In Defense of White People

Introduction
Well, apparently it has come to this. My mentions are R.I.P. as they say. Here I am writing a defense of white people. I guess I thought this went without saying, but white people are simply amazing. They can sunburn like the dickens. And that doesn’t stop them from going right back outside and getting sunburned again. I speak from personal experience. 

We also used to paint our faces blue and dance around trees and rocks and rape and pillage villages, until Christ saved us. We’ve done a lot of great things and a lot of terrible things. Alfred the Great and John Knox, George Washington and Stonewall Jackson were some of the high points, but Adolph Hitler and Margaret Sanger were definitely some of our low points. Also, I would like to apologize on behalf of white people everywhere for Vanilla Ice. He was White Boy Summer before it was even a thing, but definitely when it was still lame. But Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty and Johnny Cash have almost made up for it. 

I’m also thankful for my white privilege. I’m told this includes things like not being pulled over by cops as often in major metropolitan areas, and fewer fourth amendment frisks by the TSA. Although, the way things are going, I wouldn’t be surprised if I start getting pulled over and frisked more, but enough about the FBI, which incidentally, is apparently run by a bunch of leprous white guys. The greatest privileges I enjoy I got from my parents and grandparents, who turns out, were all white. My dad has been faithful to my mom for 46 years and counting. My grandpa, armed with an eighth-grade education, enlisted in the Marines as a 15 year old (lying about his age), and after a stint in the South Pacific in World War II and a knee injury that may have saved his life, stayed married to my grandma for 70-some years, while working on oil rigs in Louisiana, Texas, and Alaska. Both sets of grandparents handed down the same enormous blessing, including a work ethic, emotional stability, and moderate middle class wealth that comes with it. But none of this was due to the amount of pigment in their skin, it was all God’s grace. What do I have that I did not receive? The same thing goes for our Western civilization and America in particular, all predominantly white, and pervasively impacted by the gospel of Jesus Christ. 

And because sinners sin, there have been people who hate this for a long time, most recently targeting this pervasively white Christian civilization with their DEI totalitolerance and affirmative oppression. And this is evil, unjust, and should be resisted by every lawful means available to us. Did you catch that? I’m saying that’s bad, they should stop, and we should do whatever we can to stop it. I’m told that Martin Luther didn’t really say this, but like everyone says Martin Luther said, “If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the Word of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Him.” And that includes the current war on white Christian heterosexual men. 

Crazyland
Going back to Adam, that father of every skin hue, we have plunged into sin, and that means hating one another and being hated for virtually any excuse imaginable. Sin is a temporary insanity such that all attempts to explain it ultimately fail. Sin is crazy. And the proliferation of sin is crazyland. It doesn’t make sense. It imagines there is no God, pretends to be God, and then does abominations like adultery, slave trading, murdering babies, and anti-white discrimination. And sometimes we defend it by prostrating obsequiously in front of a giant painted rock or piece of carved wood. Sometimes we write fat books attempting to lecture the Almighty and our fellow man with the deep thoughts that occurred to us while we were loading our diapers with the same.  

But this doesn’t mean we don’t notice patterns. Our Adamic crazy tends to fall into very predictable ruts. There’s the caveman tyrannical-god motif. This was the plan of the builders of Babel: “Me Grub build big city be god,” and it has emerged many more times in the history of the world. But this barbaric machismo has lost its charm ever since Christ came into the world. There are still some pathetic attempts at it, but Christ’s resurrection has left the grasping for naked power seeming a little gauche except for five year-old boys on the playground and a few based bros on X. 

Ever since Jesus rose from the dead, the heroic story arc now consists in overcoming weakness and suffering before enjoying victory. Those who trust in Jesus join Him in this heroic narrative arc, both cosmically, as they hope in resurrected life after their own literal death, but also in miniature ways, as they embrace the suffering of obedience to Christ (taking up His cross) and experiencing miniature resurrections in this life, beginning with conversion itself but also the blessings that often follow simple obedience: the struggle to find, keep, and accomplish good work and the blessing of paychecks; the struggle to find and woo a good woman and the blessing of her companionship, respect, children, and home. 

And this is something that has changed about the nature of the world. When Christ rose from the dead, something fundamentally changed. The head of the serpent was mortally wounded, and his direct imperial and tyrannical power to deceive and destroy was weakened (although certainly not obliterated). But this means that the more effective means of grasping for power now imitates true power, which is at the right hand of the Father. And He walks with a limp. He rules with scars in His hands and feet and side. 

So there’s still that old Adamic nature, full of hate and animosity and malice, but the trend, ever since the resurrection, is toward what we may call “messianic appropriation.” While the occasional Nietzsche has attempted to defy this gravity, everyone feels it. Christ is at the right hand of the Father, and He got there by humbling Himself and taking on the form of a servant, obedient even to the most shameful and excruciating death of the Cross. Therefore, God has highly exalted Him. Christ conquered by getting low. 

This is where we get the idea of “playing the victim” and various attempts to weaponize weakness and victimhood. These are faux-messianic moves, pretending to get low: occupying buildings and requesting gluten-free handouts; going on hunger strikes and then announcing to the world that you’re feeling a little woozy. It’s Christo-Larping, play acting like Christ, soccer-flopping for control, throwing fits in the toy aisle until you get what you demand. 

These motifs have particular power in more or less Christian civilizations. Karl Marx popularized perhaps the most systematic and virulent form of this theory in his adaptation of Hegelian dialectic, refined and revised in various critical theories of the last century, claiming that human history is nothing but oppressors and oppressed, driven by a primordial envy and angst. The goal is a judo move of manipulation, trying to trick resurrection power out of an emotional fit. And they can succeed by two possible outcomes: one way is for you to give in and give them what they demand (but beware: they’ll be back for more tomorrow) or the other way they succeed is by getting you to react like them with your own emotional outburst, throwing your own right wing tantrum, which amounts to joining the mob. And if you get so sick and tired of their fits that you punch one of them (or worse), all the better since now they have a real shiner to complain about instead of the fake one they’ve been donning with makeup. You’ve handed them a real victim status, which is one of the main currencies in crazyland.   

The point here is not to try to explain what is going on in the heads of mobs. Many mobs form like the one in Ephesus with people chanting mantras for hours, about which they know not: some people shouting one thing, others shouting another, because hey, who doesn’t like a good mob catharsis?

Which is what we’re witnessing. We live in God’s world where envy and hatred are like an electrical charge that build and collect in societies searching for a scapegoat. Beginning with Cain, envy and hatred have always required blood. As Rene Girard has described in exquisite detail, Christ is the only perfect victim and therefore He is the only sacrifice where that electrical charge goes to actually die. 

So why do Leftists hate white people? Because white people are the majority race in the West (the oppressors), because they are the majority recipients of Christian blessings (authority, wealth, influence), and because angry people are always looking for an excuse to punch something. But neo-Marxist impulses aiming to destroy Christianity are driving the whole thing. It may be many layers up, but there are people watching this whole thing from the shadows waiting for the right pitch of cacophony (weakness) in which a totalitarian statist solution (salvation) will be widely welcomed in order to restore the “peace.” 

Conclusion: In Defense of Christian Nationalism 
Apparently, some folks on the right think that by identifying the central target of this hatred as Christ and Christian Civilization we are in some way lessening the need to fight or resist. That may be a temptation of others, but I’m a Christian Nationalist and I love my heritage and I’m determined to fight for it. But what made the Christian West and Christian America particularly glorious and worth fighting for was Christ Himself with us. He gave us a good land flowing with milk and honey, thousands of miles of navigable waterways, seaports, arable land, timber, oil fields, and prolific fish and game. He gave us laws of true justice, common law, due process, representative and limited government. He gave us creativity and industry and generous and adventurous hearts. He gave us fathers and mothers who loved and sacrificed in particular places, laboring to build chapels and cathedrals, composing motets and hymns, raising children, overcoming odds, resisting tyranny, defending their homelands, kneeling in prayer at bedsides. He gave us apple pies and mashed potatoes and barbecue and cold beer. And yes, God gave Rock and Roll to you.  

Yes, we are being targeted by many for our skin color, but we must not get distracted. They should stop that, and we should use every lawful means to make them stop. But while we can and must be deeply grateful for our particular families, cultures, traditions, and nations, our gratitude needs to be ordered rightly, and not by the prejudice of our enemies. One wit on Twitter said that you can’t “cure white guilt by pathologizing white pride,” but a whole lot depends on what we mean by “white pride.” God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble. There’s a kind of white pride that’s a drunk tick, swollen on the blood of 65 million babies. And that kind of pride absolutely needs to be pathologized.

Susannah Roberts pointed out on X, “it’s not happening>it’s happening & it’s good” can be a right wing path too, & it’s currently happening with white Christian nationalism among ppl who 18 months ago wd have been appalled “how dare you call us white nationalists”>”we must develop white ethnic consciousness.” And she’s not wrong. 

Our enemies have been accusing us of being “white nationalists” and a bunch of us have been denying that vehemently because “white” is not what binds us together. White skin is not the point of integration. A bunch of us have been white, and we aren’t sorry about that at all. We’re thankful, and we love that gift of God. But it would be a massive blunder to think that our enemies are trying to help us find our point of unity. It isn’t skin pigmentation, but they would love for us to think so. This doesn’t mean their hatred doesn’t matter. It just means we shouldn’t take our marching orders from our enemies. They hate our white skin, our white heritage, our white culture. Got it. But if most of us convert to Islam or become liberal sops tomorrow, this culture war will burn out in about five minutes. The culture war is a clash of, well, cultures. And cultures are built on a “cult” – on a way of worship and ordering lives over generations in particular places according to that worship. Henry Van Til said that culture is religion externalized, and as it happened, the Christian religion got externalized in a bunch of white folks in the West, for which we are very grateful and unashamed. But that means that the center of our culture is not the whiteness; the center is Christ. We’re grateful for families; we’re grateful for all the gifts and the fact that the gifts have come down to us in a particular hue and pigmentation. Praise God from Whom all blessings flow. 

But if we start talking and acting like there’s something intrinsic in us that warrants those gifts, we know what God will do. And He will have every right to do it. I would very much like my white kids to be able to continue enjoying God’s blessings, and that means recognizing that they are all gifts of grace, completely undeserved, and therefore fundamentally have nothing do with anything that I am or have, and certainly therefore, nothing to do with the color of my skin, and I say all of this in defense of white people. 

Photo by Museums Victoria on Unsplash