Based on Race

Spend some time listening to the dissident commentators who still do live streams and podcasts from the remote corners of the net, and you’ll notice a change among the mad-at-dad atheist, mugged by reality ex-Randian, and fake pagan LARPer set. While nearly all of them have long acknowledged that the descent into Clown World began with the West’s abandonment of Christianity, the same knee-jerk conditioning that keeps online atheists from concluding to You Know Who set the former fedora tippers off on a quixotic quest for meaning.

Cobbling together ad hoc philosophies, carving out an ethnostate, even embracing Bolshevism, but done right this time–all were proposed as the glue to hold huwite society together in place of what demonstrably worked before.

Now, as the opposition’s driving force reveals itself unequivocally as a twisted secular religion, it is finally dawning on the wignats that feigning tree worship as a fig leaf for street drug abuse and porn addiction is inferior to the Death Cult’s dominant moral vision. The more intelligent and continent among them have at last admitted that only a religion embraced culture-wide can rescue the West from its current bout of madness.

Among the pro-religion faction, the most intellectually honest have accepted that Christianity–specifically the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church–is a necessary pillar of Western civilization. It was the Western Church’s moral vision and structure that baptized the necessary but insufficient pillars of Greco-Roman thought and the Western European peoples to give birth to the West. Only the Catholic Church still retains the fullness of that vision enshrined in her unchanging doctrine. Neither Oriental creeds nor Postmodern novelties can take her place.

Those among the heathen dissidents who remain obstinate argue that Christianity was already tried and has failed. All Christian denominations, they say, are hopelessly cucked on race.

The first objection makes unprincipled exceptions for the other two pillars. Yes, the Woke Cult has overtaken the West. Rejecting one of its three pillars as irretrievably lost is just selective despair. Any accusation of racial cuckoldry leveled against Christianity applies even more so to whites as a whole. If the mad-at-dad crowd applied their “once cucked, always cucked” principle with any consistency, they’d pack it in and find a better use of their time, like fapping to VTubers.

Their second objection falls prey to the old atheist category error of equating contemporary Christians’ words and actions with ancient Church doctrine. Chief among those doctrines is the teaching that man is fallen. No human being can perfectly follow the tenets of any creed on his own. The true criterion for judging a religion isn’t whether its adherents fall short of its moral standard. No belief system, secular or religious, can pass that test. What matters is the content of a moral system’s doctrine.

What does the Church really teach about race? The inestimable Classical Theist has nailed himself to the cross of his desk and obtained answers from the Church’s own Magisterium.

[A] Catholic who rightly feels uneasy with the shameless baptism of critical race theory we are seeing in Catholic media would likely find it difficult to effectively challenge their assumptions by appealing to the Magisterium themselves. For that reason, it is necessary to set the record straight on what precisely the Magisterium has to say about the value of race in a just human society.

In order to make sense of what the Magisterium has to say about the value of race, however, we should first establish a sensible conception of the ontological status of race as such. That racial differences are not reducible to social constructions should be uncontroversial for any devotee of scholastic philosophy, really. The soul, as per the Council of Vienne, is not a Cartesian ghost-in-a-machine but is the form, or immanent active principle, of the body. Because of this, hereditary characteristics that are passed on generationally diversify according to the disposition of matter receptive to the soul.

In short, Scholastic theology teaches that race is real, it’s more than skin-deep, and the variety of races extant in the world is a natural good willed by God.

Not only can acknowledging the diversity and dignity of races be defended on the grounds of scholastic philosophy, it is also backed by the Magisterium itself. In the very encyclical where Pope Pius XI condemns the race idolatry of the Third Reich, he explicitly acknowledges in no uncertain terms the inherent value of race to the common good,

“Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community – however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things – whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the word planned and created by God” (Pope Pius XI, Mit brennender Sorge).

Note Pius IX’s use of the quintessentially Catholic both, and principle here. Honoring one’s race is a good ordained by God. Worshiping any race, or depriving anyone of due charity based on race, is sinful. It’s not an either/or proposition.

Thus here we have encoded within the cells of the Magisterium itself a recognition that race not only has extramental existence, albeit as an emergent property, but that it is a fundamental value to the human community. And if it is to be counted among the fundamental values of the human community then this necessarily implies the right to preserve and defend it as such. As South African theologian Fr. P Bonaventura Hinwood in his treatise Race: the Reflections of a Theologian has put it, explicating the wisdom of Pius XI,   

“Since being and goodness are convertible, race, like any other human factor not inherently vitiated by error or evil, being a positive good, has the right to existence and identity. But race is not an end in itself, because it exists for the enriching of mankind, to which it is subordinate, and so necessarily relative. It is not, therefore, the immediate cause of the rights which accrue to it, but the occasion of them, for the sake of mankind as a whole. The fullness of which will be enhanced by these particular racial potentialities being brought to maturity. Since mankind has a right not to be mutilated by the violent destruction of any race, it is licit for a person even to lay down his life for the conservation of his race.”

Now if one’s immediate response is to write this off as the irrelevant ramblings of an obscure theologian, he is simply echoing the sentiments of what Popes Pius XII and John XXIII have said on the matter. In Pius XII’s encyclical Summi pontificatus, which was quoted by John XXIII’s Mater et magistra, he says, immediately following his explicit praise of national pride in one’s heritage, 

“The Church readily approves of, and follows with her maternal blessing, all regulations and practical efforts that, in the spirit of wisdom and moderation, lead to the evolution and increase of the potentialities and powers which spring from the hidden sources of life of each race. She does, however, lay down one provision, namely, that these regulations and efforts must not clash with the duties incumbent on all men in virtue of the common origin and destiny of all mankind” (Pope Pius XII, Summi pontificatus).

The whole article is a definite must-read.

Armed with Magisterial teaching, laymen will find combating the resurgent heresy of race idolatry much easier. The next time an online wignat dismisses the Church as “terminally cucked,” refer him to the ecumenical Council of Vienne, Piux IX, Pius, XII, and St. John XXIII.

A great way of addressing and viewing our current culture war, as well as advice for how to fight it.