Mr Pearce is a former neo-nazi who converted to Catholicism in his 20s. This powerful essay was written immediately following the Charlottesville riot in 2017.
From the National Catholic Register
By Joseph Pearce
COMMENTARY: Catholic convert and former neo-Nazi Joseph Pearce considers
the lessons we need to learn in the wake of the events of the Aug.
11-12 tragedy.
As I read reports of the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia,
between white supremacists and their opponents, it brought back memories
of my own battle-scarred past. As an angry young man in my native
England, I had joined a white supremacist party and was involved in many
bruising battles on the streets. I had rejoiced when a
counterdemonstrator was killed at one of our meetings and mourned when a
friend of mine, a neo-Nazi colleague, had died after being hit on the
head at another riotous demonstration.
In those days, I relished the violence, hoping for a full-blown race
war. As the editor of a white supremacist magazine, I sought to incite
racial hatred and was sentenced to prison twice, spending my 21st and
25th birthdays in prison. It was, therefore, with an unsettling sense of
déjà vu that I watched the events in Charlottesville unfold. I had seen
it all before, not merely as a passive spectator watching it happen on
television, but as an active participant, feeling the rage and the anger
and experiencing the violence firsthand.
Having once been in the same place and the same psychological space
as today’s white supremacists, and having experienced their sense of
outrage and alienated anger, I hope that I can offer some insights into
why such people feel the way that they do and what we can do to heal the
wounds of our broken culture. In order to do so, I will need to retrace
my own steps, recalling how I ended up in a world of racism and bigotry
— although, in all honesty, I learned much of my racism at my father’s
knee. It was nurtured in the culture of relativism at the public high
school I attended. There was no suggestion that young men and women
should be taught virtue; no suggestion that the real meaning of love was
not self-gratification, but the laying down of one’s life for another;
no suggestion that there was a God or, if there was, that he was
relevant to our lives.
Christianity, if it was mentioned at all in the classroom, was
sneered at by the teachers, almost all of whom seemed to be agnostics or
atheists, and several of whom were avowed Marxists. This secularized
education is not that dissimilar to the education that many young people
receive today in the United States. In public schools laboring under
the demands of the dictatorship of relativism, there is no room for an
education in virtue. Indeed, “virtue” as a word is effectively banished
from the classroom, and specific virtues, such as chastity and humility,
are actively frowned upon or ridiculed.
What is taught is a spirit of rebellion against traditional concepts
of goodness, truth and beauty. In this vicious and vacuous environment,
it is inevitable that vice will fill the virtue-free void. If we will
not teach goodness, truth and beauty, we cannot avoid breeding
viciousness, falsehood and ugliness, and this will include the rise of
pride in all its ugly manifestations, including pride in one’s own
perceived racial identity.
The problem is that relativism elevates feeling over reason. If it’s
all about me and my feelings and not about my place in an objective
reality of which I am only a small part, I am “free” to pick and choose
the “self” that I selfishly desire. For some, a small minority, this
might be rooted in something to do with “sexuality”; for others, and
potentially a much larger number of people, this will be rooted in a
sense of tribal or racial identity. It is in this atmosphere of
relativism, in which reality is narcissistically self-defined, that
pride runs rampant, not least of which is racial pride, the hateful,
often violent type of which we saw in Charlottesville.
In my own case, the pride that was ruling and ruining my life was
challenged by its engagement with objective reality, with authentic
reason. Discovering the works of G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, C.S.
Lewis, Blessed John Henry Newman and, eventually, during my second
prison sentence, the works of Thomas Aquinas, I began to perceive
reality as something much bigger than the pathetic world of racist
ideology that I had self-constructed.
It is for this reason that I believe strongly, with St. John Paul II
and Benedict XVI, that the Church can only effectively evangelize a
culture dominated by relativism with the power of fides et ratio,
of a faith which is indissolubly wedded to reason. The narcissism of
relativism imprisons the self within the prison of the self itself;
reason liberates the self, enabling it to stretch into the glorious
cosmos that exists beyond itself.
In short and in sum, racism and other manifestations of pride need to
be countered by an encounter with reason. There is, however, one other
force that helped me overcome my pride — and that is the power of love.
In my days of pride, I hated my enemies, and I expected my enemies to
hate me. It was the old law of: an eye for an eye. You hurt me and I
hurt you. You hate me and I hate you. Hate breeding hatred. Picture the
scenes of demonstrators and counterdemonstrators at Charlottesville,
venting their spleens against each other, screaming their hatred at each
other, each feeding off the other’s frenzy.
The way out of this deadly spiral is to go beyond the love of
neighbor, as necessary as that is, and to begin to love our enemies.
This is not simply good for us, freeing us from the bondage of hatred;
it is good for our enemies also.
In my book Race With the Devil: My Journey From Racial Hatred to Rational Love,
I recall three separate occasions when I confronted an enemy with
hatred and enmity and received in return love and friendship. In each
case, the receiving of love when I was expecting hatred sowed seeds of
healing in my hate-battered heart.
Make no mistake about it, love is a powerful weapon against our
enemies. Hatred hurts our enemies, but it doesn’t stop them from being
enemies; on the contrary, it enflames their hatred and increases their
enmity. Love, on the other hand, does not hurt our enemies; it only
hurts their hatred. And in hurting their hatred, it heals their hearts,
turning the enemy into a friend.
This is the challenge we face in the wake of the horrors of
Charlottesville. It is to love our enemies. We should not demonize the
white supremacist or the abortionist, but should love them into
submission. We should not prey on them but should pray for them, hoping
that, in the future, by the grace of God, we can pray with them.
As for James Alex Fields, the angry and hate-filled young man who has
been accused of driving his car into counterdemonstrators in
Charlottesville, I know all too well that he is what I was. He is not
beyond the love of God, nor should he be beyond the love of his
neighbors or his enemies. We should pray for him as we pray for his
victims.
Joseph Pearce is a senior editor with the Augustine Institute
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