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Justice is one of the few fundamental truths that we all innately understand as humans. A 2 year old is innocent. A 40 year old rapist who runs a sex-trafficking ring is not. He’s incurred a great moral debt. If that debt were never paid it would be a great injustice. We sense that deeply.
We are keenly aware of transgression and violations of natural law. It’s why we have words for guilt, remorse, and shame. Religion is very much humankind’s accounting system for the economy of innocence and blame. It seeks to classify corruption. To diagnose the divergence of good and evil. To find respite from imperfection and restitution from impurity.
Based on the current modus operandi of all public institutions in this country and much of the West, I want to compare two relevant religions – Identity Politics, and Christianity. The astute viewer or listener might say “hey, Identity Politics isn’t a religion!” For all intents and purposes it functions as one. I’m going to adopt the term “Identianity” as the religion that uses Identity Politics as its gospel.
I need to take a moment to define Identity Politics, as it’s a broadly used term. In essence, it is categorizing people into groups and pitting these groups against each other, dividing us based on some superficial surface for some pernicious political purpose. The group “identity” is often based on race, sex, or sexual orientation, but is not confined to these, as groups are formed based on real or perceived oppressions at any given time.
Identianity is not unique to modern times or modern political movements. It was the curse of caste systems, the fuel of feudalism, the scourge of slavery, the corruption of the Klan, the dark heart of tribal warfare.
The pages of history overflow with the ink of heinousness done by one group of humans to another. This is why Identity Politics, when presented as a fight for the rights of the mistreated appeals to our sense of justice. Who wouldn’t want to right all the wrongs of humanity? But we have to ask if Identity Politics is the proper tool for this tremendous task.
In functional societies, interpersonal transgressions are dealt with in an agreed-upon a system of laws and consequences. When a crime is committed, blame is assessed. The accused is determined innocent or guilty, and in the latter case punishment is prescribed. Personal transgressions though, or sins of the soul, violate higher laws and require an entirely different judicial system.
In Christianity, each individual fallible human is to blame for their own transgressions. Jesus Christ, the infallible son of God manifest in human flesh, is uniquely and importantly the innocent party. This innocence, combined with the unfathomable physical and psychological pain that he agreed to endure, allows him to mercifully make all amends in satisfying the universal demand of justice. He’s our savior in every sense of the word.
In the garden of Eden, we fall.
In the garden of Gethsemane, we are caught.
In the current incarnation of Identianity, no matter the crime or the disparity, the white heterosexual male is to blame. As the apex transgressor, he is responsible for all wickedness, wrongdoings, and woes. The sins of mankind are solely the sins of the white heterosexual mankind.
Not only must this collectively stained group be silenced and purged, everything that their pervasive impurity has tainted must be decimated. Capitalism, colonialism, fossil fuels, the very notion of a nation, the nuclear family, Christianity, mathematics, classical music, art, literature. It all must fall.
In this case though, there’s no one to catch them. The white heterosexual male must shoulder the crushing weight of all the world’s wrongs. Their penance is the only payment that can be offered to satisfy the demand of justice. The debt is always growing though and will never be atoned for. Thus they must simply succumb to their fate as the perpetual target of cathartic rage.
With a burden so great, it’s no wonder that so many are sent scattering to claim disassociation, hoping against hope that there’s a way out of purgatory. Self-condemnation, virtue signaling, public confessions, writing books about their guilt and fragility, putting signs in the windows of businesses.
Dabbing blood on their door frames, hoping the avenging angel of societal death passes them by.
As for the innocent party, that would be anyone that points a finger at the white heterosexual male. And the less adjacent you are, or the more “intersectional”, to use their term, the more innocence you can claim. It becomes strategically advantageous to be recognized as disadvantaged or oppressed, because it gives one a stronger moral claim in society. Along with which comes more social credit – the right to speak above others, to be believed above others, to receive more benefits.
Once the white heterosexual male has been sufficiently scapegoated and scourged however, a new fall guy will need to be appointed. The white heterosexual female is on deck. The heterosexual black male apostate likely follows, and on down the list. The fire of cultural Marxism will always need fuel to keep burning.
So we have the guilty, the innocent, and the scapegoat. But who is the savior in Identianity? Listen to any speech from a far-left politician – they’ll tell you. The government is the savior. They just need more power, more money. But these tithes are specially earmarked. They must be used for the proper partisan programs that the priests and priestesses of Identianity have in mind.
This is why you’ve seen everything become so highly politicized. In this religion, the government is exalted. All matters must be brought to the altar of politics where the supreme authorities can judge in favor of those that have lobbied their position most effectively. Citizens are mere subjects, looking upward to the state, begging to receive its blessings.
Identianity has its own evangelicals and pastors. It has its own sacraments, seminaries, and crusades. The university system in the West has been steadily infiltrated by the missionaries of Identianity over the past six decades. The converts that came out of this system have gone on to turn all of our institutions into monasteries of illiberalism. This doctrine is preached from the pulpits of mainstream media, worshipped in workplaces, coerced into corporations, and exhorted in elementary schools.
We now find ourselves at an inflection point, where we must reflect on the ramifications. How is this philosophy playing out in the world? How has it played out in the past? The fruits of Identity Politics are division, anger, resentment, contention, and ultimately some form of ethnic cleansing. It encourages people to see the worst in others. It encourages people to figure out how they can be victims.
The fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance. It encourages people to see the best in others. It encourages people to figure out how they can be victors.
In Christianity, to say we as individuals have no sin, is to deceive ourselves. To diagnose the brokenness of the human condition one looks inward. And to heal these wounds, one looks to Christ. The heart is changed and the person is transformed from the inside out.
In Identianity, one looks to the government to heal the wounds by punishing some other group. The transformation can only happen from the outside in, and only if certain conditions are met. The enemy is always without, never within.
Jesus admonishes his followers to forgive one another 70 times 7 times. Forgiveness would be counterproductive to Identity Politics and is therefore completely excluded from the doctrine. People can only seen as part of a collective identity, and since mercy is a feature of individuality, there is also no mercy in Identianity. For the same reason, there can be no redemption.
So while Identianity takes on the veneer of religion in many regards, its system of misappropriating innocence and collectivizing blame ultimately manufactures a fraudulent and dangerous imitation. It attempts to copy the architecture but uses the wrong materials, which is why it always falls in the end, and always leads to destruction.
Before concluding, I want to address two counter arguments.
The first being that Christianity has been the cause of plenty of division, resentment, and destruction itself. While I would acknowledge that many have used religion as a pretense for personal and political motives, I’d point out that this is a corruption of the offenders and of the doctrine itself. Not only have murder, envy, and bearing false witness been officially condemned since Moses made his way down the Mount with the tablets, but Christ set forth in no uncertain terms that love for God and love for each other would henceforth and always be the way for his disciples to live.
Conversely, contention is a fundamental tenet of Identianity, of which all its ambassadors from Marx to Marcuse to Kendi would agree. Rather than “blessed are the peacemakers”, for they will be called children of God, their sermon on the mount would include “blessed are the beefmakers”, for they will be called children of the State.
The second counter argument is that Identity Politics is required because of the deep and far-reaching wounds left behind from the institutional crimes of racism in America, such as slavery and Jim Crow laws. No one argues that these weren’t great travesties. But forgotten is the fact that not everyone agreed with them in the first place. When you abolish the abolitionists you are guilty of the same erasure that you accuse the hegemony of. No present or past people, no matter how you group them, is a monolith. Even if you accepted the false premise that they were, holding present people responsible for past people’s decisions is no better than putting “colored” signs on drinking fountains. You’re spending counterfeit currency in the economy of innocence and blame.
So what’s the real currency? As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
I will never deny that many wrongs have been wrought. Or that there is still work to be done. But enmity is definitely not the remedy. Making America hate is not the way to make America great.
As Alexis De Tocqueville said “feelings and ideas are renewed, the heart enlarged, the mind expanded, only by the reciprocal actions of men one upon another.” Identianity will never facilitate this.
Identity Politics should be rejected not because it demands justice for those who have been unjustly treated, but because it demands division and corrodes confidence in each other and in individuals. It’s a colossal disservice to inseminate the mindset of victimhood and paranoia in people. To teach them that they can’t accomplish anything without the help of government, or that they shouldn’t even have ambitions in the first place because the system is against them. This is mind poisoning.
Our world is a broken one shattered into fragments of well-intentioned brutalities and unwitting imperfections and every day you and I drop one of those pieces on the grand scale of justice. Identity Politics claims that it is the hand that is heavy enough to re-balance that scale. But that misguided hand has caused nothing but disaster every time it’s touched humanity.
None of us are innocent. In one way or another, we’re all a little bit crooked. There’s only one judge and savior that can set us straight. Who paid the cost. And it’s not the State.
This is not a left or right thing, or a black and white thing. We must venerate the value every individual and resist the compulsion to categorize people by some group identity. An identity that can and always will be manipulated by those seeking to wield political power.
It was former Marxist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn whom, after spending a decade in a Soviet Gulag for criticizing Stalin in a private letter, famously formulated the truth of the matter – “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties (nor, I would add, between races) — but right through every human heart.”
Above all, Identity Politics should be rejected because it denies this eternal truth.
Let us not make idols of identity while we pursue progress, equality, justice, mercy, goodness, and enlightenment. For the opposite of racism is not anti-racism, but righteousness.
