Blindfolded by Dental Floss

Happy New Year, everyone, and welcome back to another year of theological content.

We begin the year with the first episode of season 3 of our podcast, Awkward Asian Theologians, which dropped over the past weekend.

This season, we started on a bit of a sombre note, dealing with the topic of racism. More concerningly, we dealt with something that we have observed with growing frequency. I am talking here about the growing acceptability of racism within the Church, particularly among millenials and younger.

Even more pointedly, we dealt in the episode certain claims we have been privy to, in which race had become a criterion for Christian fidelity. For example - and we kid you not - the claim that one cannot be Catholic and of mixed-race.

While the temptation might be to treat this as a new phenomenon, the episode treated this as another instance of a very old phenomenon. More specifically, we submitted the idea that racism (especially racism within the Church) rests upon the Christological heresies that plagued the ancient Church. More to the point, our claim in the episode was that racism espoused within the Church attacked three key Christological aspects.

First, racism attacked the incarnation insofar as it entertained the idea that only certain iterations of God’s creation mediated God’s salvation and not others.

Second, racism cut across the hypostatic union, insofar as racism rested on a collapse of the distinction between the divine and human natures, such that an aspect of human nature (namely one’s ethnicity) is given divine powers and salvific powers no less.

In response to these reiterations of old problems, we dipped into a more recent statement by Pope St. Pius XI, who in 1937 wrote a letter to the Church in Germany entitled Mit Brennender Sorge (“With Burning Concern”), and addressed the growing trend among German Catholics to align themselves with the ideologies - including its racial dimension - of National Socialism. Among the broadsides issued by Pius XI, there included this statement:

Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community… whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.

While we did not record this point in the podcast episode, what I found striking was the similarity between those who rest their Catholicism on aspects like ethnicity (which we tend to associate with those on the right side of politcs) and those who, on the more lax and liberal side of politics, rest their Catholicism on a more “cultural Catholicism”, which is just a more respectable way of coupling faith with ethnicity (the most pointed example of this being Soren Kiergegaard’s railing against a woman who said she must be Christian because she was Danish).

“Blindfolded by Dental Floss” is out now and can be listened to in full on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music.