Immediately following the Charlottesville incident the Reformed African American Network (RAAN) issued “The Charlottesville Declaration: An Appeal to the Church in America,” which has since been endorsed by an expanding roster of clergy and clerisy eager to virtue signal in accord with rappers, hip-hop personae, and the secular mainstream. It begins with these words:
In Charlottesville, VA, the violence of white supremacy visited our nation once again; its demonic presence has not been exorcised from us. From the founding of this nation until the present hour, the idolatry of whiteness has been a pro-death spirit within our republic.
Drafted by putative Christians Rhodes and Tisby, this encyclical posits that America’s natal spirit is ‘demonic’ because it was founded, as all other nations are, on an ethno-religious basis.
But the ethnic character of other nations earns them no such condemnation. After all, RAAN objects neither to the adamant Black Supremacy taken for granted in African nations. And they remain conspicuously silent on the matter of the many African nations that have not only oppressed, but even genocided their White minority populations! RAAN doesn’t even object to those states that at present maintain anti-White exterminationist policies (e.g. Zimbabwe and South Africa). They warrant no criticism whatever in their estimation. Far from ‘demonic’ in fact, RAAN regards the unapologetic Black Supremacy of those nations a positive good in the world.
Though they focus their animus foremost at America for affirming the life and legacy of our own folk, just as every nation in history has, RAAN’s singular contempt for Whiteness makes plain that their objection is against all Eurostock nations, irrespective of territory.
It is easy for us to scapegoat the domestic terrorists who incited violence that ended in the deaths of three Americans. We can call them extremists who do not represent American values, but upon closer examination, the ideology deployed as a weapon in Charlottesville haunts every institution of the country, including the Church.
Wait. The White people who turned out in Charlottesville to protest the removal of our historic Christian monuments are ‘domestic terrorists’? Because they protested the secular crusade against our heritage? Because they defended themselves against attackers who outnumbered them five to one? Or simply because they dared to be White?
Do they really not comprehend that if you deem objection to the Bolshevik-style erasure of our history and culture ‘terrorism’ you have conceded the secular case against all Christian history? To take such a stance you have actually sanctioned the outlawing of the Bible itself! How do they not see this?
Even their supportive argument for the thesis that ‘incitation of violence’ defined the Charlottesville protestors as ‘terrorists’ is a direct blow against the Christian faith. If taking a stance hated by the secular world is ‘incitation to violence’, and thereby ‘terrorism’, you have conceded completely to the abolishment of the Christian faith!
Never mind that the term ‘terrorism’ was coined during the Jacobin revolution to describe liberal government suppression of Christian heritage by intimidation — the very thing that RAAN here endorses.
And declaring American history and culture contrary to ‘American values’ is a self-contradictory statement. RAAN’s conception of American values abolishes all traditional American values in favor of arbitrary government and the anti-American heathen hordes.
Moreover, if you reject the values that you admit from the nation’s founding permeated ‘every institution of the country, including the Church,’ as inconsistent with ‘American values,’ you once again negate yourself. Because you use the term ‘American values’ to signify all things contrary to American ideals and identity.
Thus, it is with great concern for the soul of this nation that we, the undersigned, covenant to “cry loud and spare not” (Isaiah 58:1) against America’s national sin, beginning within the body of Christ. White supremacy—often called by many names including racism, white privilege, “alt-right” and the KKK—is an insidious doctrine that in manifold ways steals, kills, and destroys the inviolable dignity of all God’s children (Genesis 1:26-28).
If ‘racism’ is America’s national sin, and you define racism according to Critical Race Theory as “the inborn prejudice and power of all White people” (as RAAN does), all you are condemning is the existence of White people. Keeping with the leftist zeitgeist, RAAN holds that the existence of White history, culture, and people ‘steals, kills, and destroys the inviolable dignity of all God’s children’. Do I need to point out that this position takes for granted that White people aren’t ultimately human? Or that in this ideology, Whiteness is cast as the proximate definition of evil?
Irony most acute: no Ku Kluxer ever promulgated a theory of race more hostile toward Blacks than is RAAN’s doctrine against Whites.
It suppresses the truth of God (Romans 1:18), and walks out of step with the true Gospel (Galatians 2:14). All that is left for an unrepentant stance toward sin is God’s justice and judgement. Alas, many of the Lord’s followers remain hard of heart and hearing, making God’s judgement upon this nation seemingly inevitable.
Galatians 2:14 is an especially odd prooftext for RAAN’s case. It reads: “But when I saw that they walked not uprightly according to the truth of the gospel, I said unto Peter before them all, If thou, being a Judaean, livest after the manner of Gentiles, and not as do the Judaeans, why compellest thou the Gentiles to live as do the Judaeans?”
Ruminate on this a moment. RAAN and the secular horde are compelling White people to forswear and abrogate our identity. Black identity certainly is not on the chopping block, nor any other but the identity of White Christians. So inasmuch as Paul rebukes the Judaizer impulse in the early church to suppress the identities of the Gentiles (the predominantly European nations, incidentally), he therein also rebukes RAAN.
But their citation of Romans 1:18 is even more self-indicting: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.”
Realize, the White folks who protested in Charlottesville did so in objection to the memory-holing of our history and the leftist rewriting of American identity. Which is to say, they were the vocal opposition to those ‘suppressing the truth in unrighteousness’.
This brings to mind the gauntlet thrown down by Obama and Holder, who repetitiously called White America “a nation of cowards” because we have supposedly avoided “an honest conversation about race.” RAAN representatives have echoed these same sentiments. But the fact is, whenever White people have attempted to have ‘an honest conversation about race,’ the immediate response from the Black community is not only disagreement, but hysteria, assault, riots, doxing, demands that the state strip Whites of whatever vestigial rights remain to us, pronouncements of damnation, threats against our wives and children, calls for our necessary extermination, and gloating over our diminishment and looming extinction.
The castigation and intimidation heaped on any White who dares speak the truth in regard to history, culture, and race is the most elaborate and obvious suppression of truth today. It is also the unapologetic agenda of RAAN.
With James Cone they have concluded, “If God is not for us [non-Whites] and against White people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him.” (J. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 1969)
In RAAN’s lexicon ‘truth’ is whatever excuses their behavior and hurts White people. And just like Eric Holder, they aren’t interested in any conversation about race that doesn’t further their empowerment over Whites. That’s the truth.
Judgment begins with the household of God, which has been particularly instrumental in the creation and maintenance of racial inequity.
The trouble here is twofold.
On the one hand, the Bible knows nothing of any equality between men, save perhaps that they are all equally men, all sinners, and all liable to die. But even if all are equally men, no two are equal men. And as respects the idea of racial equality, Scripture rather takes for granted everywhere that there are some ethnicities especially “fierce,” some “mild,” some “mighty,” some “terrible from their beginning onward,” some “more noble-minded,” some “wicked beasts,” some holy, and some wholly reprobate. Noah prophesied entirely unequal destinies over his sons and the races whom they were to sire (Gen. 9); the peoples who sprang of Jacob and Esau were unequal. The Bible spares not even the subject of inequalities of appearance between the races as it praises David’s and Solomon’s “fair and ruddy countenance” and Israelite bodies being “whiter milk” and “brighter than ivory”; and this over against references to the Ethiopian’s dark skin in the context of “soiled garments,” the “leopard’s spots” (a predator), and, in the same passage, even sin itself. God’s law-order is not equalitarian in the least, but fundamentally pluriform and hierarchical.
On the other hand, RAAN’s entire worldview is itself fundamentally opposed to equality among the races anyway. Because they hold White people to be uniquely evil, and regard Blacks and Browns more naturally sanctified. More extreme than the Bible’s treatment of the Ethiopian’s dark hide as a metaphor for sin, RAAN holds Whiteness to be an actual sin. And the most grievous sin, at that.
Even while holding all legal, institutional, and social supremacy over Whites, they plead for equality as if they were the party systematically marginalized and handicapped by the state. And their descriptions of the ‘equality’ they seek is nothing but Black Supremacy top to bottom.
Because, as Rushdoony said, “The goal of the equalitarians has always been power, and equality has been an argument to tickle the sick conscience of a faithless and shaky ruling element.”
Or in a better known reference, as Orwell said, “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”
From the French Revolution to the Bolshevik Revolution to the Cultural Revolution, this has not changed. That revolutionary spirit, after all, was introduced when Satan preached equality to our first parents. All the rabble since are only aping that first community organizer.
From Puritan pilgrims to Evangelical revivalists, churchmen have been seduced by the spirit of the age, calling evil good and good evil. The blood of indigenous peoples, Africans, and other people of color cries out from American soil to God our Maker. As premature calls for peace seek to silence the pregnant rage of this generation, the words of Scripture come freshly to mind: “Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division” (Luke 12:51-53).
Just pause and marvel at the absurdity of this narrative: because they defended their families from bloodthirsty savages and enforced God’s law, our martyr-fathers are accused of falling thrall to evil zeitgeist, while RAAN obversely presupposes the ‘pregnant rage of this generation’ to be wholesome somehow. As if our Reformation-era fathers who organized their whole lives on Scripture were morally inferior to modern communists, atheists, witches, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, Satanists and gender-fluid dragonkin who share RAAN’s ‘pregnant rage’ against historic Christendom.
Really.
You cannot hold to the same avant garde view as contemporary heathendom and claim the moral high ground over the heroes of Christian history whose entire social ethic was consciously gleaned from Scripture. RAAN is doing nothing less than pronouncing their excommunication on the historic Church for not being politically correct. They declare thereby the gates of hell the new gates of heaven.
But they transcend even this hypocrisy with one yet greater: having denounced ‘division’ practiced by the Puritans and Presbyterian divines who settled this New Canaan for our covenant nation, RAAN invokes the words of Christ that sanction division (Lk. 12:51-53). And no less so than had the White Reformers, it is indeed an ethnic division which they see their new Christianity as mandating. Pay attention here:
Because of this, we do not need cheap grace, cheap peace, cheap reconciliation. We need a revival of spirit, a revolution of values, and the abundance of righteous justice in this land.
A repudiation of ‘cheap’ grace, peace, and reconciliation in favor of ‘revolution’ and ‘justice’ against White Christians, all following a prooftext about Christ bringing division (lit. a sword)? This is consonant with the ‘by any means necessary’ talk of the Black Panthers, Nation of Islam, BLM, and Antifa. I daresay, any signatories to this encyclical who understand that it calls for more aggressive race war against White people is no member of Christ. And those who do not see the genocidal objective in it are, quite frankly, fools.
Now is the time for the Church to again be the moral compass for this nation. Now is the time for a prophetic, Spirit-led remnant to bear credible “word and deed” witness to the glorious Gospel of Jesus Christ. As in the generation that preceded us, we especially call upon those born-again disciples who still cherish the authority of Scripture and the enablement of the Spirit.
Heretofore they had only denounced the historic Church, and with special emphasis against our Reformation-era fathers. But with an about-face, they now affirm the church as a moral light. Their equivocation on the word ‘church’ is understandable only by reference to all they denounced prior. Clearly, the only church they deem valid is the African community, the occasional unitarian abolitionist, and some miscegenated anti-White satellites born out of the cultural revolution of the 60s.
We declare that old time religion is still good enough for us in this new era, religion that provides us a full-orbed Gospel of evangelism and activism. May we be salt and light witnesses against the kingdom of darkness, knowing that we war not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places (Ephesians 6:12).
To this end, we call upon white leaders and members of the Evangelical church to condemn in the strongest terms the white supremacist ideology that has long existed in the church and our society. Nothing less than a full-throated condemnation can lead to true reconciliation in the Lord’s body.
In context, the forces of darkness to which they here allude are White people generally, and White Christians, especially. Remember, this statement by RAAN is in response to White people objecting to the erasure of our history, and the suppression of our Protestant faith, as well as our cultural and physical genocide.
The enemy which their ‘old time gospel’ of the 60s is to overthrow is White America, Christendom, and the orthodox Christian faith that underpins them.
Additionally, this condemnation must not be in word only, but also in deeds that “bring forth fruits worthy of repentance” (Luke 3:8). As Dr. King notes in Letter from Birmingham Jail, white apathy is worse than white supremacy.
‘Deeds’ which compel repentance in others against their will. At minimum, this means acts of intimidation and coercion. To confirm this, just ask yourself how everyone would read the same words published by a “White American Network” calling on people to engage in deeds of condemnation against Blacks to compel changes in their theology and politics.
Right, everyone would insist it was a terror pledge. Those who penned it would be excommunicated from church and society. The FBI might even descend on its authors in full force.
As an aside, RAAN’s citation of MLK Jr. – a habitual adulterer, whoremonger, blasphemer, paid communist provocateur, and denier of the Trinity, the virgin birth, original sin, and the divinity of Christ and His resurrection – conveys all we need to know about their definition of Christianity: while professing orthodox White Christians their enemies, they profess spiritual kinship with King, who was nothing but reprobate scum.
Moreover, the apathetic White liberals whom MLK and RAAN identify as their enemies alongside ‘White Supremacists’ like the Pilgrims are liberals like James White! Because he professes to be a ‘colorblind’ racial egalitarian! RAAN themselves have harried Dr. White hither and yon with accusations of ‘racism’ and ‘White Supremacy’. Because, just like BLM, RAAN concludes that Liberalism is White Supremacy too! Which only proves RAAN’s claimed longing for equality is a farce. What they demand is Black Supremacy over Whites.
We also appeal to the black church to urgently remember its historic role of living within the pastoral-prophetic tension in U.S. Christianity. We call black Christians and others back to a prophetic vocation embodied in the ministries of Lemuel Haynes, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Maria W. Stewart, Richard Allen, Charles Price Jones, Charles Harrison Mason, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Mcleod Bethune, Fannie Lou Hamer, Gardner C. Taylor, J. Deotis Roberts, and John Perkins. Now is the time to remind the nation and ourselves of the personal and social power of the Gospel.
I’m sorry, but the Black church’s historic role in Christianity has been the embodiment of the outer extremities of heresy, generally passing off in the place of Christianity what can only be called voodoo. Or as that august doctor of Roman-occupied North Africa stated it, “Ham . . . can only stand for the hot breed of heretics. They are hot, because they are on fire not with the spirit of wisdom, but the spirit of impatience; for that is the characteristic fervour in the hearts of heretics; that is what makes them disturb the peace of the saints.”And RAAN’s inclusion of a roll call of heretics to bolster their argument only further confirms that Augustine’s commentary on Hamites applies still.
Lastly, we invite Christians of good will to join in reading, learning, and acting on insights found in the ways in which the Church both legitimated and resisted white supremacy throughout the last several centuries. Armed with saving knowledge and theological and historical truth, we can persuasively call for repentance and be repairers of the breach. White supremacy will be cast out and dismantled, God willing, by prayer and fasting. We fight for victory in the name of Jesus our Lord! Amen.
By this point, it should be apparent what RAAN means by ‘Christians of good will’. It includes Black, Brown, Red, and Yellow folk irrespective of creed, and excludes all traditional and orthodox White Christians.
When they speak of being armed with ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’ by which they can ‘persuasively call for repentance,’ they mean that as adepts of Cultural Marxism and Critical Race Theory, they are prepared to intimidate and compel White Christians to renounce everything we have ever known to be true in regard to history, civics, ethics, and back of all that, theology.
When they prophesy thereby that ‘White Supremacy will be cast out and dismantled,’ we can only take them to mean the same White supremacy they identified in the Charlottesville protest — the history and heroes of Christendom, and all objectors to our organized genocide.
This then is RAAN’s mission: the suppression of White people’s speech and rights of association and assembly; the subordination of Whites in church, state, and general society; the secular state abolishment of White history (which is an approximate overlay of Christian history); and its replacement with a Cultural Marxist narrative revolving around other peoples (especially Blacks) that lays blame for all non-White dysfunction to the account of Whites; the abolishment of the American nation of “free White persons of good character” (Act of 1790) and ultimately all Eurostock nations; and the intimidation of Whites into affirming and abetting all of the above.
But these revolutionary objectives are by no means unique to the prelates at RAAN; if not the totality of their religion, these things are the clear preoccupation in virtually all Black churches. To them, the ‘gospel’ is synonymous with the destruction of White America.
Listen, I’m not saying all the Charlottesville demonstrators were Christians. Even if the majority professed Christian faith, a fair number no doubt claimed no allegiance to Christ. And there were no doubt agent provocateurs aplenty in their ranks bent on making them appear, if at all possible, the aggressors. And for what it’s worth, this writer doesn’t see much to be gained by ‘uniting the Right,’ because to whatever degree we concede to an ecumenical sentiment, we only grant the very liberalism we should be standing against. But the general concern and objective of the demonstration was nonetheless theologically sound and entirely defensive in orientation.
RAAN’s declaration, on the other hand, was pure maniacal heresy.
| Tweet |
|
|
|
