Hot as Sin

Turns out your Sunday Church was all about Climate Studies, but God left the Global South on read

Your religion could be backed by logic after all. Wait, hold up, don’t just throw rocks at me yet.

Christianity paints the heaven as above the clouds, cool and calm, and very- I mean, VERY white, but the hell as the hot, dirty, dark fiery pit of the underworld. This concept is eerily similar to the world map, with the Global North housing the colder and Whiter countries, while the Global South housing the hotter countries filled with sweaty coloured bodies. The closer one is born to the Equator, the higher the chances of getting eternally damned to hell!

Latitudes were used as social ladder, and geography and climate were used to define morality-by-birth. The angels are born in the frosty Europe and America, but demons are from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, Ethiopi, born already halfway to hell.

While your God floats on the clouds, He throws his demons to swim in the muddy swamps. How benevolent indeed!

This logic has validated the master race during colonisation. The Whites claimed to know the history of the people of the wilderness better. They decided to civilise the exotic people of the Global South whose brains were fried by the Sun’s heat that pushed the coloured people to the brink of insanity.

Those to whom the Sun is kinder have been weaponising their place of birth and its climate to position themselves higher than the ones misfortunate enough to be born under the Sun’s unforgiving glare. Not only are they situated at the north of the map, but also, politically, at the top of the world.

Just how mortals spend their lives trying to secure a position in the heavens in the afterlife, the Southerners aspire to migrate to the Whiter and colder countries of the North. The unwelcome demons of the underworld are still told to ‘go back to where you came from’ by the natives of the heavenly countries. Though it is the Whites who had been colonising the world for centuries, the relocation of these brown and black bodied demons into Whiter spaces is viewed as a threat but the blonde who visits India to learn Yoga is seen as the angel who has graced the hot land with their presence. Just like the heaven is symblised with hope and prosperity, so are the Northern countries, while the Global South represent the dead end that needs to be escaped. However it is ironic that the Northerners come to this same dead end to ‘find themselves’ among the dirt and dust.

Language is a powerful political tool. Have you observed the contexts of usages of the words hot and cool? The former is used to emphasise the wildness and exoticity of the subject...almost carnal, but the latter is used in a context of calmness and freshness, quite similar to the word chill. Heat is disturbing, passionate, wild, excessive. A hot mess. A hot-blooded temper. It is even used to describe lust, attraction and sinful desire. But cool is approving, calm, composed and collected. A cool head is the rational mind of a civilised man, the voice of reason, of the Western science and logic. Cool is chill and safe.

This is a careful orchestration of a narrative meant to ensure power for ages because climate does not shift overnight. It starts with science but is followed by a bunch of fictional stories. This has ensured a permanence of suspicion. One can redraw the borders of nations on the map, but the Sun will remain hot. And this is used by the Whites into making the coloured people believe that maybe because of their sins, the world conspires against them, that the Sun disagrees to be kind to them. Christianity uses climate to justify that the Whites have earned the pleasant heat. Everyday when the Sun rises and shines bright, it feeds into this morally superior ego of the Whites. Hence, the relocation of the coloured bodies is seen as intrusion onto their heavenly land, intrusion of those who do not deserve the kinder Sun. With the destiny being determined by the birthplace, the hierarchy feels inevitable and unchangeable.

What started with climate, is now all about good jeans, or rather as American Eagle likes to say, genes. Their campaign with Sydney Sweeney was more a dog-whistle to the eugenics than a mere harmless pun. The White face with blonde hair and slender body is marketed as the ideal White Christian appearance, approved by scientific racism. The Christian God in White robe defines what humans should look like, damning everyone else who do not possess the ideal Eurocentric features.

The heavenly Father gatekeeps morality, sanity, calmness, purity, and even humanity, leaving the coloured demons sweating at the threshold.

I am Disha Sarkar, an English Literature graduate from India. I like to read and study about races, classes, castes, marginalised communities, gender, languages and cultures.