matter what. That’s the definition of selling out.
I cannot stress enough that it is not enough for us as a people to go back to any kind of imagined status quo. Other than the everyday violence and injustice that imperial America is always wreaking at home and abroad (America kills, imprisons, and enslaves a lot of people all the time—they just don’t normally execute white Americans in the street in broad daylight to enforce a criminal mass deportation scheme), we are facing crises from climate change, water consumption, and of course, and the rising cult of insane self-deifying, self-identifying accelerationist billionaires who want to burn the world down and remake it in their image.
I had a theology teacher in college that I much admired in other ways, but I remembered laughing at something he said once—he said that Christians shouldn’t have enemies. Only a white person in America could believe something so incredibly naïve. I don’t have to explain how unbelievably myopic such a statement is…but I guess I will anyway. If someone wants to steal your rights, your freedom, your health, your life from you, you have an enemy. Having an enemy is not about your feelings or your attitudes, white people, it is about someone trying to, or succeeding in, harming you. So maybe fight them or something. Or just roll over and die like Lot’s wife, I guess.