The Thomas Achord – Alastair Roberts Mess
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:
Thomas Achord is the headmaster of a private classical Christian school, the co-author of the 2021 book Who is My Neighbor? An Anthology in Natural Relations, and is co-host of the Ars Politica podcast with Stephen Wolfe, the author of the recent book, The Case for Christian Nationalism. Ars Politica is devoted to Christian political thought and has been running for seventy episodes, and Achord’s public political project is focused on applying his understanding of the Christian political tradition to the present day.
Of what relevance is Achord? Achord came to my attention initially because of his association with Stephen Wolfe. I cannot know and do not claim to know to what degree if any Wolfe shares what I believe Achord’s views to be. I will here lay out what I believe to be the case about Achord’s views, based on publicly-available information. I do not make any claims about Wolfe’s own. Achord’s work is, in my view, representative of a small but troubling corner of the world that has been broadly called Christian nationalism, and one which I think it would be disastrous to see come to define the movement.
Just a few days ago, Wolfe recommended Who is My Neighbor? as a work by two of his friends. The Kinist IronInk blog describes Who is My Neighbor? as follows: ‘This book is nearly 700 pages long and it provides one quote after another culled from authors (both Christian and Pagan) from Ancient History to modern times, which demonstrate that the doctrines of Kinism have been what all men in all times and in all places have believed.’
More of its contents are laid out in this thread.
Based on my understanding of it, I am firmly opposed to Achord’s political project and to anything like it. This opposition is not coming from someone who is a ‘leftist’. I have been vocal in criticism of mass immigration policies (see this Theopolis conversation, for instance), advocating some views that would be highly objectionable to many. Indeed, Achord favourably quotes statements from me in his book. Nor am I an opponent in principle of Christian nationalism, a position advanced by some of the voices I most admire in political theology and of which, in some form, I myself might reasonably be classed as an advocate.
Rather, my concern is that there is either a stowaway hidden in a specific Christian nationalist project, or perhaps certain projects are functioning as Trojan horses. I fear that Achord is one example of that. I am aiming to bring that to light in hopes of staunching such influences, because I believe it to be a corruption of ideas which I think are very good and important indeed.
There is nothing that would do more to discredit and weaken any Christian nationalist, postliberal, or other similar project than for one of its advocates to be in fact using it as cover for segregationist or white nationalist views. There is nothing that would be more destructive to the movement than to allow it to be so coopted without opposition.
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:
When I first read on Twitter the allegations that Achord was Tulius, I arranged for this information to get into the hands of the Sequitur board at once, with the message that they had better be aware of this and start looking into it, because it was blowing up. This came not from Alastair Roberts, but from me -- and not because I believed that Achord was guilty, but because I didn't want the board of a small school I cared about to be blindsided by a controversy emerging on Twitter about its headmaster. I figured they would look into it, and ask Achord about it. I don't really know Achord -- he is a very quiet, modest, friendly man; I can't recall ever having had a conversation with him of more than a few words -- but I certainly didn't suspect that he would be behind this account. The only thing I knew about him, aside from his position, was that in the great 2016 flood in the Baton Rouge area, he went out in his boat to rescue people, until the local authorities made him and other private boaters stop. Cajun Navy stuff. It's a good man who does that.
The next thing I knew, Achord had been let go by the school. And then I saw he wrote an essay on Medium making himself out to be a victim of someone who impersonated him on Twitter, as "Tulius Aadland," resulting now in the persecution of him and his family. He positioned himself as having resigned to spare Sequitur grief, and strongly asserted his innocence. Personally, I wanted to believe that. Nobody who cares about Sequitur wants something like this to be true.
But it's impossible to overlook this post on the Tulius Aadland account:
That photo was taken inside the building of Istrouma Baptist Church where Sequitur meets for classes. Notice the stylized cross above. That's the Istrouma logo. Here's a shot from the church's website:
If we are to believe that Thomas Achord is not Tulius Aadland -- an alias that, as Alastair demonstrates, is close to ones Achord has used in the past -- then we must believe that this troll, in an effort to discredit him in 2022, sneaked into the Sequitur classroom building -- this, despite the building having security -- and snapped this photo, then posted it on a racist, sexist, misogynist Christian chad account, without drawing attention to the fact that it was taken inside the Sequitur building.
Really, do you believe that? I guess it could have happened, but it seems to me highly unlikely. It seems more reasonable to believe that Achord, as Tulius, never imagined that the Istrouma logo would give him away years later, when this very lightly followed Twitter account came to light abruptly and unexpectedly.
If Achord is Tulius -- as seems completely reasonable to believe, given this, and given the dossier Alastair Roberts has compiled -- then you'd better believe it matters, entirely apart from Achord's association with Stephen Wolfe. It matters to me as a parent of kids who went to Sequitur, and as someone who cares very much for the school's success. It matters as someone who doesn't want the CCE movement infiltrated and used by racists for their evil goals. (Achord has written beautifully and well about CCE elsewhere.) This darkness needs to be brought to the light. Plus, Achord is a talented teacher and speaker whose work has presence beyond Sequitur, throughout the Classical Christian Education world. If Achord is Tulius Aadland, then he has no business having anything to do with teaching kids, running schools, or using his rising profile in the CCE movement to quietly mainstream white nationalism. If Sequitur's board weren't made aware of the controversy, then this innocent school could fall with its headmaster, and not see it coming. So too could the well-meaning institutions within the CCE world that involved Achord in their pedagogical work.
I sent the smoking gun tweet to Alastair Roberts, as I'd heard that he was working on a longer piece about Achord. By the time this happened, Achord had already been fired, and written his defense on Medium. I wanted Roberts to know that there was evidence, in this Tweet, that the Medium essay was untrue.
Roberts makes a case for why this matters regarding the Stephen Wolfe project. It's a good one; I think he's right. It's completely fair to ask Wolfe to give an accounting for what he knew about Achord's views, and to what extent he shares them. Why? Strictly speaking, his book speaks for itself, but it's understandable that people may wonder where all this Christian nationalism, at least Wolfe's version, is going. If it's in the Achord direction, then that is towards the kind of racial consciousness that conservatives like me regularly deplore publicly when it comes from the Left. It is intolerable on the Right, and we have to say so, especially when people who believe these things hold positions of authority within our communities.
Once more: I have no opinion about the Wolfe book, because I haven't read it. But it is not "guilt by association" to expect Wolfe to explain his relationship with Achord's thought, given that they are partners on an ideas podcast. If Achord hadn't involved himself with Stephen Wolfe, author of a popular book about Christian nationalism, to propagate religious and political thought via a podcast, his name never would have come up, his apparent secret online life would have remained a secret ... and the board of Sequitur, as well as his colleagues, would never have known about it.
If he is Tulius Aadland, as seems clear from the evidence, then it is a very, very good thing that this darkness saw the light of truth and exposure. There is one man responsible for the destruction of Thomas Achord's career and reputation, and it's not Alastair Roberts. It is possible that Stephen Wolfe knew nothing of what seem to be Thomas Achord's real beliefs about race, Judaism, and women -- and if so, he has to make that clear, because Thomas Achord is his close professional associate in the battle for ideas.
Alastair Roberts is the bringer of painful but vital and important facts to light. It is always a sign of weakness and cowardice to blame the messenger. Read the entire Roberts essay on Achord, and make your own mind up. All this evidence may or may not be sufficient to convict in a court of law, but there is no way that the board of directors of a Christian school could see all that and do anything other than dismiss Thomas Achord. And remember, they let him go days ago! I don't know this for sure, but I suspect that when the board members saw the "smoking gun" tweet above, they instantly knew what people not intimately involved with the school would not: that the photo had been taken from inside the Sequitur classroom building. That's probably why they didn't believe his protestations of innocence. I know I wouldn't have, and I don't. But if he's got a good explanation that puts him in the clear, well, let's hear it. Impugning the motives of Achord's critics is cheap and unworthy of the seriousness of this matter, both for Christian public witness, the integrity of the CCE movement, and the political future of our country.
If what Alastair Roberts reports is true -- and I believe it is -- then he and others who have worked to expose it have done a work of light. Achord, if he is truly Tulius, knows this -- which is why he posted under a pseudonym. He had to have known that it was completely unacceptable to the kind of people he was seeking to influence. And if Wolfe's particular form of Christian nationalism smuggles in racism and anti-Semitism, then those who are broadly supportive of the Christian nationalism project need to understand what's really going on here. There is nothing Christian about racism. As St. Paul teaches, "Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all." (Colossians 3:11).
We should expect Roberts and others to be attacked by those who want to keep evil shrouded in darkness. All of us who worked to expose evil in the Catholic Church, regarding sexual abuse, know exactly how this works. If they can't deny the substance of the thing, they are going to attack the supposed motives of those who expose evil.
UPDATE: Back from church, and I see that on Twitter, someone asked me the question: Achord, under his own name, published a book a couple of years ago, titled "Who Is My Neighbor? An Anthology In Natural Relations", a thick compilation of writings from the ancient past, through to the current day, reflecting on the meaning and roots of community. The book apparently advocates, at least in part, for a notion of community based in racial segregation. The question was a fair and necessary one: Did the school know about this book? If so, why did they tolerate it?
Well, I can't answer for the leadership of the school, but they had better have an answer, because the question is legitimate. My guess -- and I offer this from only knowing at a slight remove how the school was run -- is that they had no idea. When I first heard about this book last week, I looked it up online, and it appeared from its cover to be a dull, worthy reference book of the sort that is fairly common in classical Christian education communities. You know, Aristotle, Plato, Homer, et al. Later, I went back to look at the table of contents via Amazon's "Look Inside" feature of the paperback (not the Kindle), and it looked like ... a dull, worthy reference book. It was only after I read deeply into the very long table of contents that I found the "Sociology" section, which begins on page 24 (it's a very long table of contents) and my jaw fell open. There it is.
Knowing the school and its culture somewhat -- my wife taught there from 2016 until last week, when she resigned in disgust over the Achord affair, and our three kids were educated -- it is very easy for me to see how they didn't know what Achord was advocating with this book. Sequitur is a small, resource-poor school that depends on dedicated faculty working long hours at low pay to keep it going. My wife poured herself into teaching her classes, and spent immense time with preparation, and doing all kinds of things to keep the school going. I'm sure it was the same with others. It likely never occurred to anybody to look deeply into this book, beyond seeing the cover, and flipping through the first few pages of the table of contents. It appears at first glance to be an ordinary book. Besides, nobody there would think that a trusted and likable colleague and headmaster at a Christian school would argue quietly for racial segregation!
In retrospect, the school's board and others obviously should have dug deeper. They'll have to explain why they didn't. But had I been on the board, I doubt very much it would have occurred to me to suspect that a book like this had a segregationist agenda.
And this fact highlights the rationale behind the push by Alastair Roberts and other Protestant thinkers to dig deep into the new Christian nationalism movement, at least as it is defined and advocated by Stephen Wolfe, Achord's podcasting collaborator. As I understand it, Roberts and others have expressed concern that racist beliefs are being smuggled into otherwise legitimate and useful speculation and argumentation around questions of nation and community. The fact that this school's headmaster could co-edit and publish a volume with sections buried deep inside a thick text, arguing for the importance of racial segregation, and nobody at the school noticed it because the liked and respected Achord, and his work seemed superficially fine-- well, if that's not a vindication of the warnings of Roberts and other critics, what is?
It also seems hard for very online types to grasp that Sequitur faculty and others surrounding the school didn't know that Achord had a podcast with Wolfe. Again, I don't know if they did or didn't, because I have been largely absent from the school community for the past couple of years. But if I had never listened to it, and was simply told that the headmaster co-hosted a podcast about Christianity and politics, I wouldn't have given it a second thought -- especially if I had no reason to suspect that my colleague had a racialist agenda. I've never heard the podcast, so I don't know what Achord and Wolfe have said on it. It might be fine. The point is, unless you had real reason to suspect that there was something dark going on here, why would you bother listening to it, if you didn't have any interest in the topic? There are papers to grade, lesson plans to write, reading to be done -- and, for most of the teachers, families to care for.
I think what has happened to Sequitur here is a wake-up call for all classical Christian schools, to pay more attention to the things faculty and administration believe on these fronts. It's also important for parents of kids at these schools to be aware of it. What grieves me about this, aside from the pain I feel over the suffering the school will face over all this, is that it will be used by enemies of classical Christian education to try to discredit it. This would be monstrously unjust! The CCE movement is large and relatively diverse. There are black classical Christian educators who are drawn to the movement for the same reason everybody else is: they want a better education for their children than their kids can get anywhere else, one grounded in the Great Books, following a traditional pedagogical method, and framed by the Christian faith. This is hugely important, and it's why I praised the movement in my book The Benedict Option. I have seen up close the immense value of this kind of education.
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.
Moreover, it could not be more plain that global capitalism regards the nation-state as boundaries to the frictionless movement of people and capital. Globalists attack governments like Viktor Orban's in Hungary, where I now live, because the Hungarians, though capitalist and broadly liberal, because they are Westerners, nevertheless prefer to keep their own settled way of life, as much as that is possible. Thus capitalists and contemporary liberals have to demonize governments like these as bigoted and backwards, simply because the people who elect them are standing up for themselves and their people's traditions. Lily-white Sweden, the most progressive of all European countries, opened its borders to large numbers of Third World refugees, and now has a major crime problem centered in those communities. The Swedes, as good left-liberals, believed that multiculturalist lie that human beings are blank slates who can be molded easily into accepting a progressive way of life. The problem is not black or brown people per se; it's these people as bearers of radically different cultures -- cultures that do not easily mix with the settled culture of the locals.
To be clear, there is no such thing as Paradise on earth. We can only do our best to get as close to a just temporal order as possible. You solve one problem of injustice, and two more pop up. This is because human beings are fallen, fallible creatures. The presumption within classical liberalism that the ultimate goal is the freely choosing individual, unencumbered by unchosen obligations to community, place, family, or even, as of late, biology, goes deeply against human nature and flourishing. It is perfectly understandable, and indeed quite laudable, that thinkers on the Right are exploring deeper intellectual sources of thought on the meaning of community, and how to establish a just and flourishing framework within which people can live and achieve the Good.
There is no perfect community because there are no perfect people, as I said. There is also not a sole legitimate form of community, valid the world over -- as we arrogant Americans learned when we tried to impose liberal democracy on the Iraqis. A true multiculturalism would be capable of tolerating meaningful difference; tolerance doesn't mean much if you already agree with the people you are supposedly tolerating. This is the utter phoniness of the Left today: they say they value diversity, but it's only a superficial diversity, one made of up people who have different skin colors, sexual desires, and gender identities, but who all believe the same things.
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.
There are extreme circumstances in which one has to make compromises with bad people for an ultimate good. In Ukraine now, patriots fighting the Russians have to fight alongside fascists sporting the Nazi swastika. In Nazi-occupied France, Catholics joined Communists in the resistance. In the Spanish Civil War, it was all but impossible for Christians not to side with Franco's Nationalists, if only because the Stalinists and the anarchists fighting on the Republican side massacred priests and nuns. But we are very far from such a situation in contemporary America, thank God! And we have to work hard to keep that fate far from us.
What infuriates me about the Left, which has captured virtually every major institution in the United States, is that they have cast aside the classically liberal refusal to judge people as individuals, and instead judge them only as bearers of group identity. You cannot create a culture and a polity in which certain people -- in this case, whites -- are systematically disadvantaged because of their ethnic identity, and not expect the equal and opposite reaction among whites who are not intimidated by Leftist opprobrium. The best thing the Left can do to help we on the Right who reject and refuse white nationalism is to reject and refuse manifestations of racism on the Left. But antiwhite racism has become a core part of the postliberal Left's identity. The Left has accepted a form of race hatred and called it virtue, while condemning race hatred among the same kind of people it hates!
This is unjust, this is hypocritical, and this is entirely unsustainable. Marko Attila Hoare, a professor in Sarajevo, warned in a recent interview with me that the Left in power in America is driving the country towards an ethnic conflagration like that which destroyed postcommunist Yugoslavia. He said in part:
The old Yugoslavia under one-party Communist rule was a state with an ethnically diverse population, which the regime could keep united, up to a point, through a set of common values and national narrative, rooted in the common struggle against the Nazis and other foreign occupiers in World War II and relatively successful, prosperous statehood in the present. The national narrative of Tito's Yugoslavia was one that most Yugoslavs could identify with to a greater or lesser extent.
Yugoslavia was destroyed when radical Serb nationalists - led by Slobodan Milosevic's hardline Communist regime in Serbia - mobilised an ideological assault against it that emphasised ethnic differences, undermined the common Yugoslav narrative and played upon historical grievances. So, instead of emphasising the shared Yugoslav community and history of fighting foreign enemies together, Serb nationalists emphasised the Serbs' historical experience of oppression at the hands of Croat, Bosnian Muslim and Albanian fascists in World War II and, before that, at the hands of Muslim Ottoman occupiers. The result of this Serb-extremist mobilisation was to drive a wedge between the different ethnonational groups in Yugoslavia, destroying any sense of common patriotism and identity among both Serbs and non-Serbs (Croats, Bosnian Muslims, Albanians, Slovenes etc.). Ultimately, this resulted in the destruction of the common Yugoslav and Bosnian homelands and a genocide in which Milosevic and the Serb nationalists systematically destroyed Catholic churches, mosques and other buildings and parts of the heritage that they considered alien in the areas of Bosnia they occupied, erasing traces of the hated Ottoman imperial past to reforge the land according to their extremist vision of purity.
Woke activists and members of the elite in the US today are launching a similarly divisive assault on the ties that bind Americans. The US is a successful multi ethnic nation-state: whatever its past treatment of black Americans, Native Americans or other non-whites, today members of minorities can rise to the very top: Barack Obama, Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Richard Cavazos, etc. This involves the US's own national narrative resting on the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, defeat of the Confederacy, victory in World War II and ultimately incorporating Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement; the idea that people should be judged by the content of their character not the colour of their skin. Woke or identitarian ideology seeks to destroy this unifying narrative and common American identity, emphasising instead supposedly inherent, immutable racial identities and the divisions between 'good' blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans etc. and 'evil' whites. They seek to replace the positive narrative with one that reduces American history to the history of colonialism, slavery, white supremacy and imperialism. They reject Thanksgiving which most Americans celebrate. They engage in acts of systematically vandalising statues and other historical monuments - even of figures like Thomas Jefferson and Ulysses Grant - as ritual acts of expunging the hated national past in favour of their own extremist vision of purity.
Woke ideology - identity politics - represents a reaction against racial integration and in favour of maintained racial differences, much as Milosevic's Serb nationalists reacted against the integration of Serbs with Croats and Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks). Though we should note one difference that actually strengthens the comparison: Milosevic’s Serb nationalists were mostly Serbs and were abusing their own national history. Whereas woke or identitarian liberals and leftists are largely white Americans who have appropriated the name of the struggle for black and other minority rights.
He goes on:
So, I would say to members of the US elite who embrace identity politics and demonize the US as inseparable from white supremacy, colonialism etc.: you are creating a momentum whose consequences you cannot foresee. You are undermining the ties that bind Americans: their common national identity, common belief in their country, common national narrative. You are instead heightening the racial identities that divide them; the very racial differences that past white supremacists promoted. You are reducing American history to the parts that divide Americans, reopening or keeping open historical wounds. Not only is this a priori divisive, but you are also creating a potentially dangerous backlash.
He's right. White nationalism, à la Achord, is part of the backlash. White conservative Christians like Alastair Roberts and his crew, and me, will speak out against this malign ideology. But we rightly expect those on the Left to do the same in policing its own ranks. White nationalists are not powerful in this country; those who believe in discriminating openly against white people control the Democratic Party, the media, academia, law, medicine, and the commanding heights of the economy. Wherever you see "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" promoted, there you see leftist-approved racial discrimination against whites (and, increasingly, against Asians). If the Left keeps this up, then Christians like Alastair Roberts will not be able to help you suppress white nationalism, because loud and powerful voices will eventually rise up to condemn conservatives like us as useful idiots for their persecutors. Leftists who have embraced woke ideology are the best friends white nationalists could hope for. People on the Left find that claim to be outrageous, but it happens to be true. Get out of your bubbles and try, just try, to imagine what it looks like from the point of view of people not like you.
UPDATE.2: Want to respond to this:
To be as clear as I can, I read last week different tweets linking Achord to the Tulius account. A friend sent them to me because he knew that I have an association with Sequitur Classical Academy (my kids all went there, and my wife taught there till last week, when she resigned in anger over all this). I read the Tulius account, and the tweets alleging that Achord was Tulius, and sent screenshots of all of them to the school, warning them that they had better be aware of this and have a plan to deal with it, because it was blowing up. A couple of days later, I think it was, Achord was gone. I have no idea what kind of conversation the school's board had with him when he met with them, but I was told that board members recognized the "smoking gun" tweet of Tulius's featured a photo undeniably taken inside the school.
Seems clear to me that Alastair Roberts's long essay was necessary, especially given that Achord still maintains that he is not Tulius. What's more, Achord is the podcast partner of Stephen Wolfe, who followed Tulius. Why would Wolfe follow an account that tweeted clearly racist, anti-Semitic, misogynistic stuff? Even if, against overwhelming evidence, Achord is not Tulius, Achord still co-edited, under his own name, a 2020 reference book that, buried deep inside, argues for racial segregation as a social good. No Christian school could afford to have someone who believes those things as its headmaster. Here's a screenshot from the "Sociology" section in the Table of Contents of the book -- a contents section that runs to nearly 30 pages! You have to dig to find this stuff, but it's there:
Mind you, I really can't stand the way "diversity," as it's used by contemporary institutions, is meant to be an unquestionable dogma. There is lots that can and should be questioned about it, and I do often, on this blog. But it seems to me that Achord and his co-editor go far beyond that, into pro-segregationist stances. That, plus the things he appears to have said anonymously online as Tulius, makes his position as headmaster untenable. And it raises serious questions about the darker implications of Stephen Wolfe's work. I say that as someone who has not read Wolfe's work, so I neither praise nor condemn it. But given his close association with Achord, and his following of the Tulius account, I think it's very fair and necessary to expect a full statement from Stephen Wolfe about what he thinks of Achord's views, and an explanation of why his (Wolfe's) ideas about "Christian nationalism" exclude Achord's racialist beliefs, if they do.
What's more, there's this from Tulius:
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As someone who has promoted frequently in his work the Classical Christian Education movement, this is extremely worrying. If Achord is Tulius -- as I believe he is -- then he has been working as a Trojan horse within the CCE movement, to racialize it and turn it towards white nationalism. Personally, I believe in embracing and defending the cultural and religious heritage of the West, and of Christendom, of which peoples of all ethnicities who grew up in or moved to the West are heirs. The black American descendants of African slaves are no less heirs of the West than the white American descendants of Greeks and Romans. To adopt the position that Tulius does is to accept the malignant view of woke academics, who essentialize race in the same way that Tulius does, but from the opposite side. My kids all had classical Christian educations, and benefited greatly from it, I believe. But if CCE quietly becomes a vector for redpilling my children into racism and anti-Semitism, it will die, and will deserve to die.
With his comprehensive takedown of the Achord claims, Alastair Roberts has done my kids' old school a favor, and has raised broader, crucially important questions about the Christian nationalism project. I am not opposed to Christian nationalism as a general principle. I live for now in Hungary, a country led by a nationalism prime minister who asserts that his country's culture is built unapologetically on a Christian basis. Yoram Hazony, the Orthodox Jewish political theorist, actually believes that the USA needs a form of Christian nationalism. But the "Christian" in "Christian nationalism" must never be understood as a synonym for "white".
