How Epiphany Refutes The Left’s Obsession With Race

On January 6, Christians around the world celebrate Epiphany, the Twelfth Day of Christmas. Traditionally in the West, this holiday commemorates the visit of the Three Wise Men to present their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh at the manger of Jesus Christ. While the spiritual impact of this holy day is far and away the most important aspect of the feast, it also contains an element that combats one of the most noxious elements of public discourse: an obsession with race and ethnic identity.

Initially, the holiday celebrated on January 6 commemorated the birth of Christ, as well as the visit of the Magi, Christ’s baptism by John the Baptist in the River Jordan, and Jesus’ first miracle of turning water into wine at the wedding in Cana. Each of these events came to be celebrated separately by the fourth century. In the West, the holiday came to focus on the Magi. The Bible speaks about how a shining, resplendent star led three wise men from a far country to Bethlehem, to the cradle of Christ. Early Christians said this fulfilled the words of the Prophet Isaiah, “They shall bring gold and incense, and they shall proclaim the praises of the Lord” (Isaiah 60:6), as well as the intertestamental book of Tobit, “Many nations will come from afar to the name of the Lord God, bearing gifts in their hands, gifts for the King of heaven: (13:11 [13:14 in the Douay-Rheims version]).

The early church saw profound symbolism in the gifts they brought to the newborn King: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. St. Gregory the Great, the Pope of Rome (540–604), wrote a widespread explanation:

Magi offer gold, frankincense and myrrh. Gold suited a king well; incense was presented to God as a sacrifice; and it is with myrrh that one embalms the bodies of the deceased. The magi proclaim, by their symbolic gifts, who they are worshiping. … [They] offer gold to the Lord who has just been born, confessing that he reigns in all places; offer him incense, recognizing that he who appeared in time was God before all times; offer him myrrh, recognizing that he whom we believe to be impassive in his divinity has also become mortal in assuming our flesh.

The Church also standardized the way it depicted the three wise men — who were named Balthasar, Melchior, and Gaspar (or Caspar), according to an ancient tradition — in religious artwork. The traditional Eastern icon of Christmas depicted the gift-bearing Magi as men at different stages of life: an elderly man with a white beard, an adult man with a full and dark beard, and a young man without a beard. Symbolically, their age intended to show viewers that people of all backgrounds will come to worship at the creche of Christ. Centuries later, theologians “internationalized” the three Magi and imagined them representing what people of the time considered the three branches of the human race: the descendants of Ham, Shem, and Japheth (black, Semitic, and Indo-European people, respectively). Western religious art, which had a greater focus on realism, began to change the ethnicity of two of the wise men in the fourteenth century, depicting two of the wise men as a Middle Eastern Semite and a dark-skinned African.

In today’s world, which sees self-centered grievance as the highest virtue, the Persian people would complain of “erasure in real time.” Others would see this as an act of ahistorical inclusion. But it is specifically this aspect of the feast that undermines the left-wing obsession with race and ethnicity as embodied in one of the most dominant ideologies in the West today: Critical Race Theory.

CRT and its derivative ideologies teach race essentialism, that the immutable and inborn characteristic of race and ethnicity (as well as sex) — which President John F. Kennedy called “the accident of birth” — represents the definitive aspect of our personality. CRT exponents teach that all individuals should identify with their race/ethnic status above petty, personal interests or chosen affiliations. Part of the process of transforming into a social justice warrior involves realigning one’s entire mentality with the Marxist goal of equality of outcome (known as “equity”) between ethnic groups. CRT teaches the novel idea that one has to embrace CRT’s quasi-Marxist view of the world in order to be authentically representative of his/her ethnic group. You hear echoes of this concept whenever pampered white left-wingers tell blacks from hardscrabble roots like Clarence Thomas that he is a sellout. “Squad” member Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) expressed this idea most clearly when she told Netroots Nation in July 2019, “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice. We don’t need queers that don’t