Christianity and race

Dear Mr. Auster,

As your daily reader (from India), I see a tension in your ideas between being a Christian and being a European (racially). How do you reconcile these?

Being a Christian should make one immune to racial claims (this is where I think European Christianity finally floundered). Don’t you agree?

Regards,
Vishal M.

Dear Mr. M.,

Thank you for reading VFR regularly. But if you read me regularly, surely you know that I reject the modern liberal notion of Christianity that delegitimizes the particularities of nationhood, along with its components, culture, ethnicity, and race. Yes, there is a tension between Christianity and nation, but that doesn’t mean that we abandon nation, any more than the tension between the individual self and God means that we abandon our individual self! (A point that a Hindu may have a harder time understanding!)

Also, far from floundering on race, European Christianity floundered on liberalism with its rejection of race and its rejection of Christianity.

Please read my article, How Liberal Christianity Promotes Open Borders and One-Worldism, where I deal with this problem at length.

Best wishes,
Lawrence Auster

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[Deleted Name] writes:

I read with interest your reader’s e-mail about racism and Christianity because the tension he mentioned is something I find in my own life. I am convinced that most blacks are far less intelligent than most whites (I was brought up to believe otherwise but I learned from experience), and I almost always find it very frustrating to deal with them. At the same time, I have to acknowledge that God loves them as much as He loves us and we have to love them. I think the key lies in being honest about people’s abilities. Charity does not demand that we pretend people are intelligent, or qualified for certain tasks, when they are not. And while I try to be kind to African immigrants I meet here, I would not hesitate to vote for a law barring them from coming here.

I recently helped a Nigerian woman find some furniture for her apartment. She saw a sofa she wanted and decided to take it. She said she really needed one and her husband had bought several of them, but every time he got them up the stairs he found they did not fit through the door of the apartment. Then he just had to give them away. He had wasted a lot of time and money in this endevour. She said, I’m not sure if this one will fit, so here’s what I’ll do: tomorrow afternoon when my husband gets off work he will get his friend to come here with a van. We will take the sofa to our building and see if we can get it through the door to the apartment. If not, we’ll bring it back.

This was a big, heavy, three-seat sofa. She lives on the third floor of her building. The stairs are narrow.

When I suggested we just use a tape measure (which I had with me) to measure the sofa, then go to her place to measure the door, she was really impressed with my brilliant idea. It turned out the door was far too narrow for the sofa. I doubt they would even have been able to get it up the stairs anyway.

This is one incident but it is absolutely typical of the thought patterns of black Africans. A few of them are very smart, but on the whole they are not well suited to manage a society like the one we have. This country will be irreparably harmed if it continues to admit large numbers of them.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 14, 2007 01:46 AM | Send