By Nathan Stone
Towards the end of his reign, Tuthmosis III of Egypt ordered the destruction of all the public monuments to his aunt, Hatshepsut, the former leader of Egypt. It wasn’t the first instance of iconoclasm that the world had seen, but it has become one of the most memorable.
Iconoclasm — the deliberate destruction of images — has existed almost as long as man has walked the earth. When it took place, there were usually deep and profound reasons for these planned destructions. Rulers sought to erase the memory of their rivals.
Recently, Shaun King, a champion of the Black Lives Matter movement, called for the destruction of Christian iconography, statues, and stained glass, if they represent Christ, His mother, or any of the apostles as white. This, according to King, makes the iconography nothing more than a “gross form of white supremacy” and “racist propaganda” created to be “tools of oppression.”
To King, the only proper response to any fossil of racism or oppression is to destroy it. As any depictions of Christ or the Virgin Mary with light skin represent “white supremacy,” according to King they’ve all got to go.
True Christianity Was Never About Race
The idea that Christianity is or has been infected with white supremacy is not new. Susan Abrahams, the dean of faculty at Pacific School of Religion, blamed “White Christians” for Charlottesville. Jeannine Hill Fletcher wrote a book in 2018 that purportedly showed racism was a natural outgrowth of Christianity, springing from “Christian superiority.”
As St. Paul wrote in Galatians, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Pigmentation did not matter in Christianity; what mattered was faith in Christ. This is also why, contrary to the implication in King’s ridiculous tweets, Christianity often adapted itself to the environment of indigenous peoples.
The Radicals Want to ‘Cancel’ Christianity
Stained glass and statues do not show Christianity to be racist. A quick Google search would have shown this to King. So why King would make a statement that could be so easily refuted? The answer is that this outrage over white portrayals of Christ and the apostles is a blind meant to detract us from the real goal: canceling Christianity.
Just a year ago, believing the radical left had such a goal would have sounded conspiratorial. Within the last four weeks, however, St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City was vandalized. Across from the White House, St. John’s Church was attacked twice. Neither church nor the statue was involved in any way or form with the deaths of George Floyd or Rayshard Brooks.
The reason for the attacks becomes clearer when considering that Black Lives Matterand Antifa are Marxist organizations and Marxism is an enemy of Christianity. It has to be. An atheistic system that sees economic Hegelianism as god will have to consider all transcendent religions the enemy. It’s why the Soviet Union was an atheistic state, which replaced God with the Communist Party.
Another reason comes from the hatred Marxism holds for Western Civilization. The dream of Marxism is to eradicate Western civilization and replace it with itself; its reaction to the legitimate evils that have been committed by Occidentals is not reform but obliteration.
Marxists Hate Christianity’s Fusion of Faith and Reason
Christianity created specific institutions that we identify with the West, like hospitals and universities, but it did much more. Most importantly, it brought about the great fusion between faith and reason. Before Christianity, there had been tension between the two.
Because Christianity teaches that all men are created by God, it ushered in a radical idea of equality not seen in the world before. And because every person is made in the image of God, all people are endowed with inalienable, natural rights, a strain of thinking first proposed by the later Scholastic philosophers.
Christianity was also responsible for Europeans leaving their homes in the Crusades and the Age of Exploration. Land and gold were motivations too, but God was right there in the center. In one famous example, the signers of the Mayflower Compact listed the “Glory of God, and the Advancement of the Christian Faith” as two of their reasons for journeying to Massachusetts.
All of these accomplishments are evil in the eyes of Marxists. They helped build Western Civilization into the glory that it was and encouraged colonization, conversion, objectivity, and logic, all things that have been declared to be hallmarks of “white supremacy.” As such, Christianity, along with the police, history, and science, must be destroyed to clear the ground of the new utopia.
If this trajectory isn’t stopped, we should not be surprised if the Marxists among us take King seriously and begin to burn churches like they are burned in France.
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