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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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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.

I can not help but notice that the first people who substantially increased the number of non-white, non-native humans in the US were the slave owners. Some flavors of Christianity played a substantial role in the abolition, but few people today would say "having a non-white population is fine as long as you don't treat them as human beings", so blaming the abolitionists is rightfully not done.

Christianity is not a religion tied to a specific ethnic group. Any human can become a Christian, and at least at that point hope to be treated by other Christians as a human being.

This is not to say that Christianity demands equality. Historically, Christianity presided over the most unequal period in European history. The serf and the lord might or might not be equal before God in some abstract way, but if God made the world so unequal then the serf should accept his lot. Given that Christianity is compatible with inequality in general, I think it is equally compatible with racial inequality specifically. I mean, the slave owners were Christians of some flavor.

I think the case is similar with Islam, which is also open to all humans. While it has certainly endorsed societies which were very unequal along racial and other lines, you can say that it is not intrinsically racist.

Judaism for example is designed as a religion for one ethnicity. The conversion process seems more like an add-on, fundamentally it is not about converting other humans.

I don't really know about Hinduism, but given that you are already stuck with your caste for life (afaik), I do not think that there is much emphasis on a process to adopt heathens into one of the castes.

Historically, Christianity presided over the most unequal period in European history.

Is that so? Medieval Europe at least did not have slavery in any great amount. That is actually fairly unique for the time period and for the kind of societies they had. The Roman Empire had chattel slavery of pretty much the same kind that would later be re-introduced to the European colonies in the Americas. It seems to have been an old pan-Mediterranean institution, that died out in Christian Europe and was reintroduced basically by cribbing from the Arabs, who had kept it.

I would argue that being a serf was better than being a slave, but only marginally. Yes, you could not be sold away from the land, or be fed to the dogs without any pretense of justice, but mostly your lord captured all of the surplus and you survived on his whim.

So I would argue that your lord being your brother in Christ did gain you something as compared to your lord being a a warrior god who taught might makes right.

I concede that the Roman Empire was probably more unequal, though. For northern Europe, being a slave to some Germanic tribe was shittier than being a serf in the medieval age. But I would argue that the former societies were not very rich to begin with, so the from a Gini coefficient point of view the middle ages were probably worse.

It's actually quite interesting that Christianity, to the limits of sources, never liked slavery very much, even in time periods when slavery was normal and uncontroversial, and that some of the first Christian-religiously-influenced laws ever passed were protecting slave welfare.