Friendly Debate Advice for Christian Nationalists
Posted By Thomas Steuben On In North American New Right | Comments Disabled
[1]1,700 words
It is the season of giving, and in that spirit I would like to give a Christmas present to the Christians within our ranks as a gesture of good will. Due to the Brandon economy, I do not have any partridges or pear trees, but I do have two arguments that can be used in defense of our politics by Christian Nationalists: Descartes’ cogito ergo sum and the differentiation between the private and public spheres. And what’s more, they are arguments that can operate entirely within the Christian worldview.
Even though I am not Christian, I do not see Christian Nationalism disappearing anytime soon, especially given recent developments with Ye. Also, many of the people who we are trying to reach are Christian. Thus, we need to find a way for Christianity to coexist with dissident politics.
My advice is inspired in part by the Nick Fuentes versus Alex Jones debate [2]. At the end of the debate, at around 1:16:30, one of the callers asks Fuentes why he doesn’t start “living in Christ,” “become like the Amish,” and do his own thing instead of “throwing bombs.” Fuentes responded well, and I will give him credit where it is due despite having criticized him in the past. But the caller’s question, while asked in good faith, is indicative of a mindset that is so widespread and pernicious that it must be decisively refuted.
There is an effeminate, ahistorical version of Christianity which seems to have emerged in the 1800s and then became even more widespread in the 1900s which mostly boils down to passively praying as history passes by, being overly sugary sweet no matter what, withdrawing from the world, and indulging liberal subversion such as by forgiving the murderer of one’s child at the hands of feral immigrants. It is the fellaheen mindset which Oswald Spengler described as appearing when a culture becomes old and tired.
While this specific caller and many others advance these attitudes in good faith, there is also a contingent of people who use the all-too-familiar tactic of demanding that Christians abide by a cherry-picked version of their rules and values while they themselves have none. Thus have some of the most well-intentioned people been taken advantage of by the worst of the worst for decades.
I have found that I must temper my natural impulse to dive straight into matters of blood and iron, or to point in exasperation at how white Christians in Waco and Randy Weaver’s wife were murdered by the feds simply for wanting to peacefully live by themselves, and consider the matter to be decisively concluded. I confess that I, too, often end up talking past people instead of addressing their viewpoints. I hope to arm Christian Nationalists with some arguments that are tailored to their worldview, and which will therefore be more effective when they debate other Christians who are adjacent to our politics.
Let us examine Descartes’ cogito ergo sum — “I think therefore I am” — first. Well, duh. But this point is actually an important first step. If we are thinking, we must exist. But what if we are deluded? What if we are in an insane asylum, in a dream, trapped in The Matrix, or most importantly for this argument, deceived by a demon? We know that we exist in some form or another, but can we be sure about the exterior world? If the exterior world is a delusion, studying it would be pointless and perhaps even gravely misleading.
But there is hope. We have within us the idea of perfection — even though we have never once seen anything perfect in the exterior world. Descartes argues that it logically follows that a perfect being must therefore exist. Descartes takes this as proof of the theistic God: an all-knowing, all-good, all-powerful being.
God, due to His theistic nature, would not delude us, or suffer us to be deluded. Of course, some may point to drugs, the insane, and dreams to counter this. There is also the story of the Binding of Isaac in which God instructs Abraham to sacrifice his son, which would seem to have been a deception, since God did not really intend Abraham to follow through with the killing. These exceptions all prove the rule because they are all temporary, however.
[3]You can buy H. L. Mencken’s The Passing of a Profit and Other Forgotten Stories here [4].
God would therefore not prevent a demon, or anything, to permanently delude us. Thus, the exterior world is real and true.
This may seem again like another “duh” moment, but it is in fact quite critical. Descartes created the cogito proof because he wasn’t just interested in theology and philosophy, but also the sciences, and he wanted to have a Christian justification for the pursuit of science. Thanks to Descartes, we can dispense with such televangelist nonsense like the idea that God created dinosaur bones and put them in the ground to test the faithful, or that we should be focused exclusively on spiritual matters to the exclusion of other things, such as the natural sciences.
This means we can take the objective, exterior, empirical world precisely as we find it. We do not have to second-guess it.
What this means for Christian Nationalists is that they can apply the cogito proof to the social sciences just as Descartes applied it to the natural sciences. They can study race realism, high politics, and history without being heretical. Race and IQ can be studied as they are empirically found, just like dinosaur bones. Some of these things may have to be reconciled with Scripture, such as race realism with Imago Dei, which is the doctrine that Man is made in the image of God. I will leave the details of that to the Christians. But they can be reconciled — or at the very least, both can be true. We do not have to recoil from the hard facts of black criminality and Jewish subversion as heresies.
The second argument is that there is a stark differentiation between the public and private spheres.
Christ’s commandment of “love your enemy” is probably the most manipulated passage in the entire Bible. The Bible was written in Koine Greek, which, like all languages, reflects the culture of its speakers. Koine Greek reflects how the ancient Greeks saw a stark divide between private (meaning personal) affairs and public affairs, such as the state’s.
As noted by Carl Schmitt in The Concept of the Political, the word for “enemy” used in “love your enemy” is inimicos and not hostes. Inimicos is a private, or personal, enemy such as the neighbor who doesn’t pick up after his dog, while hostes is a public enemy, such as an enemy’s army.
This distinction is vital. What this means is that in our personal lives we should be loving and forgiving, but not necessarily towards our nation’s enemies. Christ and those who recorded His words must have known that there were two very distinct words for a public enemy and a private enemy which don’t sound anything alike. If we were supposed to love our public enemies, Christ would have clarified that.
Furthermore, the distinction between private and public pervades the entire Bible. Christ never led an army or governed a state, and his life was focused almost entirely on the personal, or private. His teachings and leadership by example reflect this. Christ was a loving lamb of God.
(There is another, hidden meaning to “love your enemy” which is explained by Julius Evola as creating a line of sympathy to discharge negative energy upon an enemy, but this is outside the scope of this article.)
Contrast this with the Old Testament, which is filled with war and politics, and which are distinctly public. Moses exemplifies the public nature of the Old Testament more than any other person, and he acted with iron ruthlessness. His plagues upon Egypt, his harsh discipline of the Israelites in the desert, and his setting in motion of the brutal (but probably well-deserved) conquest of Canaan by Joshua are examples of how those in positions of public responsibility must be willing to break more than a few eggs to make an omelet. Machiavelli praised Moses for both founding a new religion as well as a new state for good reason, even though he attributed Moses’ success more to divine will than virtu, or excellence.
Too many Republicans In Name Only (RINOs) act like Christ in matters of state because they either have good faith, but ultimately a poor understanding of the Bible; or because they are manipulating their Christian constituents in bad faith.
Regardless, a Christian Nationalist should act as ruthlessly as Moses in the political arena, and save his Christian charity for making peace with annoying neighbors.
Let us apply this to the scenarios in which white youths are murdered by immigrants or blacks, and their idiot parents then ask for clemency for the killer. Is this a private or a public matter? In some ways, it is private, as it involves a wrong which is intensely personal. But it is ultimately more public than private. Murder is a matter of public concern, because if murderers are not dealt with harshly, they will likely murder other innocents. Additionally, the racial component makes it a public matter because it fits into a broader racial struggle between the white nations and their non-white adversaries. A Christian Nationalist might “forgive” a killer on a spiritual level and pray for the salvation of his soul like Christ, but he would also urge a swift execution by the state and stricter immigration policies — in the spirit of Moses.
Whether you should act more like Christ or Moses depends on if the situation is private or public.
In summary, the lukewarm mindset which has held Christians back from realizing their full potential as a political force can be countered by, first, understanding that it is all right to deal with reality as we find it, because a theistic God would not deceive us; and second, differentiating between the public and the private, and therefore understanding that there is a time and place to be sweet and a time and place to be harsh.
May you have a Huwhite Christmas and some successful debates over hot chocolate.
* * *
Like all journals of dissident ideas, Counter-Currents depends on the support of readers like you. Help us compete with the censors of the Left and the violent accelerationists of the Right with a donation today. (The easiest way to help is with an e-check donation. All you need is your checkbook.)
For other ways to donate, click here [5].