Race With the Devil: My Journey from Racial Hatred to Rational Love

Race With the Devil: My Journey from Racial Hatred to Rational Love.  By Joseph Pearce, Saint Benedict Press, 2013.

 

Joseph Pearce has written acclaimed literary biographies of G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Oscar Wilde, Roy Campbell, and William Shakespeare, but now he as written a book about the life of a man that only he could have written– his own memoir.  Joseph Pearce as a teenager and twenty-something was an incredibly different man from the thoughtful, religious man who would study the some of the most important Christian literary figures of the twentieth century.  As a youth, Joseph Pearce was involved in radical white supremacist politics, and he would not move away from hate groups until after he fell under the influence of reading G.K. Chesterton in jail while serving a prison sentence for inciting racial hatred.  Pearce’s memoir opens with stark and detailed prose describing his mental and physical state during his time in jail, as well as his personal and spiritual transformation. 

 

“I sat in a cell in London’s Wormwood Scrubs prison on the second day of a twelve month prison sentence…

 

In those days I had been an idealistic fanatic, and I considered myself a political prisoner of an anti-British tyrannical state… I saw myself as a political soldier and a political prisoner who needed to emerge from jail in better shape physically and mentally for the renewal of the struggle…  I was at war with Britain’s multi-racial society, working tirelessly to bring it to its knees through the incitement of a race war from which the National Front would emerge, phoenix-like, from the ashes.  Such was the strategy which had animated my actions and which had led to my imprisonment…

 

As I looked despondently at the unmentionable abyss of time that the following twelve months represented, it was as though I were descending into a tunnel from which the light at the end was not yet visible.  I did not know it but I was entering the dark night of the soul of which St. John of the Cross speaks…

 

The previous day, the first full day of my sentence, had been the feast of St. Lucy, patroness of the blind.  It was a singularly appropriate date for one so blinded by bigotry to begin his dark night of imprisonment and his journey towards the light of liberation that it would signify.  I was indeed a blind man, oblivious of the saints’ days on which the miracle of conversion was being wrought, ignorant of the intercession of the saints of whose presence I was unaware, and unable to see the hand of Providence in these coincidences.  I had no light in my inner darkness except for the desire for a light I could not see.”

 

Anyone who is familiar with Pearce’s work is bound to ask, “Who is this man?  I don’t recognize him.  The man described here is nothing like the author I know from his biographies.”  There are few character arcs more complete, more thoroughly transformative, than Pearce’s personal journey.  Throughout the book, the scholarly, thoughtful Pearce interposes himself into the narrative, reflecting on how distasteful he finds his old opinions, how radical politics wrecked people’s lives, and the various regrets he has about the way he lived his life before his conversion.  Here and there, the contemporary Pearce reflects upon how certain people’s lives went in directions that he would never have expected, or how his becoming a better man was not due to a conscious effort on his own part to purge himself of his prejudices, but instead was caused by the intervention of the Holy Spirit.  Over the course of the book, Pearce’s anger and bigotry fall away, and it’s clear that he wasn’t trying to be converted, but it happened through his reading and re-examining his life.

 

Pearce’s entrance into racial politics seem to have been influenced in part by his father’s opinions, though it seems that it would be unjust to denounce his father as a hate-filled bigot, though it appears to be fair to make a comparison to Archie Bunker.  Pearce speaks warmly and affectionately of his father, a man who frequently expressed bias against certain groups of people, yet who was occasionally close friends with individuals who were members of those groups.  

 

“My father, Albert Arthur Pearce, had his own childhood rudely interrupted by the eruption of the Second World War… he left school at fourteen, having never really excelled as a student, and became a carpenter… he used to quip somewhat mischievously that there was only ever one good carpenter and that He had been crucified for His labors.

 

He grew up with all the pride and prejudice of a child of the British Empire, devoted to the pomp and circumstance of British imperial tradition, and was embittered by witnessing its dissolution and decay during his own lifetime.  His own father had been born during the reign of Queen Victoria, when the Empire was at its zenith and when it was said quite correctly that the sun never set upon it.  The emasculation of Britain in the twentieth century was a bitter pill for my father to swallow.  He held on to the romantic vision of the Empire long after it had ceased to exist in reality.  He proclaimed with bombastic bravura that there were only three types of people in the world: Englishmen, those who would like to be Englishmen, and those who didn’t know any better.  I always felt a little uncomfortable at the arrogance of such a statement but I embraced the belief that the British or the English (the words were always used interchangeably and synonymously) were somehow a chosen people, a people set apart.  We were somehow better than everyone else.”

 

The portrait of postwar, postcolonial England is not a particularly flattering one.  The religious faith of Anglicans is depicted as generally a nominal one, and his family’s religious practices were practically non-existent.  Christmas was a time for presents and Easter was for chocolate eggs, and about the only times when they went inside a church was for weddings or funerals.  Pearce’s family was not antireligious, or even particularly disbelieving, just disinterested in religious services.  He writes:

 

“Religious indifference, with its inherent tendency towards agnosticism, is, however, not synonymous with an antagonism towards religion.  Whereas atheists are antagonistic towards religion because they are anything but indifferent towards it, my parents saw Christianity as being good and benign, even if it shouldn’t be taken too seriously.  As for atheism, I’m sure that my parents would have seen it as mean-spirited, the creed of killjoy Scrooges who refused the brotherhood of man implicit in the spirit of Christmas.”

 

Today, there are numerous forces in the British government, arts and culture, education, and society that would like to see all forms of religion purged from the public sphere, and even the private sphere.  Pearce’s biographies stand as cogent arguments as to the relevance of religion to literature, art, and society.  Race With the Devil is filled with references to the vestiges of a religious culture, such as a forest named after the Virgin Mary, where neither Pearce nor any of his friends knew the true background of how the forest got its name.  For many of Pearce’s friends, racial warfare took the place of religious faith. Pearce’s book is not just a tale of his own religious journey, it is also a depiction of the spiritual state of England.

 

“Flannery O’Connor wrote of the American South that it was “hardly Christ-centered” but that it was “certainly Christ haunted.”  It would be equally true to describe England as Christ-haunted, though in England’s case it would be truer to say that the ghost of Christ is considered an unwelcome guest, a shade or shadow of the past who refuses to go away.  Thus it was that the faded figure of Christ overshadowed my own childhood, although, as with so much else, I did not know it at the time.  The shadow of His presence and the presence of His Church was everywhere, though in a form that had been grotesquely distorted by the defamation and deformation that was the consequence of England’s break from Rome.  It might, in fact, be truer to say that Christ’s faded presence was itself overshadowed by the fading presence of the English Reformation and the anti-papist propaganda that it spawned.  This, at least, is the impression that emerges as I survey the cultural landscape of my childhood, eyeing it with the wisdom of hindsight across the abyss of years that separate me from it.”

 

This is a painfully revealing book.  Pearce does not shy away from depicting his own flaws, ranging from his involvement in despicable political organizations to a failed relationship.  While he is very open about his own issues and development, he is quite right to be reticent about protecting the privacy of his other family members– this is not really an autobiography, but rather a memoir centered around his spiritual transformation.  The redemptive power of God’s grace is at the center of this book, and it can serve as helpful reading for individuals who are trying to be better people, as well as for fans of Pearce’s who may shocked and inspired by how he became the man he is today.

 

 

–Chris Chan