Counter-Currents
Painting by Charles-Philippe Larivière of the Battle of Montgisard in 1177 (ca. 1842)
3,554 words
If there ever was a civilization that deserves the name of Renaissance, this was the civilization of the Middle Ages. In its objectivity, its virile spirit, its hierarchical structure, its proud antihumanistic simplicity so often permeated by the sense of the sacred, the Middle Ages represented a return to the origins. — Julius Evola[1]
Author’s note: I offer this essay as a response of sorts to Robert Hampton’s recent contribution, “Is America a More ‘Christian’ Nation than Ever Before?” It’s not exactly a reply, as this essay has been in development for quite a while; nor is it intended as a rebuttal, since Mr. Hampton’s conclusion — that the acolytes of “social justice theology” make use of (and perhaps even believe in) a modified, secularized Christian belief system to advance their agenda — is incontestable. Perhaps “supplement” or “footnote” is more appropriate. My purpose is to counter the contemporary depiction of Christianity, by adherents as well as enemies, as a proto-Leftist religion of man, and to establish that this secularized theology is not a “modification” of the faith but rather a bastardization. I do not expect this to sway the avowedly anti-Christian or to affect a revaluation among Christian apologists for the New Order. However, I do hope that it will serve as a corrective to certain contemporary heresies, play a role in recovering an important aspect of our European heritage, and help those still loyal to the faith of our fathers to acquire a new perspective on their beliefs.
While definitions of “humanism” vary, ranging from the fairly banal focus on human needs to the fifteenth-century revival of classical letters, contemporary humanism is most often defined by its atheism, egalitarianism, and progressive politics. A suitable definition of this ideology, featuring all the necessary shibboleths, comes from Humanist magazine:
Humanism is a rational philosophy informed by science, inspired by art, and motivated by compassion. Affirming the dignity of each human being, it supports the maximization of individual liberty and opportunity consonant with social and planetary responsibility. It advocates the extension of participatory democracy and the expansion of the open society, standing for human rights and social justice.
Humanism in the modern West is typically portrayed as a legacy of the Italian Renaissance, which is itself understood as a revolt by classical scholars against the otherworldliness of medieval Christianity. Nowadays, however, mainstream Christianity is firmly in the humanist camp, with the pontiff of Rome waxing lyrical on the “infinite dignity of every human being” and both Catholic and mainline Protestant churches promoting a variant of social justice that prioritizes material welfare over any traditional concern with the salvation of souls, the inculcation of virtue, or spiritual transcendence. Mainstream Christianity has, in other words, become a de facto religion of mankind — one that worships, more often than not, its basest representatives.
This contemporary religious humanist perspective, which can be traced to the centuries-long “feminization of Christianity” and the infection of many sects by modernist heresies like liberation theology, naturally repels individuals of a classical, conservative, and reactionary spirit. Indeed, despite their hubristic self-image as heralds of a reborn classical civilization, many of the major figures of the Italian Renaissance merely adopted the irreligion, materialism, and worst excesses of Imperial paganism rather than the cold piety of ancient Rome. Their humanism was a rejection of the transcendent and deeply religious ethos of classical civilization, and it is a softer version of this humanism that we see in many churches today. This weak-minded, limp-wristed moralism represents the type of Christianity that Nietzsche justly criticized and ridiculed.
However, it was the faith of historic Christendom — the adaptation of ancient Christianity to Greco-Roman and Frankish society which, following Oswald Spengler, I refer to as “Gothic Christianity” — that gave us the soaring cathedrals, knightly orders, chivalric code, and Grail legends of the Middle Ages. As a corrective to contemporary misunderstandings, I offer the following theses.
1. Gothic Christianity is elitist and hierarchical, not egalitarian.
Christianity teaches that all souls will be judged by God after death. This does not mean that all judgments will have the same outcome. Nor does it mean that humans are equal in any other respect. It does mean that kings will be judged as well as peasants, and the peasant who lives righteously and performs his role well will be judged more favorably than an inept and vicious king. A spiritual hierarchy therefore exists, though it may not necessarily correspond to the earthly one. Such postmortem judgments are common among the religions of the world, yet I’ve never heard anyone accuse Pharaonic Egypt of egalitarianism.
The contemporary association of Christianity with democratic egalitarianism is a form of heresy, unknown to the early Church. Indeed, as opposed to contemporary Christian’s mawkish insistence that all people are “children of God,” Gothic Christianity tended to view most men as little better than beasts — often worse, in fact. The true human life is the life of reason, virtue, and godliness, and those who give themselves over to sensual pleasure and wickedness are generally regarded as subhuman. All men cannot indiscriminately be called children of God, but only those who follow the path of the “new man” or “athlete of Christ”; as St. Paul writes, “If we are children [of God], then we are heirs — heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory” (Romans 8:16-17).
You can buy Julius Evola’s East & West here.
Gothic Christianity accepted that there were differences among humans in terms of gifts, virtues, and bloodlines. The mere possession of a soul does not mean that this soul is well-used, and some people are incapable of self-rule and therefore must be ruled by others of superior virtue and wisdom. It was for this reason that early Christianity accepted monarchy and slavery. This was reinforced by the Church Fathers, who obtained further rationale in the writings of the Greeks and Romans. Similarly, some people are, by grace and effort, more capable of attaining theosis and achieving sainthood in this mortal realm. The communion of saints does not consist solely of monks, priests, and hermits, but includes kings and warriors as well: Joan of Arc, Martin of Tours, Louis the Pious.
Unlike modern teaching, which would have us believe that we could all be millionaires and celebrities if these oppressive social systems didn’t keep bringing us down, there is a definite elitism to the traditional Christian view. It is not, like other elitisms, predicated on wealth or birth or doctrinal knowledge, but on a spiritual quality. Through grace, ascesis, faith, and good works, all could potentially achieve a higher state after death — but it is only given to the very few to achieve such a state in life. Once again, it is important to note that the possession of superior gifts does not entitle the possessor to unjust privileges or cruelty. Indeed, it requires a life of humility and self-sacrifice: “The greatest among you shall be your servant.” The Christian does not live for himself, but sacrifices himself to serve his God and his people. To again quote St. Paul, “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service” (Romans 12:1).
2. Gothic Christianity’s ultimate goals are liberation, salvation, and transcendence, not universal material welfare.
Just as it is sometimes thought to preach the equality of all mankind, Christianity is alternately praised and blamed for placing the universal improvement of human welfare above all other concerns. This, it is argued, is the end result of a theology of universal “love” and “charity.”
There are few words in the English language more misused than “love.” When mainline pastors and pop stars rhapsodize that “God is love” or reference the overplayed greeting-card version of 1 Corinthians (“love is patient, love is kind,” etc.), the whole idea naturally sounds quite effeminate and off-putting to those of a reactionary temperament. As used in the New Testament, “love” is a translation of the Latin caritas, and its frequently used cognate — “charity” — hardly sounds any better to contemporary ears. It conjures up images of soup kitchens, checkbooks, and Sally Struthers, and while commendable in itself fails to capture the radical nature of the concept. “Charity” and “love” have unfortunately become synonymous with contemporary ideologies of social justice, thereby diminishing mainline Christianity into a form of bourgeois philanthropy (at best) or revolutionary ideology (at worst).
Caritas is a Latin translation of the Greek agape. Both words connote a type of love or benevolence that is more aptly applied to God’s love for mankind, connoting radical self-sacrifice and magnanimity. In the Christus Victor view of atonement, Christ’s Incarnation, life of service, sacrificial death, and triumphant Resurrection were all undertaken to liberate mankind from the prince of the world and all of his snares — one of which was the dry legalism of Jewish law, which made man’s relationship to God a purely judicial transaction. In this interpretation, through Christ’s intervention man is offered the possibility of genuine transcendence, union with God, or the beatific vision. Caritas is a theological virtue whereby we are enjoined to emulate the radical and self-sacrificing agape of God in seeking to realize our own divinity. Oswald Spengler contrasts the sentimental moralism of today’s churchgoers with the radical, dynamic caritas of Gothic Christianity:
But we must not confuse this sympathy in the grand religious sense with the vague sentimentality of the everyday man, who cannot command himself . . . That which in civilized times is called social ethics has nothing to do with religion, and its presence only goes to show the weakness and emptiness of the religiousness of the day . . . But compassion likewise demands inward greatness of soul, [exemplified by] the most saintly servants of pity, the Francis of Assisi, the Bernard of Clairvaux, in whom renunciation was a pervading fragrance, to whom self-offering was bliss, whose caritas was ethereal, bloodless, timeless, historyless, in whom fear of the universe had dissolved itself into pure, flawless love.[2]
This caritas does include acts of charity and philanthropy, to be sure, both as expressions of religious faith and as positive goods for their own sake. But that is not the ultimate aim of spiritual practice, which is the achievement of a higher state of being. And though contemporary Christian social teaching would have us believe otherwise (see, for instance, the “seamless garment of life,” which degrades Catholic ethics into a support for contemporary notions of social justice with a veneer of sexual prudery), contributing to universal human material welfare is not the only possible expression of caritas. Indeed, the furtherance of human material welfare and preservation of life are sometimes at odds with true benevolence. An excess of comfort and material well-being can have negative effects on the human spirit and are needlessly destructive of other human lives as well as the integrity of the natural world, which is an expression of divine beauty and not merely a storehouse for human material consumption. Moreover, Gothic Christianity prioritized many things over the mere preservation of human life or material welfare, including the salvation of souls, the maintenance of social order, the administration of justice, and the defense of the community against those who would do it harm. Caritas does not require that a man sacrifice his own people or community to a nebulous “humanity,” as the Christian tradition affirms the existence of valid ethnic, cultural, and racial distinctions, considered a divine gift in their own right.
Ultimately, while Christianity does not condone cruelty and is not indifferent to human suffering, its highest earthly good is the establishment of a society aligned with the will of God and supportive of human transcendence. As Evola wrote, “The perfection of the human being is the end to which every healthy social institution must be subordinated, and it must be promoted as much as possible.”[3] Working to this end is itself a form of caritas — genuine benevolence and magnanimity — far greater than mere humanistic morality.
3. Gothic Christianity is theocentric, not anthropocentric.
As a corollary to this common misperception of Christianity as chiefly concerned with advancing human material welfare, critics and supporters alike often depict Christianity as a distinctly human-centered or “anthropocentric” creed, one that is interested solely in human welfare and the experience of the human species. This point is often made by ecological critics, who, like Lynn White Jr. in a famous essay, interpret the Biblical injunctions to “subdue the Earth” and “be fruitful and multiply” as invitations to the wholesale slaughter and domestication of the natural world. It is true that this interpretation has been eagerly embraced by many Christians throughout history (the Puritans in particular come to mind). However, in truth Christianity is theocentric, not anthropocentric. It regards God as the source of all Being, and the Earth and its myriad beings as creations of God and therefore possessed of dignity. And though creation is not equal in dignity with God himself, this does not mean it is any less deserving of respect and proper stewardship.
If Christianity seems particularly focused on mankind, this is because it is a religion for men and therefore deals with the peculiar features of human life. Moreover, it is an especially introspective religion, demanding much examination and soul-searching, and it is only natural that devotional and theological writings would be dedicated largely to the movements of the human spirit. However, this does not denigrate the natural world. In traditional Christian thought, before the schisms and reformations of the second millennium, the “book of nature” was held in equal esteem with the scriptures. Gnosticism may regard the material world as evil, but traditional Christianity, like Neoplatonism, rejects this view. Christianity is blamed for what should more accurately be attributed to the anthropocentrism and materialism of the Enlightenment — a period when Christianity was in decline.
It is also important to note that the exalted place given to mankind in Christianity — viceroys of God, stewards of Creation — does not apply to man in his fallen state. It is initially granted to Adam and his descendants before the Fall, and therefore properly applies only to men who have regained the primordial state of purity, wisdom, and immortality. Since the days of Adam, no human other than Christ himself has attained that state, and others who have come closest — celebrated as saints — have been markedly different from the domineering, anthropocentric bogeyman of contemporary imagination.
You can buy Savitri Devi’s The Lightning and the Sun here.
Humans are very small and insignificant compared to the might of God and the cosmos, and due to our corrupted wills have fallen lower than other creatures, which have largely retained their original divine nature. Humans are not even most powerful of created beings; they are certainly inferior to the angels in wisdom and might. Therefore, while man is capable of reaching great heights, of all known creatures he is uniquely capable of evil. As Savitri Devi — no friend of Christianity — astutely wrote,
[M]an is, of all living things on the Earth, the only one where there are, in the midst of the same race, élites and physical, mental, and moral dregs; the only one that, not being strictly defined by its species, can rise (and sometimes does rise) above it until it merges (or almost) with the ideal prototype that transcends it: the superman . . . but that can also lower itself (and lowers itself, in fact, more and more in the age in which we live) below, not only the minimum level of value that one expects to find in his race, but below all living creatures—those prisoners of sure instinct and of practical intelligence put wholly in the service of this instinct that are unable of revolt against the unwritten laws of their being, in other words, to sin.[4]
Ultimately, mankind’s high calling is to transcend its fallen condition — its severance from the will of God and laws of nature — and serve as the viceroy, steward, student, and appreciator of the created world, seeking knowledge of and union with transcendent being. As in Heidegger’s thought, man is not merely a “thinking animal” intended to rule over other beings as their physical master. He is called, rather, to be the “shepherd of Being.”[5] Mere humanism is a particularly low conception of man’s true destiny.
4. Gothic Christianity is militant, not pacific or quietist.
Though the Earth and its myriad beings are a creation of God and therefore imbued with divinity, the fact remains that the world has fallen under the sway of the Enemy and is full of its snares and wickedness. Gothic Christianity has always been a militant creed, emphasizing ceaseless combat against “against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” C. S. Lewis encouraged Christians to regard the world as “occupied territory” and themselves as secret agents: “Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.”
By contrast, Leftist adherents of contemporary pseudo-Christianity, as well as their critics, often argue that true piety demands a rejection of violence, self-defense, judgement, and harsh language. This depiction of Christ as a harmless teacher of love and resignation ignores his exhortation that he came not “to bring peace, but a sword”; his instruction to his disciples that “he who has no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one”; his praise for the faith of the centurion; his violent expulsion of the moneychangers from the Temple; his constant condemnations of the hypocritical Pharisees; his ominous parables about separating the wheat from the chaff and the sheep from the goats; and his cursing of the fig tree. Caritas is an outgrowth of the Christian’s love of God, extending ultimately to all beings (even those who do little to merit it). But it does not preclude judgement, and it reaches its limits when it conflicts with other aspects of the divine law. Indeed, sometimes it may require violence.
Violence is the rule in this fallen world. It is sometimes necessary to defend the pure and innocent from the depredations of the wicked. While senseless violence, cruelty, and rapine are absolutely prohibited by Christian ethics (in keeping with all civilized moralities), certain forms of violence have been sanctified. This includes holy war, a means of defending the innocent and one’s people from destruction; it also includes the judicial punishment of those who would defile the sacred as well as wicked criminals who subvert the laws of God and man. In the words of St. Paul, “If you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer” (Romans 13:4).
Contrary to the Christian pacifism that is alternately praised and vilified these days, the Christian is under no obligation to allow evil to overtake the Earth without protest. As the world grows darker, revolt against the Enemy will likely become more violent. The dogma of non-resistance to evil is the coward’s way out and merely serves to hasten the triumph of the wicked. The violence of the Christian should be of a detached nature, done out of love for God and one’s people, without hatred or viciousness; but it is necessary nevertheless. The holy warrior is one who performs the necessary sacrifice, who takes upon himself the guilt and suffering that violence entails, in service of God and mankind. The wielders of violence maintain order and justice, and therefore play a role in salvation. This is the true meaning of the seventh beatitude, “blessed are the peacemakers.”
* * *
Humanism, as defined in this essay, is the pseudo-religion of our elites, the bastard child of Renaissance iconoclasts and Enlightenment philosophes, a warmed-over concoction of late classical degeneracy, misotheistic Gnosticism, and scientific progressivism that has led to the ghastly spectacle of the contemporary world.
However, it is not our intention to denigrate mankind altogether. Contemporary humanism, divorced from the sacred, viewing man merely as a “rational animal,” and depriving mankind of access to the transcendent dimension, is actually the greater calumny on human existence. The most cursory examination of contemporary society makes it clear that it can only be considered “man-centered” in the grossest sense, and in every other way has proven inimical to the human spirit. A true humanism would rest upon the certitude of something transcending humanity, and the nobility of our perennial quest to know, to serve, and to attain union with it. Therein lies the true “dignity of man.”
* * *
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Notes
[1] Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, trans. Guido Stucco (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 1995), 309.
[2] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West: An Abridged Edition, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991 [1926]), 322.
[3] Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins, trans. Guido Stucco (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2002), 139.
[4] Savitri Devi, “Contempt of the Average Man,” Chapter 4 of Souveniers et réflexions d’une Aryenne, trans. R. G. Fowler.
[5] “Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being. Man loses nothing in this ‘less’; rather, he gains in that he attains the truth of Being. He gains the essential poverty of the shepherd, whose dignity consists in being called by Being itself into the preservation of Being’s truth.” (Martin Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, 1964)
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20 comments
Is a single sole man who claims to be God, God? The priest of the Most High of the order of Melchizedek did not claim as such (see John chapter 10 and Heb 6:20)!! I don’t buy into the current dialectic to global monarchism of any kind, it is in the final analysis communism as only the monarch and his oligarchical collectivists will own and control all global property the same as if it were collectively owned by all equally… the gnostic’s were correct, Sir, God is Spirit (John 4:24, Numbers 23:19, 1 Samuel 15:29, 1 Samuel 8:7, 2 COr 3:17 and Acts 7:48 with 1 Cor 3:16) …
I’ve listened to these Golden Age stories on the Right for decades, and there are two problems. First, the arguments are self-referential, (pro domo, as Schuon would say) or in other words, ultimately expressions of personal preference. Myself, I would prefer Goethe’s Weimar, or, equally impossibly distant, the Castalia of Hesse, which, being in the 25th century, has cars and radios. (I suppose, if he’d heard of it, Hesse would have appropriated the internet for his Glass Bead Game).
Secondly, at this point someone will say, “You can’t turn the clock back.” But there’s good news (“evvangelion”)! Brother Stair, whom I’ve written about frequently here on C-C, though recently deceased, established a farming community in South Carolina which should meet your needs for transcendence and anti-materialism.
No TV (beams Satanic messages of materialism into your brain!)
No cars etc. (auto loans tie you to the post-Ren. banking system and capitalist jobs)
No houses (mortgages, ditto)
No medicine or dentistry (witchcraft! Only God creates health and sickness is punishment for sin. Repent!)
Celibacy (marriage and family tie you to etc.)
All live in common, growing their own food to survive, and doing nothing else but praying and celebrating God, as they await his imminent Second Coming in fiery vengeance, destroying the Satanic post-Ren. world.
You can return to the Middle Ages right now, today! If you’re serious about it.
Oh, there is one little thing, your “Holy Roman Catholic Church” is actually the Whore of Babylon, drunkenly swilling from her cup of iniquities and abominations. Maybe you could organize a Counter-Reformation. I’m sure you anti-humanist Christians can work things out peacefully, without that pagan Reason.
Mr. O’Meara, I’ve been a great admirer of your work for Counter-Currents as well as your blog for several years. I’m honored that you took the time to read and comment on my essay.
I’m afraid I must have been unclear if you think I entertain any hopes of “turning back the clock,” which is of course neither possible nor desirable. My goal, which is rather less ambitious, was simply to provide a perspective on Christianity as it took root in premodern Western Europe, and to establish that it’s contemporary absorption into the Borg Cube of social justice was not an historic inevitability.
Thus, while Brother Stair’s commune is sounds charming, I don’t know that it’s necessary to abjure everything about contemporary society in order to reject its materialism (a doctrine that denies anything outside the sensory realm) and humanism (which, in this essay, describes an ideology that attaches exclusive value to humanity and its material needs to the detriment of spiritual values). Something more akin to Faye’s archeofuturism may be more appropriate, though its specifics and achievability are open to question.
And the view of the Church – or, rather, the Curia – as Whore of Babylon is not without precedent in Christian mysticism (see, e.g., Dante and Meister Eckhart). The doctrine is distinct from the institution. The historical Curia may merit little admiration and much contempt, but the ritual and doctrine of the Church have provided a legitimate link to the world of tradition and a path to attaining higher states of being for many. And adherence to them does not tie a person to the ideology of the left, or prevent him from defending his people and its history from destruction.
Thank you for providing an opportunity to clarify my thoughts on this matter. I look forward to your next essay.
I like this argument. Of course, there are already protestations in the comments, but the author indicated that humanism is a state of the spirit, and that therefore, ‘Christianity contra Humanism’ means Christianity which is antithetical to that spirit, as opposed to what we have today. After all, who can deny that any liturgical form/theology is susceptible to this disease when today we have forms of Satanism and Paganism which have become profoundly humanitarian and utopian?
I’ll add a few points:
1) Moderns ‘understand’ Nietzsche better than his contemporaries have since in Nietzsche’s day few could understand what he was agitating against, given that he was the subject of the Prussian state, known for its militarism, hierarchy, social paternalism, legalism, aristocratic norms, etc, which was bent on dominating the continent (Nietzsche himself witnessed the Franco-Prussian war). He must have sounded very hyperbolic to his compatriots.
2) Anti-humanism must, in the widest sense, be understood as a reaction and a struggle against the privilege of man’s crafty ‘reason’. It was very astute of the Medieval man to regard most popular forms of erudition as deception. Theology very well understood heart’s love of deceit which only a fool should mistake for deliberate malice. It’s ironic how this age smitten with the science of psychology and contemptuous of all morality is ignorant in basic psychology
3) Theology offered us a good attitude: Let God worry about outcomes. There is no justification for dissidents to aspire to compromises, and to compromise with values that are in the ultimate account doomed. Modern values are in fact, deserving of greater public contempt, which in turn calls for greater courage.
This was a very beautiful article. This is the Christianity that I practice and that our ancestors practiced before they fell into error. Under the Aegis of what this author calls Gothic Christianity, the White Race rose to incredible heights, far greater heights than when we lived under the aegis of Paganism. I would add to the theses in this article, in response to Pagans of a pro-white bent (instead of NeoPagans) that what is best in Paganism is preserved in Christianity and made better.
Good response, but let us not forget that the main issue wrt Christianity is not whether it serves any instrumental prowhite purpose, but whether its claims are true. Of course, if it’s false then we must indeed consider it from an instrumental perspective: can what is here called “Gothic Christianity” be resurrected and used to advance white interests? If not, and if we’re sure the Faith is indeed false, then it should be jettisoned (at least by white nationalists, and at least quietly so for now).
But for those who believe in the truth of the Faith, the question is whether contemporary Christianity’s embrace of {what I consider to be the pagan cult of} Diversity is theologically correct. This breaks down further into the issues of whether embracing Diversity is theologically imperative, or merely allowable. This in turn opens up the issue of whether white preservationism (WP) (more specifically, the measures necessary to ensure WP) is theologically allowable (or perhaps even imperative – as I believe it is, for whites). I argue that this is the core issue in the confrontation between Christianity and white nationalism. Am I being a bad Christian if I show concern for preventing white extinction, and support the mechanisms (race-realist education, immigration termination, racio-territorial separation, alien settler-colonialist expatriations, white pride inculcation) needed to do so?
Well, I am observing the mind virus close to the heart of the beast and I’m seeing a lot of “Liberationist Theology” activism from the usual suspects, especially as Boomers like myself are retiring. The voices are shrill, dogmatic and non-discursive ─ and increasingly coming from positions of power.
These outrages are on a exponential curve, and there are many causes for this sad state of affairs, but by the “usual suspects,” in this case I don’t mean the usual Commie Jews and their swarthy low-IQ minions (the noticing of which is otherwise blatantly obvious for somebody like me).
What I’m saying is that there is more going on.
I think we absolutely should be looking hard at Christian wokesters (especially those in high status and powerful positions) that are able to crusade for the nascent Left (and sometimes for the milquetoast Right) by using “Christian virtues” which are aimed against White people in ways that are, or might be, far too obvious than what might typically come from a Shlomo or a Shabazz.
This is not a question of Modernity or Progress as I see it.
The agnostic George Lincoln Rockwell supported the right of White people to be Christians and to worship or follow their consciences as they choose ─ and for as long as they wished to do so. I agree with that sentiment.
We should be manning the ramparts together when White people are under assault ─ so Christians, stop the butthurt, grow up, and admit there is a basic problem, one VERY close to home.
Christians have spilled a lot of blood against each other trying to settle the question of which church is right. I am more inclined to history than philosophy so I would say that the only thing good to come out of this sectarian conflict is the humanistic principle of the Separation of Church and State.
This means that I expect my brothers and sisters to protect me from our racial enemies, and I ask for the same courtesy not be believe in exactly what cosmology they do, nor even what you do.
What I don’t agree with is the (perhaps pervasive) idea from some otherwise decent White Nationalists, that all you have to do is to heal Christianity somehow ─ and thereby Western Civilization is miraculously right as rain, and all back to normal.
No! We are LONG past that, if it were ever true. More likely, this is exactly how we got into the morass where we are in the first place.
It makes sense that if someone truly believes in God and in the divinity of Jesus, then all they have to do is “trust the plan.”
No! A thousand times, no.
I am not interested in somebody’s personal relationship with God.
What I am concerned about is why and how somebody always escorts the barbarians past the national frontiers and straight into the keep.
Something is rotten in Denmark, and it goes far beyond failing to fight the Joos, or the “insufficient believers” leaving the barn door open just a crack.
Furthermore, nobody any longer believes in Natural Law (whatever that means) anyway. Nothing can be grown from the magic beans any more ─ and I, for one, am not going to pretend that the beans are still magic (or that they ever were). The problem is not the modern world or technology or women knowing how to read, etc. , etc.
A real-world playbook that depends upon ignorance and SUPERSTITION is bound to fail eventually. I would even call it the playbook of the enemy. That is the bottom line for me.
So what is to be done?
Well, in 90 ++ percent Caucasian Idaho, where most of my extended family are from, they are struggling with questions of change and superlative growth as refugees from Sodom & Gomorrah leave their wretched Blue states and inexplicably bring the Blueness with them.
At one time there was such a thing as principled lunch-pail Democrats, and in fact my Mormon aunt was McGovern’s DNC chair in 1972 after retiring in Scottsdale. She was critical of the Leftist Jews and lunatic lesbos that ruined the Party of Jefferson. My ultraconservative LDS parents supported George Wallace in 1968, and the GOP thereafter. I have been an outright WN for at least forty years, and have seen nothing but decades of failure from the perspective of a historian, not an erudite philosopher or moralist. We are far from a question of optics and principled political takes today.
I am not opposed to organizing the GOP, with the God-fearing wings or otherwise, because that is where the White people are. But the GOP is clueless, directionless, and hopelessly lost. Idaho, for example, is the “reddest of the Red States,” yet everybody knows that it won’t be so for very long.
How do you “keep Idaho Idaho” when you can’t even articulate what you are fighting to preserve other than “Christian values,” low taxes and a frontier spirit?
In a 1/18/2022 article from Politico called “Why There’s a Civil War in Idaho — Inside the GOP” – the author highlights one-party “divisiveness” as plaguing the Conservative GOP in the state.
The Seattle-based author quotes a Kootenai (Idaho) County Commissioner who quit the GOP and sees this as symptomatic of a broader shift:
“We came here 20 years ago because it was the closest thing we could find to Norman Rockwell,” he told me. “Now people come looking for George Lincoln Rockwell” — the founder of the American Nazi Party.
Well, Commander Rockwell’s genius circa sixty years ago was to recognize that Conservativism was bound to fail because “Conservatives are trying to conserve what is already gone.”
White (and Christian) Idaho is gone. They just don’t know it yet.
Can it still be saved?
Maybe, but it is a hard-sell convincing people who are over 90 percent White already that Jews and Negroes are the enemy when they don’t even see them, let alone the ones running the pulpits of power.
“Divisiveness” is just another word for poorly organizing failure. I doubt that shepherding Christian Democrats into the toxic mix that is our world today is going to freshen the brew any. Their Christian daughters will soon be mating with Somali refugees in Boise, because Bono thinks that’s what Jesus would do.
Tone-deaf calls for traditional Christianity are only going to miss the mark by wider measures than they do ─ but people are welcome to pray about it if they want.
A dozen or so years ago, Arizona (my state) was leading the anti-immigration revolt, which has all but gone the way of yesterday’s news. Now we are a Purple state and the demographic and ideological writing is on the wall. We are also suffering from the same phenomenal growth ─ and other states like us are already deep shades of Blue, and not the Prussian kind.
I don’t have all the answers ─ and I don’t want to offend decent Christians and WN allies. But somehow we have to think outside of the box. That is why I liked Mr. Robert Hampton’s article.
The problem is not Modernity and Progress either. I am not surprised that the Faithful would eschew such worldly things since they are whom Nietzsche called the Afterworldsmen. The world is how God made it and the hair shirt and the sacred rites are the only laundry soap that you will need to enter the Kingdom.
In an extreme sense there is also the Eternal Jew in his endemic typhus ghetto who does not bathe or deign to be deloused because the natural world is as G_d has made it.
As far as I’m concerned, the trad-Christians can put their vestments and other esoterica away. They are not even going to convince their own coreligionists. Maybe it’s time for Christians to just ask themselves some hard, introspective questions.
The reality is not Medieval hierarchies, but Christians in real positions of authority, influence and power who are compelled to lecture about “privileged” White people.
“We have so much to do,” they tell us. And no, they are not stopping at the Tranny bathrooms.
On moral grounds they will be the ones putting Christians back in the hair shirt and me in the iron maiden. The enemy is inside the gates, and some kind of fumigation is urgent.
🙂
Oh, I wish I could find a congregation of the Gothic Christianity Church! They seem to be few and far between these days.
When I was young, I was initially attracted to medieval history by way of the art, architecture and music of the Middle Ages. Its beauty is unsurpassed, and so medieval man undoubtedly had something great going on. Medieval aesthetics has appealed to many people in later ages, but those aesthetics cannot truthfully be separated from Christianity, no matter what some weirdo from the Society for Creative Anachronism will say. One doesn’t have to be a Christian to appreciate the art, music and architecture, but one should acknowledge the guiding spirit.
An emperor standing barefoot outside a castle for days in snowy weather, waiting to speak to the pope; nobles and peasants doing manual labor to assist with the building of great cathedrals; Crusaders leaving their homes and families for a very distant land, perhaps never to return, to defend Christendom and for the sake of repentance and other Christian vows… these kinds of things were not uncommon in that era. Some churchmen, knights, scholars, kings and queens did incredibly good things on behalf of their people.
Your discussion of the Christian meaning of love is very important. It seems that many people have serious misconceptions of it. David McMurdo, a Scotsman who has written and commented on spirituality, has said some helpful things regarding this:
“…to modern culture, love is nothing but an emotion, and that is a huge misunderstanding, and it causes a huge problem… you can’t dictate your own emotions… but love is an act before it’s anything else, and so when Yeshua said you must love even your enemies, he was simply saying that you should treat your enemies well regardless of how you feel about it. But if you understand love is only an emotion you’re not going to see that, and you’re not going to understand that, and you’re going to assume that Christians must be these individuals who have these positive emotional dispositions towards absolutely everyone they encounter, which was not what Yeshua required of them, because he himself far from had a positive emotional disposition towards those he encountered.”
Back when I was in college and going through a seeking phase, I went to a meeting of a local “Humanist” group. I naively expected to meet some present-day Erasmus or John Colet, and of course I was sorely disappointed. I don’t remember the exact affiliation of the group, but I do remember it was a bunch of bitter, very smug leftists, who spent most of the meeting ridiculing the likes of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Now Thatcher and Reagan certainly had serious faults, but they showed much more compassion than this bunch of know-it-alls, and a much more realistic view of mankind. Everything about the so-called humanists in this meeting screamed that they were “divorced from the sacred,” as you mentioned. I learned from various experiences and studies that humans need the sacred to be healthy.
I wish very much that the Faith & Heritage website which you linked to was still active. It was a great resource to me, and a comfort, knowing that there were kindred spirits out there. I’m glad its articles are still made available.
Thank you for this very rich essay. I can attest to the hunger that some of us feel for something akin to Gothic Christianity.
This article looks excellent. I have skimmed but not read it. I hope do so later tonight. But as it early references Hampton’s latest attack on Christianity, I’m reposting two comments I made there, which might be relevant food for thought here, too.
…
Comment 1:
The real place to start a rapprochement between white nationalism and Christianity is by demonstrating that Christianity and wokeness are antithetical, and that Christianity both allows for the measures necessary to ensure white preservation (WP) and even mandates them as a matter of true justice (though that is my unique position, very extreme, and in need of extensive theological demonstration). Christians who are also white race traitors look at the moral issues surrounding race and justice through the wrong end of the analytical telescope. Consider nation-wrecking mass nonwhite immigration. The brainwashed Christian imagines there is a moral obligation to admit aliens as a matter of “Christian hospitality” and “charity” and “universal brotherhood”. The insightful Christian looks at the matter the other way: that aliens have a moral obligation not to inflict their disruptive presence on innocent peoples, whose cultures get diluted and the psychic bonds between generations vitiated or sundered by this alien selfishness.
The issue is never viewed morally dispassionately, and certainly not from the standpoint of what’s best for whites, but always from the alien or [faux-]virtue-signaling “native alienist” (as Joe Sobran put in four decades ago) position. But that assumes an equality of moral legitimacy between the two positions which isn’t there. The alien is the disruptor, the aggressor. From a Christian moral theological standpoint, there is a rebuttable presumption against the alien and in favor of the native. If Christ exists and were to return to Earth, He would not chastise us (at least not for wishing to keep alien invaders out the better to preserve our cultures and physical security for our own people and descendants on this demographically exploding, but for whites shrinking, planet), but the selfish aliens and their bizarre, xenophilic liberal enablers for destabilizing healthy nations.
Comment 2:
When assessing how prowhites should approach the Christian Question, a little bit of common sense is in order. The tactic of people like Hampton is so transparently asinine. He finds some vile race traitor like David French, one who loudly proclaims that he’s a “Christian”; takes him at his word, both in terms of sincerity (ie, that David French really sees himself as a Christian, which is likely true), and accuracy (ie, that this is how a Christian properly thinks about racial questions, which is completely false); and then proceeds to use this faux-Christian wokesterism as proof of the uselessness of political outreach to Christians, thereby attempting to drive wedges between Christians and the prowhite justice movement.
As I have stated many times, the proper task for WPs is to deconstruct “Christian” anti-WP (ie, to show why Christianity is not theologically antagonistic to WP), and then show why true Christianity is morally compatible with at least some forms of WP. Does Christianity support white genocide, including passive genocide via coercive (state-mandated) alien demographic dilution? Of course not. That the heretic Pope and other prominent “Christians” disagree with me doesn’t mean they’re correct.
More broadly, as I’ve also stated many times at CC, Hampton and his ilk are pushing an agenda with their coverage of race and Christianity, which is basically that Christianity is a declining force or presence among whites, as well as an increasingly hostile one, and that WPs thus should increasingly just ignore it, or even aggressively oppose it. This is wrongheaded on so many levels.
The vast majority of those Americans who broadly think of themselves as being “on the Right” are also Christians. Most atheists/secularists are on the Left. Unlike many here, I tend to see rightist thinking as being all of a piece. People who are anti-left in some ways can be made anti-left in others. People who are left in some ways are usually easily made left in others. Go to a Trump rally. Most of the people are white, and most if asked will say they’re Christian. That is where we can win converts (to our cause of racial honesty and WP). And there is no other large group of white people we can win to the prowhite cause except those already on the Right, especially as leftism is today primarily defined by its antiwhiteness (notwithstanding that some old Jewish socialist like Sanders really really wants everyone to lower the temp on intersectionality and focus on promoting economic marxism, it doesn’t happen, does it? – this fact itself being a further testament to our correctness on race; ie, that racial conflict is more salient than ideology).
The prowhite movement needs to reach out more to normal conservative Christians and patriots (people like my family) than to any other identifiable white group. Christians who are normiecons should be on our side as a matter of both righteousness and self-interest. If we cannot win them (and we can: rank and file evangelicals were among Trump’s strongest supporters, despite the cuckoldry and treason of many of their leaders), we will never become a majority among whites – or perhaps even a large enough minority to make the Ethnostate a real possibility. But we certainly won’t win them over by dismissing their importance or exaggerating our disagreements (which, at least for non-Nazi [and perhaps non-Evolan] WPs, are rooted in ignorance and misunderstanding, rather than unbridgeable philosophical divides).
Also rebels against medieval Roman Catholicism could have strong nationalist views; take the Czech Hussites for example. The preacher Jan Hus was, besides his spiritual interests, concerned about the Czech people being swamped by Germans, and it was thanks to the Hussite Wars, led by fundamentalist fanatics, that the Czech people’s continued independent existence was guaranteed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZQwkX3euFg
From the war articles of the famous Hussite commander Jan Zizka:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Hussite_Wars/%C5%BDi%C5%BEka%27s_regulations_of_war
“And we again will keep, fulfil and maintain [our promises] because of our dear Lord God and His holy martyrdom, for the sake of the freedom of the truth of God’s law, for the glory of the saints, for the help of those who are faithful to the holy Church, and particularly for those of the Bohemian and Slavic race[8] [“jazyk”] and all Christianity, that the faithful may be glorified and all open or secret heretics and miscreants be shamed. Thus may Almighty God deign to grant us and you His aid and lead us to victory against His enemies and ours, and fight for us and with you with His might, and not withdraw from us His holy grace. Amen.”
Mr de Vere: it is not my intention to challenge the very interesting theses that you present in your essay, but rather the premise behind your desire to write this essay. You write: “I do hope that it will serve as a corrective to certain contemporary heresies, play a role in recovering an important aspect of our European heritage, and help those still loyal to the faith of our fathers to acquire a new perspective on their beliefs”. I agree that Christianity is an important aspect of our European heritage; my issue is with your comment on Christianity being the faith of our fathers.
As you know perfectly well, “our fathers” –the European family– did not start in the Middle Ages with Christianity. The Greeks were not Christian: they were pagans. Germanic nations were pagan. And it was the Christians who slaughtered them.
I quote from “March Of The Titans”, by Arthur Kemp: “To destroy German Paganism, Charlemagne proclaimed harsh laws applicable to those Germans under his control who refused to be baptised. Eating meat during Lent, cremating the dead, and pretending to be baptized, were all punishable by death. In 768 AD Charlemagne started a thirty-two-year long campaign of what can only be described as genocidal evangelism against the Saxons under his control in western Germany. The campaign started with the cutting down of the Saxon’s most sacred tree … in 772 he issued a proclamation that he would kill every Saxon who refused to accept Jesus Christ … in 782 … he ordered the beheading of 4,500 Saxons … in 794 every third Saxon living in any pagan area was kidnapped and forced to resettle among Christian Franks” … “the only Whites not Christian left by the year 1000 were found in Eastern Europe … the Church employed the services of some of the most fanatic Christians of all -the Teutonic Knights. … once a number of pagans were captured, they were offered the choice of being baptised, or being killed on the spot” , etc.
This is the genocide that your Gothic Christianity perpetuated against our White fathers. I am sorry: I cannot sympathise.
Marcus Eli Ravage has described it in his articles A REAL CASE AGAINST THE JEWS and COMMISSARY TO THE GENTILES.
“Look back a little and see what has happened. Nineteen hundred years ago you were an innocent, care-free pagan race. You worshipped countless Gods and Goddesses, the spirits of the air, of the running streams and of the woodland. You took unblushing pride in the glory of your naked bodies. You carved images of your gods and of the tantalizing human gure. You delighted in the combats of the eld, the arena and the battle-ground. War and slavery were xed institutions in your systems. Disporting yourselves on the hillsides and in the valleys of the great outdoors, you took to speculating on the wonder and mystery of life and laid the foundations of natural science and philosophy. Yours was a noble, sensual culture, unirked by the prickings of the social conscience or by any sentimental questionings about human equality. Who knows what great and glorious destiny might have been yours if we had le you alone.
But we did not leave you alone. We took you in hand and pulled down the beautiful and generous structure you had reared, and changed the whole course of your history. We conquered you as no empire of yours ever subjugated Africa or Asia. And we did it all without bullets, without blood or turmoil, without force of any kind. We did it solely by
the irresistible might of our spirit, with ideas, with propaganda.
We made you the willing and unconscious bearers of our mission to the whole world, to the barbarous races of the world, to the countless unborn generations. Without fully understanding what we were doing to you, you became the agents at large of our racial tradition, carrying our gospel to unexplored ends of the earth”.
I don’t meant to sound smug, but this is a rather anti-intellectual point of view. We are not playing a video game where our goal is to align ourselves to colourful factions, and it is also rather absurd to vilify Charlemagne and his men because they are, for better or worse, ancestors of modern Germans, French, the Dutch, etc, whereas the slaughtered Saxons are not, given that they died a valiant death.
As much as it is justifiable to criticize religious intolerance, the Catholic religion revived a healthy universalism at least in part, through its establishing of multiple rites and Churches (although unfortunately, it does not extend the principle of the correspondence of rites outside of the faith, as the ancient world did, i.e. Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus, a semitic residue). On the other hand, we also invoke religious intolerance ourselves when we argue for the exclusion of Muslims from our societies. So we shouldn’t, in the manner of sophists, get uppity about some things only on rhetorical grounds.
Wow Mr Konrad! I am so glad you are not trying to ‘sound smug’; otherwise I fear you’d be locking me up in an asylum for the mentally retarded, or sending me back to Junior K. ‘anti-intellectual point of view’, … ‘We are not playing a video game’? Why the ad hominem attacks? Is COVID stressing you out or something?
The points that I was trying to make (and you are entitled to disagree) are:
1. Christianity (Gothic or otherwise) is not the original religion of our ancestors, as Mr de Vere, seems to imply in the present essay: Paganism was –but I grant you that I may have misunderstood him.
2. Paganism was erased from European soil through brutal genocide and repression by the Church. Why is quoting some examples of these atrocities playing video games? I referenced these quotes.
Finally, I would now like to add a third point, since you brought it up when you wrote: ‘the Catholic religion revived a healthy universalism…’. This is then my third point: a religion for European Whites and Whites in the diaspora should not be universal. It should be ethnic. Christianity claims to be a universal religion, this is true, and this is the problem: universalism is a prolegomena (you see? I can throw fancy words too) to globalism. Now, I definitely agree that what I am about to state is extremely romantic and idealistic, and you are entitled to disagree with it, and I would respect you for it too –this is it: a White Nationalist movement should strive to revive the spiritual values and ethnic religions of our ancestors. This is something that the Asatru Folk Assembly tries to do, for example, or what I think that Collin Cleary tries to do in some of his articles on Nordic religion in this site.
But your third point is precisely the reverse of what is true. What scandalized Rome the most about Jewish religion was nothing else but its racial character: the fact that it was reclusive, that it considered outsiders impure and resented them, that it refused to allow outsiders in the rites or grant access to the Temple, etc… Tacitus says as much explicitly. Christians went further and outright insulted other people’s religions, interrupted their rites, and made other gestures of intolerance. Diocletian persecutors too, are explicit that this is what offends them.
On the other hand, not only have the Romans perfectly explicitly recognized the correspondence of their cults with those of the Greeks or Gauls (Caesar in his Gallic Wars makes a clear comparison of Gaulish gods to Roman), but also borrowed cults from Non-Aryan peoples from North Africa and the East. Not one word of protest is to be found in Roman letters with regard to this.
What New Paganism does is to turn everything on its head. It declares precisely that which is Semitic – an introvert, racial religion – to be Aryan, and that which is Aryan in spirit – universalism and transparency – to be Semitic.
Thus, the New Paganism elevates Judaism (and the religion of the Druze) to the status of greatest esteem, something no true civilization could dare entertain, as the provincial character and backwardness of these confessions is evident.
A racial religion is not going to happen. People with greater intelligence and willpower had attempted to do that in the 19th century, and it brought them just about nowhere. You are merely trying to blame the consequences of globalism on a religion.
“On the other hand, not only have the Romans perfectly explicitly recognized the correspondence of their cults with those of the Greeks or Gauls (Caesar in his Gallic Wars makes a clear comparison of Gaulish gods to Roman), but also borrowed cults from Non-Aryan peoples from North Africa and the East. Not one word of protest is to be found in Roman letters with regard to this.”
The Greeks also borrowed plenty of mythical material from the Phoenicians – like deities of sexual desire for example, Aphrodite and Adonis:
https://phoenicia.org/greek.html
“Adonis is a young fertility god who represents death and rebirth in an oriental vegetation cult; he parallels the Eastern companion god62 Dumuzi/Tammuz and the Hittite Telipinu. He is a Semitic immigrant to the Greek pantheon and is therefore not counted among the greater gods. His cult was established in Greece by 600 BC and his worship was known to Sappho and her circle.63”
Quick comment, and I didnt read the previous comments, so maybe Im repeating someone: one thing is xtianity as a religion, and another thing xtianity as institution. As the author points out, xtiniaty as institution was (for a long period of time) not bad for Western civilization, and even was good in some aspects: Philosophically, Politically, etc. The Catholic Church (and certain groups inside it, like the Inquisition) were the only institutions aware of the Jewish Problem before the NSDAP, was a conservative political force, banned usury, create interesting forms of art and architecture, etc.
xtianity as religion has its roots in judaism, with some pagan colours added after the conquest of Europe, and its basically a Slave Religion.
This is a paradox that some (including me) still have problems to understand.
I too am trying to get to the bottom of this whole Gordian knot of traditional, “based Christianity” vs. Race Realism, and I appreciate the author’s observations about a Gothic Christianity in Western Europe having a life-force vigor totally different from today’s pathetic effeminate pseudo-christianity. Although it might have made this article too long, some perspectives on the Orthodox tradition of the east, and Russian Orthodoxy in particular, would perhaps help to clarify the subject. The Orthodox have been in contact, and frequent violent conflict, with the enemies of Europe for many centuries – they are much less prone to fantasies of universalism. True Europeans of whatever persuasion had better join together and stop quibbling, because the Enemy wants to destroy all of us.
Christianity is jewish. Period. So all the christians that I see on here that talk shit about jews all day long are witless slaves. Everything else is a bunch of hot air. I will say though, it sounds great.
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