Christianity: White Supremacists At Prayer?

As Dreher asks, 'How far do you think a Cal State professor would get giving a lecture on how Judaism fosters social evil, or Islam?' Don't bother, we all know the answer.

From The American Conservative

By Rod Dreher

A reader whose parents escaped Communist Hungary sends this link to an upcoming lecture at Cal State Fullerton. I’m old enough to remember when Orange County was conservative. Heck, I’m old enough to remember when California was liberal, not militantly woke. Anyway, if you’re on campus on the evening of November 3, this is what you can go hear at the College of Humanities & Social Sciences’ “Interdisciplinary Conversations on Anti-Blackness”:

Justin Huft, Sociology and Psychology, Religiosity and Critical Whiteness: How Christianity Serves White Supremacy

Though race, socioeconomic status, education levels, and geographic location are often cited as possible reasons for investing in white surpremacist [sic] philosophies, an often overlooked component of white supremacy culture is how Christianity contributes to these beliefs. A wide range of interdisciplinary research has identified how Christianity buttresses patriarchal power structures and beliefs. We will discuss how Christianity reaffirms white supremacy views; including how a “color-blind” approach maintains the optics of being “non-racist,” while upholding racist systems of power.

Here’s a link to Prof. Huft’s faculty page. 

There is nothing wrong with investigating the intersection between religion and racial structures in societies. But in this climate of racial hysteria, we have here a professor at a California state university giving a lecture on how Christianity “contributes” to what the contemporary American left has identified as the greatest social evil of our time. Note that even if Christianity teaches people not to judge others by the color of their skin, it is still white supremacist. 

How far do you think a Cal State professor would get giving a lecture on how Judaism fosters social evil, or Islam? You know the answer: because anti-Christian bigotry is a sign of enlightenment among these elites. Nobody at Cal State Fullerton is going to have to answer for this.

Why did the daughter of Hungarian refugees send this item to me? The answer is in this passage from the introduction of Live Not By Lies:

What makes the emerging situation in the West similar to what they fled? After all, every society has rules and taboos and mechanisms to enforce them. What unnerves those who lived under Soviet communism is this similarity: Elites and elite institutions are abandoning old-fashioned liberalism, based in defending the rights of the individual, and replacing it with a progressive creed that regards justice in terms of groups. It encourages people to identify with groups—ethnic, sexual, and otherwise—and to think of Good and Evil as a matter of power dynamics among the groups. A utopian vision drives these progressives, one that compels them to seek to rewrite history and reinvent language to reflect their ideals of social justice.

Further, these utopian progressives are constantly changing the standards of thought, speech, and behavior. You can never be sure when those in power will come after you as a villain for having said or done something that was perfectly fine the day before. And the consequences for violating the new taboos are extreme, including losing your livelihood and having your reputation ruined forever.

People are becoming instant pariahs for having expressed a politically incorrect opinion, or in some other way provoking a progressive mob, which amplifies its scapegoating through social and conventional media. Under the guise of “diversity,” “inclusivity,” “equity,” and other egalitarian jargon, the Left creates powerful mechanisms for controlling thought and discourse and marginalizes dissenters as evil.

It is very hard for Americans who have never lived through this kind of ideological fog to recognize what is happening. To be sure, whatever this is, it is not a carbon copy of life in the Soviet Bloc nations, with their secret police, their gulags, their strict censorship, and their material deprivation. That is precisely the problem, these people warn. The fact that relative to Soviet Bloc conditions, life in the West remains so free and so prosperous is what blinds Americans to the mounting threat to our liberty. That, and the way those who take away freedom couch it in the language of liberating victims from oppression.

“I was born and raised in the Soviet Union, and I’m frankly stunned by how similar some of these developments are to the way Soviet propaganda operated,” says one professor, now living in the Midwest.

Another émigré professor, this one from Czechoslovakia, was equally blunt. He told me that he began noticing a shift a decade or so ago: friends would lower their voices and look over their shoulders when expressing conservative views. When he expressed his conservative beliefs in a normal tone of voice, the Americans would start to fidget and constantly scan the room to see who might be listening.

“I grew up like this,” he tells me, “but it was not supposed to be happening here.”

What is happening here? A progressive—and profoundly anti-Christian militancy—is steadily overtaking society; one described by Pope Benedict XVI as a “worldwide dictatorship of seemingly humanistic ideologies” that pushes dissenters to society’s margins. Benedict called this a manifestation of “the spiritual power of the Antichrist.” This spiritual power takes material form in government and private institutions, in corporations, in academia and media, and in the changing practices of everyday American life. It is empowered by unprecedented technological capabilities to surveil private life. There is virtually nowhere left to hide.

If you are a Christian in Orange County, go out there to protest peacefully that night, with prayer and song. If you are a Christian student on that campus, stand up and be heard. White Christians, Latino Christians, Black Christians, Asian Christians — everybody, fight the hate! Don’t let them teach you to despise your own faith. Jewish students and Islamic students would not stand for this if it were happening to them.

UPDATE: A reader sends evidence that Prof. Huft is a bona fide totalitarian. Here he is in 2017 writing to the student newspaper to protest a fellow professor’s op-ed in which he (the other prof) said students should treat a planned Milo Yiannopoulos lecture on campus as a chance to learn, to engage with someone who doesn’t share their views. Huft wet himself with anger. Excerpt:

Oppressors (accidental or purposeful) in a system often place expectations like this on the oppressed in order to effectively silence their discomfort. If we reposition your argument into other contexts, I think it’s easy to see how absurd and offensive it is (perhaps, we can also turn domestic violence into learning opportunities for women, Doug?).

At the same time, you are seemingly trying to hold up and empower students, you are using different oppressive tactics to reinforce a narrative that dismisses and systematically silences any dissent.

It is very easy for a person with your intersection of identities to be blind to what some students are experiencing, but the language being used to contrast this narrative is far from productive.

When you talked about “getting our collective panties in a bunch,” I also understand that you are likely not trying to be as misogynistic as you are. Again, it is easy to be a white male and be blind to how you (and I) contribute to ongoing systems of oppression.

This surfside Stalinist is not just the enemy of Christians and conservatives; he is the enemy of actual liberals, too.