How atheists and racial minorities commit the same anti-majoritarian fallacy

In a January 2007 post I said that the idea that “individual atheists may be as moral as or more moral than many Christians, which is of course true,” misses the point that the “model moral atheists did not derive their morality out of a vacuum, out of some pure uninstructed contemplation; they derived it as members of an actually existing majority Christian society with a Judeo-Christian morality.” Similarly, I said, the idea that “many individual blacks in their job performance, conduct, and moral character are equal or superior to many whites, which is of course true, … misses the point that those blacks are operating within a white majority society the standards and expectations of which have been created by white people.”

I continued:

The non-liberal lesson we derive from the above is that minorities, such as atheists or blacks, need to recognize that their own dearest goods and values depend on the continued existence and health of the majority, such as Christians or whites, that actually forms and maintains the culture; and that the minorities should therefore respect the majority and not try to undercut or overturn it. An atheist or a member of a religious minority who seeks to destroy the majority religion, or a member of a racial minority who seeks to turn America into a non-white country, is violating the true social contract that any society must have if it is to continue both to exist as a society, and to tolerate and include its minorities in its common life.

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Terry Morris writes:

Ah, great entry. I seem to have missed the January 2007 edition. But your entry resonates because many of us have argued the exact ideas before in a variety of contexts—” … destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”—Geo. Washington.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 15, 2008 10:35 AM | Send