The Thomas Achord – Alastair Roberts MessWhy it matters whether or not a classical Christian educator and political podcaster is a closet racist and anti-Semite
Rod Dreher
Nov 27, 2022
Here is a link to theologian Alastair Roberts's compelling, lengthy, and thorough case for why the former Sequitur Classical Academy headmaster Thomas Achord, pictured above, is likely to be behind a vile racist, antisemitic, misogynist Twitter account, under the name "Tulius Aadland," despite his denial. It starts like this:
* * *
This is absolutely correct! Me, I don't know about Wolfe's book, other than it has been widely discussed among Protestants I follow. Like Roberts, I don't have a problem in principle with "Christian nationalism," depending on how you define it -- that is, I don't know that I would endorse Wolfe's views. Maybe I would, I dunno. I haven't read the book, and don't take a position on a book I haven't read.
But I first became aware of the Achord thing by reading Twitter a few days ago. It very much matters to me whether or not Thomas Achord is guilty of being behind the Tulius Aadland account. Why? Because my children all studied at Sequitur. My wife, until all this emerged and she resigned in disgust, taught there for six years. It's a small Christian school that has been vital to the life of my family, and of Christian families I know and care about. Thomas Achord has been a (talented!) teacher there for years, and has for the past several served as its headmaster. If its headmaster was living a secret life online as a racist, antisemitic, misogynistic white nationalist, you'd better be sure that I'd want to know about it! Such a thing, if true, could bring shame and even destruction onto the school -- and worse, given that Tulius said explicitly on his thread that he is heavily involved in Classical Christian Education, and wanted to use it as a Trojan horse to smuggle in white nationalism:
* * *
But this is why it is vital for the movement to purge from its ranks that minority advocating racism!
On the walk back from church this morning, I was thinking about what this controversy says about politics and culture on the postliberal Right, and the challenges we who are involved in it face. Here are a few thoughts.
The crisis upon us now in the West has its roots in the collapse of the broadly Christian consensus that was the basis of our common life. As the brilliant popular historian Tom Holland, a secular liberal, showed in his recent bestseller Dominion, classical liberalism emerged out of Christianity and nowhere else -- and there are good reasons for that. Can classical liberalism survive severed from its roots in broadly shared religion? I don't think so, and the crisis we're living through now demonstrates that. Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, in his 1982 book After Virtue, explained that absent common religion, we either have to ground communal ethics in an Aristotelian vision, or we will get Nietzsche's will to power.
Plus, we have to give Marx credit: he saw back in his day that dynamic capitalism was a dissolver of traditions -- religious, cultural, national, and so forth. As late capitalism has gone global, Marx's insights have been more than vindicated. This is in no way to recommend Marx's solutions -- indeed, he was grateful to capitalism for getting rid of the obstacles to Communism. My point is simply that critics of the Right and the Left who identify capitalism and post-Christian liberalism as the enemies of thick communities and the preservation of particular traditions are correct.
* * *
Here is a neuralgic point: for years I have been warning that if you don't want to raise demons of racism on the white Right, then you had better stop welcoming those same demons in their nonwhite Left-wing guise. As a right-wing white Christian, I have no problem at all calling out and casting out racists among our ranks. I don't believe it will do to say, "But the Left does it, so why shouldn't we?" I do not want to stand before the Judgment Seat of God one day and have to explain that I turned a blind eye to racism and anti-Semitism because I didn't want the Left to have an advantage.
* * *
Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-thomas-achord-alastair-roberts-mess/
