“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them”
Genesis 1:27
“You shall love the lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.”
Matthew 22:37-40
Racism is an affront and an insult to God. Jesus Christ, the incarnate logos and word of God made flesh suffered the humiliation of the cross for the salvation of the whole of mankind regardless of ethnicity, ancestry, or skin color. Racism is an obscenity and a blasphemy against what God created, and a denial of what the Son of God, the incarnate logos, suffered on the cross for.
Throughout history, there have been Christians who have been practitioners of racism. These people were not Christians, they were heretics and blasphemers. These include the western Christian countries who were involved in the transatlantic slave trade against people from Africa, and American Protestants who first supported slavery and then racial segregation, as well as outright murder of African Americans.
Another form of race hatred has been in the form of anti semitism. Anti Semitism was once religious (Orthodox, Roman Catholics, and Protestants have all been complicit in this sin at one point or another in history). By the twentieth century, as Western Europe underwent a process of secularization, Anti Semitism became a matter of racial hatred.
This was the case when Hitler seized power in 1933. By 1942, what the Germans called “The Final Solution of the Jewish Question” in which the Jews were to be exterminated became official state policy. Six million Jews were slaughtered in the Shoah (Holocaust).
The Nazis may have been the most ambitious and depraved group of racists. They had entire groups of people chosen for either outright extermination or enslavement. Jews and Gypsies were chosen to be wiped out of existence. Slavic peoples such as the Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, and Czecks were considered “untermenschen” (subhuman).
The Slavic countries were treated far worse than the other countries of Nazi occupied Europe. They were considered in the Nazi racial hierarchy to be just above Jews. These Slavic peoples suffered horribly under Nazi rule. Of course, Hitler hated the Russians with an enormous passion.
Operation Barbarossa, the name of the Nazi invasion of Russia which began on June 22, 1941 was waged as a racial war of conquest against the “inferior” and “asiatic” Russians. During the war, Josef Stalin turned to help from the Russian Orthodox Church to help motivate the Russian people to fight the Nazis. The murderer of Orthodox Bishops, Priests, and faithful turned to the Holy Church of God for assistance against the pagan, racist, and occult ideology of Nazism.
Several years ago a book was published entitled, “Ataturk in the Nazi imagination” by Stefan Ihrig. Ihrig having researched Nazi party newspapers from the 1920’s found that the Nazis were greatly inspired by the founder of modern Turkey, the so called “Ataturk” whose name was Mustafa Kemal.
Kemal was a notorious Turkish racist who presided over the final genocide of Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek Christians that had begun under the auspices of his predecessors known as “the Young Turks” in 1914. Ihrig writes in this book that the Turkish genocide of Christians served as a model for the Holocaust of the Jews under Hitler. Racism is an act of war against God and the denial of the Biblical teaching of creation.
Saint Paul writes, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Racism is a cancer that can strike anywhere. In 2012, as Greece was sinking into the economic crisis, the Neo Nazi Golden Dawn Party won seats in the Greek Parliament. This was a vile and satanic political party that embraced all the Nazi ideas of racism, anti semitism, occultism, and neo paganism. Their members went about the streets of Athens beating up and terrorizing illegal immigrants. Fortunately, their support diminished in Greece and are no longer a factor in Greek politics.
Orthodox Christians should always reject racism as such theories and practices contravene the Biblical teaching of creation, the message of the Gospel and the example of Jesus Christ, and the purpose of the saviour’s own suffering and resurrection which was for the purpose of the salvation of all people everywhere.
Orthodox Christians should reflect on the evils of racism during these critical days in the United States. Greek Americans in particular should be sympathetic to African Americans. In 1922, there was an American Admiral named Mark Bristol who was the High Commissioner at Constantinople who referred to the Greeks as “the worst race in the near east”. This man was responsible for censoring news reports that were intended to inform the world of the slaughter of Greek and Armenian Christians at Smyrna.
Five years ago, I went to see the film “Selma” about Martin Luther King. What a pleasant surprise it was to see an actor portray Greek Orthodox Archbishop Iakovos. The character is in the film for two minutes or so, but what a two minutes. The Archbishop along with Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish leaders stuck their necks out and could have been killed for joining Dr. King.
Various forms of racism have existed in the United States over the years. There is a book called “imbeciles” by a writer named Adam Cohen. The book focuses on a woman named Carrie Buck who was the daughter of a prostitute who was adopted by another couple. Carrie was impregnated by a young man who was related to the couple and was subsequently sterilized despite the fact that she did not understand the consequences of this procedure.
Carrie Buck’s case got to the Supreme Court which ruled in favor of the sterilization. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in the Court’s ruling declared that “three generations of imbeciles are enough”. Cohen writes that between 1907 and 1983, at least sixty and seventy thousand people had been involuntarily sterilized. During the late 1920’s and 1930’s, the eugenics movement which supported bills supporting involuntary sterilization throughout America was thwarted by the Roman Catholic Church (to its credit) which stopped such laws from passing by mobilizing its priests, nuns, and faithful to lobby against them.
The Eugenics movement in the United States did not only hold racist views of African Americans, they advocated immigration restrictions against Italians, Jews, Greeks, Irish, Poles, and Russians. Much racism emanates from the corruption of the theories of Charles Darwin.
These theories are called “social darwinism”. In fairness to Darwin, he never endorsed or advocated the ideas associated with “social darwinism”. Social Darwinism in the nineteenth century produced various theories of racism and included advocates such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an Englishman who would have an influence on Hitler himself.
The philosophy of racism is evil and will always be the enemy of Christianity and the cross of Christ.
Reflections on the Double Headed Eagle Blog
