(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
During the trial of the white racists who in August 2017 killed a female counter-protester during the confrontations in Charlottesville, the accused made frequent references to Nazi terminology and aired their admiration for Adolf Hitler.
We remember the tragic events. A group – mainly young white men – had gathered in the so-called Unite the Right Rally, and formally protested the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee and that the park in the city would be named The Emancipation Park. «Jews will not replace us!» and «White Lives Matter!», they shouted. The events sent shock waves through large sections of the American population, and the world community watched in horror. It was generally seen as yet another ugly expression of an unpleasant mixture of anti-Semitism and hatred of America's black population.
Social hierarchies
However, this is a superficial interpretation, believes Magda Teter, who is his-
tory professor at Fordham University. She has written a book in which she takes Charlottesville as her starting point, and from there comes up with a much deeper and extremely relevant explanation of why the term white supremacy should not just be called white supremacy, but white Christian supremacy. For Charlottesville, and dozens of other expressions of modern racism, must be understood not just as a current phenomenon rooted in the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century, but as something that can be traced all the way back to the earliest days of Christianity.
Early Christianity was very aware that it drew on elements from the Jewish tradition. But it was also early on in distancing itself from its origins, and it did so by setting up social hierarchies. Further back in time, namely in the Middle Ages, this got a special twist. For example, the Catholic theologians of the time took their point of departure from the Old Testament account of the free woman Sarah and the slave woman Hagar. When Islam arose in the 7th century, it became common to regard Hagar as the progenitor of the Arabs, i.e. the Muslims, while the Jews were descendants of Sarah. But by a clever manipulation of the metaphors in Paul's epistles, the medieval theologians had it depicted so that both the Jews and the Muslims were descendants of a slave woman, while the Christians were the children of a free woman and therefore stood at the top of the hierarchy.
But this thinking behind the scenes, it was very easy to stratify humanity when the Europeans began to bring African slaves to the new colonies in the Americas. The black Africans were considered primitive and evil, and although Christian missionaries sought to convert both them and the indigenous populations of America, skin color – race – did not deny itself. Although they became Christians, they were still relegated to the bottom of the hierarchy.
The church came last
The French Revolution led in many ways to new mindsets in Europe, not least of which was based on the idea of freedom, equality and fraternity. But in the general worldview, it was still Europe that symbolized freedom. America, which iconography had until then portrayed as a naked and wild woman, now became the white and triumphant Columbia. A good example of this is the Statue of Liberty, the large statue at the entrance to New York. She is a white woman, and therefore an expression of the idea that true freedom belongs only to white people.
When Islam arose in the 7th century, it became common to regard the slave woman Hagar as the progenitor of the Arabs, while the Jews were the descendants of the free woman Sarah.
In her research, Magda Teter has primarily focused on the United States. In this perspective, she provides a good example with the trials in Nuremberg against the top Nazis in the time after the end of the second world war. The indictment operated with three categories – crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. But as far as the last category is concerned, Nazism and Hitlerism were the focus of the courtroom. It was the Americans who had the upper hand at Nuremberg, and in this way a precedent was created for the concept of crimes against humanity to almost exclusively refer to the current, which in that case was Hitler and his band of criminals, thereby freeing all parties to reflect on the deeper causes of the disaster.
As Teter sees it, the church is centrally located in this whole problem, and it is in the church context that it takes the longest time to break down the racist divides. It was 20 years after the Holocaust before the Vatican in 1966 issued the great declaration Our aetate, where the Catholic Church formally absolved the Jews of responsibility for killing Jesus. At that time, the civil rights movement in the United States was at its peak, and here too the author shows that the church came last. Where a series of significant court cases led to the beginning of equality in schools, public transport and a wide range of areas of everyday life, the church became one of the last places where black and white Americans could sit together unimpeded.
The church became one of the last places where black and white Americans could mingle unhindered
sit together.
It is all this that we must keep in mind when we consider white American society. And this is what happened when the white thugs invaded Capitol Hill in Washington on January 6, 2021. While the Trump supporters naturally acted on the inspiration of current developments and modern media coverage, and while several of them wore T-shirts with the inscription Camp Auschwitz, the real symbolism was probably best presented by the gallows and the large cross the men set up outside the building. Here the notions of white Christian supremacy came to full blast. The symbols are ancient, and symbols tend to change over time, but they are important to notice, and this is the important eye-opener Magda Teter gives us here with her important book.
