Christianity v. Progressivism

Vincent J. Curtis

22 Jan 21

RE: uKnighted against racism.  Students of St. Thomas More R.C. Secondary School have organized an ad hoc group that intends to fight racism.  Hamilton Spectator of today’s date.  (The Knights is the school's team name, hence the play on uKnighted)

I find student activism against racism to be strange and disturbing.  Why should high school students nowadays be concerned about it?  Do they find it in their midst, or is this a concern about the wider world?

Christianity has preached against racism since its beginning, millennia before racism was a thing.  Jesus and the Samaritans, St. Paul on slavery, and the Council of Jerusalem of 50 A.D. all implicitly repudiated racism.  My earliest recollection of racism was the summer of 1963 when Spectator headlines screamed KKK atrocities.  The condemnation of Israel by the U.N. in 1974 as a racist country put the word into the popular lexicon.  Racism, and to be a racist, has been condemned continuously for the last fifty years.  Yet, it persists?  Why?

It must be that the root of racism is a component of human nature, and it requires the power of rationality to overcome it.  Christianity’s rationale is that we are all created in the image and likeness of God, and our focus is on the person as individual, not person as exemplar of group, or class, or race, all of which are incidental to character.  Progressivism offers no rationale reason opposing racism.  It serendipitously, for today, holds racism to be evil a priori when practiced by white people, and the internal contradictions of that proposition are obvious.  Progressivism's condemnation is pre-rational and emotional.  It is also inconsistent since eugenics and the work of Margaret Sanger were borne in the progressivism of the 1920s.)

This is what concerns me: is it progressivism that motivates the students, or a Christian response to observed phenomenon?

After fifty years of inculcation, racism ought not to exist in maturing young people.

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