There was a tragic racially motivated massacre Saturday (May 14) in Buffalo, New York. A young man, whether he is demon-possessed, mentally ill, or miseducated, I do not know, entered a supermarket with the intent to kill as many black people as he could. Suffice it to say that what he did represents the opinions or views of the tiniest of tiny minorities in this country who are terrified and believe race or ethnicity is the defining feature of what it is to be American. This view is no more representative of America’s European majority than Louis Farrakhan’s racist rantings are representative of America’s African minority, and we can’t let the race hustlers of any ethnicity gaslight the nation into believing America is a nation founded on notions of race. It simply isn’t true. Of all the nations on this planet, ours is the one most committed to the view that the content of the mind, the philosophical and religious underpinnings, the family and the home are what makes America and not the geographic and ethnic origins of its populace. 

Christianity, and protestant Christianity especially, is America’s foundational philosophy. We find this philosophy laid out in Ephesians chapter 2. Paul, in addressing the ethnic and cultural divisions that plagued his time and place, tells the gentiles of Ephesus that Christ had broken down the wall of separation between Jew and Gentile and made these new Christians one Church by his death on the cross. What we have little understanding of today given the weakness of our public education system is how fractious Europe was during the time of the migration of our founders to this continent. 

Just to take the British Isles as an example, the native population (not those of Asian or African ethnicity) see themselves even today as English and Welsh and Scottish and Irish and Cornish and any number of other regional ethnicities rather than just British and it was yet more true at the time of our founding. In 1700, Scotland was a separate kingdom from England, and these two peoples did not see themselves as one at all. Our founding called upon these Europeans to see themselves as One People united around the central tenets of our Christian and Western European heritage and not their places of origin, just as the Church was one new people made up of peoples from every ethnicity and language centered on Christ. 

Sometime after our great Civil War (1861-65), America slipped off its foundation. Biblical Christianity was replaced by progressivism in the mainline churches and in secular society. The 20th Century, with its wars and revolutions, saw America abandon its founding principles for a worldview that considers every thought equal and nothing eternal. We abandoned the collective quest for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, for the exaltation of the individual and individual thought and expression. While it’s easy for those who think like me to point to the rise of feminism, homosexual celebration, and abortion as markers of American collapse, it is more important to point out that it is the abandonment of the simple truth that God IS which lies at the base of our national decline. With no pesky god telling us what is Good or True or Beautiful, we have been set free to come up with our own definitions and practices, and inevitably those practices don’t work very well. 

White (or Black) Supremacy is one of those beliefs that don’t work well. It is a belief built on a vapor. The color of the skin says nothing about the condition of the heart and mind, but the idea of ethnic superiority is as old as humanity itself. The natural default position is us against them. Are you with me or are you against me? That is The Question. The Christian concept of the creation of a new humanity that spans all tribal and ethnic identities unites us on universal principles. Once honest Christianity is abandoned, we revert quite naturally to our old tribalism. 

Consequent to America’s rejection of unity on a common identity, it has embraced a concept of pluralism in which every philosophical/religious/ethnic identity is encouraged in the name of diversity. The problem is that diversity doesn’t work. For a nation to remain one, it must have a common identity. Multiple identities, like multiple personality disorder, is an illness not an advantage. A hyphenated America is a disordered America. This is not to say that every immigrant must surrender his prior identity, but he must embrace the founding principles of the republic and see himself as fully American with no loyalties to any other governmental or social principles. Enrich the existing culture while embracing the founding principle of “out of many one” – the principle of Ephesians 2. 

So to answer the question that heads this epistle, the answer is, No. Ethnic supremacy, be it white, or black, or Chinese, or Japanese, or whatever is a denial of our founding and the instrument of national suicide. The walls of separation must be torn down from both sides, from the majority and from the minorities and our oneness celebrated.