Counter-Currents
The Anti-Christian Alt-Right
A Response to Matthew Rose
Greg Johnson
1,126 words
First Things bills itself as “America’s most influential journal of religion and public life.” Founded in 1990 by Richard John Neuhaus, First Things is offers a conservative and Christian outlook on culture and politics. But, like everything else that is conservative and Christian in America today, First Things is careful to say nothing that challenges Jewish cultural and political hegemony. Thus its Christianity is of the ecumenical “Judeo-Christian” sort, and its conservatism is far more neo than paleo.
The March 2018 issue of First Things contains an essay called “The Anti-Christian Alt-Right: The Perverse Thought of Right-Wing Identity Politics,” by Matthew Rose, director and senior fellow at the Berkeley Institute, which appears to be a tiny [Judeo-]Christian and [neo-]conservative outpost in Berkeley, California.
Rose clearly has done his homework, and his article is one more sign that the cultural and political establishment now realizes that White Nationalism cannot be simply dismissed with middlebrow journalistic snark. This has created an opening for more serious scholars — like Rose, Damon Berry, and George Hawley — who actually wish to understand our ideas before dismissing them. In Rose’s words:
Almost everything written about the “alternative right” in mainstream outlets is wrong in one respect. The alt-right is not stupid. It is deep. Its ideas are not ridiculous. They are serious. To appreciate this fact, one needs to inquire beyond its presence on social media, where its obnoxious use of insult, obscenity, and racism has earned it a reputation for moral idiocy. The reputation is deserved, but do not be deceived. Behind its online tantrums and personal attacks are arguments of genuine power and expanding appeal.
Although Rose’s article focuses mostly on Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola, and Alain de Benoist, I was pleased that Counter-Currents, Gregory Hood, and my own work were mentioned — even though I reject the Alt Right “brand” and call myself a White Nationalist and a New Rightist. As a White Nationalist, I advocate ethnic homelands for all white peoples who wish to control their own destinies. As a New Rightist, I emphasize the importance of laying the metapolitical foundations for political change in order to create white ethnostates.
Rose is correct that there is an anti-Christian element in White Nationalism, and he is right to point to such thinkers as Spengler, Evola, and Benoist, although Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity is far more fundamental, influencing all three thinkers and the White Nationalist milieu in general. Rose is also correct that many White Nationalists who oppose Christianity do so from a religious rather than a secular viewpoint.
Rose is wrong, however, to describe Christianity as the “chief adversary” of White Nationalism. I think it is wrongheaded to see White Nationalism as an anti-Christian movement, as I have argued in a number of essays:
- “The Christian Question in White Nationalism”
- “Racial Civil Religion”
- “That Old Time Liberalism”
- “Christianity and European Identity”
- “An Academic Study of the North American New Right”
First, we have many Christian comrades and allies, and I see no reason to alienate them by forcing them to choose between our cause and their faith. Of course, I would not hesitate to force such a choice if I thought it necessary, which brings us to my second reason: Christianity is not our principal enemy.
Christianity lost its cultural hegemony in the seventeenth century to a new civil religion: liberalism, to which the church bends its knee in all essential matters. Even White Nationalists like me who regard the organized Jewish community as politically dominant in white societies acknowledge that this power depends on the hegemony of liberal ideas. Liberalism is our principal ideological enemy, and the organized Jewish community is our principal political enemy. It is only because of their slavish submission to liberalism and Jewish power that the Christian churches have become objective enemies of European man and civilization.
But then again, the church has always accommodated itself to various secular powers, because ultimately its kingdom is not of this world. The church has always rendered unto Caesar, and the White Nationalist struggle as I conceive it is to become the new Caesar: to destroy the hegemony of liberal universalism and replace it with a new hegemonic system of ideas that treats the survival and flourishing of our race, in all its different ethnic manifestations, as sacrosanct. The natural political consequence will be the return of white hegemony in white societies. We will again be masters of our own homes. When that comes to pass, I fully expect the churches to hunt around for biblical and theological rationales for accepting the new order.
And, as Rose so helpfully mentions, there is no reason for the church to dispute the legitimacy of natural feelings of partiality and preference for one’s kin over strangers or one’s nation over foreigners. Indeed, as Aquinas points out in his Questions on Charity, divine grace need not cancel out natural hierarchies but can pass through them. Thus, there is absolutely nothing “perverse” about white identity politics from a natural or a Christian point of view.
I must dispute Rose’s dismissive remarks about race, such as “race is a modern category, and lacks theological roots.” I wonder if he would be willing to wave away concerns about such modern problems as global warming, cloning, and online privacy in the same airy fashion. Does he dismiss concerns to preserve endangered species of tigers and rhinos because “race is a modern category, and lacks theological roots”?
Rose’s statement that “Race offers no inheritance, and its mere preservation reflects no human achievement” is near nonsense. Races are extended kinship groups. Would he say the same thing about the family? Our race is our extended family. It is our genetic heritage. And the whole of modern culture belies the claim that its preservation is no human achievement, since the entire cultural and political mainstream of the West, including the churches, are hell-bent on promoting the intellectual deconstruction and physical replacement of the white race.
As I argue in my essay “White Extinction,” all the recognized biological causes of extinction apply to the white race today. Furthermore, in my essay “White Genocide” I argue that these conditions have been imposed by political policies and thus can be reversed by political policies. The destruction of the white man, just as surely as the destruction of the white rhino, is very much a “human achievement.” And saving our race is a human achievement as well.
Many Christians have the residual good sense to see that there is an ongoing war against the family and that it needs to be defended both intellectually and politically. The same is true of the white race, and until Christians realize this, the principal intellectual influences on the rising tide of populist nationalism will be non-believers like me.
15 comments
“The church has always rendered unto Caesar, and the White Nationalist struggle as I conceive it is to become the new Caesar…” Just as it has accommodated itself to resolutely anti-Christian groups and interests for centuries. A very tidy debate point.
Good point about the church. Perhaps it would be politically opportune to bash the church rather than Christianity. People might even think we know the difference.
“Christianity lost its cultural hegemony in the seventeenth century to a new civil religion: liberalism, to which the church bends its knee in all essential matters”
Very well put. Somebody understands the situation.
“It is only because of their slavish submission to liberalism and Jewish power that the Christian churches have become objective enemies of European man and civilization.”
It became so long before, even from its inception, as many of this blog’s contributors who follow “anti-christian” spiritual paths will confirm.
As to abrahamism, and monotheism, in general, I will just bring up your own articles on The Amazing Assman.
We mustn’t reject any tool that can be put to out use. There is more poison than there is use in christianity, yeah, but at this point in time (ACTUAL) conservative christians are on our side and christianity as a framework has its use.
I’ve seen reference on counter-currents a few times over the years to the following site, which defends racial separation and pro-white outlook according to Christian belief.
http://www.faithandheritage.com
http://faithandheritage.com/2018/03/christians-are-welcome-in-the-alt-right/
Thanks for including these links. I did not know of those sites but am glad I found them. The mission statement of Faith & Heritage in itself will be a useful communication tool to reach people with a grounding in Christian faith who are yet terribly confused by the hyper-liberal false-moralisms of the day.
As I always say: it´s all simply a problem of the mind… all in the Zen sense:
yes! : for the mind, you can always twist and turn it six ways to Sunday: there is no race… construct… moral… blah blah
Then you turn to what you feel, doesn´t take a second to know: I want to be with MY people.
That´s all I need to know.
Not more difficult than that.
In sum, Greg,
Is Christianity currently our friend? No.
When will they be our friend? After we win.
Well that’s not very useful, is it?
Christianity has about as much relevance and utility to this movement as it does to molecular biology.
I put the following forward: The old Aryan pantheon died a natural death, but the natural European replacement did not have the chance to fill that void; instead, the stoicism of Seneca, Cicero, and Aurelius was superseded by the religion from the desert. What we ought to do is back track to that fork in the road and take the path the West would have taken had it been as physically isolated from the East as it was from Easter Island.
The natural law, the logos, arta / aretê: looking at the inherent order of the universe and seeking to see and foster that same order within one’s self and in society is the true religion of the white man.
We are anti-Christian in our outlook and goals, and most of our major thinkers throughout the last two centuries (Nietzsche, Klages, Evola, Crowley, Cioran, Serrano…) were anti-Christian, very much so.
I see no point in shirking from this fact. In fact, it is something that can be weaponized: liberal modernity is a product of christianity, and they belong to the same repressive old order.
AfterThought wrote: “Christianity has about as much relevance and utility to this movement as it does to molecular biology.”
Yet it could easily and successfully be argued that Greco-Christian religious ideas, practice and culture had everything to do with establishing the foundation upon which European cultures were built.
And it could more easily be argued that an isolated white nationalism, removed from its entire organic context and presented as an abstract ideal, is more similar to a specialization or a reduction into a fractional science as is ‘molecular biology’.
My ideas in respect to the topic of what has happened to Europe that has so weakened it and so removed it from its foundation and its roots, and rendered it exploitable and penetrable by hyper-liberalism, have to do with losing its relation to itself — to its ‘soul’ I might say. It is not the ‘idea’ of oneself that has been lost, but rather one has really become lost. Self-recovery is therefor spiritual and existential.
From my own understanding of things I would venture to say that it is the loss of the strong relationship to a genuine European religiosity — the Greco-Christian traditions in their widest possible sense which very definitely included paganism and pagan ‘concerns’, if I can put it like that; in short, European Paideia — that marks the point at which Europe begins to dissolve. I use ‘Europe’ as an ideal symbol here which must be recovered.
I do not think it possible to intellectually impose by intellectual fiat a new religious sensibility into Europe. My impression, open to critique and correction, is that some intellectual-pagan thinkers have the formula backwards: they have themselves, intellectually and perhaps with some life-adjustments, imposed on themselves a sort of intellecto-religious program and they imagine that this can be imposed on European culture. To speak of going back to the historical fork in the road when the urban Christian conqueror chained down the pagan European tribesman and from that imagined point forging a new road, seems to me an unreal phantasy that only arises in an isolated individual. I do not think it is going to happen that way!
It is one thing to propose things — in this case an entire cultural regeneration! — from an intellectual platform, but it seems quite another to really establish such renovation and to set it into motion. I venture to say that if there is going to be a European renovation in the true sense of the word, which also means in an enduring way, that it will only happen and can only happen thorough cultural renovation which very definitely involves the spirit and spiritual concerns.
It seems a folly to imagine dismissing and excluding the traditions of ideation that are so intricately tied up with Europeanism. Rather one has to work to rediscover them all over again and to incorprate them all over again into the way in which one lives. Given that many people — tens of thousands? millions? — are responding to our powerful ideas, it can be supposed that ‘we’ are ripe for a wide social and cultural renovation. It is something that is longed for.
I do not think that a mere intellectual paganism of the Evolian or Nietzschean sort will succeed on its own in ispiring the movement we seek in a wide and enduring sense. The reason is because these come from the head and not from the heart, more from the mind and less from the soul. It is the soul that has to be brought back to life and to then push away all that is destructive and undermining: the rot of hyper-liberalism.
It is true — true indeed —- that the ‘desert religion’ entered Europe through the Judaic vessel. But Christopher Dawson made an interesting observation about that. He pointed out that Judaism is itself the ‘modern’ tip of traditions that extend back to ‘time immemorial’. The Greco-Christian and philosophic traditions which informed Europe are very much those of Europe and in this sense are ‘ours’ exclusively. And we have taken many different ideas and moulded them to our own purposes. And this is so of the desert religion.
So, from where I stand I see it is vital and necessary to reclaim and recapture the entirety of what makes us us through a process of full-bodied rediscovery of ‘who we are’. It is non-intelligent to establish any breach between cultural Christianity and this movement. Far better to see and understand how Greco-Christian forms and ideas can be revitalized in our present.
“Liberalism is our principal ideological enemy, and the organized Jewish community is our principal political enemy. It is only because of their slavish submission to liberalism and Jewish power that the Christian churches have become objective enemies of European man and civilization.” Exactly. And let’s not forget either that the neo-pagan movement and academic Nietzscheanism haven’t fared much better. If we are going to oppose anything the Jews and liberalism have infiltrated, subverted and distorted then we’ll end up opposing just about everything including entertainment, art, philosophy, literature, music, etc. It’s a case of not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I’m open to debate and realise that to succeed White Nationalism will have to appeal to a broad range of people, however, it has got to be said that it is very often cowards who criticise Christianity, because such criticism never results in imprisonment – hence it’s an easy target focussed on by those who don’t understand or daren’t understand Jewish power. Most Christians know in their heart of hearts that Jewish control of the world has been bad for civilisation and that a world without white people will be a world without Christianity. Over the centuries The Church has been heavily influenced by Classicism, which basically means it is no longer ‘a desert religion’ and has in effect become a white religion; and even though there have been shallow eccentrics such as Lord George Gordon who do try and get back to the desert, philosophers such as Justus Lipsius (Neostoicism) have far more been more the norm. I was lucky, an English Public School, (which means private in American terms), gave me a Classical Education, a Stoic Philosophy, a Christian religion and made me a White Nationalist. No contradiction at all.
Hellenism was a dead hand from the get-go.
Rose et alia might consider that the religious decline of America parallels its racial decline.
For example, until the 1960s the content of movies was generally pro-family, pro-patriotic and pro-Christian. But the revolutions in civil rights and in immigration which took off in the 1960s and paralleled the sexual revolution saw a continual erosion in the credibility and authority of the Church. One aspect was in the loss of influence of the various Christian denominations on the content of the movies (for better or worse). Given the tremendous propaganda power of Hollywood, this likely rebounded in a loss of respect for traditional religion.
It just may be there was a racial component to the Christianity which in turn was a foundation for Manifest Destiny and then the struggle against communism during the Cold War. Change a country’s race, change its culture, change its religion. And then open its people up for conquest by alien elements and/or global level secularism.
This is something that First Things needs to consider as secularism-consumerism replaces Christianity in the Western world.
For example, until the 1960s the content of movies was generally pro-family, pro-patriotic and pro-Christian
I rent films older than that (1940s) and they were already sneaking in anti-white hostility by way of the “let’s blow the lid off those [implicitly white] middle class suburbs” subject matter. Hollywood in its wisdom will show the world what hypocrites those townspeople really are!
The toe in the door. Who lived in those tidy suburbs? Check. Who constituted the middle class? Check. All in a pro-patriotic, pro-Christsian, pro-family framework.
Maybe I sound paranoid, but now in any movie that wasn’t made in Japan I look for underlying themes that occasionally are barely there. Sometimes, though, it is so obvious it is painful, such as that P.O.S. “Giant”. Even the westerns are not safe.
The Gospel of John speaks to “all” humanity: “You must be born again”
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