We all know the story of the Good Samaritan. It is probably the most famous story in the Christian Bible. The other main contender would be the Prodigal Son. They are only found in Luke’s Gospel: perhaps Matthew and Mark didn’t think they were very important. Luke says that he is offering his Gospel as an improvement on the others, so maybe there was an honest difference of opinion about what mattered and what didn’t.
Both stories seem to say that you ought to love a person even if they are, or have become, unlovable; even if they have offended you in the worst way possible; even if they are, on base and ground enough, your enemy.
And whatever preachers may sometimes claim, Jesus doesn’t say “And this will blow your mind! The good father welcomed the wicked son back! And try and get your head around this! The Samaritan was the true neighbour!” He seems to take the conclusion for granted.
If you asked a hundred people to retell the story, ninety seven of them would say that it is about a Jewish traveller who was set upon by highway robbers and was helped by a traditional enemy of the Jews who happened to be passing at the time. So the reverse is true: Jews should help Samaritans when they are in trouble; and by extension, everyone should help everyone.
The two travellers who ignore the wounded man are certainly Judeans: one of them performed religious ceremonies in the temple and the other was a member of a caste who did other kinds of religious work. Priest is a job description and Levite is a tribal designation: all Priests were Levites but not all Levites were Priests. I imagine my Jewish readers will explain that it was rather more complicated than that. My guess is that the Priest and the Levite were on their way to Jerusalem, to perform some kind of ceremony there, where the injured man was travelling from Jerusalem to the commercial town of Jericho. The text doesn’t say that; but if they had all been going the same way along such a dangerous road wouldn’t they have set out together?
So the message might be primarily racial: the two Jews didn’t help the Jewish man, but the Samaritan did—so aren’t all these racial distinctions pretty silly?
It might have been a more generally anti-temple message. The two professional god-botherers don’t act on their beliefs; so what was the point in having them to begin with?
It might even have been an anti-cult message: killing animals on the altar according to the correct procedure doesn’t help an injured man. Only practical action does.
There have been attempts to allegorise the story. The injured man is the human race; the first two travellers represent Religion; the third represents Jesus himself. William Langland rather delightfully identified the Priest with Abraham, and therefore with Faith; the Levite with Moses and therefore with Hope and the Samaritan with Jesus and therefore with Charity. Which only works if you don’t know what a Samaritan is.
But nothing in the text particularly says that the traveller was Jewish. If he was travelling away from Jerusalem, maybe he wasn’t. Maybe the point of the story isn’t “The Samaritan helped his enemy.” Maybe the point of the story is “The Samaritan didn’t bother to ask who the traveller was: the fact that he needed help was sufficient.”
Nearly everyone would say that this was the core of the Christian message. You ought to love your neighbour, even if he’s your enemy. Your enemies are also your neighbours. There are no such things as enemies. Love asks no questions. Love fulfills the law. On this command hangs the Torah.
Very many people would say that this is the “true” Christian message, and that all the God stuff was thought up years later by Popes and Emperors in order to keep the common people docile.
In Sunday School, we were taught, implicitly, that before Jesus came along the idea of loving your neighbour had never occurred to anyone. The Jews were much too busy washing their hands and avoiding shellfish to have considered the idea of kindness. It’s a shockingly antisemitic idea. It was still a shockingly antisemitic idea when a very clever writer said that Jesus was nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change.
Do gurus and prophets introduce new ideas into the world? Or do they merely re-iterate old ones? There is a funny scene in the Vicar of Dibley when the sincere but dippy clergywoman tells a parishioner that God wants us to love our enemies. The parishioner asks if that includes the ex-boyfriend who cheated on her. “Yes, it does; unfortunately, it does,” she replies. But she is quite clear that that is why Christmas is worth celebrating: because it marks the birth of the man who introduced this astonishing idea into the world.
Eugene Peterson’s Bible paraphrase says that the lawyer in the story was looking for a loophole. I don’t think that’s in the text, but it’s a pretty good supposition. “The Torah says we should love everyone, but that surely doesn’t mean everyone everyone, does it?” It may be that some canon-lawyers of the time sometimes said that “neighbour” means “in-group”: that “love your neighbour” meant “love fellow, Torah observant, Judeans” and that Jesus’ take on this was “there are no out groups, ever” [1]
Is helping out people who you have every reason to hate a specifically Christian virtue?
Or is helping out people who you dislike simply part of the Tao, the universal morality that all human beings have at all times believed in?
Was a British Quaker Red Cross volunteer patching up a German soldier at the Somme doing something on the level of a Jew lighting a Hanukkah candle or a Muslim putting off his dinner until the sun goes down: a cult practice which may well be spiritually beneficial for them but which you wouldn’t expect anyone outside of their faith group to join in with? Or was he doing something that everyone ought to do? Was Jesus reminding the Pharisee of something that he already knew but had forgotten; or asking him to judge his Torah against a higher universal law? Or was he just saying something like “In the future, the distinct thing about Christians will be that they are nice to people they dislike, in the same way that the distinct thing about Sikhs is their head-ware and the distinct thing about Jews is that thing they do to baby boys?”
You see, currently, there is a charitable organisation that specifically provides medical assistance and shelter for people who have been mugged on the Jerusalem-Jerico highway. They have volunteer doctors and nurses, and reciprocal arrangements with all the local inns. The medics are volunteers who get called away from their regular jobs, but the medical equipment and the ambulances and the inns cost money, and the state doesn’t provide them with any help at all. They rely entirely on charitable donations. They often make appeals on my Facebook feed.
And whenever they do, comments appear underneath.
“Why are you helping Samaritan travellers” they say “Charity begins at home!”
“Why are you providing a taxi-service for Samaritans who are invading my country?” they say.
“If he didn’t want to be mugged, he should have stayed at home!” they opine.
“There is a fifth column of radical Marxist lunatics who want to replace Judeans with Samaritans” they say “And also to let boys use the girls’ bathrooms!”
“All these Samaritans travelling down the road are drug addicts, rapists, and child abusers” they say
“And when they get to Jerusalem, they eat the dogs. They eat the pets. They eat the dogs. That’s where Covid came from. Join the dots. Wake up, sheeple. You are traitors!”
My question is: are the people who write this stuff evil?
Or are they merely not Christian?
Have they stepped outside the Tao and rejected the universal morality of the entire human race?
Or have they merely rejected some highly specific Christian taboos?
Do they need to be evangelised?
Or simply guillotined? [2]
There was an advertisement on Facebook for Co-Op Car insurance. It was illustrated by a picture of an older, dark-skinned lady driving a motor car.
The following comments appeared beneath the advertisement.
• ✔✔✔
• ✔✔
• ✔
• Co-op UK?? [Graphic of gravestone marked “White Couples in TV Adverts”]
• Africa?
• Do you operate many stores in Africa? You need to update your ad people. They must be showing the African one in England.
• Any discount for white folks?
• [Image of a monkey]
• [Image of four young people of colour, labelled: Netflix: The Beatles]
• Sadly you are right
• Box ticking
The emoji of the tick or tick-box has replaced the swastika and the NF icon as the sigil which racists use to identify themselves. It represents a racist conspiracy theory that a shadowy cabal forces insurance companies to employ dark skinned models in their advertising. They are issued, metaphorically, with forms, and only employ dark skinned people so they can metaphorically tick the metaphorical “we employ dark skinned people” box on those forms. Racists post the racist tickbox emoji whenever a non-white person appears on social media in any context—an actor, a photographic model, a journalist, a politician or even a cartoon character. The message is absolutely clear. No dark skinned person ever gets a job on their own merits and if the mysterious shadowy cabal were abolished, there would be no visible dark skinned people on social media ever again.
The single word Africa and the question about Co-Op stores in Africa needs no explanation: it refers to the obviously racist belief that the UK should be a Caucasian ethno-state; that dark-skinned people are by definition not British, and the only place you would expect to encounter a dark skinned person would be on a different continent.
The racist photo of the Beatles in black-face is based on the racist conspiracy theory that because some TV companies sometimes employ dark skinned actors in some roles, it follows that no light skinned actor is ever employed in any role, even of an historical character who had obviously light skin. A glance at recent movies about, e.g, Bob Dylan, Amy Winehouse, Ruth Ellis and the Munich Olympics would reveal this to be racist bullshit. I grant that the guy from the boy-band was played by a chimpanzee.
Until recently, American racists applied the racist acronym “CRT” to books and organisations that they didn’t think were racist enough. School text books that implied that dark-skinned people existed and had a history and that slavery was not an unqualifiedly good thing were said to be pushing a “CRT” agenda. [3]
The racist codeword “CRT” has been largely supplanted by the racist codeword “DEI”. “DEI” carries the same connotations as the racist green tick: it implies that any dark skinned person in any job has been put there by a mysterious shadowy cabal with sinister ulterior motivations. Ncuti Gatwa, Kamala Harris, Rishi Sunak, Kemi Badenoch and Michelle Obama have all been described as “DEI hires”. If the made up thing called DEI were magicked away, the world would be reassuringly mono-racial again.
No-one in Europe has ever used Diversity, Equality and Inclusiveness in this sense: we have tended to talk about Positive Discrimination or protected characteristics. When British racists use the term they are parroting the racist language they have learned from American racists.
When I was at school, children whose reading and writing was substantially below what would be expected of their age group were called “remedial”. Now they would be termed “special needs”. In my mother’s time, they would have been called “backward”. My grandfather might still have spoken of “the remove” (as in “fat owl of the”). Never at any time has anyone in the UK used the word “retarded”, and, thankfully, “retard” has never been used as a term of abuse.
In the UK, we have a Labour Party, who were at one time thought to be Socialists: their opponents sometimes called them Commies or even Trots. We have a Conservative party, who are often called Tories. Somewhere in between, not as far to the left as Labour used to be and not as far to the right as the Tories are now we have the Liberal Democrats. They used to be called just the Liberals; then they formed an alliance with the Social Democrats and became the Liberal/SDP Alliance, then they merged and became the Liberal Democrats. For a brief and embarrassing period they were part of a Conservative/LibDem coalition, which helpfully shortened to Condems.
Never at any time in this country has “Liberal” meant socialist or radical; it has always meant middle of the road or moderate. If you were the kind of person who wanted to imply that people who were not quite as far to the right as you were mentally handicapped, the natural English portmanteau would be “Trots-medial” or “Spe-Socialist-al Needs or “Rem-omunist” English quizzlings who use the term “Libtard” are parroting offensive language that they have picked up from American duh-brains.
The comments that I have quoted are from the very thinnest end of the racist wedge. I have also seen references to corn-bread, fried chicken and cannibalism; claims that dark skinned people are uniformly drug addicts, that they all carry knives and infectious diseases; and are invariably in the UK illegally.
People who write this sort of thing do not have legitimate concerns or grievances. They are not putting valid ideas in intemperate language. Certainly, some journey, some process, has brought them to where they are now. It may very well be that they can be brought unto true repentance. Nothing is evil in the beginning. But right here, right now these people see a photograph of an old lady driving a motorcar; a family throwing a stick for a dog on a National Trust Property, or an office worker ordering a cheeseburger at McDonalds and see, not an old lady, a family, or an office worker, but a black old lady, a black family or a black officer worker; and are immediately moved to excrete terms like foreigner, African, drug-addict, refugee, invader, tick-box, or DEI from their arsehole of a mouth.
A discussion about how they became evil and how they might be cured from being evil is well-worth having. But you and I are not saying that dark-skinned people can’t be British, and they are. You and I have never tried to set fire to a hotel or stood outside a mosque chanting blasphemous slogans. Say misguided, if you want to. Say lowlife racist worm. But we have lost and for the foreseeable future they are in charge.
[1] Richard Dawkins asserted in the God Delusion that “love your neigbour” only ever meant “love your fellow Jew”. So it is just possible that the original meaning of the parable was “Love not only Judeans, but also Galileans and Samaritans —but obviously not those pagan bastards.” But that’s not how the church has understood the story for the past two thousand years.
[2] “You don’t seriously think that people who write racist comments on social media should be beheaded?”
No, obviously not. But I couldn’t work out what else to write in this space.
“Hanged” would sound as if I was seriously advocating capital punishment.
“Put up against the wall and shot when the revolution comes” sounds too Communist, and also too frivolous.
“Exterminated” is okay if you are thinking of Daleks, but less okay if you are thinking of Hitler.
“Burned at the stake” is even worse.
Strike out “guillotined” and insert your choice of
“Have their membership of the human race rescinded”
“Permanently exiled to the Phantom Zone”
“Sent to their bedrooms and told to stay there until they are ready to be nice”
[Continues]
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