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I've noticed the alt-right (specifically the Richard Spencer wing) is blaming Christianity for cucking Whites and making them accept non-whites in their country. To me this isn't even close to being true and can be dismissed outright as nonsense.
We know from genetics that modern Europeans separated from sub saharan African 30 to 40 thousand years ago. We also know that Western Europeans didn't have any meaningful contact with Blacks until the 15th century when Portugal "discovered" West Africa during the Age of Exploration. By accepting this, we can see that Western Europe has had over 500 years of contact with Blacks.
I've specifically been looking into England, but the same is true for other nations. The highest count of non-whites I can find on Google Scholar recently is 2.6% in 1951. Interestingly, 2.2% of those 2.6% were first generation immigrants. This is by far the highest I've seen with other estimates putting it close to 99%.
So at this point, we have pretty clear data that when Europe was Christian (and America), there was almost 0 non-white immigration to Europe. We also know places like France put in racist laws like Code Noir that explicitly put Whites at the top of the social hierarchy.
When we look at when this changed, it was really the 1960's. But at this point, Christianity was starting to decline due to science and especially Darwin (and in my opinion became obviously not true). The increased immigration and anti-racist views correlates with Christianity's decline, so the idea that Christianity having everyone's soul being equal can be equally dismissed. In fact, I would argue the pro non-white immigration came from the secular left or if you want to argue it's the right neoliberalism. I see zero evidence of this that Richard Spencer and his allies argue to be true. In fact, the evidence shows the complete opposite.
The elements of Christianity which would lead one to believe that antiracism is important to the faith were historically counterbalanced with deeper readings of the text and studies in ancient history and philosophy. The ones steering politics were exclusively men who were well-educated in these texts. The decline of Christian literacy coincides with the decline in the emphasis on ancient classics with its brutal realism (“the strong do what they will and the weak do what they must”), and the extolling of false political science (no racial differences as a matter of assumption), and the dominance of a largely non-Christian media influenced disproportionately by non-Christians. Everyone believed in unique racial characteristics before the 19th century, but science came in during the 20th century and told everyone this has been debunked actually.
Islam has a much stronger emphasis on anti racism than Christianity, see here
it’s simply that only highly educated men decided things in Islamic nations. Even today, if only men decided politics, it would be difficult for democrats to win an election. If only men trained in theology and the philosophy / history of the classics decided things, who knows what things would look like? I suppose you could say that, like Adam, the West’s original sin was a combination of pride + being persuaded by womankind, which changed who decided things and then led to all sorts of issues downstream.
Islam is a substantially anti-racist religion, and even the vast majority of Khaleeji (and therefore to some extent ‘founding stock’) Islamic scholars have essentially the exact same blank slatist view of race as a woke American college professor. Racial prejudice exists throughout the Islamic world, but it’s the petty prejudice of local peoples, it broadly isn’t religiously endorsed. Even in the West, while largely lay Muslim communities are grouped by country of origin, hardcore Islamist groups and mosques are often remarkably multiethnic and some groups arrested for planning attacks feature variably Arab, black, Desi, Chechen and white converts. And Muslim countries like Turkey with Syrians and Jordan with the PLO have been very tolerant (arguably much moreso even than modern Europe when you look at the percentage of the total population taken in) of refugees until, in the latter case, they literally tried to militarily overthrow the government. Sure, many Gulf Arabs are still racist against Africans, but that’s nothing you won’t hear from many Southern Italians about their recent arrivals. ISIS obviously had Muslims from every corner of the earth fighting alongside each other; the Arabs who led it were happy to hand over captured non-Muslim Arab girls as bribes and spoils of war to non-Arab Muslim fighters, which again shows the primacy of religion over race among devout Islamists. In Malaysia there were big campaigns about the global ummah and billboards about racial tolerance lol. I work with a lot of Muslims around the world, including conservative ones, and their views on race are - in the case of the devout - indistinguishable from white leftists, even if they disagree on everything else.
I agree that Christianity is less explicitly anti-racist. Still, I think anti-Christian reactionaries would say that its more generally less martial affect, pacifist origins, emphasis on turning the other cheek, the meek shall inherit the earth and so on are ultimately more conducive to DEI ideas than not. Also, we tend to see historical Western figures (say early Americans, or slave traders, or imperialists) as uniformly devout Christians. Almost all would have believed in God and considered themselves Christian, but actual levels of religious devotion varied considerably, in many historically Christian communities the majority of people have never attended Church every Sunday for example, not in 1750 and not today.
I think this is glossing over a substantial amount of Islamic history - in particular, the Umayyads were moderately Arab-supremacist, and Islam made a much stronger universalist turn with the victory of the Abbasids, who were non-Arab and therefore strongly inclined to an interpretation of Islam in which ethnic or tribal identity is irrelevant.
In the case of Christianity, I think it's going to be important here to clarify 'anti-racist', since the term admits to so many interpretations today. I think one could fairly assert that at least from Paul (the historical Jesus being less clearly accessible), Christianity is a *non-*racist religion, in the sense that race or ethnic identity is simply irrelevant. The big early leap is going from Christianity as internal to Jews to Christianity for all people, but once that leap was made - and it appears to have been made extremely early - it was set. Thus in the New Testament we see conversions of everyone from Ethiopians to Macedonians, divine revelations to indicate a universal call (Acts 10), preaching to all people (Acts 17, all of Paul's career), and a theology in which "there is no longer Jew nor Greek, barbarian nor Scythian". We even find this universalist language put into the mouth of Jesus (e.g. John 10:16), whether you think that's historical or not.
However, none of that is the same thing as 'anti-racism' in the dogmatic modern sense. The traditional Christian position going back as far as the New Testament is that race/ethnicity/cultural-identity/ancestry is irrelevant, and what matters is personal faith, such that one who believes is the true descendant of the patriarchs (cf. Matthew 3:9, Galatians 3:6-7), even taking priority over the flesh (Philippians 3:2-7). This is obviously quite different to anti-racism in the modern sense, which remains deeply interested in race as a moral and ethical category.
We have to be careful not to misinterpret a spiritual ruling for a worldly ruling. “No longer barbarian or Scythian” also includes the line “no longer slave or free”; a different verse with the same intention specifies “no male or female in Christ”. Now, we know that early Christians comprised both slave and free men, and we know there was no call to free these Christian slaves. And we also know that there were strict rules regarding how women ought to behave, always submitted to either the husband or the male church leader. So we can’t take “no barbarian or Scythian” to mean the eradication of cultural units or allegiances, because there were binding cultural rules for women and allegiances of slaves to masters. IMO these verses are “simply” saying that within the spirit of Christ our worldly identities are enveloped toward spiritual ends (heavenly rewards and judgments). Christ has primacy, and is the whole spiritual “bloodline” if you will, but its relevant category is spirit and not world. So I may be a worldly slave, yet freed in Christ, or free in the world yet a slave to Christ (too lazy google this passage). I may be wealthy in the world, but it would be a mistake for the church to give me extra attention and place me in the front because of worldly wealth.
Paul sort of demonstrates this nuance in Romans. His gentile Christian congregants are his brothers, yet he doesn’t deny that “I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin”, and he especially desired that his worldly brothers would join the spiritual brotherhood. I think this is the morally correct nuance to take regarding world concerns and religion concerns. Genetic differences in race are a world concern that concern the political aspect of a person (rules on emigration, whatever). The absolute irrelevance of genetics for spiritual life and spiritual ends is a religious truth that concerns the spiritual aspect of a person. They are different. The spiritual has supremacy but also has little bearing on the political (“give unto Caesar…”).
Well, yes, Paul isn't denying that people are still Jewish or Greek or barbarian or Scythian in a literal sense.
He's denying that Jewishness or Greekness or barbarianness or Scythianness are relevant to one's identity in Christ. Those things do not matter, which is why Christianity thus tends to resist politics that are premised on asserting their importance, and why attempts to reconcile Christianity with overtly racialist politics can only function by mutilating or perverting Christianity.
You can try to draw a worldly/spiritual distinction, but I think that's perilous in practice and often ends merely in the assertion of a double standard. The worldly or political life of a Christian must be shaped by his or her spiritual life also - neither Jesus nor Paul confine their teachings to an abstract realm of the inward spirit, but rather understand that their spiritual teachings have profound consequences for the way one lives and interacts with others. Thus, for instance, when Peter refrains from joining Gentiles for meals in Galatians 2, Paul rebukes him to his face. The spiritual equality of all people in Christ has obliterated the kind of distinctions that might have justified Peter shunning his Gentile brothers and sisters.
Which is to say that the spiritual does have bearing on the political. How could it ever not?
But he is not saying “they don’t matter” socially or politically, because then he would advocate for freeing slaves and treating women like men. But nobody was advocating for these things. So whatever Paul is saying here, it can’t have anything to do with actions related to the polis (the social, the political). The “in Christ” isn’t some stand-in for “now that Christ has come, we treat everyone the same”, because we know from the text and from history that they had rules regarding women and rules regarding slaves. It makes the most sense to understand “in Christ” in its spiritual dimension. Consider:
[a few sentences above our passage] If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
[a few sentences down from our passage] Wives, submit to your husbands. Slaves, obey in everything those who are your earthly masters.
Paul could very well have advocated that women be treated like men and the slaves be freed by their masters. It’s all on the same page of the letter. But given Paul didn’t even sense the possibility of a contradiction, I find it most reasonable to conclude that we are talking about things “not on Earth”.
I'd argue that Paul actually does significantly advocate for treating women and men the same way. The same standard applies to both. It's very striking if you compare, for instance, Paul's writing on sexuality and relationships compared to anything contemporaries were saying. Consider 1 Cor 7, for instance - every time Paul presents a piece for advice for one sex, he then immediately presents an identical piece of advice for the opposite sex. Thus:
You notice how he says something about one partner and then immediately says it about the other, including the at-the-time surprising statement that the wife has authority over the husband's body, in a way exactly equivalent to the way the husband has authority over the wife's body. When he talks about the regulation of the couple's sexual life, he emphasises mutual agreement - he could have described only a unilateral decision by the husband, but his emphasis is always harmony between the two.
Likewise:
You get the idea. Paul's approach to marriage and gender relations appears to be very much "that which is good for the goose is good for the gander". It is even more striking if you have any sense of the cultural background - the Law, the ascetic/celibate practices of the Essenes, the Greco-Roman household.
Now, sure, in a few places this is moderated a bit. I'm not going to discuss 1 Timothy on the grounds that it's likely pseudonymous, and not a good view on what Paul specifically thought, but there is whatever the heck is going in 1 Corinthians 11, and of course there's Ephesians 5:21-33. In Ephesians we get a bit more of a concession to propriety - you can see the same basically mutualist ethic from 1 Cor 7, but he applies it metaphorically to Christ and the church and therefore adds an image of hierarchy. Even so, I think it's still noticeably a very different ethic to that of the surrounding pagan or even Jewish world (parallel Eph 5:28 and 1 Cor 7:4), and emphasises a kind of devotion and mutual service.
I'm not saying that Paul thinks men and women are literally one hundred percent identical (though there is an interesting trend; much as the eschaton is "already but not yet", for Paul gendered divisions are beginning to dissolve, even as outward expressions of the same remain normative, as in 1 Cor 11), but rather that he does see them as possessing a spiritual equality ("there is no longer male nor female") which has consequences for the ordering of the family and of sexual life ("the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does"). The gender binary in a sense remains, but it remains so as to be transfigured by holiness into a sign of Christ's relationship with the church (cf. Eph 5).
As such I continue to firmly reject the idea that the spiritual equality of believers, along both lines of sex and by analogy lines of race, does not have consequences for the ordering of society. Of course it does. Christians will behave differently to pagans because of who they know themselves to be spiritually.
We see Paul outlining this specifically! He devotes large portions of this letters to both the relations between the sexes (as in 1 Cor) and the relations between different ethnic groups (as in Romans and Galatians), and in both cases the trend is to assert a new spiritual equality in Christ which changes and transfigures communal behaviour. Male and female believers will relate to each other differently and more equally because of who they are in Christ. Jewish and Gentile believers will relate to each other differently and more equally because of who they are in Christ. As far as slavery goes, Paul never really talks about it because for Paul it is genuinely irrelevant. Political status in the world is meaningless to Paul - or if there's any kind of priority, if anything, it is the poor who have the highest priority (cf. his discussions of his own poverty or his status as a prisoner). He assumes that there will continue to be slaves and masters, and judging from history he was quite correct there, but his point, as with outward expressions of gender propriety, is that this distinction no longer matters. Thus his advice in Philemon 15-16 is that Philemon will receive this runaway slave "no longer as a slave but as more than a slave, a beloved brother". Paul isn't so much pro-slavery or anti-slavery as he is a-slavery. It just does not matter, because the master-slave distinction is dissolved and overwhelmed by the new identity that Philemon and Onesimus possess in Christ.
He was very much aware of such issues and addressed them, in a way that is frankly quite powerful both in his own day and I would argue today. You should not just read Paul and shrug and go, "Oh, well, nothing there about how society is to be ordered." As Paul himself might say, may it not be so!
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I don’t disagree with the nuance you discuss, but it’s also true that people don’t necessarily fully think through the implications of the political and ideological positions they advocate. This is a big point of Moldbug’s: by our standards many of the key thinkers of the enlightenment were deeply conservative/reactionary, they didn’t seek to dismantle a lot of the things that subsequent liberal thinkers did, but they nevertheless established forms of ideological enquiry that through processes like the Hegelian dialectic created modern progressivism in a continuous process.
It can both be true that 1776 leads inexorably to 2024 and that none of the founding fathers would be remotely happy with the current ruling ideology of the United States. Similarly, it can be true that the early Christians established a religion that had a tendency towards universalism and universal equality even though the early Christians still believed in the vast majority of social institutions (slavery, patriarchy, tribalism) of their age.
I don’t think you can ascribe Belief A causation to Outcome C when there’s a huge expanse of Phenomena B between them. In the case of 2024’s progressive politics, there are clearer phenomena that caused it, and we can imagine 1776-like norms which inspire a different sort of progress than the one we ostensibly have now. For universalism, it explains more if you look to the French Revolution, which was no more influenced by Christianity than the counter-revolutionaries (who were arguably more influenced by Christianity, or at least Christian heritage). If Christianity can equally inspire both Divine Right nobilities and universalism, it’s more clear to ignore it altogether and look for more direct and salient causes.
I mean, would we ever say that Confucius inspired Mao’s revolution? No, there was an interjecting element in between. Did the Talmud inspire the Soviet Union? No, elements in between. The distances are way too large to clearly ascribe causal attributes, and other causes make more sense.
I suppose we can say, that Christianity causes universalism in the same way Christopher Columbus caused millions of Indians to die from disease. It’s simply that exploring a new thing comes with completely “random”, unknowable, unforeseen problems down the road. But we can imagine a discovery of America that does not accidentally induce a smallpox epidemic, so it’s not like there’s any wisdom in connecting discovery to smallpox in our minds.
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