Anti-Racism Comes for the Church: The Case of Thomas Achord

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A year or two ago, I received a large, unsolicited, and apparently self-published book in the mail: Who Is My Neighbor? An Anthology in Natural Relations ^[2], edited by Thomas Achord and Darrell Dow. Neither name was familiar to me. Since my available reading time is somewhat constrained, I did no more than leaf through it at first. But I kept it on my shelf because the idea of “an anthology in natural relations” sounded worthwhile. The editors clearly felt that relations in contemporary America had become unnatural (in some sense), and in response they had assembled hundreds of short, simple texts on proper human relations from antiquity to the present day. Their anthology emphasized the Classical and Christian traditions, but included some material from Egypt, China, India, the Jewish tradition, and more. There were chapters on God (or the gods), marriage, family and household (including slavery), local and political community, economics, education, literature, and other matters — much of the very stuff of human life.

I was sympathetic to the project. Contemporary man has no idea how unusual his moral notions appear within a broad historical context. This characteristically modern form of ignorance has been called the “provincialism of time,” and one of the purposes of education is overcoming it to some degree. Browsing such an anthology might even have therapeutic value for some of our contemporaries.

But I had mostly forgotten about this book when, browsing a dissident website a couple of weeks ago, I came across an appeal to help the family of a man who had lost his livelihood due to thoughtcrime. I made a small donation and searched the Internet for further information on the case. This quickly led me to a number of posts about a certain Thomas Achord, an alleged “white supremacist” who had also been dismissed from his employment in November 2022. That name rang a bell, and a quick check of my bookshelf confirmed that this second cancelee was indeed the co-editor of Who Is My Neighbor?

Until November of last year, Mr. Achord served as the headmaster of a small private school in Louisiana that is part of the Classical Christian Education (CCE) movement. This is a traditionalist movement which stresses exposing the young to the Bible and other classic texts, in part through the study of Latin (and sometimes Greek). It provides pupils with an understanding that the world did not begin the day they were born, and that their own generation is merely one link in a chain spanning centuries. This helps transmit to them a sense of identity and roots, as well as protecting them from faddish thinking. I have been sympathetic to the movement since it first came to my attention in the 1990s.

Late last year, an Englishman and Christian theologian named Alastair Roberts discovered that Achord had maintained a pseudonymous blog between January 2020 and August 2021. As is the way with pseudonymous writings, much of this material was more forthright in language than what Achord had published under his own name, although not inconsistent with it. Roberts criticized some of the pseudonymous posts, but his language was measured and he explicitly disavowed any desire to threaten Achord’s employment.

Roberts’ post was soon spotted by columnist Rod Dreher, however, whose children had attended Achord’s school. In addition to the material uncovered by Roberts, Dreher took exception to a chapter of Who Is My Neighbor? containing texts in support of the common-sense ideas that diversity promotes conflict and erodes social capital, while good fences make good neighbors. Dreher quickly decided such ideas made Achord a “vile racist” (as well as an anti-Semite and misogynist) and “doxxed” him to the school, which panicked and promptly fired the father of four. Dreher acknowledges that Achord is quiet, modest, friendly, and talented; his ideas are Dreher’s only justification for getting the man dismissed.

Some circumstances may make this dispute appear surprising. Dreher is perhaps best known as the author of The Benedict Option (2017), a book advocating the formation by like-minded Christians of small, face-to-face communities capable of withstanding the onslaught of mass culture and cultivating the virtues among the rising generation. This is similar to the goals pursued by the Classical Christian Education movement, so it is not surprising Dreher enrolled his own children in such a school.

But it also seems to overlap rather largely with the aims of Achord and Dow in editing their Anthology in Natural Relations. In the Introduction they write:

The subversion of natural and organic connections (family, nation, etc.) has spiritual implications. The goal is the subversion of Christian nations and the culture produced by Christendom. The way forward means recognizing that the world into which we are born includes families, institutions and nations that are structured hierarchically.  Likewise our duties within those structures (i.e., justice) are hierarchical in nature. To live with piety is to accept our place in that structure of reality, favoring the near over the far.

Achord’s “racism” is presumably related to his advocacy of “favoring the near over the far.”

Achord and Dow drop a broad hint as to where the contemporary “subversion of natural and organic connections” such as nation and family is coming from by printing three quotes from the founders of Communism on the back of their book:

Even the usual differences within species, like racial differences . . . can and must be done away with historically. — Karl Marx

The nationalities of the peoples associating themselves in accordance with the principle of community will be compelled to mingle with each other as a result of this association and thereby to dissolve themselves. — Friedrich Engels

The aim of socialism is not only to abolish the present division of mankind into small states and end all national isolation; not only to bring the nations closer together, but to merge them. — V. I. Lenin

Marx speaks of races, Engels and Lenin of nations and nationalities, but the basic idea is the same: Communism represents a form of universalism, a type of thinking which elevates the universal over the particular, extending even to outright hostility toward more particular forms of human association.

Speaking generally, each of us forms the center of a concentric series of spheres of attachment beginning with our immediate family and running through our extended family to our community (if we are still fortunate enough to live in one), and thence to nation, race, and the human species as a whole. Like Communism, Christianity has a universal aspect, as illustrated by Christ’s Great Commission to “go and make disciples of all nations.” The parable of the Good Samaritan also makes clear that our rightful sphere of moral concern may include even perfect strangers. But unlike Communism, neither Christ or the Church ever expressed hostility to particular attachments as such, nor advocated abolishing the institutions on which they rest. It is compatible with Christianity to love your own wife more than your neighbor’s wife. The same principal applies to one’s children, and even extended family, for extended family was an important social fact in the ancient Near East where the Bible originated.

But what about race? This, of course, is the locus of disagreement between Dreher and Achord. So we must ask: Do the Bible or Christianity view it as illegitimate to feel a greater attachment to one’s own race than to the other races of mankind?

In fact, the Bible does not have a great deal to say about race in the sense commonly intended today, viz., the three-to-seven major continental races of mankind, a sphere of belonging intermediate between the nation and the human species. There is not even any word for “race” in this sense in Biblical Hebrew or Greek. That is not surprising. The known world of Biblical times did not cover the entire terrestrial globe, so appreciation of the racial differentiation of mankind was limited.

What the Bible does refer to — in countless passages — is “nations.” And no Biblical author ever condemns patriotism or devotion to nation: “make disciples of all nations” obviously does not mean “abolish nations.” The same goes, historically, for the Christian Church. Within living memory, Bishop Fulton Sheen, for example, used to remind his vast American television audience that one could not be a good Christian without also being a patriot. This was viewed almost as a truism at the time.

Any Christian serious about developing a Biblical view of race or race relations must proceed by careful study of what the Bible says about nations, adjusting it (if and where appropriate) to the broader category of race. What would be the likely result of such a study? Well, if we accept Steve Sailer’s definition of a race as “a very extended family that is inbred to some extent,” it is hard to see how anyone could simultaneously affirm family attachments as natural and good while condemning all racial attachment. Such is the view of “Kinism,” a nationalist- and racialist-compatible tendency within the contemporary Church which seems to me consistent with scripture, Church tradition, and common sense.

Until recently, of course, there was no need of a special word like “Kinist” to refer to those Christians who believe in the legitimacy of particular attachments, because such belief was universal. But “anti-racism” has long since invaded the Church in force. Christians, like everyone else, grow up surrounded by shrill and sanctimonious denunciations of “racism.” This term, which is never defined, only dates back to the 1930s. It is variously ascribed either to Lenin’s sidekick Leon Trotsky or to Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish sexologist and early promoter of transsexualism who was also a strong Communist sympathizer. The very least we can say about such men is that their thinking was not inspired by Christianity. Yet, millions of white Christians such as Rod Dreher assume that the Communist-inspired notion of anti-racism is not merely compatible with, but an actual requirement of, their faith! In effect, they believe an essential doctrine of Christianity, the “sinfulness of racism,” went unmentioned in the Bible or by any church leader for 1,900 years before being revealed to Christendom by some Jewish radical less than a hundred years ago.

Such extreme historical illiteracy is the perfect example of that “provincialism of time” and faddish thinking which, as I noted above, a proper education should help protect us against. And the Achord case seems to indicate that it has now gained a controlling interest in the CCE movement. Thomas Achord realizes better than anyone what a tragedy this represents for both the church and our people. On his pseudonymous blog, he lamented that those involved in Classical Christian Education

are scared, they’re aware that things are against them as Christians, as Westerners, perhaps they sense that things are against them as whites, but they don’t admit it. My concerns are that . . . they’ll be hoodwinked and guilted into tolerating Diversity, nonwhites [and] Marxism. I want to provide formal help, tools, resources for white-advocates to take back the West for white peoples by recovering a classical education.

But this is already disallowed in today’s Church. If you feel any secret loyalty to race or nation, white man, Christian morality demands you be sniffed out, hunted down, professionally destroyed, and see the bread stolen from your children’s mouths.

After all, Christ commanded us to love one another.

You can assist Thomas Achord’s family here ^[5]. But hurry: “anti-fascist” Christians are already pressuring the site to disallow donations to a “white supremacist.”

This essay ^[6] was reprinted from The Occidental Observer ^[7] by permission of the author.

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