The Golden Rule: The Equity of Ethnonationalism

Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.
~ Matthew 7:12

This most simple summary of the Law, while perhaps being the best known biblical aphorism lingering in the collective mind, is all but entirely misunderstood today. Though misconception of spiritual things is to be expected of unbelievers, as they are intent on suppressing the truth, it is exceeding strange to see claimants of Christ adopting the unbeliever’s interpretation of Christ’s words here. But this is precisely what has happened.

Everyone from the Hindu to the atheist affirms the Golden Rule. I won’t bore the reader with the quotes proving that point, but there are ample citations available demonstrating a similar-sounding principle in all the major world religions; suffice it to say it is confirmed by virtually every source touching the subject – the Golden Rule is a universal value posited by Confucius, Buddha, Rabbi Hillel, et al., independent of Christ and the Christian tradition.

But this is so only if we interpret the Golden Rule in the same way that the modern Alienist church does. This fact alone – that the modern churches find themselves arguing that ‘the sum of the law and prophets’ (Matt. 7:12) is a universal ethic embraced by all religions – should itself refute them. For Paul solemnly admonished the Colossians in 2:8 that the Christian man must be on guard against “the traditions of men and the rudiments of the world,” i.e., the assumptions held in common by the heathen. If concord with all the cults is a boon in their eyes, they prove themselves doubly blind.

Albeit this ethical-theological stigmatism is not entirely new. In his Defense of Virginia, Dabney addressed the same spirit invading under the banner of abolitionism in his day (also accessible via the Dabney Archive):

But a more special word should be devoted to the argument from the Golden Rule. . . . [A]s leading Abolitionists continue to advance the oft-torn and tattered folly, the friends of truth must continue to tear it to shreds. The whole reasoning of the Abolitionists proceeds on the absurd idea, that any caprice or vain desire we might entertain towards our fellowman, if we were in his place, and he in ours, must be the rule of our conduct towards him, whether the desire would be in itself right or not. This absurdity has been illustrated by a thousand instances. On this rule, a parent who, were he a child again, would be wayward and self-indulgent, commits a clear sin in restraining or punishing the waywardness of his child, for this is doing the opposite of what he would wish were he again the child. Judge and sheriff commit a criminal murder in condemning and executing the most atrocious felon; for were they on the gallows themselves, the overmastering love of life would very surely prompt them to desire release. In a word, whatever ill-regulated desire we are conscious of having, or of being likely to have, in reversed circumstances, that desire we are bound to make the rule of our action in granting the parallel caprice of any other man, be he bore, beggar, highwayman, or what not. On this understanding, the Golden Rule would become any thing but golden; it would be a rule of iniquity; for instead of making impartial equity our regulating principle, it would make the accidents of man’s criminal caprice the law of his acts. It would become every man’s duty to enable all other men to do whatever his own sinful heart, mutatis mutandis, might prompt. . . .

It is clear, then, that our Saviour, by His Golden Rule, never intended to establish so absurd a law. The rule of our conduct to our neighbour is not any desire which we might have, were we to change places; but it is that desire which we should, in that case, be morally entitled to have. . . . The Apostle Paul gives precisely the true application of this rule when he says: “Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal.” And this means, not emancipation from servitude, but good treatment as servants; which is proven by the fact that the precept contemplates the relation of masters and servants as still subsisting.

Dabney’s essay is a sledgehammer, as is David Carlton’s expansion thereon. Both reprise the unpopular truth that antebellum slavery was indeed consistent with the Golden Rule and loving thy neighbor. I do not presume to improve on the case they’ve made. I’m content to focus more minutely on the matter of the modern church – even the supposed conservative denominations such as PCA and OPC – having come to interpret the Golden Rule in conformity with the counterfeit humanist ideal found in every sect of heathendom.

As is plain, Alienists are overjoyed at the application of the humanist lens to Christ’s words with respects to racial integration and interracial marriage. Their moral outrage at those who question the humanist ethos is visceral. They can conceive nothing in the conservative’s objection to miscegeny but violation of the Golden Rule and, by implication, apostasy. With a degree of sanctimony which they seem to muster for no other cause or argument, they thunder, “How would you like someone to declare your marriage a sin?! Do unto others as you would have them do unto you!” Any traditionalist who does not wilt before the Alienist’s thoughtless zeal is damned for a heretic. Which, of course, would be of little concern if it weren’t for the fact that they have infiltrated all the positions of influence in the institutional churches now. Nonetheless, on the merits of their argument an honest man can hardly stifle his laughter. But it does not rise to genuine mirth, only sardonic exasperation.

For not only did our sires uniformly denounce miscegenation and from the largest platforms, but the meager 4% margin who actually approved of miscegenation in 1958 were not Christians at all. That number was comprised of the hardest of the hard Left: Jews, atheists, communists, and Jewish atheist communists. Meantime, our fathers pronounced only the most solemn omens concerning the logical entailments thereof. Indeed, our segregationist fathers forecast that the egalitarian interpretation of the Golden Rule sanctioning interracial unions necessarily implied the sanction of everything from sodomite unions to human sacrifice and cannibalism. As Richard Weaver famously warned, ideas have consequences.

But the anti-Christ Left mocked our fathers’ logical forecasts as “ignorant paranoia” and “Chicken Little slippery-slope hysteria.”

However, not only did our fathers’ arguments accord with Scripture and logic, but all their prognostications therefrom were likewise borne out in time. The same rationale – ‘Do unto others’ seen through the humanist lens – went on to necessarily condone first “same-sex unions” and then “gay marriage.” If no one should be suffered to interfere with love* between two consenting parties, then acceptance of miscegenation on those grounds validated sodomite marriage* intrinsically. It also gave us contraceptive-based family planning, as well as abortion. No-fault divorce, too. And the Warren Court went on to apply the principle over the breadth of many more such subjects, just as our fathers’ forebodings warned. So much so that his biography by Newton would be titled Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made. Describing modern America as ‘made’ by Earl Warren is fairly apt even if he was only following the ideological course set by the likes of Justice Brandeis.

But in his wake, the engines of the court are still stoked hot as the furnaces of hell, forging from that first ore one new abominable permutation after another. All under the auspices of ‘doing unto others’ with respect to the institutions of family and nation – all under euphemisms like ‘reproductive rights,’ ‘civil rights,’ and ‘human rights.’

Truth be told, the entirety of the Sexual Revolution hinged upon that first matter of race. This, of course, is not at all a controversial statement except amongst those Christians who, having lately been coached into the Alienist view of race, do not yet apply the principle consistently. But if a margin of them retain yet some reservations against post-genderism, they are capitulating rapidly.

In practice the humanist view assumes egalitarianism, but is ironically undergirded by moral relativism and self-deification. The Devil, as from the beginning, calls for equality between man, woman, God, and the other – the Devil being the ‘other’ in the story, of course.

Even the Church of Satan subscribes to a form of the Golden Rule. Anton LaVey taught: “Do unto others as they do unto you.” While this is really a repudiation of the Golden Rule, in practice it winds up the same as the ethic taught by the Alienists under the auspices of the Golden Rule. First, it starts with an assumption of equality on the part of its adherents – that all equally deserve what they expect of others, and that all have the equal right to judge their fellows by their high estimation of their own deserts. The assumption of reciprocity therein introduces a corollary: if everyone treats everyone else as he is treated, the necessary implication is that one must treat others as one wishes to be treated, else one could never be treated as one wishes. So by way of self-interest, it winds up back at the more common expression of the Golden Rule anyway. But secondly, it assumes the previous and primary rule of satanism posited by Aleister Crowley: “Do as thou wilt.” And it is clear from Dabney’s argument above that because the liberal’s own preferences are cast as every man’s duty, Crowley’s law is actually the cornerstone assumption of the liberal Christian. The Alienist position differs from the satanist’s on this point only with respect to their relative directness and candor. But their underlying assumptions are the same. As Rushdoony observed:

The demand of humanism (and of its child, socialism) is for a universal ethics. In universal ethics we are told that, even as the family gave way to the tribe, and the tribe to the nation, so the nation must give way to a one-world order. All men must treat all other men equally. Partiality to our family, nation, or race, represents a lower morality, we are told, and must be replaced by a ‘higher’ morality of a universal ethics.¹

If granted, the Alienist view of a ‘universal morality’ nullifies the tenth commandment. For the call to level all expectations of treatment, entitling every slave to the estate of every master, is itself to declare all covetousness holy, which precipitates a like nullification of the eighth commandment, blessing every larceny. In fact, citing Christ’s summary of the Law – which is what Jesus expressly describes the Golden Rule to be – the Alienist ultimately interprets that summary as a neutralization of all that it summarizes.

But despite its ubiquity amongst the humanist sects, even that leveling – due to assumptions held by Whites in particular, and consonant with the notion of “colorblindness” – is itself deemed a deep offense to non-Whites. When Whites treat everyone as we wish to be treated, it is described by other races as consonant with “White supremacy.” But that’s just to say that the humanist conception of the Golden Rule does not pay the universalized dividends which its proponents imagine. Insofar as we are speaking of White Alienists, presumption of equality is still subject to the personal preferences and social norms of White people, the inescapability of which is willfully ignored by said liberal Whites, but appears to all other peoples as nothing but an ethno-ethical imperialism, and an especially obtuse form of hypocrisy. Thus proving the internal contradiction thereof, as well as its unlivability.

What, then, does the Golden Rule actually teach?

Though a summation of the Law in itself, the Golden Rule proclaimed by Christ is also a restatement of Moses’s foregoing summary of the law – “love thy neighbor as thyself” (Lev. 19:18) – which Jesus also identified as the second greatest commandment (Matt. 22:36-40), subordinate to the commandment to “love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might” (Deut. 6:5). As the first pertains to man’s duties to God, and the second, his duties toward other men, it is apparent that the first and second greatest commandments are coordinate with the two tables of the Decalogue. So, be it the second greatest commandment or the Golden Rule, it is apparent that our interpretation of either such summary must accord with the law each abbreviates; else it is no summary at all. To suggest otherwise is only to propose a foreign law system at odds with and overlaying God’s Law, thus implying some essential incoherence not only in Christian ethics, but in the divine Word itself, and, ultimately, in God back of it – a perspective approaching the old heresy of Marcionism. That is to say that the popular conception of the Golden Rule, in and out of the churches, amounts to blasphemy and nascent heathenism.

As religion always impacts language, this confusion has come synchronistically with a confounding of basic terms: in this case the difference between egalitarianism and equity. Where the modern churchmen have colored the Golden Rule as a pledge of equality, certain words had to be redefined to strip us of terminology by which we might reprise the biblical view. Granted, the standard dictionaries today tell you that these words – equity and egalitarianism – are synonyms, but as this is an age of such unified deceit, we turn to the elder dictionaries, from a time when the West was still monolithically Christian, for a true definition. This is the first entry in Webster’s 1828 on the word equity: “1. Justice; right. In practice, equity is the impartial distribution of justice, or the doing that to another which the laws of God and man, and of reason, give him a right to claim. It is the treating of a person according to justice and reason.”

Quite different from egalitarianism, treating all men according to the justice of God’s law means categorical and bounded proportionality relative to one’s identity, without which there is no actual relation to other men and things. Even the alternate usage of equity, pertaining to real estate, communicates the idea that right is tied up with one’s relative station and identity. The homesteader or householder is both literally and figuratively “entitled.” It is not equality, but equity, at which the Golden Rule aims.

In order to comprehend the Golden Rule as consistent with God’s Law and Scripture in general, it must presuppose all the ordered inequalities hallowed in the scope thereof: the special rights of a man to his own property encompass not only the plot and structure of his house but the lineal blood conception of his house also. This is how the fourth commandment conceives wife and children among our “possessions” and how the tenth likewise conceives our neighbor’s wife and children as his possessions separate from ours. Thus does the law demand a reciprocity of respect, each man for the unequal estate of his neighbor. Suffice it to say that if the law forbids coveting and all confusion of ownership with respect to one’s neighbor’s wife, children, slaves, livestock, and estate, then men have lawful claims of exclusive rights over many things. In this same way, though Israel was admonished to treat the alien “as one born among you,” the alien was nonetheless precluded by law from titles of land, political office, and intermarriage with Israelites. Meaning that the alien never ceased being acknowledged for what he was – an alien. Not only do I have no equal rights to my neighbor’s estate, nor to equal standing in house, nor to citizenship amongst nations of other races, but the mere fancy that I could is itself a plain violation of the law per the tenth commandment – and because it is a summary of the law, a violation of the Golden Rule itself.

So when the liberal, under the auspices of the Golden Rule, imputes to heathen foreigners the birthright of our children without distinction, he undercuts the very principle he imagines to vindicate himself. To honor the Golden Rule, we must do unto every man as we would rightly have done to us were we in his circumstance. And each man’s rights differ according to circumstance. ‘Doing unto others’ means my neighbor has equal right not to my wife and children, but to his own; by the same principle, a man of another people is entitled to citizenship not in my nation, but in his own. The Golden Rule in no way mandates that blacks are entitled access to my sisters and daughters, only to their own. The children of the world are not entitled to my love and care in anything like an equal proportion to my own children. In fact, the Scripture overtly condemns those “pleased with the children of foreigners” (Isa. 2:6; cf. Hos. 5:7) in place of their own children. The hour demands emphasis of these basic truths, because the churches have suddenly spurned God’s design for the family in favor of the delusions pursued by Angelina Jolie.

If “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations” (Isa. 56:7), those nations (ethne) must exist, and to perpetuate themselves as limited entities as the Scripture presupposes, they can only abide in some form of segregation. All of which is to say that the Golden Rule is consonant not only with familism, but also with nationalism. Sanctioning unequal privileges of lineage, inheritance, and class, with respect to historic Christendom, entails that dread bane of Alienism – White privilege. But so too for Black privilege, and Yellow, and Brown, and Red: all have privilege and supremacy relative to their own domains. The only equality in it is that every man and nation is equally entitled to their unequal rights under God.

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