Christians: The Elephant in the Room
The white man never has separated Christianity from white, nor has he separated the white man from Christianity. When you hear the white man bragging, “I’m a Christian,” he’s bragging about being a white man. ~Malcolm X.
The insightful and prophetic Malcolm X understood the intrinsic tie of white supremacy with Christianity. Today, we face the outgrowth of Malcolm X’s insight, but rather than focusing on white Christians, the problem centers on distinguishing Christians from Republicans, which the disease of Christianity makes impossible, having assimilated the Republican party. As such,
The Republican never has separated Christianity from white, nor has he separated the white Republican from Christianity. When you hear the Republican bragging, “I’m a Christian,” he’s bragging about being a white Republican.
Christianity’s core is the racism, classism, and hate that fueled white slavers. That same hate that fueled the Civil War, turning sister on sister, brother on brother, and child against parent, manifests today in poor on poor, privileged versus unprivileged, and white against nonwhite. Christians play a semantics game to confuse and keep groups marginalized, even many people in their party, with little hope of advancement. Like Malcolm X and others, I call the problem “Christian” for the inability to distinguish the parts from the whole.
Republicans
They claim they are many and varied, crossing all classes and religions, but how anyone could look at the Republican party and see a religiously diverse party of moral interest is an exercise in nonsense. Christians not only comprise most of the party, but they also control it, and when one views the statistics, the Christians readily appear. Seventy percent of the US considers itself Christian. Almost 50% of America voted for the Republican party candidate, Trump, who supports Christian values. When viewed through the lens of religion, Christians clearly control the Republican party. If you’re Jewish, agnostic, Hindu, Buddhist, or any non-Christian, and you vote Republican, you support a party entrenched in racist values that will ultimately turn on you.
Republicans are Christians.
Conservatives
People who believe they are conservatives regarding economics and other policy areas, though a dying breed, choose a party that is not in their interest. Economically, Republican politics appeals to many of these conservatives, but ultimately they give power to Christians to align policy and law. Republican legal efforts prove this true when they spend more time worrying and spending money on fighting Row vs. Wade challenges than economic development. In fact, the only economic plan Republicans seem to have is reducing taxes for corporations and the rich while sacrificing the environment for business.
Beyond a limited view of economics, Republicans wasted billions of dollars on legal challenges to abortion law since the Roe vs. Wade decision. They wasted taxpayer dollars on useless sex education based on Christian values to the tune of $2 billion across twenty years. They wasted millions of dollars trying to pass legislation to keep homosexuals out of mainstream society. They wasted billions on a wall that serves no purpose but to keep foreigners out to protect essentially low pay jobs that most Americans don’t want to perform.
The elusive conservative seeking economic development or protection invests in a system that leads to financial waste when money allocated to business development programs, education, and community building could benefit everyone. Worse yet, conservative shortsightedness is a self-fulfilling prophecy of economic demise, leading to revolution.
The history of socialist revolts, which Christians fear, should alarm the true conservative since short-term gains are the root of revolution. Fidel Castro didn’t come to power because of rampant financial equality. No, the Revolutionaries came to power because they were tired of the inequality thrust upon them.
If you don’t eventually come to truly understand the history of the class struggle, or at least have a clear idea that society is divided between the rich and the poor, and that some people subjugate and exploit other people, you’re lost in a forest, not knowing anything. – Fidel Castro.
Perhaps those referring to themselves as conservatives sincerely desire economic reform when voting Republican, but in doing so, they are complicit with Christians who spend counterintuitively to that goal.
Conservatives are Christians
Christians
Because Republicans are Christians, they are Christian Nationalists. This movement did not occur by accident, but from a strategy systematically employed with massive funding to control the GOP, many government areas such as the Supreme Court, and many less prominent offices.
Christian nationalism is also a device for mobilizing (and often manipulating) large segments of the population and concentrating power in the hands of a new elite. It does not merely reflect the religious identity it pretends to defend but actively works to construct and promote new varieties of religion for the sake of accumulating power. It actively generates or exploits cultural conflict in order to improve its grip on its target population. ~Stewart, Katherine.
Simply open your eyes to see the result of Christian efforts to degrade democracy. Christians have achieved a Republican Supreme Court, pushed laws to openly discriminate based on religious belief, continuously impeded education, actively limited voting access, openly practiced gerrymandering, and now threaten women’s rights.
Malcolm X’s Insight
Malcolm X identified the enemy, the same enemy present today, obfuscated in semantics to avoid acknowledging race. Even more than confusing, the white Christian enemy now expands under these terms to include many minorities and disadvantaged groups that harm themselves by aligning with the enemy. Unlike Malcolm X, we play an identity guessing game with the names “Republican,” “Christian,” and “conservative” meant to cloud intention. Make no mistake; they are all soldiers of the same master, willing or unwilling.
All conservatives and all Republicans are all Christians.
Castro, Fidel; Ramonet, Ignacio (2008). My Life: A Spoken Autobiography. New York
MALCOLM X. The End of White World Supremacy: Four Speeches (p. 25). Arcade. Kindle Edition.
Stewart, Katherine. The Power Worshippers (p. 2). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash
