Christianity turns brown, loud and obnoxious

As noted by Richard Dawkins and Richard Spencer on Twitter, The New York Times is now praising African Christianity, most notably “speaking in tongues.”  T. M. Luhrmann writes:

LAST month I was in Accra, Ghana, to learn more about the African version of the new charismatic Christian churches that have become so popular in the United States and are now proliferating in sub-Saharan Africa, especially Ghana and Nigeria. What struck me was how much people spoke in tongues: language-like sounds (usually, repeated phonemes from the speaker’s own language) thought by those who use them to be a language God knows but the speaker does not.

Of course, if the religious practice in question involved High Church European Christianity emphasizing European folkways such as classical music, the author would probably ignore it, if not show disdain.  But drop the average IQ of the practice 30 points or so, make it brown, and make it obnoxious, and the NY Times is in love.   As noted by others, “Non-Western Christianity is now the norm outside the West (e.g. African Christianity in Africa and Mestizo Christianity in Latin America), and Christian Cultural Marxism is now the norm in Western countries.”  In short, this phenomenon is sadly typical — both the African practice and the Western praise.

Looking toward the future in the West, will an explicitly Pro-Western variety of Christianity catch on, will people turn to neopaganism, or will atheism and agnosticism become more popular?  (A modified version of a previous poll.)

Related Stories:

“Another Paganism vs. Christianity Debate”

“Conservative Evangelical Nutjobs Pray for Amnesty”

“Religion 2.0: Identitarian Religion”

“Are Christian Leaders Today a Bunch of Girly Men?”

“Is Christianity Inherently Left-Wing and Egalitarian?”

“Why the religious should reject Intelligent Design“

Updates:

TBA

Jason Richwine Speaks Out…

…and, thank the gods, makes no apologies.

Why can’t we talk about IQ?

Sample quote:

“Well-established scientific findings were treated as self-evidently wrong — and likely the product of bigotry.

“The professional commentators eagerly ran with that theme. Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post called me a ‘fringe character.’ Will Wilkinson of the Economist decried my ‘repugnant prejudice.’ The New York Daily News published an unsigned editorial describing me as ‘the most twisted sort of intellectual’ who is ‘peddling offensive tripe.’ The Guardian’s Ana Marie Cox … called me a ‘bigot’ and a ‘more subtle and dangerous kind of extremist.’

“As with all the past incidents, most reporters learned nothing about IQ and seemed indifferent to any lessons for public policy…”

It goes without saying that anybody reading this post will want to Read the Whole Thing.

BTW –

I don’t especially blame Jennifer Rubin or Ana Marie Cox – they’re just playing to type. But Will Wilkinson? What hole in hell is hot enough for him?

Another Paganism vs. Christianity Debate

Regarding our recent conversations here about identitarian religion, another interesting debate has sprung up over Paganism vs. Christianity:

Matt Parrot:  A Defense of Christianity

Gregory Hood: A Defense of Neo-Paganism

Greg Johnson:  Racial Civil Religion

Of course, through the lens of identitarian religion, one could envision a society where identitarian Christians, identitarian pagans, and identitarian atheists/agnostics were able to co-exist in harmony.

Related:

Religion 2.0: Identitarian Religion

Are Christian Leaders Today A Bunch of Girly Men?

Updates:

Speaking of ethnocentric religious groups, check out Philip Weiss’ “Jewish success– is it ever a story?” and the recent news that Israel wants to administer ancestry DNA tests to potential immigrants (to prove their Jewishness).

Black Hollywood Actors Educate Us on Evil America

Black Hollywood Actors Educate Us on Evil America

Guest Author:  Christopher Graham

There is an interview at Parade.com with Oprah Winfrey and Forest Whitaker, who are costars in The Butler, an upcoming movie directed by Lee Daniels (also interviewed and also black).

The Butler seems to be another of Hollywood’s attempts to get black people to keep bemoaning “white culture” as it examines life in the White (!) House through the benevolent and undoubtedly wise eyes of the titular black butler who served under eight of America’s presidents, all of whom were terribly white. It is an effort to shame white people for having the audacity to move on and progress beyond the middle of the last century. I guess America doesn’t hear enough of what black people think about these issues.

Drums in the Deep

The New York Times editorializes reports on a controversy on the other side of my beloved State of Missouri:

 

“When the Missouri Supreme Court upheld a law in June allowing students from failing school districts to transfer to good ones, Harriet Gladney saw a path to a better education for her 9-year-old daughter.

 

“But then she watched television news clips from a town hall meeting for the Francis Howell School District, the predominantly white district here that her daughter’s mostly black district, Normandy, had chosen as a transfer site. Normandy, in neighboring St. Louis County, has one of the worst disciplinary rates in the state, and Francis Howell parents angrily protested the transfer of Normandy students across the county line, some yelling that their children could be stabbed and that the district’s academic standards would slip.

 

“‘When I saw them screaming and hollering like they were crazy, I thought to myself, Oh my God, this is back in Martin Luther King days,’ said Ms. Gladney, 45. ‘They’re going to get the hoses out. They’re going to be beating our kids and making sure they don’t get off the school bus.'”

 

…and so on and so forth. Please do read the whole thing – believe me, it’s all quite fascinating. In particular, the pathetic insistence of the “parents in the Francis Howell district…that their opposition had nothing to do with race.”

 

But perhaps most fascinating of all is the fact that neither Ms. Gladney nor the NYT seems to detect any irony in her desire to remove her young daughter from a (presumably) anti-racist all-black environment and to thrust her into the company of scary white racists, hoses in hand? – I mean, what’s up with that?

 

At the risk of eternal banishment from polite society, let me venture a few generalizations:

 

(1) White gentiles do not, by and large, hate individual black people, just because they’re black. If anything, they go out of their way to be nice & polite to them.

 

(2) But they do fear & seek to avoid large concentrations of black people. In fact, they are prepared to spend a lot of money to flee from such…concentrations. Above all, they wish to preserve their school-age children from too much exposure to such…concentrations.

 

(3) Blacks do not, by and large, hate individual whites, just because they’re white. But they don’t generally go out of their way to be nice & polite to them.

 

(4) And they never, ever, fear or seek to avoid large concentrations of white people. Instead, they seem to seek out their company at every opportunity.

 

I mean, how weird is that?

 

Unz Agonistes

I don’t quite know what to make of all this.

 

Ron Unz, publisher of The American Conservative, is apparently locked in a struggle for control with the Editor, Daniel McCarthy.

 

McCarthy complains, in essence, that Unz wants to use TAC as a forum for his own lengthy essays on HBD-related topics, instead of the magazine’s usual focus on “realism in foreign policy, a defense of constitutional civil liberties, and a humane Burkean conservatism.”

 

Unz responds, in essence, that it’s his money and his ideas that have kept the place afloat. In particular, he points out that his lengthy essays account for four out of five of the most-viewed stories at TAC.

 

So what to think?

 

Personally, I think Unz has been getting steadily more interesting (and better at statistics) in the last year or so, and he’s now pretty much the best thing TAC has going for it.