Jesus said, “I give to you this cracker, so that future generations will remember that I looked Hu-white to you.”

The rollercoaster won’t stop

No matter how much you might want to get off of this rollercoaster, by some twist of fate it just never seems to end. Here’s the latest development that Christians are bringing from (((Jesus of Nazareth’s))) mouth to your ears.

Jim Wallis, the founder of the Christian magazine Sojourners, thinks that Christianity has not done enough yet to destroy Europeans physically and psychologically, and so he has some advice which is sure to make you want to kill yourself:

The Oregonian, ‘White Christians need to repent for systemic racism, author says’, 17 Feb 2016:

Wallis is president and founder of the Christian magazine Sojourners and has served President Barack Obama as a spiritual advisor. He has authored 12 books as well as columns for The New York Times and The Washington Post.

His newest book, “America’s Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America,” is an indictment of white Christian apathy and inaction towards systemic racism.

“The political and economic problems of race are ultimately rooted in a theological problem,” he writes.

Modern white Christians might not own slaves or even all walk to the other side of the street to avoid passing a young black man, but they do benefit from white privilege, he said, whether they’re aware of it or not.

“To benefit from oppression is to be responsible for changing it,” he writes.

Wallis will be in Portland early next week as part of his book tour, which he’s turned into a series of town halls by inviting faith leaders in each city to join him for a public conversation about racism. Wallis and local pastor Leroy Barber will speak at Powell’s City of Books at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 22.

Ahead of his visit, we talked to Wallis about a few major issues raised in the book. His responses have been edited for clarity and brevity.

Q: You argue that racism – not just personal feelings of hate, but allowance of systematic injustice – results from problematic theology. What theological misconception do you identify at the core of modern white churches that are apathetic or inactive with regards to race?

A: In Galatians, 3:28, it says there is no Jew or gentile, slave or free, male or female – we’re all one in Christ Jesus. If churches are just silos of people like each other, we’re really not doing what it we’re supposed to do. Martin Luther King Jr. called people of God the “beloved community.” We’re supposed to be the ones who are demonstrating a diverse “beloved community.” Our theology is supposed to trump our sociology.

If you don’t want to do that, you’d better go somewhere else. This community is all about braking down those barriers. If churches are just silos of people like each other, we’re really not doing what it was supposed to do.

[...]

Q: You call on white Christians to “die to whiteness,” saying that “whiteness” is an idol that separates white Christians from God. What does “dying to whiteness” mean?

A: Whiteness is a myth. Race was created as a social construct to justify oppression. How do we get our souls back? It’s an idolatry, really. Idols separate us from God.

Dying to whiteness means to be aware of white privilege. For example, I tell a story in the book about being a little league coach. Parents of my black players had to have “the talk” with their kids, and my white parents were clueless. It’s unacceptable that my kids’ classmates and teammates had to be told they couldn’t trust their law enforcement officers. That’s a problem for me and white parents, not just black parents.

[...]

Yes, you read that correctly, it says ‘dying to whiteness’. Really. This is a thing now.

‘Dying to whiteness’ is when white people decide not to recognise the existence of their own ethnic group, and as such become ontologically incapable of enunciating ideas about the defence of that ethnic group.

You can’t defend a thing that you don’t recognise as existing.

If this isn’t ‘white genocide’ then I don’t know what is. Given the present situation, how anyone anywhere could even be considering calling for more Europeans to join these institutions is something that is simply baffling to consider.

The rollercoaster continues rolling for its own sake

A lot of pro-Christians who like to fancy themselves as ethno-nationalists, tend to respond to this sort of article by trying desperately to trace out the history of a supposedly militant Christianity that once-upon-a-time defended the integrity of European ethnic groups. They seem to believe these legends are a suitable rebuttal to the reality which is playing out right in front of them today.

But history will not let them retreat into legends from the classical age. All of this must be understood as a process. Understanding the dialectic of structure and history will enable people to understand how the position of Christian institutions only seemed to move, but in fact they maintained an ‘immobile motion’ which kept them firmly in their place.

What do I mean by this?

The first priority of any expansionist ideological institution that operates on a subscription basis, is to fund itself and expand the number of people who are subscribing to its memes where possible. The second priority of such an institution is to manoeuvre itself in the market, so that it can comfortably keep ahead of global demographic trends.

The rollercoaster doesn’t care about you

In the past era, Christianity appeared to care about the fate of European societies and the cohesiveness of European population groups, because Europeans were the only societies that were furnishing soldiers which were willing to fight to perpetuate the existence of the church institutions, or to give such institutions access to more territories to recruit followers from, or to take populations away from doctrinal rivals, and so on.

As a testament to the success of that strategy, the main church institutions were able to survive into the modern era, and Christianity grew as a religion by following Europeans wherever they went on the planet.

In the present era, Christianity no longer has to care about the fate of European societies or the cohesiveness of European population groups, because the Christian institutions don’t actually need to parasitically extract wealth from European societies in order to exist anymore. They now have the prospect of taking advantage of the single fastest-growing demographic in the entire world, Africa. Africans are more willing to accept the Christian memes than anyone else is, and as such and an almost guaranteed revenue source for Christian institutions.

The fact that Christianity has within these last 100 years freed itself from the shackles of having to care about Europeans at all in any sense, is not a distortion of Christianity, but rather, the logical end result that it had always striven for. If the past era could be understood as a ‘Northern and Central European compromise’ which occurred after the collapse of the Byzantine Empire and the loss of the food-basket territories of Egypt and Syria, the present era could be recognised as the fulfilment of the success of that compromise, since Christianity can now ‘go global’ once again and break that compromise, and it is doing so with gusto.

The accumulation of capital from land ownership, financial holdings, relationships with prosperous Northern and Central European states, and so on, is now being reinvested by Christian institutions into a full drive toward carrying out the actions necessary to position themselves to take advantage of the growing populations in Africa and other areas in the periphery.

Their number one priority did not change. It only seemed to change in the eyes of some people, and the only people who are perceiving a ‘change’, are those Europeans who in some kind of fatal conceit started to think that Christianity was somehow about them.

In fact, back then, Christianity was about the survival of Christianity and maintaining or expanding the wealth of its institutions. Now in the present day, Christianity is about the survival of Christianity and maintaining or expanding the wealth of its institutions.

See? No change.

Newsflash, Europeans: Christianity is not about you. It was never about you. Christianity is about perpetuating its own existence. It doesn’t care about you, and it never did. It is a religion that (((originated))) in the Middle East and Africa, and it is there to which it will demographically return. That Christian institutions are now pushing anti-racialist memes more fervently than they ever have before, is something which is simply inherent in the logic of events.