God-Emperor Trump & Lord Kek
Toward an Alt-Right Religion

2,646 words

I

We in the Alt Right tend to regard our internal religious debates as pointless and divisive; Atheist or Anglican or Asatru, we feel, target each other for denunciation or proselytization only to the detriment of our cause. Thus we often adopt a playful cynicism when dealing with the subject of religion so as to avoid intragroup strife and hurt feels. Consider, for example, one of our Twitter stalwarts’ wry play-by-play of a recent Alt-Right religious kerfuffle:

“ChristCuck” attacks “dirt-worshipper”; according to rescue workers, thousands of opinions feared unchanged. 

Despite pervasive reticence, however, many of us continue to dream of mapping out some kind of Alt-Right religious system or systems. We question the commonplace idea that people are best served by rejecting organized religions out of hand, though at first glance this advice seems well-intentioned and even sound.  Westerners of course do not typically wage jihad to coerce people’s beliefs to fall in line under a single, unifying gospel; we’ve all been reared on the secular precepts of cultural and moral relativism, in which everyone is right in their own special way and everyone only glimpses contingent truths for-the-moment and for themselves alone.

But what results from such attitudes in the long term? Around us we see what should be a heuristic paradise, but nothing connects with nothing. We are all these solitary pseudo-shamans claiming a discreet, personal, atomized angle on the truths of the universe, each equally valid but equally irreconcilable with those of another. There is no community, no continuity. There’s nothing to learn from your ancestors or teach your kids since everyone should just, like, work it out for themselves . . . or not.

Against this laissez-faire, anything-goes mindset we hold that the only experience worth having, religious or otherwise, over the long term, is one that can be shared with likeminded folk. Interconnectivity of experience and belief reinforces a people’s identity and steels them against strife, stupidity, and genocide. The stone endures while disconnected, particulate sands scatter in a limp breeze.

II

Besides, the idea that “anything goes” in the modern West is a thin facade. Scratch its surface and find a codex of religious dogmas as rigidly prohibitive as any verse of Leviticus or sura of the Koran: anti-essentialism, cultural Marxism, secular materialism, hate speech codes, social justice, and radical egalitarianism. Masters of these strict protocols claim as their sacred mission the destruction of mean, oppressive, hierarchical power structures. But this, too, is total bullshit: in the act of toppling the old order they’ve simply installed themselves. Now new Pharisees in government, academia, the mainstream media, and the commercial sphere mutter shibboleths of “fairness” and “diversity” only to perpetuate their power grab. The universalizing crypto-church they’ve raised holds, for us, no hope of salvation; it demands only our non-existence.

As if this weren’t bad enough, there is another global religion out there demanding our non-existence. While the self-righteous egalitarians gleefully deconstruct our identity with their magic words, jihadists simply want us dead; they relish deconstructing our neck vertebrae with their knives and our nightclubs with their AKs and our Palmyras with their C-4. That the egalitarians zealously welcome this latter group into our homelands in large numbers means the endgame of their professed tolerance is nothing but a two-tiered intolerance towards us, a rhetorical and actual death sentence.

So, while we in the modern West like to brag about being “beyond all that religious stuff,” in truth we’re increasingly crushed between the armies of Leftist Egalitarianism and Islam, religious ideologies that could not be less similar except that they work in concert against us.

III

It is through realizing the threats we face, both demographic and spiritual, from these twin death cults that many of us have been redpilled into to the Alt Right’s ranks from normie secularism or atheism, cucked Christianity, or autistic Libertarianism — seeking a climate less comfortable and more bracing. Let’s face it: when jihadists chanting Allahu Akbar recently decapitated Fr. Jacques Hamel in the middle of morning Mass in Rouen, Pope Francis could have done with a bit more harshness, perhaps a wee bit of pushback. But no, he could not bring himself to condemn the sawing-off of his underling’s head. He offered boilerplate more in line with the Church of the Globalist Egalitarians than with the church he purportedly heads: All religions want peace!

Yawn. This was never true. But now that jihadists live in western societies in large numbers, the lie is ever more apparent. The basis for western religious tolerance — that rosy, libertarian, Jeffersonian notion that it does us “no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god” since “it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg” — seems no longer to apply. Godless Marxist zealots pick our pockets while monotheist Muslims break our necks and hymens. We can no longer afford the breezy indifference of an open, tolerant, unaffiliated mind.

IV

So what to do? What to believe? We would ask it this way: what do we want our beliefs to do? For the religion of the Alt Right, in all its forms, is refreshingly pragmatic.

We have already touched on the ramifications of collective belief: get everyone reading from the same script to consolidate your power, as Constantine knew at the Council of Nicaea and as ISIS knows today. And it is almost true to say that the Alt Right is only interested in religion insofar as it satisfies such political exigencies. But not quite: the social and political effects of a belief are a sum of its effect on individuals. The social cohesion elicited by shared belief is no good if it turns us, individually speaking, into sad robots, cowards, or cuckolds — which would, in turn, render the collective nothing to be particularly proud of.

So though any manner of collective worship may unify us, we refuse to be unified in self-defeat. We refuse to honor alien, universalizing gods who don’t honor us back, who appear to think that we are fungible with other individuals and peoples. We refuse to abase ourselves before a jealous god — it is we who should be jealous of a god who puts others before us. We condemn the migrant-loving, pathological altruism of the Current Year’s pope. We blast the Evangelical Israel-firsters of the pastor Hagee stripe. We scoff at notions of endemic, original sin (“white guilt” or “white privilege”) and their groveling atonements in the virtue-signaling cult of childless volunteers in the South Sudan. We reject even the belief in a personal savior who is supposed to have already done the work of squaring up our shortfalls with the divine — turning us into idle, passive observers, i.e. cucks. Any such shortfall we claim as effortspace for own great spiritual work.

Beyond that, we’re flexible. We would believe in the divinity of a smug green frog or real estate mogul if we thought he’d reward our affections by blessing us with virtù and hale prolificacy.

V

Considering this pragmatic bent, many of us appear to want, in terms of an Alt Right religion, something more or less along the lines of the following, posted by an anonymous commenter on our forums:

We need some esoteric, occult shit for the elites and some low level, low grade crypto-ancestor worship/glorification of the past for the proles. See where it goes from there.

To this a more “no-nonsense” Alt-Righter provides the inevitable retort:

You love your mother for no other reason than she is your mother. If that’s not a good enough reason for you, all the esoteric bullshit in the world isn’t going to help you.

Both positions are valid. But the objection of the latter only proves the former’s point. Our religion must accommodate the range of outlooks and inclinations one gets even in a homogeneous population — of cops and provocateurs; of soldiers and statisticians and poets. Some of us are literal-minded Gradgrinds by nature, and there is nothing wrong with that or any getting around it. Such types, looking in justified horror at how our enemies’ religious sophistry has gotten many in the West to supplant their natural love of kin with “universal love,” would think “occult esoterica” only likewise clouds and complicates a straightforward, inviolable issue — endangering further supplantation.

To this the former commenter would say that esoterica, and religious symbols in general, are not scaffolding to prop up or enshadow our love, but are expressions of it. There is a tradition in the west, especially among the pagans of Classical antiquity, to see such symbols, in stone or in song, as projections of the artist’s inner qualities rather than as merely depictions of distant, pre-existing ideals, gods, or objective realities. This is why the classical poets from Hesiod to Ovid could take such liberties when giving their own version of their respective culture’s religious theogonies. Xenophanes went so far as to suggest that if cows and horses had hands and could draw, they would make their gods look like cows and horses.

VI

Feuerbach and Marx seize upon this idea that the gods might be mere projections as a reason to reject religion. But they would ask a poem to prove its merit using only addition, subtraction, and bags of onions or cement, and then sigh patronizingly when the poor poem fell short. Their critique of religious belief — that it has no recourse to concrete evidence or empirical data — tries to bully us into accepting that the only worthwhile accounting to be made of anything comes through means that religion cannot provide. But no human phenomena — no feelings of desire, curiosity, dread, love, hate, awe, purpose; no flight of fancy or invention — translate into the hard sciences without being stripped of the qualities that make them make sense to us. What good is it to say that because these things can’t survive the trip they are untrue? Being pragmatists in matters of religion, we feel there is no meaningful distinction to be made between the objective existence of the Parthenon, which is a “mere” projection of our aspirations to commune with the divine, and the existence of Athena herself. She exists through her effects, i.e., the Parthenon.

We are not a rigidly dogmatic people. Inventiveness is, for us, a potentially sacral act. Nietzsche held the invention of gods to be, rather than an act of self-delusion, a priceless exercise of self-sovereignty. Our desire to commune with the infinite by creating anew, and the successful projection of that desire in productions glorious and rare — from megaliths and myths to dank memes — is, for us, and as William James would say, the positive content of religious experience.

(Please. We are not here to say whether or not the gods really exist as ontic entities, or whether the actual holds primacy over the possible or vice versa — these are painfully autistic questions to be asking in light of our current crisis.)

VII

So the Alt Right provides a wide table, accommodating heterodox theologies and hermeneutics. Here a worshipper of Lord Kek or God Emperor Trump could break bread with a devout Rodnover; a Mormon may toast his fruit punch — skál! — with a mead-chugging Asatrur / Odinist and a wine-sipping materialist atheist.

Do we sound friendly and flexible to a fault? Too much like the current secular dispensation of unaffiliated, easy-going slouchers? Whence comes the unifying, bracing rigidity we claimed to need in the face of the current Islamist and liberal-egalitarian jihad?

It comes via an ethical question — the iron question: is it good for the Europeans? On this point we are fundamentalists. With this as a first principle, one can — to quote another of our commenters — implement a Kantian categorical imperative without being a faggot.

For too long we in the west have been conditioned to ask only how we might be good Europeans, which was assumed to be tantamount to asking how we could best benefit non-Europeans. The Merkel-style semi-man can never say no when browns demand gibs; he would offer up his chair, wallet, wife, law, history, and future in hopes of signaling, if only for one glorious moment, his virtue. What a beacon of selflessness he is! A holy advocate and catalyst of perpetual third world smiles!

This pathological deference takes many forms. It has altered the demographics of our neighborhoods and nations, overhauled the personnel and programming of entertainment and news networks, and changed what passes for (((higher education in the humanities))). The list goes on. Nowhere in the West, it seems, is safe from the “Great Erasure,” from Europeans’ crusade against themselves.

The Alt Right practices radical pushback against such cuckoldry as a sacred duty and an act of religious devotion.

VIII

Our devotion takes at least as many forms as the chimera of pathological deference we must slay. The green shoots of our first principle we gather and bind into three fasces: Procreation. Education. Invention.

Unless we keep ourselves healthy and strong, and produce healthy, strong children, any other consideration quickly becomes kinda irrelevant; we will fade and die and become a memory, until we cease to be even that. Thus we honor non-degenerate Motherhood and Fatherhood. We unabashedly encourage stable families and eugenic breeding practices as a religious principle.

Unless we religiously instill in ourselves and our children the story of our ancestors and their achievements (and even make lessons of their failures), we endanger the future to the great oubliette. An uncultivated, trivial mind is susceptible to distraction and amenable to enemy propaganda. So while modern SWPLs in yoga pants practice meditation or mindfulness, devoutly clearing their heads in order to better contemplate their momentary feels or their caramel macchiatos, we relentlessly cultivate in our mental spaces the seeds we inherit from our ethno-genetic and civilizational past.

Against cultural relativism, deconstruction, SJW spin, and the ravages of digitized prolefeed we thus honor as a religious principle the thoughts and deeds and creations of our forbears — artistic, scientific, martial, poetic, philosophical. With William Gayley Simpson we hold that the great works of the West provide us with the most holy scripture — Nietzsche our nobler Leviticus; Shakespeare our subtler Ecclesiastes. An Alt Right Civic Religion would cease to teach the bland, universalizing “love thy neighbor as thyself”; we would sooner draw lessons from Odysseus’ vengeance on the upstart suitors.

The fragments of Heraclitus; Being and Time; The Rite of Spring; the longship; the Lunar Rover; the battle of Thermopylae; the Pantheon; L’Apothéose d’Hercule; Götterdämmerung — these speak from us and to us. They are our sacred texts and divine monuments. We will never take them for granted, heart-breakingly rare as they are amid the dumb, frozen desolations of the universe.

IX
Templum Deorum

But we do no honor to our forbearers if we are so busy honoring them we become past-oriented, dogmatic, and uncreative. We must avoid being Emerson’s “meek young men” who “grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books.”

A religious revolution must be made by and for its moment. Every new generation, if they are in touch with the pulse of the day and draw from the infinite, will make high art and occult shit and myths and gods anew. Fortuitously, providentially, Keks and Trumps will arise at the opportune moment and in the nick of time. Genius will regenerate, as of old.

We thus find the Alt Right is not merely the “Alternative Right.” Though it is a new movement, it is part of the revolutionary, creative, inventive instinct that is ancient in us. Indeed, there something very Alt (i.e. German for “old”) in the Alt Right, i.e. ,we are the old right made anew to displace the erstwhile Right-wing, the neocons, cowards, and cucks, to revive our old civilization with new fervor, focus, and love.