Just in case you were still clinging to the faint hope that Christianity is not inherently racist, and that all of the anti-bigotry and anti-racism and manufacture of new sins so ostentatiously displayed by the Churchians is anything but inversive, subversive, and satanic, I invite you to consider the so-called Church of England’s portrayal of St. Augustine as a Negro:
St Augustine has been depicted as a black man in a children’s book written by Church of England officials as part of its diversity drive. The saint, one of the most influential figures in Christian history, has been illustrated as black in a new book called Heroes of Hope.
This book says it seeks to inspire children with examples of ‘Black and brown saints, often erased and whitewashed from history, who formed the church and therefore modern society as we know it today’.
Aurelius Augustinus was born in 345 AD in a Mediterranean coastal town now in modern-day Algeria, going on to become a bishop of the North African settlement of Hippo.
Over the years, most depictions of St Augustine have been of a white man. At that time in history, the area was a Roman province, although Augustine and his mother Saint Monica may have originated from the North African Berber ethnic group.
Although this would not make him black, there have been efforts to apply this identity to him by some groups, including at the Catholic University of Villanova in Pennsylvania. An official at the university wrote in 2023 that it was important to depict the saint as black because ‘depicting St. Augustine as a Black man actively decentres whiteness’.
Unlike most people, I have actually read St. Augustine’s work. And while his attention to theological questions centered around rape are indeed a little eyebrow raising, there is absolutely zero chance that the author of his works is a Negro.
This is just another example of the historical and geographical illiteracy of the modern faux literati, who assume that anything related to Africa thereby necessarily means “negro”. Which obviously isn’t true, but when have the inversives every concerned themselves with truth, except, of course to subvert and invert it.
Heroes of Hope was co-authored by The Rev Dr Sharon Prentis, who was appointed the deputy director of the Church of England’s Racial Justice Unit in January 2023. The unit was set up in 2022, in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests, to help meet the Church’s commitments to achieving racial justice. Dr Prentis’s co-writer was Alysia-Lara Ayonrinde, the Church’s national education lead for racial justice.
As F.A. von Hayek demonstrated, social justice is not justice. The adjective modifies the noun. Therefore, racial justice is not justice. And it is not Christian either.
I have come to feel strongly that the greatest service I can still render to my fellow men would be that I could make the speakers and writers among them thoroughly ashamed ever again to employ the term “social justice”.
—F.A. von Hayek