Counter-Currents
1,194 words
Hundreds of thousands of Afghans are fleeing their country for the West. We’re set for another replay of the 2015 Syrian crisis. Yet, this time Europe doesn’t want the refugees. France’s centrist president Emmanuel Macron vowed to block the gates to the Afghan hordes, and Greece expanded and fortified its border wall ahead of the flood. Europe won’t open its arms to millions of migrants again this time.
The same can’t be said of America’s political class. Nearly every politician and pundit wants as many Afghans here as possible. One of the main arguments for it? The Bible tells them so.
Conservative radio host Erick Erickson believes we must take in refugees in order to avoid civilizational collapse. “In scripture, one of the signs of a fallen land is its rejection of refugees,” he tweeted. “People who say we are in Romans 1 territory who also say we shouldn’t take in real refugees are complicit in getting us to Romans 1 territory.” Romans 1 exhorts Christians to convert the Gentiles from their sinful ways and warns of God’s wrath for those who disobey his laws.
NeverTrumper David French deployed the Bible to not only defend refugee resettlement, but to justify the Afghan War itself. He quotes one scholar who finds that scripture says “the protection of strangers and foreigners is a sacred duty or obligation” — which means you must accept tens of thousands of unvetted refugees. Citing a Heritage Foundation apparatchik, French claims the Afghan intervention and occupation fit Christianity’s just war tradition because it supposedly alleviates human suffering and is superior to inaction.
Southern Baptist writer and Christian media expert Daniel Darling wrote a USA Today column headlined, “The Bible tells us so: Why American Christians should welcome Afghan refugees.” He argues:
To welcome those who first welcomed us 20 years ago, who helped us hunt down the enemy who attacked us on 9/11 is simple gratitude. This is especially important for Christians, whose lives are to be marked by thankfulness and generosity, by keeping our promises. In Matthew 5, Jesus told his followers about the importance of keeping our word, “Let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No.’ Anything more comes from the evil one.”
Republican Arizona Gov. Doug Doucey cited Ephesians 2:19 — “So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the holy ones and members of the household of God” — in his statement in support of refugee resettlement.
Father James Martin, a popular Jesuit priest and writer, also used scripture to attack conservative commentators who dared question Afghan refugee resettlement:
“When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.” Leviticus 19:33-34 https://t.co/DQvo8iLWrV
— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) August 17, 2021
“You shall not oppress a resident alien; for you know well the heart of the alien, for you were aliens once, in the land of Egypt.” Exodus 23:9. https://t.co/8xM1pVFukA
— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) August 17, 2021
Even non-Christians used the same tactic. CNN host Jake Tapper, a Jew, weaponized the New Testament — -a text he gives no authority — to criticize refugee skeptics:
‘For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in,
I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) August 18, 2021
In spite of all the talk about secular America, religious arguments still remain popular. Similar arguments were made in support of Black Lives Matter and “racial justice.” For instance, French recently used the Bible to defend white guilt indoctrination in schools. He said the story of King David making amends for Saul’s sins against the Gibeonites provides a biblical justification for making kids listen to black grievances. The former National Review writer is an avowed Evangelical, so it makes sense that he would regularly cite scripture. But this isn’t just an argument made to fellow believers. Scriptural authority carries weight with the rest of society — so long as it aligns with liberal orthodoxy.
Many Right-wingers would denounce this as heresy and respond with their own arguments from the Bible or Christian philosophers. But those carry far less weight in our society. Christianity, as understood by the masses, means just being nice to one another — or, as Tom Holland argues in his book Dominion, “love is all you need.” These messages are fully complementary with liberalism and underline much of its agenda. Sure, many people still acknowledge that Christianity isn’t supportive of gay marriage or sexual promiscuity. But those are considered less important than the message of universal love.
It’s not an original take to notice liberalism’s roots in Christianity. The European New Right has argued this for decades. But mainstream writers rarely make the direct argument, even if they will turn to scripture to argue for open borders and reparations. Holland, a popular historian, makes this connection in Dominion. He highlights how Christianity acted as a progressive force within Western civilization. It laid the foundations for human rights and offered a universal moral system that taught that all men were created in God’s image. Holland sees Christianity’s influence even in modern secular trends that are hostile to organized Christianity, from women’s rights to Communism.
The book was published before the George Floyd era, but it does note the Christian influence on similar movements. “Any condemnation of Christianity as patriarchal and repressive derived from a framework that was itself utterly Christian,” he writes of the women dressing up as handmaids to protest Donald Trump. Holland agrees with Nietzsche’s assessment of Christianity as an inversion of Classical morality and which prizes victimhood and weakness. Even though Holland shares Nietzsche’s lack of faith, the modern-day author sees this Christian influence as a good thing.
Of course, this does not mean every Right-winger should apostatize and become resolutely anti-Christian. The majority of whites are Christian and our movement must welcome them into our ranks, but we should at least recognize the role Christianity plays in our present crisis.
Theoretically, Christian institutions could oppose all the threats to the West without violating scripture. But they choose not to. Nearly every Christian institution champions our dispossession and condemns “racism” as a sin. Moreover, scripture and Christian teachings — regardless of how much they may be divorced from proper context — buttress arguments in favor of open borders and racial equity. While most Americans no longer regularly attend church and wince at overt displays of the faith, the majority are still Christian, and they can still be persuaded to support open borders and racial grievances using scriptural appeals.
This stands as one of the major issues for our side. Yes, many bad faith actors deceptively use the Bible, but that doesn’t erase the fact that these people can find plenty of material in the faith. And these arguments convince many well-meaning white people to welcome illiterate Afghans with open arms.
* * *
Counter-Currents has extended special privileges to those who donate $120 or more per year.
- First, donor comments will appear immediately instead of waiting in a moderation queue. (People who abuse this privilege will lose it.)
- Second, donors will have immediate access to all Counter-Currents posts. Non-donors will find that one post a day, five posts a week will be behind a “paywall” and will be available to the general public after 30 days.
To get full access to all content behind the paywall, sign up here:
13 comments
Christianity does not require you to destroy your nation. Taking in refugees is a “prudential judgement”, like tax policy or how to set speed limits.
The way that I would approach this with fellow Christians is that we could help several times the number of Afghans by helping them resettle with similar tribes on the various borders of Afganistan. Taking a refugee plus, say $20k, would look pretty good to Pakistan or even Turkey. The Afghans would be happier because they would be in a culture that they understand.
Notwithstanding that majority of these ‘refugees’ are the ones who sold themselves for greenbacks, the only place where they should be dwelling is Afghanistan.
Turkey and Pakistan are culturally very different from Afghanistan.
Just because Afghanis happen to be Muslims does not mean they would necessarily understand either Pakistani or Turkish culture.
As long as they don’t come here or to Europe, I don’t really care where they go.
Taking Turkey out, the nearby -stans have a lot of tribal overlap where they would fit in. For Pakistan, it is the Pashtuns and Baloch tribes.
Even the Devil can quote scripture, and he did: Matthew Ch. 4 vs. 1 – 11 especially verse 6: <I>”And saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone.”</i>
Satan, referred to also as the “tempter” is quoting Psalm 91: 11 – 12; <I>” For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone.”</i>
These men (and women) of the cloth are hypocrites. They never quote Genesis Ch. 11 regarding The Tower of Babel when God scattered man across the face of the earth with different languages. They cherry pick scripture carefully.
They care about scoring political points and money from the refugee racket. They ignore the Crusades when the Church, led by Pope Urban in 1096 urged war to reclaim the Holy Land and protect Christians, a far cry from today’s useless Christianity.
What James Martin and the rest always manage to leave out is that the alien is not allowed to practice his strange religions or own property or marry members of the host population. The LORD is quite intolerant when it suits Him.
Ever heard of the Book of Esther?
“this does not mean every Right-winger should apostatize and become resolutely anti-Christian”.
Unfortunately it does, and this weaning-away of Westerners from the groveling Semitic religions and religiosity in general is but one of the insurmountable tasks we must accomplish to obtain Western recovery.
Religion begins when Man seeks answers to the Why’s of the world, but is too impatient to apply the methods of science to discover them, and too vain to accept his ignorance in the meantime.
So he invents God. God becomes his all-purpose explanation of Why. And man thus relieves his torment by religiosity.
Catharsis. Mental mastrubation. The common motive for deism, equalism, “taking a knee”, and most of the other miseries the Left has set upon the world.
Westerners, being empathetic people seeking wisdom, have fallen victim to these. Christianity has proven to be the ringworm of Western culture.
Forget mass-atheism. The vast majority of people will always need a resort to religion/deism in some form.
The substitute? Worship of State and Race. Must happen, in any distant and improbable future we hope for, in which the West finally triumphs and Man becomes his own God.
Samuel Francis concluded a long time ago:
The West’s concern for individual dignity and fairness had been exaggerated and contorted to the point of becoming a racial liability. The white-led managerial revolution offered equality to those who wished to rule, tolerance to those who sought to dominate, and refuge to those who meant to exploit. This self-destructive mentality was perversely assisted by popular Christianity, which turned cultural displacement into a mark of moral virtue. Today conservatives still think Christianity could provide philosophical and institutional resistance to liberalism. They failed to see that Christianity had been the most transgressive force in history and that its “values of peace, equality, and justice” must erode every traditional hierarchy. Its theology diverted interest from real cultural problems and reconciled believers to their own dissolution. Christianity is no friend of white Americans.
What article is that from?
“How I left Christianity” — At age 35, and a sporadic church goer, I met and married an ‘upstanding Christian man’. After a few months, he announced he’d decided we both ought to become missionaries, and I thought, “well that sounds like a grand adventure, and doing good as well”. So, 2 months later we were in Chile, at a missionary orphanage for girls in the foothills of the Andes, quite idyllic actually. I was planning to start teaching English (thought I spoke no Spanish) and I also accompanied the Mother Superior who ran the orphanage, on shopping trips for food and supplies in Santiago, and on some long drives to the coast for package pick-up. I also ate at her table with 2 other nuns (my husband ate with the gardener and handyman, separate from ‘the girls’). There were two especially young girls, 4 and 6, that were quite lovely.
Well, one day at lunch, a woman appeared with a newborn baby in her arms, and we all cooed over the cute little baby, as women do, and later the nun told me that this woman was the mother of the two very young girls there. I was dumbfounded! I had thought all the ‘orphans’ had lost their parents! “But no”, I was told, “this woman has three boys at home, and couldn’t feed everyone, so they gave us the girls — All the girls here are from such families”. And here she was, with another baby!
And there is the basis of the problem — Catholicism does not allow birth control. Nor, for that matter does Islam or Hinduism.
We missionaries were taking care of ‘excess’ children — and girls were secondary to boys. It was moment of pure enlightenment for me.
Two weeks later, I was on a plane back to the U.S. to divorce my husband and regain my sanity! A stewardess asked, “May I offer you a complimentary glass of our fine Chilean wine”? — which of course had been forbidden to me as a missionary — and I said “Oh, yes, you have no idea how welcome that is”! Christianity jettisoned, sanity regained
White people need to crucify the Christ in their minds. This also goes for liberal/leftist atheists, the myth known as Christ is a mind virus among white people.
If journalists and suburb-dwelling do-nothings can use religious scripture to convince you that your country should be a shelter for a bunch of Muslims from another side of planet, sorry, but that tells more about you than the scripture. You probably shouldn’t be allowed to leave home without supervision.
Christianity is used no more and no less than all the other tools available to the antiwhite propaganda machine. Every aspect of our lives has been perverted and exploited to serve the antiwhite narrative. One can reject antiwhitism without throwing out our civilization with it. Remove the cancer, not the healthy body.
Comments are closed.
If you have Paywall access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.
Paywall Access
Edit your comment