Accordingly, the old-fashioned republican “concept of the People no longer functions as the organized subject of the system of command, and consequently the idea of the People is replaced by the mobility, flexibility, and perpetual differentiation of the multitude.”233 The constitutional distinction between citizens and non-citizens has been eroded as nation-states are incorporated into a globalist system of corporate neo-communism. The ubiquitous matrix of globalism is not the product of a vast, right-wing conspiracy. Indeed, Empire possesses an impeccably “progressive” pedigree. Not least of all, it provides the material foundation of universal human rights. Accordingly, the emergence of the global multitude inevitably gave rise to the demand for global citizenship. Empire makes us all “citizens of the world”. We are all subjects of the interlocking networks of power constituted by the long-standing coalition between global capitalism and global communism.234 The first great project undertaken by that unholy alliance was the Second World War: the putatively democratic, pragmatically plutocratic American Republic allied itself with the brutally communist USSR to crush Nazi Germany’s desperate and, in the end, delusional defence of the Aryan race.
Forty years later, American open-door imperialism finally wore down the closed, command economy of Soviet-style Communism.235 The collapse of the Soviet Union removed the last significant barrier to the free movement of capital, technology, and labour around the world, thereby handing a handsome prize to transnational corporate capital. The neo-communist left, too, won a decisive victory. The mass migration of even the most unproductive Third World peoples into every white country is no longer open to effective political challenge. White nationalism, in particular, has been vacuum-sealed inside an intellectual bubble from whence it watches a world gone mad. By replicating the major ideological weakness of the now-defunct Nazi regime American white nationalists have deprived themselves of the spiritual oxygen needed to start political brush-fires. Once again a white racialist movement has become mired in the secular biopolitics of race. Of course, race is a biological reality and white racial realists are routinely demonized and viciously defamed in politics, the courts, the media, or in academia. But white nationalists must not deny or downplay the importance of two other, equally important, dimensions of racial identity; namely, race-as-ethnicity and race-as-theology. 236
Race is a three-dimensional, trinitarian phenomenon. Assuredly, race is a fact of life encoded in the DNA of every human being. But, like it or not, race is also a “social construct.” After all, every major continental “race” — whites, blacks, and Orientals — includes many sub-races or ethnic groups. Tribes, ethnie, and nations emerged as the contingent products of historical, cultural, and linguistic evolution. Such ethno-cultural groupings create marked differences between peoples who may be closely related in genetic terms. Such observations are, of course, grist for anti-racist propaganda mills. But the deeply-entrenched secular perspective shared by white racialists and their anti-racist opponents, blinds both to the third dimension, race-as-theology.
The New Race of Christians
The history of European civilization preserves the documentary and archaeological record of the moment when God breathed life into the white race. Only in Europe did the reciprocal interaction of biology, ethnicity, and religion create a unique family of Christian nations. The early Church was the corporate seed-bed of a new race (Greek: laos, ethnos, genos; Latin: genus, natio).237 Within little more than a century, Christians from every corner of the known world (oikumene) were re-born as a new people possessed of a history stretching back millennia and a destiny grounded in the Great Commission delivered by Christ to his apostles. The divinely-ordained mission of the Church was to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” (Matthew 28:19–20) Over the course of the next few centuries, the new Christian genos was incubated within the Church wherein it spread throughout the Roman Empire. By the close of the Golden Age of Christendom — the first millennium AD — virtually every European ethny traced its spiritual if not its biological ancestry to the once-persecuted and politically powerless race of Christians.
It is, therefore, a mistake to detach “the white race” from its history as a family of European nations baptized by the Church. In turn, the white race provided the indispensable biocultural medium for the rise of Christendom. It is important to remember, however, that the white race never possessed a cohesive or conscious collective identity. As a collective noun, the white race is a modern social construct; as a biological sub-species, it existed in nature and pre-history as a collection of more or less closely-related ethnic groups. Of necessity, the first members of the new race of Christians were compelled to break with the ancestral religious practices at the heart of their pre-existing ethnic identities, whether Jewish, Greek, or Roman. In their adoptive spiritual kingdom, Gentiles became descendants of the righteous patriarchs and prophets of Old Covenant Israel. Jews, on the other hand, had no claim to special status in the kingdom of God simply because they were the physical seed of Abraham. Most of those who called themselves Jews responded to the perceived insult by rejecting the lordship of Jesus Christ. They turned away from God to worship carnal Israel. Those who worshipped the Israel of God’s heavenly kingdom, Jews and Gentiles alike, had to “overcome the world”. (1 John 5:4–5) Few would have predicted that Christians, a small minority scattered throughout the Roman Empire, would create a spiritual kingdom that transcended ethnic boundaries in the Near East and spread into the northern reaches of Europe as well.
The gospel message of the apostles revealed to early Christians that all members of this new race were kin to the righteous remnant of Old Israel. From the apostle Paul in the first century to the church historian Eusebius, writing in the fourth century, Christians constructed a myth of shared descent from Abraham. Eusebius contended that, even if Christians were an admittedly new people, “their life and method of conduct, in accordance with the precepts of religion, has not been recently invented by us”. On the contrary, the righteousness of the new Christian race reflected their devotion to the law and the prophets in the sacred history of Israel. “At the present moment it is only among the Christians throughout the whole world that the manner of religion that was Abraham’s can actually be found in practice”.238 Christians, in other words, affirmed their spiritual kinship with all those who love the God of Israel.
The advent of Christ entailed a profound transformation in what it meant to be a Jew. Old Israel’s covenant with God was sealed by circumcision of the flesh. Christ offered a new covenant sealed by a circumcision of the heart. Hard-hearted Jews rejected Jesus because he refused the messianic kingship of carnal, nationalistic Israel. But those who shut Jesus out of their hearts ceased to be Jews in the eyes of God. Eusebius took it as axiomatic that God was finished with physical Israel when she was re-born (superseded) as the Church, the spiritual Body of Christ. Led by the risen Christ, the righteous remnant of Old Israel began a New Exodus from the old heaven and the old earth into a new creation. The New Israel reached its promised land in AD 70. The siege of Jerusalem in that year was a colossal disaster for Jews of Old Israel. The apocalypse came as no surprise to first century Christians, however. In the Book of Revelation — written before the catastrophe239 —the apostle John described his vision of Christ’s return in clouds of glory: he saw the New Jerusalem coming “down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband”. (Revelation 21:2) Forty years earlier, standing outside the Temple with his disciples, Christ had foreseen that “not one stone here will be left on another” when he came again at the “end of the age”. The Day of the Lord’s return was not to occur in some far distant future, perhaps thousands of years later. Christ assured the crowds who heard him that “this generation will certainly not pass away until these things have happened.” (Matthew 24:2–3, 34)
/> Even the contemporary Jewish historian Josephus registered the providential significance of what happened in Jerusalem. He reported several signs and portents of the coming disaster. One day, for example, “before sun-setting, chariots and troops of soldiers in their armor were seen running about among the clouds, and surrounding of cities”. Christians had already fled the city. They knew that Israel had played the harlot in its covenantal relationship with God. Yet again, she had ignored the prophets who warned her not to “sow the wind” lest she “reap the whirlwind” in the coming Day of the Lord. When Judgement Day arrived, the Temple was burned and Old Covenant Judaism came to an abrupt end. Josephus estimated that the dead during the siege numbered more than a million, most of whom were, by his lights, “pure and holy” Jews. The survivors were scattered to the four winds.240 “Israel is swallowed up; now she is among the nations like a worthless thing” (Hosea 8:7–8). No longer is God hidden behind a veil in a temple made by hands. A new temple was built for a New Israel in the hearts of the new race of faithful Christians — the spiritual Body of Christ.
Corporate bodies of Christian believers still affirm their spiritual kinship, their holy communion, with Christ by eating and drinking his flesh and blood, reconstituted symbolically from the mundane materials of bread and wine. In the first century, the blood of Christ played a central role in the social construction of a Christian people. Like any other ethnie, the Christians created “a sense of the collective self” by viewing themselves through the prism of “myths, memories, values and symbols”. Some cultures “derive communal solidarity from alleged ties of kinship and genealogical descent”. Others ground their collective identity in “an ideological affinity to allegedly similar cultures in archaic eras of communal history”. The Christian gospel blurred “the distinction between biological and cultural modes of tracing descent and customs” by drawing on the Old Testament to construct a “myth-symbol complex”. It was just such a “corpus of beliefs and sentiments” which the Church preserved, diffused, and transmitted to future generations. Together with the blood of Christ, Spirit and water became the master symbols in what ethnologists call the mythomoteur of a socially cohesive Christian ethny.241
According to the apostle John, the Lord is “the one who came by water and blood — Jesus Christ. He did not come by water only, but by water and blood.” The Holy Spirit testified to the truth: only through communion with Jesus Christ, the Son of God, could the world be overcome. Indeed, “there are three that testify” to the new Kingdom coming on clouds of glory: “the Spirit, the water, and the blood: and the three are in agreement” (1 John 5:6–8). The apostle Paul taught first-century Christians that “to live outside Christ is to die, in Christ is to live”.242 Believers were prepared therefore to endure, even to welcome persecution. Before long, the blood of the martyrs was spilled in sufficient quantities to become the water that fertilized the seed of the Church. When Constantine granted official status to the Church in the fourth century AD, the new race of Christians had established itself in large numbers in settled communities across Europe and Asia Minor. Before long, spiritual kinship among Christians was transmitted across generations, creating embryonic Christian nations in which belonging was based on blood and consecrated by the holy water of infant baptism.
By such means, the new race of Christians did overcome the world. In effect, Christian theology created a new ethnos. People drawn from different biological races and from many diverse ethnic groups took on an altogether novel ethno-religious identity. The boundaries of the new Christian genos were both fixed and fluid. Christians learned to use various forms of “ethnic reasoning” to distinguish themselves from other groups.243 But, like almost every other people in the ancient world, Christian ethnicity/race was deemed to be produced and sustained by its own distinctive religious practices. But neither the Old Testament God of Israel nor the Lordship of Jesus Christ could be assimilated into pagan pantheons. In pagan societies, “certain divine beings, the gods of the family and of the state” were connected intimately to the human members of one’s social circle of kinfolk and fellow citizens. When “a god was spoken of as a father and his worshippers as his offspring…the meaning was that the worshippers were literally of his stock, that he and they made up one natural family with reciprocal family duties to one another.” But the spiritual bond between the God of Israel and his people was not “natural” but “artificial,” not fixed but fluid. The gods of the Greeks could never be anything else but Greek gods, but Yahweh exists eternally “as a God independently of Israel”.244
Even so, it was common ground among pagans and Jews that blood was the basis for membership in an ethno-religious community. Membership in the early Christian communities, however, was, in the first instance, the work of Spirit and water. As a consequence, Christian identity was markedly more mutable than in other contemporary peoples. Conversion and baptism functioned as “rebirth.” In the first few centuries, a distinctive juxtaposition of fixity and fluidity allowed Christians to make universalizing claims, arguing that anyone can and everyone should become a member of the Christian “people.” Christian identity became both distinct from yet comparable to the racial/ethnic identity of other peoples. The dynamic and malleable character of Christian identity gave the new race a distinct advantage in the unique circumstances of the Mediterranean world of late antiquity.
Already the spread of the Roman Empire had laid the foundation for a universal religion, most obviously in the pagan cult of the Emperor. The late Roman Empire created an urban civilization based on slavery in which grinding poverty for the many produced great wealth for the few. Corruption, political instability, and recurrent social upheavals were endemic. The result was chronic anomie and widespread status inconsistencies (e.g. educated slaves in upstart wealthy households), both of which favoured the spread of an egalitarian salvation religion.245 The new race itself undermined existing racial/ethnic identities because holy men replaced warriors in its social hierarchy while slaves and women were admitted to communion alongside free citizens and wealthy men.
But there were limits to the plasticity of Christian racial/ethnic identity. The early, world-rejecting brand of Christianity had little appeal to the Teutonic peoples of north-western Europe. It was the conversion of those pagan peoples, however, which unleashed the dynamic rise of medieval Christendom. Compared to the clapped-out, anomic racial/ethnic cultures of late antiquity, the Germanic tribes who overran the Roman Empire exhibited remarkable social cohesion. Their world-accepting culture was hierarchical and rural, giving pride of place to warriors. In their pagan pre-history, tribal identity was rooted in biological ties of kinship, descent, and blood. Accordingly, when the Germanic peoples were brought into the fold of the Church, Christian identity became less fluid and more fixed.246 By the end of the first millennium of the Christian era, Spirit, water, and blood were the constituent elements of every Christian nation. Those three-dimensions of Christian racial/ethnic identity reflect the unity in diversity of the three persons of the triune God.
The Three Dimensions of Racial/Ethnic Identity
Race-as-biology promises to shed light on the relationship between blood and behaviour as manifested in measurable group differences such as average intelligence, temperament, and reproductive strategies.247 By contrast, race-as-ethnicity deals with the cultural myths and symbols which move men to collective action. As Hannah Arendt observed, to act, in the “most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin…to set something in motion”.248 The actor is someone who starts something new. Applied to the birth of an ethno-nation, her insights suggest that action promotes the process of ethno-genesis in two stages: (1) the beginning, made by a charismatic leader; and (2) the subsequent construction of a novel collective identity by his followers. No wonder, then, that the imagined community of Christians in late antiquity appeared “in the guise of a miracle”.249 Not even the most devout Jews longing for the messianic restoration of national Israel
expected what actually came to pass. Against all the odds, this new race of men was moved by the Spirit to accomplish their divinely-appointed mission. Race-as-theology helps us to understand how Spirit and blood mingled with the life-giving power of water to sustain the first, embryonic Christian communities. Since then, Christian nationhood has been nourished by the continuing interplay of Spirit, water, and blood. But disorder or dysfunction in one or more of these three elements has led many nations to defeat and destruction. Even the mostly atheistic practitioners of race-as-biology concede that a shared religious faith is likely to enhance the inclusive fitness of any race or nation.250
Conversely, the essential trinitarian character of Christian nationhood is subverted when the unitarian logic of biology suppresses the theological dimension of racial/ethnic identity. A single-minded Darwinian focus on the survival of the fittest in a pitiless process of group selection can justify all manner of crimes committed in the name of racial solidarity. But the inescapable fluidity of racial classifications undercuts any misplaced faith in the unimpeachable objectivity of race-as-biology. Many German National Socialists routinely conflated race-as-biology (Rasse) with race-as-ethnicity (Volk) while sidelining race-as-theology. They insisted, for example, that neither Jews nor Slavs were Aryans even though both were recognized as White, in law and custom, under apartheid in South Africa and Jim Crow in the American South. Nor could Christianity bridge the racial gulf between Jews and Germans; under National Socialism not even baptism could wash away the indelible stain of Semitic origins. Both the American and the German experience teach us that race-as-Christian-theology must temper both the irrational impulses of unrestrained ethnic chauvinism and the imperial claims of biological science.
Dissident Dispatches Page 19
