Authors: John Stonestreet
The Christian idea that humans are made in the image and likeness of God is the only source for universal human dignity, human rights, and human value in human history. As philosopher Luc Ferry wrote in his book, A Brief History of Thought,
Christianity was to introduce the notion that men were equal in dignity, an unprecedented idea at the time and one to which the world owes its entire democratic inheritance.
Of course, Christianity received its understanding of how God created people from the Hebrew Old Testament.
A commitment to the doctrine of imago Dei requires that Christians oppose any idea that reduces humans to some other identity. Just as Christians must reject LGBTQ ideology and critical race theory for saying what is not true about the human person, Christians must reject anti-Semitism, especially in the wake of Tucker Carlson’s soft-pedal platforming of Nick Fuentes. Hateful views about the Jewish people have been prevalent on the political Left and have now emerged on the political Right. These views must be repudiated no matter which side of the political spectrum they are found.
What will happen now in the wake of Tucker Carlson’s interview may well determine whether Fuentes and his “groyper” movement is mainstreamed or is pushed back beyond the shadowy margins of the conservative movement. Either way, Christians must be first and foremost committed to the biblical description of the universe and the human person over and above any political loyalties. Thus, this growing anti-Semitism coming from the political Right must be soundly condemned. Whether from the Left or the Right, anti-Semitism is morally evil.
Chuck Colson used to say that ideologies are best understood based by how they answer the question, “What’s really wrong with the world.” Throughout history, anti-Semitic movements have answered that question with a who, not a what. Columnist Rod Dreher recently offered this summary of Hannah Arendt’s definitive post-World War II analysis of anti-Semitism in the context of the Nazi rise to power during her generation:
The basic argument Arendt makes is that anti-Semitism provides a scapegoat that can unite a badly fragmented society around a common enemy, even if it is detached from reality. Jews become the all-purpose enemy whose existence explains society’s troubles with deadly simplicity. The more popular it becomes, the more society becomes conditioned to think of individuals as faceless collective groups.
... Moreover, anti-Semitism exploits the willingness of atomized people, devoid of meaning and structure, and their willingness to believe any fiction that restores purpose and order to their lives. And it justifies terror against the Other as a way of restoring the lost order for which people long.
The greatest evils in human history, including the Holocaust, began by identifying a group of people as the problem with the world. In The Gulag Archipelago, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn answered those who demonized a specific group of people this way:
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But ... [t]he line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.
In “groyper” ideology, the evil and irrational hatred of certain groups, especially the Jews, is offered in place of a Christian understanding of Creation and the Fall. If the biblical understanding of imago Dei has been the most consequentially good idea in human history, racialized ideas about people have been the worst. They must not be tolerated. They should not be platformed. They should not even be left unchallenged. At least in terms of numbers, these are the bad ideas that have claimed the most victims.
Christians will find enemies to the left and to the right. There, people themselves made in the image of God, have been taken captive by what Paul called, “hollow and deceptive philosophies” and, elsewhere, “spiritual forces of evil.” Our job, Paul said, is to “destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God.” We do this in hopeful prayer that,
God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will.