Unlike Mrs Tahaafe-Williams, the Principal of UTC frankly acknowledges that the complaints against me presented him with a serious conflict of interest. His allegiance to the Uniting Church (which aims to inculcate its political theology of multiculturalism in the student body at UTC) conflicted with his position as Head of the Faculty of Theology in a public university forbidden to impose religious tests or to discriminate against students on political grounds.
The written complaint from my Indian classmate, Ms Sukumar, cites only two examples of my “racially prejudiced and bigoted” attitudes. The first arose out of a classroom discussion of the split between German churches in the early years of the Third Reich. The second referred to my observation during one class that “racist is a code word for white,” made in response to Mrs Tahaafe-Williams’ claim that Kant was a “racist.”
It should be obvious that Ms Sukumar’s first example of my “racist” views had nothing to do with women, Indians, or even Tongans. In my classroom comments, I merely suggested that the Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, was himself lacking in Christian charity when he publicly charged that German churches supporting Hitler’s rise to power had betrayed their primary allegiance to Christ.
In Ms Sukumar’s mind, such a view “implied that [I] believed the Holocaust never occurred (or at least was greatly exaggerated).” Under questioning at the appeal hearing, Ms Sukumar conceded that it requires a very long logical leap to equate criticism of the Barmen Declaration of 1934, largely written by Karl Barth, with holocaust denial.
In any case, neither as a woman nor as a Tamil did Ms Sukumar have a dog in the classroom fight with Dr Myers over the proper role of German churches during the first year or two of the Nazi regime. (By coincidence — well before I learned of Ms Sukumar’s complaint — I wrote the essay on the “Protestant Deformation” that is reproduced in this volume for a second semester ecclesiology course on the issues raised during that classroom controversy).
In late April 2011, after being removed from my tutorial group in Introduction to Christian Theology, I distributed another essay to some of my classmates (including Mrs Tahaafe-Williams who made an informal complaint about it to Dr Myers).
This allegedly insulting and offensive essay (which received a Distinction grade from Dr Myers), entitled “Whiteness as a Problem in Theology” [see above], was not mentioned in Ms Sukumar’s written complaint. Only at the appeal hearing on 6 February 2012 did she opine that the paper was “racist,” “insulting,” and “offensive.”
During that hearing, I asked her whether the paper had anything to say about either women or Indians and she agreed that it did not. I then asked her why she was insulted and offended by the paper and she answered, “partly as a person, and partly as a person of colour.”
The essay in question reviews a book on whiteness as a problem in theology written by an American Negro scholar, J Kameron Carter, who contends that all people of colour should unite in a common struggle against racist “White” power structures in the USA and elsewhere.142 In other words, it is a book that illustrates the truth of the proposition that “anti-racism is anti-white.”
Given the opportunity to “refresh” her memory of the paper at the appeal hearing, Ms Sukumar cited the last sentence of that essay as an “insulting” and “offensive” example of “racism.”
Here is the offending sentence: “Indeed, Carter is doing the devil’s work when he finds something Christ-like in black America’s descent over the past century into a dysfunctional and degrading culture of rampant welfare dependency, drug addiction, soaring rates of illegitimacy, escalating violence, and chronic criminality.”
The appeal committee found that language to be so provocative and insulting that it falls outside section 18D of the Act. But I ask: How can an Indian woman in Australia claim to be insulted and offended by an essay discussing a festering problem for which many thoughtful American Negroes hold their own people responsible? (See, for example, the many YouTube videos produced by Pastor James Manning, or the articles on rising black pathologies by prominent Negro journalist Walter Williams.)
Once again, neither Mrs Tahaafe-Williams nor Ms Sukumar has a racial, ethnic, or gendered dog in the academic fight between J Kameron Carter and me. Under the Racial Discrimination Act, a person belonging to one protected minority cannot be insulted or offended vicariously on behalf of another racial or ethnic group.
In my own brush with the Australian Human Rights Commission a few years ago, a complaint against my comments on African and Chinese immigration lodged by an Argentinean man was dismissed summarily on the ground that he was not a member of a group reasonably likely to have been offended by my remarks.
Nothing I have done or said insulted or offended any named individual. Nothing mentioned by Ms Sukumar in her written complaint, or even orally at the appeal hearing ten months later, can be construed as insulting or offensive to women or Indians.
Significantly, however, Ms Sukumar did suggest that she was offended as a “person of colour” by the concluding sentence of “Whiteness as a Problem in Theology.” Since she is not an American Negro, Ms Sukumar thereby implies that “anti-racism” is indeed a code word for “anti-white.”
Given a racial/ethnic conflict between American whites and American Negroes, Ms Sukumar feels an immediate sense of solidarity with blacks allegedly oppressed by white racism. Both Mrs Tahaafe-Williams and Dr Anthony Reddie display the same animus towards “Whites.”
Mrs Tahaafe-Williams, for example, has written an article on “multicultural ministry” in which she holds Immanuel Kant, inter alia, responsible “for the systematic institutionalization of racism.” The German Enlightenment philosopher allegedly helped to pioneer the scientific racism “whereby Europe’s (translation: white peoples’) sense of its cultural and racial superiority was systematized and institutionalized.”143 Like J Kameron Carter’s book, Mrs Tahaafe-Williams’ article strongly suggests that “anti-racism” really is just a code-word for “anti-white.”
For his part, Dr Anthony Reddie makes the same point explicitly in his book, Is God Colour-Blind? Dr Reddie writes that the meaning of the term Black is not restricted “to those who are of African descent.” Nor does it “simply refer to skin colour.” Rather, he “opens it up to all people who are non-White and who are struggling in solidarity for liberation over and against the forces of White, male-dominated power structures.”144
Conclusion
A serendipitously ironic twist of fate led me to write, “reasonably and in good faith,” academically respectable essays elaborating on the two comments made in Dr Myers classes which provided Ms Sukumar with the “worst” examples of my “racist” views.
One hopes that it will be as obvious to an Australian court as it is to me that in neither case did I say or write anything that can be adjudged “insulting” and “offensive” to Tongan or Indian women within the meaning of the Racial Discrimination Act.
If I am right in that assessment, and, more importantly, if a critical mass of Anglo-Australian activists emerges to help me mount a successful legal challenge to the CSU decision, academic freedom in Australia may yet arise from its deathbed with renewed vigour.
Opportunity knocks! It is time for an Anglo-Australian civil rights movement to secure, by litigation if necessary, legally protected zones of free inquiry and free expression within the nation’s universities and colleges. Even such small-scale struggles for liberation from the false gods of corporate neo-communism will inspire a home-grown ethno-patriotism in institutions (above all, churches and universities) now given over, body and soul, to the worship of the Other.
3: The Lost Soul of WASP America
Introduction
The sweeping gains by the Republican Party in the 2010 mid-term Congressional elections were due in large part to the growing strength of America’s grass-roots Tea Party movement. Tea Party activists are overwhelmingly white; their stated goal is to roll back the federal Leviathan now heade
d by America’s first non-white President. Predictably, therefore, left-wing commentators in both Britain and the USA interpret the Tea Party phenomenon as a manifestation of white “racism.” Even some white nationalists hope the Tea Parties will evolve into an explicitly ethno-nationalist political movement. That is not going to happen.
At heart, the Tea Party movement is not about politics as such, i.e. who gets what, when, and where. Still less does it promote a surreptitious style of identity politics tailor-made for white folks. Instead, the excitement generated by the Tea Partiers resembles a corporate media-savvy revival of the old-time religious fervour for which America is famous.
The Tea Party movement is another episode in the long history of evangelical enthusiasm which has driven the permanent or long American Revolution since it broke out in the eighteenth century. A potent mixture of politics and religion fuelled the radicalism of that revolutionary upheaval. Well before the American Declaration of Independence, the first Great Awakening laid the foundation for the constitutional faith that transformed colonial Englishmen into homo Americanus. In the early nineteenth century, a second-stage evangelical revival fertilized the spiritual seedbed of secession and Civil War.
It is no accident that Tea Partiers love to dress up in American Revolutionary costumes. They are true believers, utterly committed to the peculiar political theology enshrined by the Founding Fathers of the Constitutional Republic. WASPs and professing Christians are well-represented within the Tea Party movement. Do not be deceived, however; American Protestantism is now far removed from orthodox Christianity.
True, American WASPs do affirm their faith in Christ, regularly and often. But their hopes of personal salvation are nurtured in the interior space of private conscience. In public, the altruistic WASP’s religious responsibility for the commonweal finds expression in a civic culture of constitutional patriotism. Accordingly, it is through the ritual remembrances and the red-white-and-blue, republican regalia of Middle America’s political religion that Tea Partiers express their shared identity.
The State with the Soul of a Church
The American nation-state is a secular parody of the church. Unlike the early modern Church of England, moreover, America’s established religion resolutely refuses to incarnate the spirit of a particular people, least of all, the descendants of British colonists — the long-since forgotten “founding race” of the “first new nation.”145
The newly independent Constitutional Republic set out deliberately to create a new nation. It used as its raw material not just the core population group in British North America, namely people of predominantly English ancestry, but any white person who made his way to the New World.
The spiritual core of America’s constitutional faith is a cosmopolitan conception of revolutionary universalism which aims to transcend and include any and all of the national and religious particularities of the Old World. American Anglo-Saxon Protestants readily sacrificed their ancestral ethno-religious identity on the altar of the new republican religion. Yet, a socially significant minority of “Tories” refused allegiance to an artificial body politic subject to the capricious rule of good King Demos. Rebel Whigs denounced them as “sectarians” for their stubborn loyalty to throne and altar, stripped of their property, and driven in their tens of thousands out of the country.
Abigail Adams, wife of a future President, watched the first great batch of Tory exiles depart from Boston harbour. She “reported it as the largest fleet every seen in America. Upward of one hundred and seventy sail could be counted; they looked like a forest.” Even after the American Republic made peace with Great Britain, one historian notes that triumphant Whigs insisted that no Tory should “find a resting place in the United States; and in nearly every state they were disfranchised, while in many localities they were tarred and feathered, driven from town and warned never to return”.146
Two hundred years later, the deracinated WASP descendants of those eighteenth century American rebels still occupy the front pew in America’s civil religion. Some reject the term WASP as a snide and spiteful acronym. It was, of course, coined sometime in the Fifties by resentful Jews and popularised by other subaltern ethnic groups harbouring grievances against the founding stock of white America. But neither the Jews nor the Catholics caused the American subjects of the British Crown to sell their collective soul to the Constitutional Republic. Rather, the American Adam was seduced by the promise of unmatched wealth and endless prosperity, the worldly power and everlasting glory sure to follow the peopling of a vast continental empire.
The Invisible Race
If WASP is a derogatory and abusive term, those who bear that label must accept that they deserve much of the contempt heaped upon them by other racial, religious, and ethnic groups. Hopelessly at odds with themselves, WASPs have become the invisible race. Even in their own eyes, WASPs now constitute little more than a demographic abstraction altogether devoid of the soul and the substance of a serious people. Back in the Sixties; Time magazine observed that their collective identity was merely an upmarket “lifestyle choice” available to “Waspirants” of all colors and creeds.147
American WASPs desperately need to regenerate a collective spirit of in-group solidarity. WASPs must learn to play the postmodern game of identity politics. To compete successfully, they must die to themselves as WASPs. Only through a palingenetic process of spiritual regeneration will weakling WASPs be reborn as Anglo-Saxon Christian soldiers. In the culture wars to come, their mission will be to expose the false religion marching under the banner of the Tea Party movement.
Tea Partiers are moved by more than narrowly political concerns over taxes, fiscal responsibility, and federalism. Like the vast majority of American WASPs, including a good many white nationalists, Tea Partiers are mesmerized by the cult of the Constitution. Since their political theology dogmatically denies the past, present, or future existence of an authentically Christian, Anglo-Saxon Volksgeist, any struggle to win back the soul of Middle America will spark fierce religious conflict.
The Cult of the Constitution
America’s constitutional faith has always been a cosmopolitan creed, first conceived within the transatlantic tradition of eighteenth-century British republicanism. Together with their counterparts “at home,” colonial elites created a novel intellectual constellation in which they began to re-imagine the character of Christian community. Nathan O Hatch writes that “By 1760 New England clergymen appear to have lost a clear distinction between the Kingdom of God and the goals of their own political community.”148
The meaning of the American Revolution itself was framed by a “republican eschatology” rooted in the English Commonwealth tradition. This embryonic constitutional faith endowed “the function of man as a citizen” with a “profoundly new religious significance”. Republican liberty became “a cardinal principle of Christian belief” once the principles governing civil order” were assigned a key role in the scheme of providential history”.149
The seeds of post-Christian infidelity already latent in such civil millenarianism sprouted treasonous tendrils in the fertile soil of prosperous British North American colonies nurturing imperial pretensions of their own. Following independence, the absence of an established church in the new nation reinforced the direct application of religious morality to the realm of politics, law, and government. It became second nature for Americans to treat their political preferences as religious priorities.
The religion of the Republic readily associated the revolutionary trinity of liberty, equality, and fraternity with providential history. Sharing with all mankind the political ideals of the American Revolution came to be seen as “a necessary prerequisite for spreading the Christian message.”
Inventing the People
The most fundamental task facing the American revolutionary regime was the need to invent a new people.150 Two centuries later, that grandiose project has been all but abandoned by the post-American government of the
United States. The Civil War foreshadowed the epic failure of that nation-building project. Southern stalwarts such as Senator John C Calhoun of South Carolina denied from the beginning that there was any such thing as a “citizen of the United States,” insisting that the primary and essential allegiance of each citizen lay with his own state. Calhoun snorted that investing homo Americanus with a single national citizenship would produce “a perfect nondescript,” a sort of legal hermaphrodite.151 Such particularist loyalties fuelled the sectional animosities that split the First (Federal) Republic into two warring state religions.
Unfortunately for Calhoun’s Southern compatriots, the Second (Bourgeois) Republic was founded in 1865 on the smouldering, ruins of the Confederacy. Yankee capitalists, together with their political cronies in both the North and the West, treated the occupied South as a mere creature of the victorious Union, ripe for the plucking. The Southern states were forced at gunpoint to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, empowering federal courts to compel states to extend due process rights and equal protection of the laws to newly-freed Negro slaves. Eventually, the citizens of every state were transformed into wards of the federal government.
During the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, such “constitutional” guarantees of equal protection encouraged radicals favouring a colour-blind and gender-neutral Constitution for the nation as a whole. Later still, in our own time, the Fourteenth Amendment provided revolutionary communists and putatively conservative capitalists alike with the formal constitutional warrant to produce the immigration disaster that finally laid homo Americanus low.
Following the New Deal Revolution of the Thirties, American capitalism was literally under new management. In symbiosis with the rise of an administrative state dominated by professional bureaucrats, a new class of professional managers captured control of the corporate sector. Bourgeois “owners” were transformed into shareholders with a merely nominal role in corporate governance.152 Under the direction of its managerial and professional elites, the Third (Managerial/Therapeutic) Republic set out to reinvent the American people.
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