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Honey we’ve been trying to cancel Christianity for 2000 years now but you people are like bedbugs. https://twitter.com/jennaellisesq/status/1275215576684802049
This hopefully goes without saying but history of Christianity and the history of white supremacy are deeply linked.
The formation of Europe as a discrete geographic unity and the iron-fisted hegemony of Catholicism in early medieval Europe were both in large part a response to the Islamic conquest of the southern and eastern parts of the Mediterranean world.
Until the rise of Islam it didn’t really occur to anyone that, idk, Sicily and Libya have ethnically distinct histories or that they are parts of distinct cultural and political spheres.
In fact if you read Polybius it quickly becomes clear that the ancients considered North Africa and Southern Europe very much part of a single cultural and political sphere; this was also true of post-Republic Rome and the early Byzantines.
A lot of people don’t know that North Africa was considered the bread basket of the Roman Empire, supplying much of the Empire’s wheat.
A lot of people also don’t know that some of the most important early Christian theologians were North African, including Tertullian, the first major Christian author to write in Latin, and St. Augustine, patron saint of European shame, the OG fire and brimstone preacher.
It’s impossible to overstate Augustine’s influence on Christianity and hence on history. He’s the spiritual father of both Catholicism and Protestantism.
Tertullian and Augustine were both Berbers btw. I don’t know whether Jesus was black but I know Augustine wasn’t white.
Tertullian and Augustine were both Berbers btw. I don’t know whether Jesus was black but I know Augustine wasn’t white.
Even after the Western and Eastern Roman Empires split there was still no indication of a demarcating line running through the Mediterranean and separating Southern Europe from Northern Africa.
Well into late antiquity it was understood by all the cultures around the Mediterranean that the Mediterranean was the center of the world and that above the Alps was an alien and hostile world of illiterate pale-skinned barbarians.
In 476 the last Western Roman Emperor is deposed. In 632 the Prophet Muhammad dies. By 1096 you’ve got the First Crusade.
In between, north and south Europe become increasingly ethnically and culturally homogenous and Catholicism wins absolute control of both.
In between, north and south Europe become increasingly ethnically and culturally homogenous and Catholicism wins absolute control of both.
God dammit this turned into a fucking thread didn’t it.
Anyway in late antiquity/early medieval times the northern and southern Mediterranean are separated and northern and southern Europe become a new unity.
By 1095 you’ve got this notion that there’s a trans-European “Christian nation” which has a sacred duty to stand up to the heathen hordes and a divine imperative to “liberate” the Holy Land.
This is one of my main critiques of Said’s Orientalism, btw: he suggests that that the East/West binary is a product of the Enlightenment and post-mercantile colonial capitalism, but we find it in the archive long before that.
Christians didn’t invent religious persecution and they didn’t invent colonialism. The Greeks colonized the whole Mediterranean: their culture isn’t even native to Greece. The Romans were colonizers: the word comes from Lat. “colonus.” Romans also persecuted Christians and Jews.
In the Greeks and Romans we already find the link between conquest, colonialism, and the assertion of cultural superiority - “We are more developed and rational and cultured than them, they should be glad we’re willing to share, we’re modernizing them and doing them a favor.”
What I think is new to Christianity is the idea that cultural and religious conquest are an imperative in and for themselves.
The Greeks and Romans assumed that cultural, religious, political, and economic superiority went hand in hand. The gods must want them to be the richest and strongest, which means they must have the best gods, which means they must deserve to rule.
What’s new to Christianity, as far as I can tell, is the idea that a vast group of people with no one nation and no one ethnicity and no clear geographic boundary still have a moral obligation to martyr themselves or to slaughter others purely as a matter of doctrine.
Later in history the concepts of divine right and moral imperative become an excuse for political and religious domination. But the concepts have their origins in the fanaticism of an apocalyptic death cult that worships a literal zombie.
One thing I find fascinating about early Christianity is the fervid and relentless sectarianism. Early Christians spent as much time killing each other for having the wrong kind of Christianity as they did being persecuted by the Romans.
Early Christianity was segmented in all kinds of ways and fought relentless interior battles. In part, that’s because Christianity had no geographic or economic or ethnic or national center, so all the nodes of the network fought each other for control.
Until the Muslim conquest, it was impossible to exclude North Africa and the Levant and even lands further east from the history of Christianity and from the putative “Christian nation.”
Once the Muslims conquer North Africa and the Middle East, Christianity suddenly has geographic, linguistic, political, and racial borders. It “reterritorializes,” as D&G would say.
The Greeks recognized race, and were racist in that they considered their own race, broadly conceived, as superior to others. But the Greeks were happy to admit that the origins of their culture and knowledge lay among other races, especially the Egyptians and “Indians.”
With the Muslim conquest of North Africa and the beginning of Europe as a discrete entity, there begins also a much more violent project of erasing entirely the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern and African origins of “Western culture.”
One last note and then I’ll shut up: the histories of Christianity and Europe and whiteness are not the same as the histories of anti-blackness or colorism or racism in general, which we find much earlier in the Bible and in Greek art.
OK that’s it. I’m sorry, I’m a recovering thread addiction and sometimes I relapse. For the record my threads are and always have been ad libbed, drafted threads are for losers. Have a nice day.
