Anglo-Saxon+Protestant=Guilt
0 comment Tuesday, September 30, 2014 |
Over at TakiMag, Paul Gottfried has a piece about Christianity, specifically Protestant evangelical Christianity and the Obama cult, as manifested in a Northern Michigan election party. He relates how a friend sent him clippings about the behavior of many young Christians in northern Michigan upon Obama's election:
In this heavily Protestant and very Nordic region of the country, the youth had trouble containing their joy on the outcome of this year�s election, according to the Northern Weekly Express. Throngs of young adults gathered at an election day party at the InsideOut Gallery in Traverse City, where the full house "rocked the rafters" as they watched Obama storm to victory. "Some of the biggest cheers that night came when images of African-Americans were shown on the big screen, WEEPING FOR JOY at the election of Barack Obama." The paper hastens to remind the reader that this victory was 'by any measure, one of the MOST SIGNIFICANT events in the history of the United States." Even without the use of caps, the Northern Weekly Express conveyed the ecstasy of the hour by showing the glowing faces of the Northern Michigan young standing beside cardboard images of their black savior. The election party looked more like a revival meeting than a Friday night bash, and it radiated something akin to the joy of being cleansed of one�s sins.
[...]
I think this hysteria that I�ve been observing is religious in nature. It is not confined to the atheist, social engineering Left; it is also very much alive and well among religious Protestants, and particularly among the Evangelicals and Mennonites of my acquaintance. These people are anything but non-believers. Nonetheless they entirely agree with Obama�s remark, made to Pastor Rick Warren, indicating that sin means "sexism, racism, and homophobia." A neighbor, who is a very orthodox Mennonite minister and who has the Nicene Creed on his wall, was campaigning for Obama, as an act of overcoming the ingrained racism of his community.
[...]
The exaltation of the supposedly downtrodden, as an act of group atonement for social sins and for thinking bigoted thoughts, and as the prelude to building a truly egalitarian society, have become characteristic of those seeking righteousness. Religious fervor has now been turned toward the task of validating designated minorities, including illegals streaming across our Southern borders. Such behavior is no longer specific to professional atheists, raging at the Christian Right. It is now to all appearances an epidemic spreading through the American religious community and one that is likely to continue to spread. And unlike its manifestations in non-Protestant America, in Protestant America, the advocacy of multiculturalism is definitely aimed at the displacement of traditional ethnic-cultural communities�or of what remains of them.''
I am not sure that I understand that last sentence, and from what I read it to mean, I don't agree. How is 'non-Protestant' America less guilty of promoting the displacement of traditional communities when it supports mass immigration?
The PC Christian phenomenon he is describing is not something that began with the Obama campaign, although Obama provided a figure around which these multicult 'Christians' might rally. The present-day trend in mainstream Christianity, towards embracing leftist positions on all social matters, has been going on for some time. Rick Warren gets a passing mention in the article, though he should be front and center; he has been a big influence in this trend among formerly conservative Christians towards leftist, politically correct values, and away from the Biblically-based faith of their fathers. Warren, with his emphasis on pop psychology and the 'self', along with a warmed-over social gospel, has brought many Christians into line with mainstream liberal ideology. It's no coincidence that Warren is rubbing elbows with the Bono types, and with globalists.
The brand of Christianity that Warren and his followers promote is the kind of thing which causes many outside the Christian sphere to denounce Christianity as being detrimental to Western peoples and their survival.
It's no secret that the mainstream Christian denominations have been heavily infiltrated by leftists since at least the 1940s, if not sooner. The WCC has long been known to be sympathetic to leftist radical causes. The left, as we know, has been fairly open about its longstanding effort to infiltrate and subvert from within all the institutions of our society, and the churches are not exempt; far from it. Influencing Christians away from the Word of God and towards the leftist/socialist/globalist worldview is a strategy aimed at removing one of the last obstacles to the remaking of the world, the erasure of borders, and the breakdown of family and extended kin loyalties.
The fact is, however, this is not just something that can be blamed on Protestantism or those dreaded 'WASPs' again. All branches of Christianity are to some extent affected by the new politically-corrected counterfeit Christianity.
I don't think that it is peculiar to Protestantism, although the TakiMag commentariat might be likely to suggest that, at least those with an open Catholic or Orthodox bias. Obviously the Catholic hierarchy has been in the forefront of activism in favor of open borders, especially when the borders being erased separate us from Latino Catholics, who are now being eagerly welcomed by the Church hierarchy. I've been told by some that the Church rank and file are not as fervently open-borders as the leadership, but I am not sure about that.
However, Protestant churches have been moving towards globalist politically correct ideology, too. Personally, I think it's all a part of a larger trend in Christianity, in which Christians of all denominations seemingly believe that to be a good Christian, one has to embrace one's exact opposite. To champion the rights of those who are not only extremely 'Other' in relation to us is seen as a virtue, and embracing those who are openly hostile to us, even our avowed enemies, is seen as the highest virtue, as saintliness.
We could see the recent events in the Castro District of San Francisco in the light of this. A group of Christians have been going into the Castro to pray and witness to the ''gay community.' However, in the aftermath of the recent furor over Proposition 8 in California, many of the local 'gays' were enraged by the presence of the Christians and by their public singing and praying. So they set upon the Christians, shouting obscenities and threats, and apparently even attempting to molest some of the Christians.
The Christians in question mostly reiterated how they loved their attackers, and forgave them, refusing to press charges for molestation or sexual assault.
I am certain many Christians will say this is exemplary, highly Christian behavior, and that all good Christians might hope to show such character in a similar situation.
I won't try to argue that point; it deserves another post to itself. But it exemplifies the seeming value today's Christians seem to attach to those who are the most hostile towards us. This is how you prove your mettle as a Christian: to lay down and passively accept abuse by others, or to sacrifice yourself so as to benefit some 'Other' who is either indifferent or hostile towards you. I wonder if our forefathers would have interpreted Christianity this way. They certainly did not embrace self-destruction as peoples in the name of Christianity.
Again, I know those who despise Christianity will say that this is exactly why they despise Christianity: because it makes us the doormats of the world. It makes us self-abasing and self-abnegating, and downright masochistic in some cases. I hate to use Freudian jargon but the term masochistic seems to be the only term available to describe those who find some kind of gratification in being mistreated or abused by others. And that sums up much of the Western world's behavior these days, as our leaders avidly seek people to come and loot our countries.
There may be an element of seeking redemption for our supposed collective 'sins' of xenophobia and 'racism'. We have collectively been seized by an apology mania, in which we are desperately seeking someone to whom we can apologize and make restitution for our past 'sins' or the transgressions of our fathers. In Catholic terms this is a seeking of absolution from another human being. But this is not Biblical Christianity; Christians know that we can only be redeemed by Christ, not by another human being or group of human beings.
The comments following are the usual mixed bag, with the usual axes being ground. There is usually at least one in the TakiMag comment box who has to blame the Protestant Reformation for all the evils in the world. But there are a couple of good comments, one by Condor.
Another commenter later in the discussion turns the discussion to the usual condemnation of 'WASPs', saying that the Kennedys, for example, were merely emulating WASP culture, assimilating to WASP 'Boston Brahmin' norms. That argument never dies. It's usually resorted to by those of later immigrant stock, who are still resentful generations after their families immigrated here, resentful of the WASPs -- who gave them the opportunity to become Americans. It shows that no good deed goes unpunished.
The same anti-WASP commenter cites David Hackett Fischer and his work 'Albion's Seed.' I've read Albion's Seed, and it's an interesting book, a sizeable, hefty book, with a lot of information, but it is not Gospel. Fischer is not the last word, and it's really getting very old to hear people citing him in support of their pet theories. The anti-WASP faction really love Fischer. It's too bad he has gained this cult status, and his interpretation seems to go unchallenged.
Gottfried seems to imply in his article that WASPs somehow deserve the animus the various ethnic groups direct towards them, because they ''excluded" the various ethnic immigrants of the Ellis Island wave. Well, there is another side to that story. I might easily say that the various ethnic immigrant groups who have this monumental, generations-long grudge against WASPs are people who suffer from inferiority feelings, and who felt envy towards the WASPs who built the country to which their ancestors sought admission. It seems to be human nature to resent someone to whom you are beholden. We see this with all the minority 'victim' groups, and in fact their cult of victimology, which has done so much harm in our day, could be said to have been pioneered by the various ethnic immigrants. It is they who, to this day, bemoan the supposed 'discrimination' their ancestors suffered when they landed here from the Old Country. The Irish have their centuries-old vendetta against the English for having 'stolen' their country and their culture and their language. That anti-English tradition must have colored their perceptions of the Anglo-Protestants they met here. The rhetoric is exactly the same as that of Third World peoples, American Indians, and others. It might be argued that all the opportunistic 'huddled masses' of today are following the template established by the Ellis Islanders and their descendants.
The whole cult of anti-White or anti-Western resentment might be seen as being based, ultimately, in the 'undeveloped' world's resentment and envy of European man's accomplishments and successes. Look at the Anglo-Saxon as being sort of the epitome of Western strength and dominance (think of the British Empire at its height, or American dominance during its heyday) and success. The most successful are always regarded with a mix of envy and resentment. Sometimes the resentment escalates to hatred and desire for revenge, the desire to pull down the most successful and destroy his accomplishments, which are seen as an affront to the less successful peoples.
The Anglo-Saxon male is the target mostly because he inspired so much envy and resentment by his successes -- and also by his generosity. Sometimes generosity is despised as weakness, even by those who are the recipients of that generosity.
''Envy always implies conscious inferiority wherever it resides." - Pliny
So, again, we have the usual blaming of Christians, and the blaming specifically of Anglo-Saxon Protestants for the perils we are facing now.
How long will this continue? I could blame the later waves of immigrants for their grudges and resentments, and their tendency to champion The Other out of spite towards WASP America.
It is not just the nonwhite victim groups that have fostered this White Protestant guilt syndrome, but all the other immigrant victimhood-cultists. Many White Protestants who are not identified with some ethnic victim group end up absorbing some of the blame and guilt directed at old-stock Anglo-Americans.
We could see that we are all in this together, and that what happened in the mid-19th century should be put aside in the name of saving what remains of our heritage. Can we do that, or will we continue to snipe and one another and undercut one another?

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