I truly wanted to go back to writing poems and meditations on Bible stories today. We have demonstrated that I’m awful at writing about politics. But I have to write about politics, which I despise, one more time.
Donald Trump is apparently seriously considering Stephen Bannon for his “chief strategist and senior counselor to the president.” Trump has called him a “highly qualified leader.” And Stephen Bannon is a leader, of sorts. The problem is, he’s widely known as one of the leaders of the alt right. And how do we know that? Because Stephen Bannon himself bragged that Breitbart News, the company he ran until he left to work for Donald Trump, was “the platform for the alt right.” (And if Shaun King is too “liberal” for you, consult his life-long conservative source, Ben Shapiro, who resigned from Breitbart in protest of their association with the alt right.)
And the alt right are not good people, not remotely. They are white supremacists. They believe that races shouldn’t be mixed and that America is a white nation. They openly abuse people for the infraction of mixing races; take a look at what they did to this family.
I don’t feel like I should have to say this, but in this day and age we need to be 100% clear: racism is not okay. Not at all. It’s especially not okay if you’re Catholic, which I am myself and I know most of my readers are.
It has become fashionable for Catholics in the USA right now, to ignore sins that the right-side of politics falls into and focus on the sins on the left– shouting down every social justice concern with “But what about abortion?” being the biggest example. But that’s not a Catholic thing to do. The Catholic Church absolutely condemns racism. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, directly quoting Gaudium Et Spes, states:
“Every form of social or cultural discrimination in fundamental personal rights on the grounds of sex, race, color, social conditions, language, or religion must be curbed and eradicated as incompatible with God’s design.”
Eradicated.
If you are a faithful Catholic, then you believe and profess the teaching of a Church that says right on the tin that racial discrimination must be eradicated. Not frowned upon, not politely ignored, eradicated.
And when we talk about the alt right, we’re not talking about a little bit of embarrassing unconscious racism, the kind of racism that makes your lovable grouchy uncle rant about “inner cities” at the dinner table. We’re talking about full-blown unabashed white supremacist garbage. The phrase “alt right” was coined by Richard B. Spencer, who exclaimed in 2014 that:
“Martin Luther King Jr., a fraud and degenerate in his life, has become the symbol and cynosure of White Dispossession and the deconstruction of Occidental civilization.”
Now, if you want to lose two to five minutes you will never get back in a fit of research-oriented masochism (not counting the couple minutes it’ll take to vomit and clean yourself up), you can click on the above link and read the article where he makes this claim. You will learn that he is distressed by an “ideology of social transformation and reconstruction” that he sees as having adherents who cling to it with religious zeal and as a high point of specifically American values. He never articulates quite what this ideology consists of, he assumes his readers already know, but based on what he does say I can make an educated guess. You could sum up what Spencer hates by saying,
“Every form of social or cultural discrimination in fundamental personal rights on the grounds of sex, race, color, social conditions, language, or religion must be curbed and eradicated as incompatible with God’s design.”
The alt right are not in the “I’m not racist, but,” category of racists. They are proud to be racists. They absolutely, consciously believe that European whites are better than other races and that the United States is a white nation. And they want to work to make the United States a white nation. And they are not going to work toward that by treating members of other races to nice fancy houses in pleasant foreign countries. They’re going to do by masquerading violence as public policy. And this is grave sin which we must work to eradicate, if we call ourselves Catholics.
When I found that Trump had won, I privately hoped he’d walk back on some of his worst ideas. In some ways, he has indicated he will. But he hasn’t walked back from condoning racism. Appointing Stephen Bannon to any White House position including as a maid or busboy is condoning racism; even considering the possibility of Stephen Bannon as chief strategist and senior counselor is pledging that racism is not going to be a bug of Trump’s presidency, but a feature.
And we as Catholics are morally obligated to stand against that. We have to. Whatever happens next, we have to oppose all racial injustice, always, up to and including when it costs us our own lives. And this involves opposing the alt right and Stephen Bannon, because that’s what they stand for. This is not one of those cases where you can say “But Hillary Clinton!” Hillary Clinton supported abortion, which is wrong, but she’s not going to be president. You can’t use that as an excuse anymore. Trump is actually going to be president, and this is something that is going to happen. We have to oppose it.
This is not optional. This isn’t being a “social justice warrior”. This is the bare minimum required of us by our Catholic faith.
(Image via Pixabay.)
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