Realists are helpful folks, helping us to avoid disastrous courses as it regards war in the Ukraine, responses to crime, etc. Mr. Tom Shackleford is one of those men. But in speaking recently about black Africans and Christianity, he jumped from helpful realism to unhelpful speculation: “It’s my personal spiritual suspicion that Christianity doesn’t apply to blacks, although I wouldn’t purport to be a theologian. I have no clue how anyone can observe their behavior and think there’s a copy of the Ten Commandments taped inside their skulls whereas most of this guidance comes naturally to the vast majority of us.”
This is mighty interesting. For when one takes a look around the globe, it is actually black (sub-Saharan) Africa, and not white Europe, where Christianity is growing the most rapidly. Pew Research reports,
If demography is destiny, then Christianity’s future lies in Africa. By 2060, a plurality of Christians – more than four-in-ten – will call sub-Saharan Africa home, up from 26% in 2015, according to a new analysis of demographic data by Pew Research Center. At the same time, the share of Christians living in many other regions – notably Europe – is projected to decline.
It is not simply numbers, either. These Africans are also amongst the most dedicated Christians in the world: “Christians in Africa and Latin America tend to pray more frequently, attend religious services more regularly and consider religion more important in their lives than Christians elsewhere in the world, according to a recent Pew Research Center study.”
Mr. Shackleford’s statement is also puzzling in light of Southern history itself, in which much effort before the War was expended by those of European descent to preach to, baptize, marry as husband and wife, and pray and worship with their African slaves. Sometimes they also went to the trouble of building churches for them.
Then, there is the South Carolina poet William Grayson, who gave voice to the view that God providentially allowed slavery to arise in the South so that her slaves would be introduced to Christianity, and, when they had matured sufficiently, some of the Dixian Africans would take Christianity back to Africa herself as missionaries (“The Hireling and the Slave“, p. 74).
Christianity is as applicable to black Africans as it is to white Europeans. If that is difficult for some to accept, it is because they have lost sight of how depraved Europeans were before they were enlightened with and transformed by the Holy Gospel. For example,
At this point in their history, the Goths were regarded by the Romans as less than human and more as dangerous pests. The historian Herwig Wolfram describes the Roman view of “barbarians” in general and Goths in particular in the 3rd century CE thusly:
They are barbarians; their language does not sound human, more like stammering and mere noise. The barbarians also speak diverse languages all at once or side by side, for in their eyes language is no criterion of tribal membership. Under the assault of their horrible songs the classical meter of the ancient poet goes to pieces. Their religion is superstition, and though not actually pagan, it is hardly more than corrupted Christianity, heresy and worse. For barbarians can neither think nor act rationally; theological controversies are Greek to them. If a storm approaches, they fear the heavens are collapsing, give up any advantage they may have on the battlefield, and flee. At the same time, they are dominated by a horrible death wish: they actually look forward to dying. Even their women take part in battle. Barbarians are driven by evil spirits; they are possessed by demons who force them to commit the most terrible acts. Barbarians simply resemble animals more than they do human beings, concluded contemporaries, wondering whether barbarians shared in human nature at all. (6)
If one wants, like the Romans vis-à-vis the non-Romans, to claim black Africans are not quite human, he will find himself in some very troublesome company, for it is precisely the enemies of Christ like Emperor Julian the Apostate and Voltaire who promoted such a theory (i.e., polygenesis), not to mention modern UFO/alien cultists like the Raelians.
Europe has given the world many wonderful things. This is partly due to the characteristics that they carry within them. But this is not the whole explanation. It has much more to do with the power of God’s Grace, which transforms a people over the decades and centuries into something undreamt of. Thus, the pre-Christian marauding Goths, Vikings, etc., who once burned Europe to ashes and filled her with blood, became great saints, built wonderful cathedrals, etc.
What will become of Africans and their culture as they experience the transformative Grace of God over many years? What will become of Europeans in the world who spurn It? Those who have studied the Bible and history will have a good idea; a recently reposed holy man of Russia, Archimandrite Naum (+2017), spells it out for those who are in doubt:
It seems the end is already near. Many miracles are occurring now in Africa. Many are receiving Baptism. They are leaving Islam and confessing Christ and the Mother of God. There is a well-known case where a man killed his Christian wife and young daughters, buried them, and one of the daughters appeared to him and said, “Mama breastfed us, the Lord resurrected us all.”
In their time, the Jews—the sons of the Kingdom—erupted. The pagans, descendants of Japheth, the European peoples, who are now deviating more and more towards ungodliness, were called. And now, just as the Jews once did, the European peoples are erupting in unbelief, but the descendants of Ham—mainly living in Africa—are coming to know and confess Christ.
The Yankees have gleefully been pitting white and black Southerners against one another for years. Rev. Dabney saw this as far back in Oct. 1865 in his letter to Major General Howard of Freedmen’s Bureau (Discussions, Vol. IV). We ought not to aid the Yankees in their nefarious work by proclaiming black Africans as sub-human or a different species than Europeans or etc. Both white and black Dixians need to do what they can to defuse the tensions that the Yankee elite (who hate both of us and whom they are actively trying to destroy through drugs, abortion, etc.) have fostered between us for more than 150 years. That may seem impossible at the moment to some, but:
1) our peaceful history together from the early 17th century to 1865 belies such fatalism;
2) many blacks and whites have gotten along just fine in the South despite the determined efforts of some to embitter the two; and
3) as our Sweetest Lord Jesus tells us, “With men this [in this case, racial reconciliation—W.G.] is impossible, but with God all things are possible” (St. Matthew’s Gospel 19:26).
The more united Southerners are, the better positioned we will be to stand on our own, should that time come.
-By Walt Garlington
O I’m a good old rebel, now that’s just what I am. For this “fair land of freedom” I do not care at all. I’m glad I fit against it, I only wish we’d won, And I don’t want no pardon for anything I done.
As a refuge from the Episcopal Church, now in the Anglican Church in North America, I will NEVER forget that it was African bishops who helped us sad white North Americans to start a new but faithful expression of Anglicanism here.
Black Californian turned Texan Voddie Baucham went back to Africa and there wrote a book defending white people against CRT.
Black Georgian Cynthia McKinney tried to investigate 9-11 on reasonable grounds and was pushed out of Congress for it. (Shades of my man Davy Crockett.) Last I knew, she too had fled for refuge to Africa.
As a daughter of many daughters of the Southland, I will never forget my promises to my Civil Rights era mother not to mistreat black people. She had to have been the most ladylike creature to ever defend the Civil Rights people. Not long before she died she gave me a little figurine of a black family sitting in a church pew. I think she gave it to me to tell me the kind of black people she wanted to see prosper. They weren’t the thugs we deplore. I’m sticking up for the real life versions of the plaster family in the pew, and not only for Mama’s sake.
Interesting article. But, before the unwary may be seduced into some kind of Enlightenment- thinking love fest I’d like to offer what I think is a balanced and scriptural view of race relations:
“The sacred writings clearly teach that, to prevent the amazing wickedness which brought upon the earth the purgation of the Deluge, God saw fit to break the human family into sections. He separated them by destroying the unity of speech; then by the actual dispersion, appointing the bounds of their habitation. p. 355. Among the methods of fixed separation between these original groups, was the discrimination effected by certain physical characteristics, so early introduced that no records of tradition or of stone assign their commencement; and so broadly marked as to lead a class of physiologists to deny the unity of their human origin. I certainly believe them to be mistaken in this conclusion, and firmly hold to the inspired testimony that ‘God hath made of one blood all nations of men, for to dwell on all the face of the earth.’ But there is no escape from the corresponding testimony, biblical and historical, that the human family, originally one, has been divided into certain large groups, for the purpose of being kept historically distinct. And all attempts, in every age of the world, and from whatever motives, whether of ambitious dominion or of an infidel humanitarianism, to force these together, are identical in aim and parallel in guilt with the usurpation and insurrection of the first Nimrod. p. 355. There can be no large or permanent commixture of these great social zones, without ruin: and that ruin as complete as can be conceived, since it extends to the entire physical, intellectual, and moral natures.” pp. 355-6.
Benjamin Morgan Palmer, ‘The Present Crisis and Its Issues,’ June 27, 1872 – (Life and Letters)
Tell us you have colored grand-bastards without actually saying so. Christian blacks have destroyed every Southern city where they account for more than one fifth of the population. Jackson, Mississippi used to be one of the most beautiful and prosperous cities in Dixie. Now it is a third world hell. Blacks commit more than half of the violent crimes in these United States despite only comprising twelve percent of the general population. Most African countries are lawless and savage jungles regardless of religion. Mexico is the most dangerous country in the world in spite of Catholicism. History tells us that Christianity is worthless without Europeans to defend the faith.
PGT Beauregard
You are lacking in any history of Mexico. It’s like blaming the state of the Philippines on Catholicism.
The communist took over Mexico in 1917. Statuary to Noble Spaniards removed. street names etc. changed. Sound familiar. These white fat asses out west here have no idea what’s coming. Read ‘No God Next Door’ by Michael Kenney 1935 to learn how the Catholic Nationalist in Mexico fought the Reds and financial might/military of the US, only to be double crossed by the traitor sell out pope.
Believe it or not, but the Mexicans whom still possess Christ in their hearts is all that is left of the Divine right Kings of Europe and the counter reformation. It wasn’t Catholicism that destroyed Mexico. It was the same powers that destroyed the Southland!
Hello, Outside Looking In. In defense of Mr. Beauregard, and to his credit, he did not say that “Catholicism destroyed Mexico”; he said instead that it is in spite of Catholicism [and its civilizing influences] that Mexico is, in his iteration, “the most dangerous country in the world.” Which is pretty much the opposite of “Catholicism destroyed Mexico.” He wasn’t blaming Catholicism for the sorry state of that wretched country and many of her people, in other words, he was pointing out that Catholic Christianity and “The Church” has proven less than capable, in and of itself, to train the Mexicans out of the muck and mire incident to pagan heathenism and its superstitions that Mexicans have, as you know, embraced and espoused for … centuries. Not unlike the Africans under discussion.
Just thought I ought to point that out. Carry on with the interesting discussion otherwise, sirs.
I was in a hurry for work this morning when I posted that. Thank you for calling that out. I was wondering all morning why P.G.T Beauregard would say that.
Nice seeing you back on ID again.
God Bless you Sir.
My apologies to our Spanish friends. Spaniards are truly skilled and brave warriors who were instrumental in driving the Islamic hordes from The Iberian Peninsula. I wish you luck and Godspeed in your reconquista of Mexico from the communists and narco cartels. Deo Vindice.
My apologies to you Sir, I misconstrued your excellent first post up above in a big way.
Thank you for the comment about the Iberian peninsula, I have a history there on my mother’s side of the family.
God Bless you Sir
E. Michael Jones makes a similar argument, essentially, the only thing separating Europe from Africa is 1000 years of Christianity. Culture flows from religion (including the religion and dogma of non-believing faiths that are tempting the West into apostasy from Christianity). I will avoid the efficacy between Protestantism and Catholicism in being able to transform non-Christian nations into genuine and lasting Christian cultures. Biological differences clearly have impact on what culture looks like downstream post conversion to Christianity. And it is a legitimate question as to why most of Asia, the orient and Africa, in spite of centuries of missionary attempts, largely reject Christianity. Maybe their native religion and ancient cultures are simply to established. To date, European/Hellenic Christianity is all the world has known. What African or Chinese Christianity looks like will undoubtedly be different and largely alien to Whites and it is best for everyone to be sure the separation of nations and how they worship is encouraged.
Very astute observation. With all due respect to men like David Livingstone and William Carey, whose positive influence was great, culture and race will always have some continuing influence in determining character — even after spiritual regeneration. Jan Smuts said something apropos in this vein:
“Unfortunately, the earlier efforts of missionary enterprise were made without reference to, or knowledge of, the peculiar native psychology, or the light which anthropology has thrown on the past of human cultures. …
The principle of equal rights [has been] applied in its crudest form, and while it gave the native a semblance of equality with whites, which was little good for him, it destroyed the basis of his African system which was his highest good. …
[For the African] there is no inward incentive to improvement, there is no persistent effort in construction, and there is complete absorption in the present, its joys and sorrows. Wine, women, and song in their African forms remain the great consolations of life. These children of nature have not the inner toughness of the European, nor those social and moral incentives to progress which have built up European civilization in a comparatively short period. But they have a temperament which suits Mother Africa, and which brings out the simple joys of life and deadens its pain, such as no other race possesses.”
Jan Smuts, ‘Rhodes Memorial Lectures’, 1929
There’s no such thing as racial Christianities. Christianity is a singular “Catholic” aka universal religion not a racial religion.
As regards the Bible we do know what the Philistines looked like according to Egyptian murals who called them the people of the sea. We also know Cultural Marxism is designed to attack every foundation of Western society. Hence, I am seeing new attack on churches. It has become quite fashionable now for even conservative pastors to point out Jesus was not White. The also have no problem with interracial marriage and claim the Bible does not forbid it. On the other hand, they fight Gay marriage tooth and nail. A few facts are in order. First century Palestine did have a blond component due to Philistine influences. (I once looked up girls in the Israeli miliary on Tik Tok and was shocked that they did not look stereotypically Jewish. They were light skinned with brown, blond or red hair. Many could past for White Gentiles) Need I remind people Galilee where Jesus was from was hated by the Scribes and Pharisees who called it Galilee of the Gentiles. Could that have been because it had non-Semitic people there? Furthermore, Saint Bridget had a vision of the first nativity while on a pilgrimage to Rome with Mary squatting to have Jesus being held up by two midwives. That is how that had babies in the first century! Not be laying down. She also said both Mary and Jesus were blond. There was the rumor floating around in first century Palestine (probably spread by Pharisees) that the mother of Jesus had a child by a Germanic Roman called Pantera who was Jesus’ real father. Could that be because Christ was fair and blue eyed? I think they found the tomb of Pantera in Germany recently.