Radix Journal

Radix Journal

A radical journal

Tag: Christianity

The Next Great Awakening

With the rise of the BLM movement, we are not just witnessing protests and riots but the birth of an old/new religion. Summary The Black Lives Matter protests are best…



The Black Lives Matter protests are best understood as a religious revival, emerging from the United States but global in scale. This new religion is “Multiculturalism” and based on institutions and ideals outside traditional churches; however, its structure and sacraments strikingly resemble those of Christianity. It could even be considered a kind of heresy.

Religious revivals take place in the wake of wars and disasters, periods of elevated stress and widespread angst. They are spearheaded by and attractive to people who are relatively high in neurotic traits such as anxiety. Their disturbed mental states are, temporarily, alleviated by the religious experiences that take place through these revivals—with religion, more generally, being an adaptation that allows us to cope with an unpredictable and traumatic world.

Leftists and atheists, of course, proudly reject traditional religion and sexual morality, and we should appreciate the irony of a “religious revival” capturing their hearts and minds. However, as a group, leftists and atheists are high in mental instability—especially those who are young and female—and thus they are highly susceptible to the religious experience, if not religion as it has been historically understood.

Following the Industrial Revolution and the exploitation of fossil fuels, the world became immensely wealthier, healthier, and more comfortable, and the harsh Darwinian selection pressures that characterized previous ages subsided. One of the most impactful consequences of this is the dramatic decrease in childhood mortality. Thus, millions of people with high levels of mutations, who would not have survived childhood in previous times, walk among us in the postmodern age. These “spiteful mutants” have managed to bring about the collapse of traditional religion—which is associated with mental and physical health and evolutionary success. They have spread Multiculturalism as a religion in its place. The result is a Multiculturalist revival, where 70 years ago there would have been a Christian one.

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
You, you may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you will join us
And the world will be as one
—“Imagine,” John Lennon

Interesting Times

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement swept through the Western World beginning in May 2020 after the accidental death of African-American criminal George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer. The initial result was widespread riots and looting by African-Americans in Minneapolis, followed by similar scenes in other places. But this quickly morphed into an ideological movement—under the already extant slogan “Black Lives Matter”1—in which a kind of anarchy swept through American cities, encouraged by Social Justice Warriors2 and, to a large extent, the leftist media and political establishment. A kind of hysteria appeared to take hold among White Americans, including politicians and even police officers.

Flagrantly breaking the “lock down,” which had been in action for two months due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Whites gathered in the streets and knelt in the name of George Floyd. Many police officers publicly engaged in this deferential behavior, often holding out their open hands to signify their willingness to make themselves defenseless. White Americans were filmed not just kneeling before Blacks but symbolically washing their feet.3 The riots were stated, by the media, to be “largely peaceful” even as buildings were aflame behind them or as White news reporters were physically attacked by rampaging mobs. There were calls to abolish the police and even for complete anarchy, under the slogan “No Justice, No Peace.”

The hysteria quickly spread to other Western countries. There were Black riots— assisted by White SJWs—on the streets of central London. White news reporters were attacked live on air. British police, in front of the gates of Downing Street, knelt before Black protestors rather than arrest them for breaking the lockdown and for rioting, as English Law demanded. Companies began to signal their support for “Black Lives Matter,” with those who were slow to do so being criticized as “racist” because, according to one slogan, “Silence is Violence.” In a BLM protest in Helsinki, the overwhelmingly White and female “protestors” didn’t merely kneel but lay prostrate on the ground in order to signal total submission and deference. Young females posted videos of themselves online renouncing their Whiteness, showing their “solidarity” with BLM. In one extreme case, a woman smeared herself in excrement as a sign of abasement.

Then came the attacks on statues and other public monuments. A statue of Winston Churchill in central London was graffitied with the word “Racist.” Britain’s Cenotaph war memorial was desecrated, and a young Black woman attempted to burn the Union Jack that hung from it. The statue of an 18th-century philanthropist and slave trader, which had stood in Bristol since 1895, was dragged down by a mob and thrown in the dock. Other statues that “offended” the sensitivities of the mob were preemptively removed, likely never to be re-erected, to prevent their destruction, including one of Belgium’s King Leopold, which stood in Brussels.

The streaming service HBO Max removed the American civil war epic Gone With The Wind (1939)—a film preserved by the Library of Congress as “culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant”4—after its romanticization of the South and depiction of African slaves was deemed unwatchable in the current climate. The chairman of Warner Media called the ban a “no brainer,” a curious choice of words.5 The BBC even removed from its streaming sites relatively recent comedies, made by liberal comedians only a decade ago, such as the light-hearted “Little Britain,” because “times have changed.”6

A New Religion

This wasn’t just mob rule and anarchy. On display was a religious intensity. And people were sucked into it. If the mob declared that you were not a “true believer,” you could lose your job, or perhaps even be subject to a police investigation. So, as more people exhibited their adherence to the Cult of George Floyd, an arms-race developed to indicate ever-greater fervor.

This eventuated in some White protestors “going Medieval” and actually engaging in self-flagellation—a grotesque spectacle but a seemingly inevitable culmination of the White guilt narrative.

What Causes Religiousness?

This was all so predictable. In April 2020, experts in the study of religion cautiously suggested that there might be some kind of religious revival in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis, though they focused on what might happen in churches.7 There are always religious revivals after or during wars, famines, and pandemics. Why would the Covid-19 be any different?

In other words, we are witnessing another “Great Awakening.” But the religion of a significant portion of Western populations, and especially the young, is not Christianity. This new global religion of the 21st century is Multiculturalism. That said, Multiculturalism contains many elements of evangelicalism, both aesthetically and structurally, and perhaps could be viewed as Christianity’s latest mutation.

In order to understand what has taken place, we need to make sense of what religion is; why “mortality salience” is relevant to it; and how, precisely, religious revivals occur. Once this is clear, we will see that Multiculturalism is not just an ideology, partisan politics, or passing fad; it must properly be understood as a religion itself.

One of the key predictors of becoming religious is being confronted with your own mortality or that of your loved ones. No matter what an inveterate skeptic might say or write throughout his life, when told that his mother is in intensive care or his daughter has been in a car accident, there is a very strong possibility that, in private, he will beg God for help. “There are no atheists in foxholes,” as the saying goes. So-called “mortality salience” is an extreme example of the kind of psychological stress that appears to elevate religiousness. “Feelings of exclusion” seems to cause people to become more religious, too, as do periods of dramatic change, such as significant changes in government.8

“Religion,” in the widely accepted sense of the word, involves all of the key components of an evolutionary adaptation. Religiousness is around 0.4 genetic; it is associated with physical and mental health partly at the genetic level;9 it correlates with fertility; and specific parts of the brain are associated with it.10

There are likely a number of non-exclusive reasons why religiousness evolved. One is that it promoted pro-social behavior. Those who believed in a god who told them to behave in a pro-social way were less likely to be cast out or killed by the pre-historic band and were, therefore, more likely to pass on their genes. A related possibility is that it reduced stress in the face of danger or as we become aware of our own mortality. Those who felt that their life had eternal meaning and that a god was constantly looking after them would be less likely to become depressed and anxious and would be more likely to pass on their genes.11

Consistent with this, not only do people tend to become more religious at times of stress, they are more likely to have dramatic religious experiences, in which they do not merely vaguely feel that God is present but, as far as they are concerned, see Him and hear His reassuring voice.12 People who are high in neurotic personality traits are prone to depression and anxiety, these being manifestations of “mental instability.” Neuroticism seems to decrease considerably after one has undergone conversion and other religious experiences.13

Intrinsic religiousness—genuinely believing in god—is negatively correlated with Neuroticism.14 We can see this in the average churchgoer of the past century, a man who conforms to the belief system of his community, intellectually believes in a higher power, but likely doesn’t take his religion overly seriously nor does he worship with particular emotional affect. On the other hand, extrinsic religiousness—outward conformity to religion—is positively associated with Neuroticism. We can think of the fanatic or obnoxious scold, someone who wears his faith on his sleeve, perhaps even so devoted that religion negatively affects his welfare.

Being a “religious seeker” is also associated with Neuroticism. This involves going through phases of mental instability that are alleviated by an unusual and often very extreme forms of religiosity, which are duly abandoned during periods of sound mental health.15 Overall, it’s reasonable to argue that religiousness would have been selected for, because it promoted mental health, with the result that mental health and religiosity have become genetically related, due to both being simultaneously selected over a lengthy period of time.16

Religion also would have been “kin-selected.” You can pass on your genes indirectly by aiding your kin: your children share 50 percent of your genes, and more distant kin, such as nephews, share 25 percent. If a person were highly religious, it makes their kin more attractive, because of the associations between religiousness, pro-social behavior, and mental stability. This would help explain why some Islamic fundamentalists kill daughters who have dishonored the family. It is a way of signaling the family’s commitment to Islam and, thus, elevating kin selection.17 An ethnic group is, in the sense, an extended genetic kinship group and thus a means by which you can indirectly pass on your genes.18 It is has been found, using computer modeling, that groups that are highest in positive ethnocentrism (internal cooperation) and negative ethnocentrism (external hostility) tend to dominate others in the battle of group selection.19 There is evidence implying that religiousness is genetically associated with both kinds of ethnocentrism, because a part of the brain associated with ethnocentrism is also associated with religiousness.20 And the correlation between positive ethnocentrism and religiousness would make sense because a group would be more internally cooperate if it were high in pro-social traits and low in mental instability. But our key point is that religiousness has evolved, in part, as a means of coping with stress and mortality salience.

Why Are Women So Religious?

The high female presence both in BLM protests and in churches is obvious to anyone who has ever attended either. And this shouldn’t be surprising. Women are more religious than men, across cultures, in terms of how likely they are to believe in God and engage in collective worship.21 In the United States, Catholics, Evangelical Protestants, Mainline Protestants, and Mormons are each 55 percent female. Some 70 percent of American women report an “absolute certainty” in their belief in a god, compared to 57 percent of men. American women are also much more likely to report that religion is important in their lives, and atheism is found twice as often among men than women (12 percent vs. 6 percent).22

This occurs because religion has been sexually selected for, too, as it is associated with being pro-social, rule-following (and thus not cuckolding your husband or abandoning your family and child), and with being part of a supportive group of co-religionists. These clear sex differences in the strength of religiousness will become significant later when we analyze the Black Lives Matter protests.

There are a number of probable reasons for higher female religiousness, one of which is empathy. Females are higher than in empathetic behavior, which involves being interested in people’s feelings and being able to detect their feelings from external markers, such as facial expressions.23 There is evidence that people who are high in empathy transfer this ability over to the world itself, meaning that they perceive the presence of a “mind” or “higher power” simply from looking around the world. Accordingly, low empathy—that is, stereotypical autism—is associated with atheism.24

Another reason may be adaptation to patriarchy. Females sexually select for male status because a high-status male is better able to invest in them and their offspring, meaning that both are more likely to survive.25 Until the Industrial Revolution, wealth and status strongly predicted completed fertility, and this is the case among pre-industrial peoples today. 26 If males must invest resources in the female in order to obtain sexual intercourse, then they want to be certain that the offspring in which they are investing their resources are actually their own. The result is a system of patriarchy in which females are controlled by males such that male paternity anxiety can be reduced. This system of patriarchy will tend to be promoted by the society’s religion as divinely ordained, possibly because patriarchal societies reduce paternity anxiety, meaning that they, in turn, reduce inter-male conflict, thus causing males to be more internally cooperative. And, again, as computer models have shown, societies of internally cooperative people are more likely to triumph in warfare with competing societies.27

This system of patriarchy, however, would mean that females would be strongly selected to be accepting of patriarchy and thus to be religious, as this is what the religion would promote.28 Consequently, there would be a religious “arms race” among females in order to obtain the highest-status males, especially in the kind of polygamous societies in which humans have lived for most of history, in which the highest status males monopolize the most desirable females. As such, we would expect females to be strongly prone to wishing to signal their virtue and, if religiosity were regarded as virtuous, to signal this. And they would be more convincingly able to signal it if they genuinely believed it.

Why is Religiousness Associated With Mental Health?

It is also clear to anyone that has ever attended a BLM protest that many of those involved—with their stereotypical unnatural colored hair and screams of righteous fury—are not mentally well. By contrast, females in churches appear sober and under control.

Why should traditional religiousness be associated with mental health? The answer lies in its evolutionary history. In understanding the evolution of religion, it is worth noting that it is a combination of a variety of traits, which would have been adaptive in pre-history.

1. Agency Over-Detection. We have a cognitive bias towards detecting the presence of an agent behind events. Following the “Smoke Detector Principle,” it is adaptive to assume the worst and get it wrong—such as to assume that that noise over there was a wolf rather than just the wind. This helps to explain why we might see evidence of god in the world.

2. Pattern Over-Detection. We are evolved to over-detect causation. This is adaptive because those who under-detected it would have put themselves in danger of being wiped out or not been able to analyze and understand the world around them.

3. Follow the Leader. We are evolved to form strongly-bonded groups and obey authority. By working as a team with a leader, groups are more likely to survive in the battle of group selection.29

Religions will vary in the extent of the prominence of each of these factors. This means that although religiousness is generally adaptive in an evolutionary sense of promoting individual and especially group fitness, it is quite possible for maladaptive forms of religiousness—which do not promote genetic fitness—to manifest. Some devotees might be, for example, too extreme in their obedience to the leader or in their pattern over-detection, such that adhering to such a religion is harmful for its followers. An obvious example of this would be suicide cults—such as the notorious Jonestown—in which devotees are so inclined to follow their leader and so inclined to over-detect patterns that they accept a mentally ill man’s paranoid worldview and kill themselves, completely destroying their genetic interests.30 Membership of such groups is associated with other maladaptive traits—such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder—whereas traditional religiousness is genetically associated with mental health.

The relationship between religiousness and sound mental health makes sense if we delve a little deeper into how religiousness has been selected for over time. This will also be highly relevant, later, to understanding the nature of the Black Lives Matter movement. As I have discussed in my study “The Mutant Says in His Heart, ‘There is No God,’”31 we were under conditions of harsh Darwinian selection until the breakthroughs of the Industrial Revolution, which began in around 1800. The resulting improved public health and living conditions meant that child mortality has fallen from around 50 percent in 1800 to 1 percent today.32 High child mortality ensured that the surviving population was very strongly adapted to its ecology. Babies with mutations that made them unfit—such as those leading to a poor immune system—were purged from the population every generation, meaning that it overall had a very low “mutational load.” Under these brutal conditions, traditional religion—based around the collective worship of a moral god—was adaptive, meaning that it came to be selected for in tandem with other adaptive traits, which thus became genetically connected.

With the break-down of harsh Darwinian selection, we would expect the population to display increasing evidence of mutational load. This would be observed in secular increases in the prevalence of partly genetic medical conditions.33 We would also expect the development of all kinds of deviations from this delicately balanced Darwinian religious norm—deviations that would be maladaptive in terms of group and individual selection and that would be attractive to people with maladaptive traits, such as mental illness. Religious suicide cults, such as Jonestown and Waco, would exemplify this process. These religious deviants would have high mutational loads and likely be people who would not have survived childhood under harsh Darwinian conditions.

How do we know that such people would not have survived? In that the brain is 84 percent of the genome, it is an enormous target for mutation, meaning that those who have physical mutations can be expected to have mental mutations as well, which would direct them towards deviations from the most adaptive form of religiousness. Consistent with this, it has been found that, in modern samples, collective worship of a moral god is genetically associated with physical and mental health and is negatively associated with other markers of high mutational load, including autism, physical asymmetry, and left-handedness. These are associated with atheism or religious deviations, such as paranormal belief. The inability to develop a symmetrical phenotype implies a poor immune system, because a person with a poor immune system would have to use disproportionately more of his bio-energetic resources to fight off pathogens, meaning insufficient resources left over to ensure symmetry. Left-handedness is an accepted marker of “developmental instability.” If the brain develops symmetrically, people will tend to be right-handed. Failure to do so implies mutational load and, thus, left-handedness is associated with many examples of poor physical and mental health.34

So, with the nature of “religion” and its connection to mortality salience understood, let us now turn to making sense of “religious revivals.”

What Causes Religious Revivals?

Religious revivals appear to occur when the kind of situation that would lead to a period of religiousness in an individual—such as stress and mortality salience—are experienced relatively suddenly by a substantial portion of a society. There will be variation in the nature of the revival, depending on the kind of people who are impacted. But, in general, dramatic change and a period of difficulty can be expected to lead to a religious revival of some kind. These can be charted throughout history and, interestingly, there is often a time lag separating the period of stress from the revival itself.

Christian evangelists are constantly attempting to create revivals, traveling to different communities and preaching their message of conversion and redemption. However, they only seem to be able to create mass revivals during, or just after, periods of significant distress.

An examination of British revivals during the 20th century is consistent with this pattern. The first major revival of the twentieth century took place in Wales between 1904 and 1905. At the time, South Wales was ravaged by industrial unrest and unemployment in a society in which there was no welfare state. Accordingly, Welsh workers, many of whom were already heavily influenced by Methodism and were facing serious hardship and the realistic possibility of destitution.35 Interesting, there was no religious revival during World War I in the UK, nor during the Spanish Flu pandemic that immediately followed it36. There were, however, various revivals during the 1920s. The lack of communications at the time meant that it was more difficult than in the 1950s for these to become national phenomena. A major revival in East Anglia in 1921 focused around socioeconomically deprived fishing communities, which were under considerable distress even compared to ordinary people recovering from the Great War. The following year, there were revivals in other parts of the country, most notably in fishing communities in northeast Scotland.37 There was no major revival in Britain in the 1930s, other than in the deeply conservative Hebridean islands off the north west of Scotland in 1939. This year was a time of elevated distress due to very real possibility that Britain might go to war again.38

There was no major revival in the UK during World War II itself. The next Christian revival, and a concomitant reassertion of conservative attitudes, came after the War, and especially in the 1950s. There was a revival in the Hebrides in 1949, in which large numbers of people, who had not previously been especially devout, underwent religious experiences and became more involved in their church and in which those who were already religious became more fervent. According to revival leader the Rev. Duncan Campbell (1898-1972), in late 1949, in the village of Barvas on the Island of Lewis, he conducted a night-time meeting at which:

Three o’ clock in the morning came and God swept in. About a dozen men and women lay prostrate on the floor, speechless . . . We left our cottage at 3am to discover men and women seeking God. I walked along a country road and found three men on their faces, crying to God for mercy. There was a light in every home; no-one seemed to think of sleep.

At 5 AM that morning, 14 buses full of people arrived from all parts of the island and even from the island of Harris. People at these meetings fell into trances, fainted, swayed and collapsed to the floor.39 Campbell felt that he had been inspired by the Holy Spirit to go and revive the Outer Hebrides and, given the stressful conditions of the time, people were extremely receptive to religious-fervor in a ways that they otherwise wouldn’t have been.40

Wartime rationing did not cease until 1954, so it could be argued that it was only at this point that “normal life” finally reasserted itself.41 In an era of mass-communication, a spark was needed to set off a nationwide revival, and this came in the form of American pastor Billy Graham (1918-2018), as witnessed in his British rallies, which took place between 1954 and 1955. The postwar religious fervor was such that it has been estimated that roughly 21 percent of the London population attended a Billy Graham rally, while up 73 percent of the Glasgow population did so.42 In 1955, 100,000 people packed a Glasgow stadium to attend a single service conducted by Billy Graham.43 I am not aware that the relationship has been quantitatively tested, but, as a rule of British Modern History, religious revivals seem to manifest in areas of elevated mortality salience as a consequence of impoverishment or, directly, famine and other highly stressful phenomena.

What Kind of People Have Religious Experiences?

What was happening, in terms of individual and mass-psychology, during these revivals? As we have discussed, quotidian, stable religiousness—in which you are religious all the time—is correlated with sound mental health. Even religious people who are mentally healthy, however, go through periods of stress and mortality salience in which they may become more religious. They may even undergo forms of what is known as a “religious experience.”

Religious experiences are profound psychological experiences in which a person may be overwhelmed by a feeling of God’s love and even hear God’s voice or believe to have seen Him. In making sense of these kinds of experiences, American neuroscientist Andrew Newberg and colleagues argue that the mind has two effective systems, calming and arousal. When either of these systems is pushed to their extremes, through meditation or hyper-arousal—both of which can be achieved via religious services—they argue that it is dangerous for the body. Accordingly, the other system hits in, leading to alternative states of consciousness and intense psychological experiences.44 British biologist Richard Dawkins has suggested that they may be provoked by the way in which stress makes us highly instinctive, and thus prone to religious belief anyway. Dawkins also argues that we are also evolved to over-detect agency: as mentioned above, if we mistake a distant rock for a wolf, we have lost nothing, but if we make the opposite mistake, we may be killed. Accordingly, at times of very intense stress, we are much more likely to mistake some unidentified sound as the voice of God and, at the same time, find that our calming system would hit in. This would lead to an intense religious experience combined with feelings of relief and joy.45 Undergoing mild religious experiences—known as “spiritual” experiences—is about 0.3 heritable. Undergoing intense religious experiences is approximately 0.66 heritable.46 This high heritability might imply that the ability to undergo a religious experience is extremely beneficial, in evolutionary terms, because it combats stress and, due to its profound nature, keeps you low in negative feelings for a substantial period of time afterwards.

However, we must distinguish between the “religious experience” and the “conversion experience”—and also between being “religious,” being “hyper-religious,” and going through a phase of being intensely religious. American psychologist William James (1842-1910) distinguished between the religion of the “sick soul” and that of “healthy mindedness.” The religion of healthy mindedness is characterized by relatively mild religious experiences. The religion of the “sick soul,” however, is marked by a dramatic conversion experiences, which occur at times of intense stress.47 Those who lead religious revivals—people such as Billy Graham—can be regarded as constantly “hyper-religious.” As already noted, this is associated with either schizophrenia or with being a severely depressive personality. Psychological studies of those who lead religious revivals have found that most of them display evidence of these pathological traits. They require, for example, the absolute structure and order which fanatical religiousness provides in order to allay their anxiety and frequently undergo intense religious experiences.48 Such is the nature of revival “leaders.” It may be beneficial for a healthy society to be able to maintain a very small percentage of such lunatics, precisely because they are able to inspire fervent religiosity in other people and religiosity is traditionally a means of promoting ethnocentrism. In this regard, it has been noted that tribal shamans tend to the same kinds of psychological characteristics as modern-day charismatic leaders.49

But what about the followers, and those who become followers during a revival? What is their psychology? Religious revivals are characterized by the “conversion” type of religious experience, in which a person undergoes a kind of psychological breakdown and, to some extent, adopts a new identity, for example as a “Christian” or as “real Christian” in a way that they somehow were not prior to the revival.50 They, consequently, go through a transient phrase of hyper-religiosity. Transient hyper-religiosity is associated with high Neuroticism,51 while bipolar disorder and bouts of depression also predict periods of extreme religious fervor, as does schizophrenia.52 Schizophrenia, and its milder forms, is also elevated at times of stress, just as is anxiety.53 There is a range of severity to schizophrenia-type conditions. Mild symptoms are summarized as “schizoid personality.” This is characterized by anhedonia (the inability to experience joy) and apathy. More severe is “schizotypal personality,” where the schizoid symptoms are accompanied by social anxiety, paranoid ideation, unconventional or paranoid beliefs, and, sometimes, psychosis. Diagnosable schizophrenia is a particularly severe manifestation of these characteristics.54 Having undergone a conversion experience has been found to be associated with having been, prior to that experience, high in anxiety and other Neuroticism traits.55 When people suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress, which is associated with high Neuroticism, they can develop a very specific kind of religiosity known as “spiritual struggle” or “negative religious coping.” Those who undergo this believe that God is punishing them for their sins, plead for God to intervene in the world, and project hostility towards out-group members. “Positive religious coping” can cross over with this, insomuch as it involves conversion, but this also involves the belief that God has forgiven you and that you are purified of your sins.56

So, people who are high in Neuroticism—and even under the harsh Darwinian conditions prevalent until 1800, there would have been population variance in this trait—are more likely to become part of religious revivals. They will feel stress more acutely and will, accordingly, be more likely to become extremely religious in the aftermath of periods of intense societal distress. Females score higher than males in Neuroticism. For this reason alone, we would predict that females would play a noticeable part in religious revivals.57 Consistent with this, studies of religious revivals in the U.S. have found that “white and black women were among the most visible participants at religious revivals, where converts wept, wailed, writhed, and fainted as they received God’s grace.”58 Neuroticism tends to decrease with age in males. But in females, Neuroticism decreases with age until adolescence and at that point, it increases, possibly due to the adaptive need to worry about one’s children. This can be seen most obviously among university students, where females in particular tend to suffer mental health problems of various kinds that they will often have recovered from by the time they are in their mid-20s.59 Neuroticism, in women, begins to decline in early adulthood.60 For this reason, as well as due to their higher general religiousness, we would expect females in their mid-teens to mid-20s to be attracted to religious revivals. In line with this prediction, there is detailed data on those who “came forward” to receive God’s forgiveness during Billy Graham’s British rallies. In London, 65 percent were female and 50 percent were under the age of 19. In Glasgow, 71 percent were women and 73 percent were under the age of 30.61

Even those who are not sufficiently Neurotic to undergo religious experiences can be expected to be influenced by a religious revival if it appears to be sufficiently popular. Neuroticism predicts extrinsic religiousness, that is, religious outward conformity.62 People who are high in Neuroticism will fear being judged negatively or even being ostracized for failure to conform, meaning that they may fake religious fervor even if they don’t actually feel it. This means that religious revivals that become particularly prominent can envelop people who are far lower in Neuroticism than those who are, as they see it, “slain by the Holy Spirit.” Accordingly, popular revivals can generate a kind of group hysteria and thus appear far more popular than they really are. This is obvious when we consider how so many celebrities felt compelled to jump on the bandwagon of Black Lives Matter.

The Religion of Multiculturalism and Mental Health

So, with the nature of “religion” and “religious revivals” clear in our minds, we can now explore the “religious” nature of the Black Lives Matter protests. There are obvious parallels between 20th-century religious revivals—such as that that spear-headed by Billy Graham—and the Black Lives Matter revival. The leaders of the movement are extreme “liberals”—with this being clearly associated with mental instability, where conservatism and traditional religiosity are correlated with mental stability.63 The “revival” has taken place in the wake of a period of elevated mortality salience; in other words, it is a response to stress. Those who are drawn into it are politically liberal themselves, with this being associated with mental instability.64

In many respects, Multiculturalism can be argued to be a secular “replacement religion” for Christianity—and perhaps even a kind of Christian sect. The same argument has been made with regard to Marxism and even some kinds of Romantic Nationalism.

1. Dogmas

Traditional Christianity is based around a series of dogmas that you must accept in order to be regarded as a Christian and achieve salvation. These dogmas are sometimes logically incoherent—such as the Trinity—or require the acceptance of truth-claims that cannot be proved or are, on any reasonable basis, extraordinarily improbable. However, you signal your intellectual submission to the religious community by accepting these. This can be regarded as their purpose; they are tests of loyalty. In much the same way, Multiculturalism requires that you accept dogmas that are empirically inaccurate or patently nonsensical, such as that there are no race differences in intelligence or that everyone is “equal.”

2. “The Last Shall Be First.”

Christianity also tends towards idolizing the “marginalized.” It preaches that “the last shall be first” and encourages its followers to empower those who are supposedly marginalized, and humble themselves, embracing a kind of sacred poverty. Similarly, Marxism idolizes the dispossessed in the form of the “worker”; Romantic nationalism worships the “peasant”; and Multiculturalism, as espoused by Whites, idolizes non-Whites, and the more different they are—culturally and genetically—from Whites, the more they are worthy of reverence. There is evidence that humans—being evolved to tightly structured groups—have two fundamental instincts: one towards climbing the social hierarchy and the other towards equality, as groups that are relatively equal tend to avoid collapsing into discord.65 Thus, religions that preach “equality” can be highly psychologically attractive, especially to those who are not close to the top of the hierarchy or who fear they will not be able to get there. This is consistent with evidence that males who are physically strong—and thus who would have been more likely to ascend the prehistoric hierarchy via winning fights and being sexually selected for—are more likely to hold conservative views that specifically favor hierarchy and inequality.66

3. Self-Abasement and Guilt

The third key point that Multiculturalism has in common with Christianity, though not with pagan religions such as Hinduism, is the salience of “guilt.” In general, “guilt” and “shame” both function to make people “know their place,” and thus conform and behave in pro-social, cooperative ways. Accordingly, a group that adopts a religion imbued with these feelings to an optimum degree would be likely to out-compete other groups.

Christianity is a religion to which “guilt” is extremely important—“central to the biblical message” as one theologian has put it.67 According to Christian dogmas, humanity is “Fallen” as a consequence of its “Original Sin.” In other words, God is perfect and all-benevolent, whereas humanity is inherently sinful and bad, living in a sinful, Fallen world. Indeed, it was cast down into this world from Paradise as a punishment for its wickedness. The only way humanity can gain salvation and forgiveness is to admit how sinful it is and humbly worship God and follow the commands of His Church. Worldly success is, in a sense, something for which you should feel guilty—unless you are certain that God has blessed you with this success—because it implies that you are insufficiently humble; you are failing to sufficiently repent for your wickedness.

In much the same fashion, the Church of Multiculturalism tells its adherents that they are burdened by the Original Sin of Whiteness. White people are presumed to have treated people of other races in abominable ways, with images of slavery, the Holocaust, Jim Crow, and the like acting as symbols of their primal deeds. Whites must repent for their Original Sin by empowering those who are not White, such that racial “Equality” is attained. In the same way that wealthy people in Christian societies are “privileged” and must engage in charitable works to assuage their “guilt,” White people have the “privilege” of being “White”—not only being wealthy but enjoying that wealth at the expense of non-Whites, whom their ancestors brutalized, enslaved, or murdered. “Privilege” is the source of “guilt,” which must be assuaged through acts of humility and penance, potentially including not producing White children and adopting non-Whites instead.

Shame, though less obvious, is also germane to Christianity and its replacement religions. Those who refused to conform to Christianity could be “shamed” as devil-worshippers who might bring God’s anger on the community, and shunned accordingly. Those who do not “take the knee” for George Floyd or who remain silent, instead of publicly stating their support for Black Lives Matter, can be shamed as possible “racists;” with this term of abuse implying that you are not an adherent to the religious community. You are “Other.” This is because membership of the community is based around adherence to dogmas, not around blood-bonds, as is the case with pagan religions and with many forms of nationalism.68

A New Kind of Awakening

The key difference between the Church of Multiculturalism and Christianity is that there is no god—no non-physical existence. Moreover, Black Lives Matter represents an extremely “spiteful” form of religiosity, in the sense that there doesn’t appear to be any “forgiveness.” In Billy Graham rallies, you could “step forward” and be forgiven for your sins. In Black Lives Matter rallies, it doesn’t matter how many times you “take the knee,” there can be no forgiveness for your sin of being White. You must simply learn to live with the guilt, slightly assuaging it ever so often by campaigning to empower non-Whites.

As previously discussed, we can conceive of two distinct kinds of religion: those which are selected for under centuries of Darwinian conditions—that tend to involve the collective worship of a moral god—and those which deviate from this norm. Due to the way in which mental health and religiousness were co-selected under Darwinian conditions as we have explored, this “traditional religiosity” is now positively associated with mental health, while deviations from it—such as New Age affectations or belief in the paranormal—are associated with anxiety and depression, either on-going or periodic. People who are high in mental instability can be expected to become highly religious in the wake of a crisis and being low in traditional religiosity as well as fervently left-wing correlates with being high in mental instability

Accordingly, we would expect such people—self-identified “liberals”—to become extremely religious (in terms of their religious deviation) in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, and this is what we appear to be seeing. In previous situations of gravity, the overwhelming majority of the British population was Christian and believed, to varying degrees, in its doctrines. This would have meant that the relationship between being a traditional Christian and mental stability would have been much weaker than is now the case. It also meant that the revivals were Christian in nature, because this was the religious belief even of the kind of mentally unstable people who tend to undergo intense religious experiences. As already noted, a specific form of religiosity has been found to manifest among mentally unstable people suffering from high levels of stress—“Spiritual Struggle.” Those who felt the Holy Spirit during this revival would be, in general, relatively high in Neuroticism, something that would be soothed, temporarily, by their religious experience. Usually, their Christian zeal would be temporary. It would no longer be psychologically required once the period of stress was over and recovered from, by which time the factor that was elevating their anxiety to intolerable levels would have dissipated.

In 2020, especially for younger people, their religion is Multiculturalism and not Christianity. Christianity is now the religion of a shrinking minority. Consequently, we would expect some variant on the kind of revival outlined above to occur in the wake of Covid-19, especially among such people. Its leaders, as with Christian revivals, would be mentally unstable people. However, many of the “followers,” caught up in the revival, would be prone to mental instability and would be going through a particularly acute phase of anxiety. As with a Christian revival, these feelings would be alleviated by the collective experience—in this instance of “Black Lives Matter”—in which they would feel a sense of certainty that they were morally superior; that they were better than most (“racist”) people; and that they were part of creating a paradise on Earth. Once the anxiety-reducing feelings this induced wore off, such people would no longer be subject to acute mortality salience and then they would return to being much less fervent believers in the Church of Multiculturalism.

We would expect any such revival to be more pronounced among Multiculturalists than among Christians. Social Justice Warriors are irreligious and liberal, both of which correlate with mental instability. “Christians” are conservative and religious, both associated with mental stability. Accordingly, in a world in which remnant Christianity is associated with sound mindedness, a Multiculturalist revival in the wake of a pandemic becomes far more probable than a Christian one—though there still may be a Christian one of some kind in the near future. We would expect this Multiculturalist revival to be elevated among young people—because people go through a period of relatively high mental instability when they are young adults—and, in particular, among young females, because females are more religious than males and they are more prone to depression and anxiety. Multiculturalism is the “new religion”—the “new morality”—and thus females would be evolved to want to signal the extent of their adherence to it, being ultimately psychologically adapted to polygamous societies in which they must compete for the highest status males by strongly signaling their religiosity and sexual faithfulness.69 Females are also evolved to a patriarchal society in which decisions tend to be made for them by their fathers and husbands. With the breakdown of patriarchy, it has been argued that we would expect females—especially young females—to make particularly maladaptive decisions.70 These would include strongly aligning with a religion that seeks to destroy their ethnic group and effectively encouragers them to be childless.

It should be noted that, in relatively religious societies, females tend to be more politically conservative than males, seemingly because females are more religious and the religion promotes “traditional” values as the will of God. However, when the influence of traditional religiousness breaks down, the female propensity towards higher empathy—and thus leftism and anti-traditionalism—begins to manifest. In 1992, in Britain, women born in the 1920s were more conservative than men of the same age. However, women born in the 1960s were less conservative than males of the same age.71 These younger women, no longer as influenced by traditional religious ideas, tend to promote leftist ones—including altruism towards competing ethnic groups—with a kind of religious zeal. One commentator astutely termed them “The New Church Ladies,” evoking the subterranean religious quality to so much of contemporary female discourse.72

Traditional religiousness took the female propensity to strongly believe in God and engage in religious worship and focused this into an adaptive form of religiosity in which God promoted group-selected values. With the breakdown of this religion, we are left with females tending to be religiously fervent and high in generalized empathy and thus attracted to Multiculturalism and leftism. Females are also higher than males in Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Neuroticism, and, thus in social conformity.73 So, for this reason as well, we would expect them to be more heavily involved in the New Church into which younger females have been inculcated.

It has been observed that highly educated young people—those with post-graduate degrees—are significantly over-represented among Black Lives Matter activists.74 One possible explanation for this—beyond the fact that university Humanities and Social Science departments are increasingly indoctrination factories for leftist ideas75—is that there is a positive relationship between Neuroticism and academic success at university, especially when this is combined with high Conscientiousness (impulse control and rule-following).76 This is possibly because anxiety acts as a motivator towards diligence or because Neuroticism means you desire greater certainty about the nature of the world and believe you can attain this through higher education. In that Neuroticism predicts extrinsic religiousness77—that is, outward religious conformity—we would expect non-SJWs who were relatively high in these traits to be drawn into this dominant, public revival due to their fear of not conforming, leading them to compete to strongly outwardly conform.

Anarchic Religious Awakenings

The other difference between the British religious awakenings in the 20th century and Black Lives Matter is the anarchy involved: BLM activists flagrantly breaking the law, engaging in dangerous behavior, rioting, inciting perpetual disorder (“No Justice, No Peace”), and engaging in iconoclasm by toppling statues and desecrating memorials. In this sense, a clearer comparison can be found in the Peasants War that took place in German-speaking states in the 1520s, in the early days of the Reformation. There are multiple reasons why the Reformation began when it did, but one of them was a period of elevated mortality salience. There had been severe famine in Germany between 1515 and 1520.78

Reports indicate that violent Protestant mobs would strip Catholic Churches of their valuables and destroy their idols. As with Black Lives Matter, educated people were heavily over-represented among early Protestant iconoclasts—they were mainly the so-called “middling sort.”79 The Protestant leaders would oppose iconoclasm, publicly stating that idols should only be removed with permission from the proper authorities. But, as has occurred in Britain in 2020, the Swiss authorities preemptively removed icons as a way of halting public disorder and also as way of appeasing Protestant leaders. In June 1524, all Zurich churches were closed in order to prevent a maelstrom.80

In other words, Black Lives Matter is a particularly pronounced religious revival. In the 1520s, this occurred, in part, due to particularly difficult conditions. In 2020, it may be that the cause was moderately difficult conditions plus a growing percentage of young people who, partly for genetic reasons underpinned by increasing mutational load, increasingly suffer from depression and anxiety and, therefore, cannot psychologically cope with what would have been historically regarded as quite normal levels of mortality salience. Contemporary young people are increasingly in a situation of “evolutionary mismatch” where—under the influence of modern, anti-traditional ideologies, over-parenting, and education— they are decreasingly socialized as children in the manner that was the norm under harsh Darwinian conditions. This has been shown to lead to severe behavioral problems in non-human animals,81 and we will explore this issue in more detail below.

Furthermore, far superior communications—social media and instantaneous reactions to events around the world—mean that what may otherwise have been isolated patches of revivalism have been globalized, impacting much larger numbers of people. And there may also be an extent to which these riots are in the interests of some powerful individuals, who are themselves fervent adherents to Multiculturalism or who desire a subservient population that will not challenge them. If the population is depressed and demoralized, this subservience is clearly better accomplished. Accordingly, the riots—which could be crushed if so desired—are permitted to run their course. It is as if ordinary people are being told: “Look what we can allow to happen to you if you elect the wrong people or vote the wrong way in a referendum.” Afraid of offending the righteous mob—and their high-level sympathizers—even leaders who oppose leftist disorder dare not act decisively. Again, comparisons to the iconoclasm of the early English Reformation leap to mind. Iconoclasts were permitted to “get away with it” during the periods when the Protestant faction, most notably led by Thomas Cromwell (c.1485-1540), wielded the most influence at Court.82

All of this leads us to a final question. How have we reached a situation where so many people—including many in positions of power—wish to destroy their own extended kinship group?

BLM and the Spiteful Mutants

Christianity, even the zealous kind of the Reformation, was an adaptive form of religiosity. Thus, a key part of it is “forgiveness”—after publicly confessing your sins and wavering of faith. With the breakdown of Darwinian selection, we see an increasing deviation from this religious evolutionary norm, including religions that are maladaptive, because they are ultimately nihilistic and lack doctrines that allow a person’s highly negative feelings during times of stress to be fully expunged. This is what we see with Black Lives Matter—the ultimate logic of which is that Whites should simply feel perpetual shame throughout their lives with no hope of it being alleviated, other than in a very mild and brief way via “taking the knee.”

Young people have been inculcated with this maladaptive religion due, in part, to the breakdown of traditional Christianity, which, like all religions that survived under harsh Darwinian conditions, tended to take behavior that was adaptive in terms of group selection and turn this into the will of God. As discussed above, as child mortality collapsed, we had more and more people who would not have survived under harsher conditions—due to their high mutational load—who had mutations of the mind that caused to hold beliefs that would be highly maladaptive if held by even a small percentage of the group—anti-natalism being only the most obvious. Due to our being a highly eusocial species—that is, interacting in a “hive mind”—we are heavily influenced by those around us. In this way, it has been found that depression can spread like a contagion. If you are around a person who is depressed then you are more likely to become depressed yourself, a condition which is negatively associated with fertility.83 As a result, these mutants— spiteful mutants84—helped to spread their maladaptive ways of thinking even to non-mutants, gradually undermining adaptive institutions, such as traditional churches, and replacing them with their Church of Multiculturalism, a church which is now clearly adhered to even by the leadership of the Church of England.85 Having taken over the state’s organs of power, such as the education system and the media, they could then inculcate young people into the New Church, alter the evolutionarily adaptive methods of socialization traditionally imposed on them, and push them—and with them, the entire super-organism—to think and behave increasingly contra to their genetic interests.

This became possible when a “tipping point” is reached, whereby about 25 percent of the population advocated anti-traditional ideas. Experiments have shown that when this happens, people perceive the new worldview as the way forward and begin to abandon the old one en masse.86 With our evolution to obedience and following the leader and the mob, this can sometimes result in a misfiring of our adaptations such that we start to engage in behavior which is not in our evolutionary interests. This is particularly likely to be the case if we are subject to “evolutionary mismatch;” if we are placed in an ecology to which we are not evolved. We are evolved to a pre-industrial ecology, so we can expect to find ourselves increasingly maladapted as the ecology increasingly deviates from this. We will engage in behavior which would have been adaptive under previous conditions – such as following the crowd – but this will be decreasingly adaptive as the crowd is increasingly evolutionarily mismatched, mutated and influenced by spiteful mutants.

In 1954, this tipping point had not yet been reached in Britain. People forced themselves, for fear of ostracism, through so-called “effortful control,”87 to believe in traditional Christianity, meaning that the revival was Christian and adaptive in nature. Around 1970, the tipping point was reached. This is demonstrated by the fact that evidence of mutational load – in the form of autism, which is associated with paternal age – did not predict atheism in the 1950s, but by the 1970s it did predict atheism. By the 1970s, in the U.S., having an older father predicted atheism in a way that had not previously been the case. This is because Christianity was so strong during the earlier period that autistics, who tend not to be religious as we have already noted, forced themselves to conform to the dominant religiosity. By the latter period, the tipping point had been reached, so they no longer needed to conform.88

The Toppling of Evolutionary Success

The Church of Multiculturalism, and its Black Lives Matter conversion rallies, is a Church with “spiteful mutants” as its priestly class. Under harsh Darwinian conditions, only those with adaptive cognitive biases survived childhood, because maladaptive cognitive biases were under-pinned by mutation, and those with high mutational load would likely perish before reaching adulthood. With the extreme relaxation of these conditions, these “spiteful mutants” walk among us in significant numbers. These are people who are programmed to behave in a way that is highly maladaptive in evolutionary terms—which results in the destruction of group and even individual fitness—and to persuade others to do likewise. All of the doctrines they advocate involve, if accepted, essentially being a “failure as an organism”:

  • life has no meaning so you may as well not have children;
  • put the interests of other ethnic groups above your own and so reduce the extent to which your own genes are passed on;
  • have few or no children to assist non-human animals and their genetic interests over your own.

The toppling of “racist” statues by the Black Lives Matter mob can be perceived as tearing down the “old gods,” those whom European people have venerated as heroes. These statues have traditionally been erected to honor highly group-selected people who have promoted the genetic interests of Europeans by expanding their territory and leading their ethnic group to victory over rivals. In a sense, the statues are sacred, they are idols; objects of worship. To tear them down is a way of asserting that the religion that they represented no longer has any power, is no longer sacred, simply because the idols that embody it can successfully humiliated.

In 1520, Spanish explorer Hernan Cortes (1485-1547) destroyed every Aztec idol that he could and desecrated the temples. He noticed that it left the Aztecs demoralized and less able to put up a fight.89 So, this leaves the worshipers in a state of confusion in which the previously certain, uniquely real system by which they made sense of the world—and in which they played an integral and positive part—is an under assault. They feel confused because they have got used to this system, and the comforting presence of these statues, and they feel demoralized and anxious. Any significant change can cause this by virtue of elevating anxiety about the unknown.90

This, alongside the symbolism of the system that gives their life meaning being attacked, leads them to feel depressed and looking for new certainties. But what if the certainties offered are nihilistic and tell you that you are inherently evil and should debase and even destroy yourself, never able to be forgiven for your and your ancestors’ sins? This is the ultimate message of the Death Cult that is the Church of Multiculturalism. It is, therefore, no coincidence that it attracts the same psychological types who are attracted to literal suicide cults. Indeed, a Black Lives Matter Suicide Cult, in which young White women kill themselves to repent for their racist sins, would not be beyond the realms of possibility.


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  11. Ara Norenzayan and Azim Sharif, “The Origin and Evolution of Religious Pro-Sociality,” Science, 322 (2008): 58-62. ↩︎
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  77. Hills, Francis, Argyle, and Jackson, “Primary Personality Trait Correlates of Religious Practice and Orientation,” op cit. ↩︎
  78. Andrew Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Religion, War, Famine and Death in Reformation Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 15. ↩︎
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  81. See Michael A. Woodley of Menie, Matthew A. Sarraf, Radomir N. Pestow, and Heitor B. F. Fernandes, “Social Epistasis Amplifies the Fitness Costs of Deleterious Mutations, Engendering Rapid Fitness Decline Among Modernized Populations,” Evolutionary Psychological Science, 3 (2017): 181-191; and John Calhoun, “Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 66 (1973): 80-88. ↩︎
  82. Julie Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm During the English Civil War (Woodbridge, Suffolk, The Boydell Press, 2003), 4. ↩︎
  83. T.E. Joiner, “Contagious Depression: Existence, Specificity to Depressed Symptoms, and the Role of Reassurance Seeking,” Journal of Personal and Social Psychology 67 (1994): 287-296. ↩︎
  84. M. A. Woodley of Menie, M. Sarraf, R. Pestow and H. Fernandes, H. Social Epistasis Amplifies the Fitness Costs of Deleterious Mutations, Engendering Rapid Fitness Decline Among Modernized Populations. Evolutionary Psychological Science, 3 (2017): 181-191. ↩︎
  85. See Edward Dutton, “Imagination—It’s An Illusion, Quarterly Review, May 25, 2018, accessed June 20, 2020. ↩︎
  86. Damon Centola, Joshua Becker, Devon Brackbill, Andrea Baronchelli, “Experimental Evidence for Tipping Points in Social Convention, Science, 360 (2018): 1116-1119. ↩︎
  87. K. MacDonald. Effortful Control, Explicit Processing, and the Regulation of Human Evolved Predispositions. Psychological Review, 11 (2008): 1012-1031. ↩︎
  88. M.A. Woodley of Menie, S. Kanazawa, J. Pallesen, and M. Sarraf. Paternal Age Is Negatively Associated With Religious Behavior in a Post-60s But Not a Pre-60s US Birth Cohort: Testing a Prediction From the Social Epistasis Amplification Model. Journal of Religion and Health, (2020). doi: 10.1007/s10943-020-00987-9 ↩︎
  89. Victor Davis Hanson. Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2007), 175. ↩︎
  90. Ara Norenzayan and Azim F. Shariff, “The Origin and Evolution of Religious Pro-Sociality, Science, 322 (2008): 58-62. ↩︎

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Brexit: Quake or Squib

The victory of Leave against Remain on June 23, 2016, which not even the bookies had expected (52% with a record over 70% turnout) was a blow to the intelligentsia. That said, the British referendum is ambiguous. It can be an Excalibur or a heavy blow to Great Britain and the European Union. Already a financial crisis is looming…here is an early analysis of this complicated event.

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared on Guillaume Faye’s blog “J’ai Tout Compris” here.


The People Who Vote Wrong

Journalists, intellectuals, and politicians have criticized this anti-EU vote in derogatory terms: A victory for “populism” of the “uneducated”, “little whites”, even “racist”. This argument is openly undemocratic of course, the “real” democracy, that is to say, its simulacrum, the oligarchy (from the Greek “Government of a minority”). The people have no voice. Regarded as populist insolence from the rural areas and small towns against London and other cosmopolitan and urban sores, Brexit was seen with contempt and horror.

Ivan Rioufol, who is indignant at “this detestable EU, that is destroying Europe”(Le Figaro, 07/01/2016), quotes reactions from three icons of the hegemonic ideology, symbols of the cosmopolitan “superclass”. First Bernard Henri-Levy: “Brexit is not the victory of people, but of populism. Demagoguery not democracy”. In other words, true democracy is not the will of the citizens, but that of its politically correct leaders. Then Jacques Attali: “This is the dictatorship of populism and the selfishness of nations”. The Nation, that is the enemy. The EU must be a machine to crush common European ethnic identity.

Finally Alain Minc, the more explicit-and absurdly scornful: “The referendum is not the victory of the people of the elites, but of the uneducated”. Except that these “educated people”, devoid of common sense, ivory tower intellectuals, are, to use a word of deep French slang “idiots”. Where the common man is intelligent precisely because his mind is not polluted by brilliant, but stupid abstractions and because he has contact with every day experience-like with immigration.

The reactions of these three characters reflect both a total disregard for European peoples(rooted plebs in their minds) and class hatred by a cosmopolitan bourgeoisie disconnected from reality. Add to that Luc Ferry (Le Figaro, 07/07/2016) who refers to Montesquieu, apparently having never read him, added his two cents to anti-populism(anti-democracy), explaining that the referendum was always a bad thing because the people, who never graduated from anywhere, do not understand anything. What intelligence from Luc Ferry, a freelancer….

An Emotional Vote on Identity, not Economics

The English working class voted against the cosmopolitanism of the European Union, and in their minds, for national sovereignty. For François d’Orcival (Valeurs actuelles, 30/06 –06/07 2016) voting in favor of Brexit was all about immigration, with the invasive wave of 2016, fostered by a delusional Angela Merkel and European Commission decreeing admission quotes, organizing the invasion! Not to mention the workers from Eastern Europe.

Brexit won against serious economic arguments (the risk of a major recession) for reasons of ethnic and national identity. The electorate has been more sensitive to issues of identity , than materialistic considerations, economic and financial, even at the risk of a crisis. This is an important point for political scientists…in contrast to the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie, rooted people don’t think “money first”, but “identity first”. However, the vote in favor of Brexit comes with many ambiguities and unpredictable consequences. It’s a passport to the unknown, welcome aboard the phantom train!

Brexit Makes Sense: Britain Has Been Euro-Incompatible

Initially, the six founding nations (West Germany, Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands) were “Carolingian”-more or less consciously reconstituting the empire of Charlemagne, and therefore was incompatible with the British thalassocracy. In a January 14, 1963, press conference, General de Gaulle explained the veto of Britain into the European community as due to the antagonism between continental Europe and an anti-European merchant thalassocratic U.K. dominated as a geopolitical vassal by its former colony the United States.

De Gaulle predicted that Britain would never sincerely play the European game, but that of America. Obama fighting Brexit was quite normal, as it was for the U.K. to stay in the E.U. as a Trojan Horse.

Britain though has never really been a part of the E.U. It’s always had one foot in, and one foot out. It has not adopted the Euro or the Schengen agreement, or even 60% of the financial agreements. The British-mainly the English- schizophrenics never knew if they were European or not. The tragedy is that they show a supercilious devotion to sovereignty vis-à-vis the E.U. (and rightly so) but they abandoned their strategic sovereignty to America! Go figure…

The European Union Has Betrayed the European Idea

The idea of the European Union was initially well thought out. It is the governments of European countries, the authors of institutional abuse, political and ideological who are responsible for the failures, not “Brussels”.

Initially, with a common agricultural policy and a philosophy of continental protectionism, the European Community was going in the right direction. This has now been completely abandoned: The commission adopted unbridled free trade at the expense of European nations. (Fully opaque) negotiations to a transatlantic free trade agreement (TAFTA) is evidence of submission to the U.S.A. from a European Commission where corruption and lobbying from the U.S. are rampant. Mr. Junker, the president of the commission being the very model of transparency…

The totally absurd, European institutions (with too many “commissioners”, useless to appeal to all countries) have nothing but ineffective and undemocratic management. They are not built according to the needs of the peoples and nations of Europe, but to serve the interests of a privileged caste of eurocrats(technocratic and parliamentary) which paradoxically contains many Europhobes who abuse the system.

From the 50s, there were two visions of Europe: First, the founders Max Schumman, Alcide De Gasperi, and Konrad Adenauer: a Carolingian Europe reduced to six, with external protectionism and the maintenance of internal borders. This Europe was phased out in favor of the model of Jean Monnet(a proven Washington agent) which unfortunately prevailed over the vision of the fathers in favor of a purely mercantile and technocratic E.U. widened to nearly thirty states and led by an undemocratic Commission with grotesque regulations. So, the big jellyfish stung itself.

Do not confuse the initial draft of the European Community of Nations and the current European Union, which is really the anti-European fruit of many governments and their politicians.

The Possibility of a Neutered Brexit

Several European referendums against the E.U., notably in France and the Netherlands, have been invalidated, which is totally undemocratic. The Lisbon Treaty, ratified in 2007 by the parliament, violated the 2005 French referendum which rejected the European Constitution. It is quite possible that Brexit will suffer the same fate. It is entirely possible that the release of Britain from the E.U. will be entirely formal(legal) but not real.

It is conceivable that this British referendum if not followed by action, especially if a financial crisis arises, will not happen. Already David Cameron refused to use Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, which initiates the divorce of a member country from the E.U. If his successor does, then it will be two years of negotiations before the actual departure of the United Kingdom.

The future British government will negotiate the divorce will cynically try to keep all the benefits (the financial center of the City of London may process throughout the EU, customs without access to the single market, etc.) by getting rid of disadvantages including its contribution to the EU budget. Brexit can, therefore, vanish as if it was a hologram.

Obituary For the U.K.

Great Britain(the United Kingdom), it is said, may be dismantled due to the possible secession of Scotland and Northern Ireland (Ulster), which would join the Republic of Ireland, and E.U. member. Both nations wish to remain in the E.U., not to mention Gibraltar which voted 98% remain. A new Scottish referendum on leaving the U.K. is being considered. The problem with this is that an independent Scotland applying for membership in the E.U. would face a potential veto by the Spanish State, due to the possible contagion of secession spreading to Catalonia. Not to mention Scotland phasing into the Euro.

The situation may be insoluble.

In short, the referendum for Brexit may result in the end of the UK. The Queen (or the future King) would reign only over England and Wales. This amputation of Britain would be a major geopolitical and historical impact for Europe. Think of the implications for NATO …

The European Union is No Longer Credible and Can Disappear

The European Union looks like a rather political or non-political monster. Why can it disappear? Because, like the USSR, it is a utopia; a technocratic-liberal utopia where the USSR was a technocratic-socialist utopia (or “communist”,same thing). To say this is not at all to show “anti-European” or paleo-nationalist(petty-nationalist) sentiment. A united Europe is a profound dream (Kant himself desired it) but the way it was built on the ideological project of Jean Monnet proved disastrous and, in fact, perfectly anti-European. And anti-democratic.

Further increasing the number of EU members, and integrating four new small ungovernable Balkan countries when it is already at 28 shows it is no longer seriously serious. Admitting Turkey, ruled by Islamic semi-dictator Erdogan for which negotiations continue would only be the nail in the coffin.

Technocratic bureaucracy and hyper-regulations to impose a competitive liberalism, which is a total contradiction. It makes our American competitors laugh. Not only there is no protection of borders (free trade dogma) but the EU encourages and organizes the migration invasion – with the complicity of Chancellor Merkel, it is true! A non-elected, perfectly anti-democratic body, the Commission, is assigned the kingly authority of the Council. The Parliament in Strasbourg, the blurred skills and undefined and inconsistent government, is useless except to provide exorbitant privileges to its members and their families.

Jacques Delors, former president of the European Commission, confessed to being the cynical architect of a “soft despotism.” For the European Commission, the proof of the undemocratic, and despotic, was given 4 May 2016 by the proposal to distribute authoritatively without consulting the indigenous peoples the “refugees” and “migrants” (invaders to speak clearly) on pain of a fine of € 250,000 if denied or repressed! Amazing.

Invent Another Europe!

The idea of European integration was ruined by anti-European forces in reality. The refusal to admit the “Christian roots” of Europe, is symbolic. Europe is desired without roots, open to all migratory invasions and without economic protection. The European Union or the European Colander was seen as a voluntary and objective way to destroy the historical and ethnic nations of Europe. All under the benevolent eye of Washington…
The National Front and other sovereigntists wish the demise of this current European Union, this charnel house of nations, but they have no clear alternative. The Europe of Nations, that is to say, a new European Union, is never seriously considered.

If not changed significantly, the European Union faces certain death. For its balance book is increasingly showing up in the red. The European Union has nevertheless improved economies in the East and the South through avalanche grants. But this is just a minor byproduct. In the medium and the long term, the idea of the European Union is decaying. It is very likely the European Union will break up. We need to invent something else.
It is repeated throughout the E.U. that we need it to avoid the World Wars of old. This is a bad argument because even without the E.U. this would not be possible because the next war has already begun. The war between Europeans and Muslims.

Now, after Brexit, they want to “refound the E.U.” on new foundations. But they are just drunkards swearing off a drink in the morning. For the rest of us, we must start dreaming of alternatives.

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The Camp of the Saints: Where Literature and Life Collide

The Camp, although so redolent of Gitanes and High Mass at Nȏtre Dame, was in some strange way about me. It suggested that I was part of a cultural continuum that transcended national boundaries, which somehow encompassed Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and Latin; Classicism, Christianity, and humanism; conservatism as well as liberalism.

There is something about the sea that makes it a useful metaphor for change—a combination of its constant movement, its exhilarating ozone, its swift mutability, its vastness and mystery. Depending on what shore one stands on, the sea is a road or rampart, highway to freedom or gateway for invaders, origin of life or cause of death—or all of these things at once.

Nineteenth-Dynasty Egyptians fearing another descent by the Sea Peoples, or Lindisfarne monks glimpsing at longships, understandably had less agreeable ideas of Ocean than Portugal’s Henry the Navigator, England’s Walter Raleigh, or all those other swaggering Europeans from the Age of Discovery. But always, to look out to sea is to invite introspection, consider possibilities.

One numinous day in 1972, a forty-something French novelist named Jean Raspail looked out over the Mediterranean from Vallauris, west of Antibes. He was privately-educated and widely-travelled, the winner of the Académie Française’s Jean Walter Prize for empathetic writings about the unlucky native peoples of South America, a traditionalist Catholic acutely aware of his country’s position in the world. He had seen pulsating poverty around the globe, knew the realities of overpopulation and ethnic conflict, and now he had a revelatory vision of his prosperous Provence suddenly so engulfed. “And what if they came?” he asked himself. “And what if they came?”

He records that The Camp of the Saints almost wrote itself, with him starting to write each morning without quite knowing where the story would have taken him by evening. There was certainly no shortage of source-material, now that Situationists and Soixante-huitards were the mainstream, and all of European civilization—under ideological attack. “The Wretched of the Earth” had been co-opted as auxiliaries by Marxists and as potential consumers by capitalists; the colonies were being abandoned; Catholicism was in freefall; and traditions had become trammels. Judging from permitted public discourse, everyone—from bishops, politicians and academics to actresses—was united in embracing an idea of “France” as outmoded and morally reprehensible. France needed to atone, according to this new narrative, for empire and exploitations, to reinvent herself for a post-national age, effectively commit suicide in order to save her soul.

To Raspail, such ideas were risible, as they probably seemed to the majority of the French—but he also knew that they needed to be taken seriously. He saw that darkly comic notions could have revolutionary consequences. So he stitched real-life quotations from contemporary public intellectuals and celebrities into an epic imagining of a million-strong convoy of India’s poorest and most misshapen, setting out inchoately from the mouth of the Hooghly in rust-bucket ships, and across the Indian Ocean towards the Cape of Good Hope, and so around to Europe—a Promised Land of plenty, trailing the stench of latrines. This reverse colonization by the Tier Monde’s least enterprising was the perfect antithesis of the elitist European navigators, the old continent recoiling back in on itself in tiredness and toxic doubt. Old Europe, expansive Europe, Christian Europe, the Camp of the Saints (Revelations, 20:9)—and for that matter easygoing Europe, too—was suddenly a shrinking island in a world of angry water.

In lambent language, Raspail visualizes the multitudinous currents that ebb and flow through his fictive France as “The Last Chance Armada” creeps through preternaturally calm waters en route to disembarkation and destiny. He tells all too believably of moral grandstanding—the mood-mélange of calculation, foolishness, hysteria, and myopia—the excited solidarity that surges through France’s marginal minorities—the ever-shriller rhodomontade about international obligations, human rights and anti-racism – the cowed silence or wry acceptance of the minority of realists. A river of hypocritical canards flows South from studios even as their utterers decamp in the opposite direction—leaving in their rubbish-strewn wake fellow French too poor or old to move, and a tiny number of patriots too attached to their homeland to consider forsaking it even in extremis.

These last-standers hold out on a hilltop, as all of France and Europe fall to what Raspail brilliantly termed “stampeding lambs”—immigrants, who are simultaneously individually inoffensive and cumulatively catastrophic. For a brief spell, the diehards assert their identity as their ancestors had always been prepared to do, patrolling their tiny borders, using hunting rifles to pick off interlopers, revelling in simply being French and in France (although one is an Indian volunteer). This is even though—or because—they guess it is only a matter of days before their own annihilation, which is inevitably ordered by Paris.

The Camp was highly original—Raspail’s realization that immigration was the defining issue of his (and our) age, his clear-eyed examination of intellectual trends then still far from their logical denouements, his uncompromising commitment to la France profonde, and to Christianity—all rendered in strong and sonorous prose. His narrative, howsoever exaggerated for effect, was a distillation and condensation of observable reality. He laid bare the weaponization of words—gentle words like “tolerance,” “compassion,” “non-discrimination”—and the harsh facts underlying ‘liberal’ contemporaneousness. “I see the UN has decided to abolish the concept of race”, one Camp resistant remarks sardonically. “That means us!”

Acclaimed authors were not expected to have such retrograde attitudes, and mainstream publishers (Laffont in France, Scribner’s in America) were not supposed to publish anything that emanated from the Right Bank. So there was a savage backlash from littérateurs (although Raspail also had intellectual allies), who saw the book as a betrayal by one of their own. Some must also have recognized themselves, or elements of themselves, in the book’s more contemptible characters. Reviewers dutifully assailed it in hyperbolical terms; one typical American article called it “a fascist fantasy…a disgusting book”. The reviewers thus morally purged, and the book (from their point of view) sluiced hygienically down the pissoir, it fell into abeyance, read chiefly by those on the furthest Right fringes of French life.

Yet it never went out of print in France, and every few years showed itself dangerously above the surface, usually in response to some news story paralleling his plot. It has now entered a new half-life, still sometimes ritualistically condemned, but increasingly accepted as a part (albeit a slightly embarrassing part) of the literary landscape. The novel undoubtedly helped create the intellectual space, which has made it possible for Alain Finkielkraut, Michel Onfray, Michel Houellebecq, Renaud Camus, and Éric Zemmour to examine some of the countless dilemmas of immigration, often on prime-time media slots—‘a cathode-ray apocalypse’, according to one terrified old-timer.

Some early denunciators have sportingly admitted that they had been wrong to condemn The Camp—but it has dogged Raspail’s career nonetheless, and undoubtedly prevented him from being elected to the Académie Française in 2000. Yet even if he was forbidden to join the ranks of “les immortels” (as Academicians are nicknamed), ironically his book is likely to live for longer than most of those produced by present Academy members (except, maybe, Finkielkraut). As the author observed in a September 2015 interview,

“What’s happening today isn’t important, it’s anecdotal, because we are only at the beginning…Politicians have no solution to this problem. It’s like the national debt—we pass it on to our grandchildren.”

When Sea Changes was published in 2012, several commentators pointed out similarities to The Camp—a comparison more flattering to me than Raspail—and similarities could indeed be found, although also major differences. The Camp, which I read when I was nineteen, had unquestionably been an influence on me, helping crystallize pre-existing intuitions. It had proved to my youthful satisfaction something I had always felt (despite always being told I must not)—that immigration really mattered, more than almost any other political question. The book suggested not just that it was reasonable to take an interest, but that it was irresponsible not to do so. Raspail linked ancientness to modernity and aesthetics to demographics, and there was a fey romance in his worldview, so at odds with the boring mainstream (within which every choice seemed to come down to either Leftish vapidity or Rightish philistinism).

The Camp, although so redolent of Gitanes and High Mass at Nȏtre Dame, was in some strange way about me. It suggested that I was part of a cultural continuum that transcended national boundaries, which somehow encompassed Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and Latin; Classicism, Christianity, and humanism; conservatism as well as liberalism. I was in Raspail’s redoubt, even though I was not French, nor Catholic, indeed whether or not I believed in Christianity. When Raspail’s character Professor Calgues peers out from his seventeenth-century house towards the ominous beachhead, he was someone, whose motivations I could comprehend, and on whose side I instinctively aligned.

Ever afterwards, when I heard of some new landmark in loss—more restrictions on free speech in Belgium, liberalization of German citizenship laws, immigrant rapists in Malmo, riots in Bradford, a mosque opening in Granada (the first one since the Reconquista)—they seemed to be of more than local significance. I watched passive-aggressive phalanxes overwhelm one old bastion after another, and wondered when somebody with power would take notice, do something. But like the fifth-century Romans, who were cheering so enthusiastically at the Colosseum that they did not hear Alaric’s attack, twentieth-century Europeans seemed dangerously distracted from their dispossession. I was clearly a bit of a prig, yet I still think I had a point.

Then 9/11 sparked mass interest in immigration for the first time since Enoch Powell. Overnight there were newspaper columns, radio and TV programmes, think-tank reports…and then those dead were fading into memory, and immigration was continuing just as before. Even new bombs in London, Madrid and elsewhere did not slow the flow (cliché notwithstanding, it was never a “tide”, because tides go out again). Politicians, who projected Western power often violently abroad, were fostering weakness at home—even as public concern against mass migration, always considerable, continued to grow. The protesting-too-much, Stakhanovite rhetoric about diversity somehow equalling strength was heard much less often, but the underlying disease (literally dis-ease) remained untreated. If anything, the temperature kept rising, the boils—suppurating.

By now, I had exchanged Deptford for Lincolnshire, and a 1990s flat for an 1840s house across a field from a 1380 church, near a beach on which Viking rings have been found. It was only natural that I should imagine this ghosted frontier as besieged, not now by Danish pirates, but by soft-power cannon-fodder, human shields for an internationalist army. Hesitantly, with frequent halts, and feeling rather inadequate to the task, I started to makes notes for Sea Changes.

It mattered that the unwanted incomers should be comprehensible, sympathetic people doing exactly as I would have done. (I am, after all, an immigrant too.) Ibraham Nassouf had every reason to flee Basra, and every reason to think he would find a home in Britain. Who could not feel sorry for a man doubly betrayed, first, by his own culture, and then, by the West? But it mattered even more that the unwilling recipients should also be comprehensible and sympathetic, because this was the perspective usually absent from media discussions about immigration. The name of Dan Gowt given to my decent, out-of-his-depth farmer had several connotations—Daniel in the lions’ den, the old-fashioned disability of gout, and the old landscape, in which he had long-ago lodged so securely (gowt being an Anglo-Saxon term for a “drain” or “dyke”).

I wanted also to dissect the contemporary leftist mentality, which loves to see itself as ‘radical’, yet which is so reminiscent of previous religious outbreaks. So I named my chiliastic, self-regarding journalist John Leyden, in a nod to the especially obnoxious Anabaptist preacher John of Leyden. It just remained to give the too-British-to-be-quite-British name of Albert Norman to my never-quite-serious conservative journalist to have all the principal protagonists, after which, like Raspail, I let the action partly write itself.

Less happens in Sea Changes than in The Camp. The scale is smaller, the tone—more intimate. It is undoubtedly a more ‘English’ book in its slightly untidy, unsystematic approach to even this hugest of events—at times, more like reportage than a novel. Sea Changes is also more plangent—few of The Camp’s calumniators remarked on its essential calmness, Raspail’s belief that the time of the Europeans was over, and this was irresistible, part of a great cosmic cycle, in which sometimes one and sometimes another group rotates to the top. The ending of Sea Changes is much less dramatic, in fact, inconclusive—there could theoretically be a Sea Changes II.

Maybe there will need to be, because despite Raspail’s efforts, the Europe of 2015 is in an even sorrier psychological state than it was in 1972. To take one small but piquant example, Raspail suggests that French radio broadcasts Eine Kleine Nachtmusik as an instinctive response to the Last Chance Armada’s landfall, instead of the previously prevailing pop and trivia. This now sounds wildly romantic—today, the pop and trivia would continue unabated. (That cheering from the Colosseum…)

In retrospect, 1970s can seem like a decade of realism. They were certainly freer years intellectually. Would The Camp find a mainstream publisher now, in any Western country? Maybe, but most publishers, howsoever nominally committed to freedom of expression, when given an obviously controversial and not obviously commercial text, would probably prefer some other publisher to exercise that right. At the least, the text would probably be redacted to reflect today’s neuroses. France, like every European country, has a manically active and, at times, aggressive Left always looking for things to hate, to give them a raison d’être in a universe emptied of meaning—and they are usually acceded to by publishers, universities, institutions, and governments, because it is easier that way. Certainly, I found it impossible to place Sea Changes with any major firm, or even an agent, despite its more-in-sorrow-than-anger decidedly un-apocalyptic tone. Although it sounds immodest, I do not think Sea Changes is any worse than many of the books published by big firms (and I had no problem finding an agent for other books)—so I am compelled to conclude that the problem was the subject-matter.

That subject-matter is every day being added to, as real events catch up with Raspail’s plot-line (once called so unlikely). Europeans of all classes stare in compassion, but also dismay, at the oncoming pulses from Syria, Afghanistan, Eritrea, and all points East and South, encouraged by a worldly-unwise Roman Cathartic Pontiff and an angst-ridden German Chancellor so desperate to erase her people’s past that she is willing to convulse their present and sell their future. (And these are the conservatives.) The ultra-Left, of course, welcomes the turmoil, full certain that Jerusalem will be built here as soon as Europe falls. Mainstream opinion squats guiltily in the middle, morally obese, dining chiefly on sweets, wallowing in a diabetic kind of delusion. “Britain opens its arms to refugees”, gushed a Times headline—below a photo of a child staring through a rain-streaked Hungarian train window—the editors never seemingly considering that the effect is more like an opening of veins.

Few of our many self-appointed gatekeepers (who are also our gaolers) ever seem to ask themselves, “What happens next?” Of course, genuine refugees ought always to be assisted—as they would (presumably) help us if our situations were reversed. Few Europeans would object to costed and conditional schemes to assist those really in need, with refugees returned as soon as it is safe for them. Many Europeans would also accept that some of their governments bear much responsibility for the catastrophes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. But we also know that many of the new arrivals are economic opportunists, who know their human rights (and maybe even Islamist infiltrators), that those, who come, will stay, and their families will join them—and that behind this vanguard, whole new hosts shuffle on from all horizons.

How many will there be? Where will they live? How will we pay for them? What mental baggage do they bring? How will they adjust to us—or will we be told yet again to adjust to them? How will their being here affect the idea we have of ourselves, and our communal identities? Will there even be an “us” several decades hence? A Jesuit priest, who had spent most of his life in Africa and Asia, noted he had been “called home” to Italy to oversee arrivals—but if this continues, how much longer will he have a “home”? Will our children and grandchildren be better or worse off living in a continent even more divided than now, and more likely to be majority Muslim? Fifty years hence, what will be the state of the fought-for freedoms of the Left, or Christianity, stable states, and free economies of the Right—innovations and inheritances alike engulfed in a sea of perpetual Otherness?

It is possible to find inadvertently comic touches even in the midst of compulsory métissage, as we watch the tergiversations of politicians straddling contradictory demands, unwilling either to “embrace” or to be “left behind”: the Finnish Prime Minister, who so crassly offered to put up refugees in one of his houses; Sinn Féin’s wolfishly-grinning Gerry Adams toting a sign saying “Refugees welcome”; the English bishop, who demanded 30,000 more refugees, yet declined to offer any house-room in his mansion; that the Royal Naval flagship picking up Mediterranean migrants was H.M.S. Bulwark (rather than, say, Sponge); the German open-borders activist, who understandably felt “very sad” after being stabbed by clients.

To the sardonically-inclined, the present spectacle is, at times, reminiscent of religious ecstasies—mass swoonings, passionate and ostentatious self-flagellations (too passionate, too ostentatious to be true), votive offerings, and even icons, in the shape of little, drowned, doll-like Aylan Kurdi, lying so rigidly to attention at the margin of the Aegean. There is vast emotion out there in the hinterland—but how deep does it go? How many truly feel for people they do not know? Already, there are panicky pull-backs by mainstream—politicians suddenly seeing what they have allowed, upswings for non-mainstream parties representing old Europe, surging demonstrations, hostels burned…and these are just the immediate effects.

Then there are the absorbing psychological puzzles, like Chancellor Merkel—rectory-reared like so many of the worst (and best), privately haunted by the idea of Europe dying, yet pursuing policies guaranteed to expedite this, somehow believing that economic prudence, strong institutions, and family life can be achieved without social solidarity. The outwardly stolid operator would seem to be a little girl inside, aghast at the nature of the world, seeking inner absolution by changing everyone and everything else. Her ignoble example filters all the way down to the likes of the Hessian provincial politician, who told a restive audience of his own people that if they did not like the idea of 400 immigrants being deposited in their little town, they should be the ones to leave.

Unsatisfied with this, Merkel is offering Turkish EU membership as a bribe for helping halt the Syrian tsunami—all too ably assisted by foreign equivalents like David Cameron and the European Commission’s suitably-named Jean-Claude Juncker. To offer European membership to a developing nation with a burgeoning population, dominated by an historically antithetical faith, unstable and corrupt, riven by terrorism and bordering Syria, Iraq, and Iran is a stroke of geopolitical genius that might be disbelieved if suggested by a satirical novelist, just as Raspail’s forecasts were ridiculed by so many of his contemporaries.

Human beings notoriously tend towards short-term thinking, but we can sometimes make serious attempts to avert looming catastrophes, as seen in relation to climate change. Why can we not similarly exert ourselves to protect unique national cultures, irreplaceable efflorescences of the human spirit? Must our continent of cathedrals and charters be overcome, drowned as surely and sadly as the Kurdish boy? Must all that is excellent and European be agglomerated down in the name of a spurious equality?

Or maybe there is still a way to break free from merciless logic through some blend of activisms that can remind us of who and what we were, and could be again. Maybe we can turn our alleged end into a brave beginning. History is fluid, we have resources, and there is scope for practical idealism. We, who have inherited this most enviable of civilizations, need to believe that and look for a future—because the alternative is unspeakable.

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“Vikings” and the Pagan-Christian Synthesis

“In the gentle fall of rain from Heaven I hear my God. But in the thunder I still hear Thor.” (Brother Athelstan)

Ragnar: So have you returned to your faith, renounced ours? Athelstan: I wish it was so simple. In the gentle fall of rain from Heaven I hear my God. But in the thunder I still hear Thor. That is my agony. Ragnar: I hope that some day our Gods can become friends. Ragnar: So have you returned to your faith, renounced ours? Athelstan: I wish it was so simple. In the gentle fall of rain from Heaven I hear my God. But in the thunder I still hear Thor. That is my agony. Ragnar: I hope that some day our Gods can become friends.

Whenever political activists talk about culture, they need to be careful about not over-reading the artist’s intent.

Rather than guessing what he meant politics-wise, activists have to look for the influences, heretical or mainstream, he drew upon. Unlike the intended message, which is subject to interpretation, cultural influences can be identified with sufficient likelihood.

Though it cannot be proven—and culture industry creators would likely deny it—it is more than plausible that James C. Russell’s The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity has had an important influence on popular culture.

In Canadian-Irish TV series Vikings, this influence is close to obvious. Though the show’s screenwriters may not have read it—I would be very surprised they haven’t at least heard of it—they seem to have been influenced by it at least through an intermediary text, or person, which/who conveyed Russell’s message.

Russell established in his book that the Christianization of Germanic Europe (in the broad sense, including Scandinavia) was two-sided: the indigenous Pagan faith was replaced, by fair means or foul, by an exogenous one; and in doing so, Christianity was altered by its prey, a process which had actually already begun in the Roman empire.

The ubiquity of Pagan symbols and rituals in European Christianity

This is a reality that is hard to talk about with Christians—and the more conservative, the harder. It is like Edgar Poe’s Purloined Letter: what is right before one’s eyes is what they cannot see. The omnipresence of Pagan rituals and symbols in European Christianity is such that many Christians see them as having always belonged to their faith, even in its first stages, when it was still a markedly Oriental religion.

In some countries, “king cakes” are baked for the celebration of the Epiphany, and crepes are cooked for the day of Candlemas. Both symbolize a Sun disk, and these two Winter feasts were, before Christianity phagocytated them, meant to prepare the return of the Sun.

Of course, we also know that the Christmas holiday was established to replace the celebration of the Winter Solstice, which was a solar cult in various European indigenous religions, most notably in Rome (Sol Invictus).

Interestingly, since the fracture between Catholicism and Protestantism roughly corresponds to that between Latin and Germanic Europe (please note my emphasis on “roughly” before mentioning Catholic Flanders or Calvinist Romandy), Protestants are usually more aware of this unholy origin. As Richard Rives at WND proudly reminded us, Christmas used to be illegal in many Protestant countries. Below is a screenshot from Rives’s video:

That Rome has influenced Christianity is made evident by the fact that the Catholic Church is established in the Eternal City, that the Pope is called “Pontifex Maximus” as the Roman Emperors used to be, and of course that Latin is the main liturgic language. But do all Catholics know that cardinals wear purple cassocks just like Roman senators used to? That priests (in Western churches) are clean-shaven and keep their hair short like the Romans? And that nuns cover their hair as Roman free women did, to distinguish themselves from slaves?

Christianity didn’t merely conquer the Indo-European world. It was also molded by it, almost beyond recognition after centuries of reciprocal acculturation.

This is chiefly what the two first seasons of TV series Vikings are about.

Ragnar (left) hands his plunder over to Jarl Haraldson. Ragnar (left) hands his plunder over to Jarl Haraldson.

When the story begins, Ragnar Lothbrok is an under-achieving farmer, who occasionnaly goes raiding with other Norsemen in the Baltic lands. He resents the authority of Jarl Haraldson, who is a generation older than he.

Every year, after the harvest, Haraldson orders his men to raid East. The plunder is meager, since Balts are not really richer than Vikings. But even though their farms are hardly sufficient to support their families, Ragnar and the other young raiders have to hand over all the booty to Haraldson, who comfortably stays home. If the story was taking place in today’s West, Haraldson would likely be a baby-boomer expecting his children to pay for his retirement pension after a pat on the back, and then wonder why they, unlike him, cannot make both ends meet. But I digress (or do I?).

Ragnar has enough, and so does his brother Rollo (not to be confused with the founder of the Duchy of Normandy; the story is contemporary to Charlemagne, over a century before the Norsemen’s settlement in France).

Ragnar buys a sun compass to a merchant, which enables him to find his way West, beyond the strait that separates the Baltic Sea from the North Sea. There, the merchant told Ragnar, fabulous riches await him in a place named England. Further South is the even-richer “Frankia” (the Kingdom of the Franks).

Since all the ships belong to Haraldson, Ragnar needs a new boat. He asks his friend Floki (reminiscent of the God Loki), to build a flat-bottomed one, that can both navigate on rivers and high seas. The Scandinavian drakkar is born. Floki’s odd appearance and erratic behavior are a nod to Heath Ledger’s Joker (Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight), as illustrated by a scene in the second season when Floki tells Ragnar’s son that he’s “just a joker”.

“All things begin and end as stories”

Compass, boat… Ragnar now needs a crew. Rollo gathers the region’s best warriors and sets up a meeting. Wary of Ragnar’s intentions at first, and afraid that Haraldson might punish them for disobeying him, the men are, one by one, taken by Ragnar’s Tyler Durden-like speech. Ragnar doesn’t try to convince his audience by way of factual arguments or logical demonstrations. Rather, he inspires them with a dream, a story they’ll tell their children. As Ragnar puts it, “all things begin and end as stories”:

As could be expected, Ragnar’s raids on Northumbria (one of England’s seven kingdoms at the time) significantly increase his prestige and power in Kattegat, still under Haraldson’s rule. This inevitably leads to a conflict between the two men. Being hunted down by Haraldson’s men, Ragnar challenges Haraldson in combat and, predictably, kills him and becomes Jarl.

“Why are we not looking outwards to the West?”

Being now an important ruler, Ragnar will try to unify the Vikings, still spending most of their formidable energy fighting each other (something Madison Grant lamented). After an epic battle leaving no victor between two Viking armies, one led by Ragnar, the other led by his brother Rollo, Ragnar delivers a speech in which he urges all men to “look outwards to the West:”

During his first raid on Northumbria, Ragnar met with a Saxon monk, named Athelstan. He spared his life not out of mercy, but because, Athelstan speaking Norse in addition to Old Saxon, Ragnar thought (rightly) that he’d be of great use to him.

At first a hostage and then a slave, Athelstan soon became Ragnar’s protégé, and even his main advisor, due to his cleverness, courage, and wits.

This symbolizes the encounter between Nordic Paganism and Christianity. At first disgusted by the Pagans’ uncouth manners, Athelstan will more and more forget his Christian faith and convert to the Vikings’ Pagan religion (or maybe I should say “revert,” since continental Saxons had only recently been Christianized under the iron fist of Charlemagne, who was not always the gentle-hearted, loving king both popular and elite culture have pictured along the centuries).

Of course, the acculturation goes both ways: Ragnar is impressed by the Christians’ ability to build wealthy, efficient societies, while his people are still wasting their tremendous strength in suicidal, internecine berserk.

Christianization, a “come-together” moment for Europeans

For all the legitimate criticisms that Pagan or Nietzschean alt-righters can have about Christianity (especially today’s Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant), they souldn’t forget that it was the first religion that gave a feeling of kinship and a common purpose to Europeans.

Descendants of the long-forgotten Indo-European people, Europeans had scattered across the heterogeneous continent they conquered and branched off into a number of peoples, speaking many different languages, to the point where they saw each other as foreigners, and even “Barbarians.”

(And it happened again during the first half of the 20th century. Then, Europeans worldwide nearly annihilated each other in wars driven by petty nationalisms that were wrong on all counts: genetic, cultural, moral.)

Christianization, despite Christianity’s extra-European origins and universalistic outlook, was for Europeans a “come-together” moment, and this encounter between two Germanic peoples once separated by faith illustrates it well.

Odin on the Cross

Back to the series, this back-and-forth between Paganism and Christianity reaches a higher level when Athelstan is captured by King Ecbert of Wessex during a new Viking raid. Recognized as a Saxon and thus as an apostate, Athelstan is crucified (see picture on the right) by the local bishop (likely a historical inaccuracy since Emperor Constantine had outlawed crucifixion in the 4th century A.D. and none were documented afterwards).

What struck me when I saw the scene was the way Athelstan was represented. Look at the picture closely. Having been beaten up by the Christian populace, his eye is so black that he looks one-eyed, just like Odin. Given the emphasis on his appearance on the cross, I doubt it is coincidental.

Luckily for Athelstan, King Ecbert arrives just in time. He orders the bishop to cut him down, and once again, Athelstan becomes the ruler’s protégé and counsellor. (Priests advising kings was commonplace then: one of Charlemagne’s main advisors was Alcuin, an English monk.)

Of course, King Ecbert wants to know more about the Vikings to be able to defeat them. He is a symetrical character to Ragnar’s: like the latter, Ecbert rules over a portion of a divided country, and hopes to unify England under his rule. The war with the Vikings must be a way, thinks he, to assert his legitimacy, since he is the only one able to resist them. As we know, however, it is two centuries later a Norseman, William the Conqueror, who will succeed in this endeavor at the Battle of Hastings.

The second reason why King Ecbert takes interest in Athelstan is because as a former monk, he is fluent in Latin. Ecbert wants Athelstan to translate and read him aloud the lives of the Roman emperors (likely Suetonius’s Twelve Caesars), thinking Roman civilization was superior to Early Medieval Europe, which is another historical inaccuracy. The very idea of the “Dark Ages” is a modern fabrication devised by French revolutionaries to justify the Enlightenment’s tabula rasa. Roman basilicas and Gothic cathedrals still stand to testify that the “Dark” Ages were actually bright.

The similarities between Paganism and Christianity

Being forced into returning to Christianity, Athelstan has a hard time forgetting Paganism, as if the latter was a natural faith to him while Christianity necessarily needed constraint. During Mass, he almost falls out when a crucified Christ appears to be bleeding, which reminds him of a Viking, Leif, who was sacrificed at the Pagan temple of Uppsala:

Increasingly, Athelstan is struck by the similarities between Paganism and Christianity. When King Ecbert asks him to tell him more about Odin, Thor, Loki or Freyja, Athelstan responds in a way that both thrills and frightens him:

“Their gods are very old… and sometimes I could not help noticing some similarities with our own God… and His Son.”

Later, when Ragnar and Athelstan meet again (King Ecbert and Ragnar are seeking a truce), Ragnar asks Athelstan whether he has returned to Christianity and abandoned Paganism. But things are not so simple:

Ragnar, who unlike his brother Rollo has not received baptism at this point (this was one of King Alle of Northumbria’s conditions for the peace talks), takes a growing interest in Christianity, which foreshadows the Vikings’ conversion. This of course is a historical short-cut, given that Norsemen would not become Christians before the 10th and 11th centuries.

But religious acculturation is a long march, which proceeds with seemingly benign but, in retrospect, irreversible and accelerating steps. Over three centuries passed between Nero’s persecutions against Christians and Theodosius I turning Christianity into the Roman Empire’s official State religion (380). The latter happened “only” 43 years after Constantine’s conversion on his deathbed (337).

In the series, such benign step is the scene in which both Ragnar and Athelstan recite a Pater Noster before going into battle against King Horik of Denmark. Once victorious, Ragnar becomes the uncontested ruler of the Vikings. A Promethean figure, Ragnar proves that boundaries exist to be tresspassed.

The second season ends on this note (Season 3 will be released in 2015) and I could finish my review here, but I think that beyond the depiction of the Pagan-Christian synthesis, Vikings asks a capital question for us, which is:

Which religion for 21st century Europeans?

Three questions seem to arise here. Should we return to the faith of our ancestors? Should we save Christianity from itself? Or should we overcome both Paganism and Christianity with a futuristic religion that would set space conquest as our “Manifest Destiny?” (I’m leaving aside the question whether we should stick to materialistic Modernity. The absence of Transcendence of the latter obviously argues against such an option. If the status quo was a viable one, our legacy would be guaranteed.)

Returning to Paganism poses a major problem. As Karl Marx famously put it, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” And I fear a return to Paganism would be such a farce, from what I can judge when I take a look at recent forms of Paganism. Pagans can’t act as if Christianity hadn’t vanquished their faith. I hear the argument that Paganism was just in a state of dormition, and that for most of European history (including when Europeans had no consciousnness of being one people), Europeans were Pagans.

But then, how would it not contradict the imperious necessity of a European Brotherhood? The absence thereof was arguably Paganism’s main flaw, and Christianity, for all its vices, allowed Europeans to get together.

Most readers of this article would return to Germanic and Nordic religions, while the author would have to choose between Gallic and Roman ones (the latter would be more to my liking, by the way; I consider myself a Roman rather than a Gaul). Slavs would be separated from the rest of us. Again.

The same argument works for Christianity. Once united by faith, Christendom has been torn apart by the wars between Catholics and Protestants. These Wars of Religion ended on a “draw,” leading to the triumph of the secular State, which paved the way towards Modernity. That’s where we are now.

Critics of Christianity on the Alternative Right usually blame it for its universalism, but I think the main problem with Christianity is the belief in the Apocalypse. Whether we precipitate the End of the World or wait for it, we can’t have a future (a future far beyond the death and rebirth of our own individual souls, a selfish concern if there ever was one) if we don’t believe that something awaits us (“us” being the long chain linking our ancestors to our descendants) after the Earth has become inhospitable for human life.

Enter this futuristic religion I was mentioning as the third option. The main trap for it would be to amount to “Modernity on life support,” with the West, now encompassing all of Mankind, escaping to new worlds after having made the original one unwelcoming. This would happen only if Europeans keep refusing to drink at Tradition’s rejuvenating spring.

Tradition that comprises both Paganism and Christianity as sucessive, necessary steps in European Man’s upward journey. Yes, that presupposes a belief in linear time. For our mortal planet’s lifespan is linear, too.

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Satire as News


Editor’s Note: This was originally published by the race realist satire blog Diversity Chronicle. The site has managed to troll major media in the past and is an interesting venture in seeing how ridiculous our society has become that these stories are now believable news stories.


The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), in a decision that has enraged fundamentalists and those on the radical and extreme right, has voted to recognize that Jesus Christ “may have been gay and transgendered.” This decision has provoked some extremists to accuse the Presbyterian Church of blasphemy and even apostasy. The Presbyterian Church reports receiving hundreds of angry letters of homophobic hate-mail since the decision, expressing hateful, bigoted, retrograde and ignorant views against the LGBT community. Previously, the church voted to ordain openly gay clergy and to allow ministers to officiate at gay weddings, rightly earning praise from progressives.

In another decision that is only controversial among hateful and intolerant bigots, the Presbyterians have decided to begin teaching children of all ages about homosexuality and the transgendered. Experts agree that it is important to reach children at the earliest ages in order to inculcate a spirit of tolerance for alternative lifestyles. Children need to understand that all sexual orientations and lifestyles, as well as all sexual acts, are equal and morally equivalent under all circumstances. No orientation or type of sexual act is better than any other – all are equal!

Statistics from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and other groups, showing that homosexuals are more likely to contract AIDS or other STDs, can have no basis in fact. They are quite obviously the result of a shockingly pervasive institutional homophobia. There can be no other rational explanation. In another decision, praised by progressives, condoms will be distributed at every Sunday school class. The church has decided to give out new glow-in-the-dark condoms in an effort to get children and teens more interested in practicing safe sex.

Children will be taught reinterpreted Bible stories, which include positive LGBT role-models. Based on a literal reading of some biblical verses, like 2 Samuel 1:26, it is now widely accepted that King David, the ancient Israelite hero, was a proud homosexual. The verse reads “I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.” Another verse even includes a kiss between David and Jonathan! “And as soon as the lad was gone, David arose out of a place toward the south, and fell on his face to the ground, and bowed himself three times: and they kissed one another, and wept one with another, until David exceeded.” (1 Samuel 20:41)

We even read that Jonathan stripped himself of his clothes before David! 1 Samuel 18:3-4 says “Then Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul. And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was upon him, and gave it to David, and his garments, even to his sword, and to his bow, and to his girdle.” Although most scholars agree that the Torah does prohibit homosexuality rather explicitly (Leviticus 20:13) the Old Testament teaches that, where love is concerned, even God must bow to human feelings and abrogate His law! This might sound like God has changed His mind, which might disturb some fundamentalists, but the Bible cites other examples of this. God regretted that He had made man at one point (Genesis 6:6-7), and He regretted flooding the earth and vowed never to do it again. (Genesis 9:10-11)

LGBT and Liberation Theology Pastor Douglas Calvert observed that “There is actually a great deal of evidence that Jesus Christ was not heterosexual. According to tradition he had very long hair. He was very effeminate and soft spoken. He never married. He had no children, and he never expressed a romantic interest in the opposite sex. He did hang out with twelve guys though, and travelled with them all the time. When they were alone with nothing else to do, did they experiment with each other? Did they sleep together, or engage in orgies? We may never know for certain, but the answer is most definitely that they probably did.”

Paul Oestreicher, an Anglican chaplain at the university of Sussex, agrees. His article “Was Jesus gay? Probably” can be read here. More and more mainline protestant denominations are becoming open to the idea that Jesus Christ, whom they regard as the Son of God, and the third person of the Trinity, may have been gay. Instead of finding this as a source of shame or disconcertion, Christians should be proud and loudly proclaim the fact that Jesus Christ was gay! They should march through the streets advertising it with banners and shouting it through megaphones, loudly proclaiming “We are proud God is gay!”

Although most other prominent religious figures were married, or were polygamous, Jesus Christ never married. Many male pagan deities had wives or several wives and concubines as well. Shiva, the Hindu deity, had at least eight wives and countless concubines according to tradition. Despite Jewish tradition upholding marriage, Christ never married, nor did he own any slave girls. Curiously, the chief founder of Christianity, who sought to propagate it after Christ’s death, the Apostle Paul, also never married. Perhaps Christianity was the first world religion accepting of homosexuality.

Moses, Muhammad, and even the Buddha married and had offspring. Is it possible instead that Christ was not homosexual but perhaps was impotent? Is it possible that he had no sexual drive? Was he a sexually repressed heterosexual, who merely avoided women? Perhaps he was socially awkward with women? While these things cannot be ruled out, they seem unlikely. Some critics point to verses seemingly extolling the virtues of a eunuch’s life. (Mathew 19:12) Those verses however only serve to further reinforce the fact that Christ despised and abhorred the very idea of heterosexual sex!

Feminist Professor Claudia Jackson noted that “Jesus Christ was an early feminist; he understood that any sexual activity between a man and a woman was always rape. It is rape even if a woman expressly asked a man to have sexual relations with her. Men have always enjoyed a position of superiority over women. Thus the relationships between the sexes have always been unequal. Therefore heterosexual sexual activity always represents an indecent assault upon women.”

The Gospel of John refers to the gay lover of Jesus Christ “and to the other disciple, whom Jesus loved…” (John 20:2) Before his death by crucifixion the Bible tells us, in John 19:26-27 “When Jesus therefore saw his mother, and the disciple standing by, whom he loved, he saith unto his mother, Woman, behold thy son! Then saith he to the disciple, Behold thy mother! And from that hour that disciple took her unto his own home.” Clearly Jesus was saying something like “Mom, I’ve married a man. We are gay lovers. So, he is your son-in-law. He should live with you now, and take care of you.” This could not be more clear.

Some fundamentalist opponents of homosexuality cite verses like Leviticus 20:13 “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.” There are several possible answers to this, besides the one mentioned earlier. The New Testament clearly teaches that God’s law was nailed to the cross and abolished on the basis of Christ’s sacrificial death. Thus God’s laws in the Old Testament are no longer binding for Christians. (Colossians 2:14) If one is Jewish, one could perhaps argue God was once homophobic but is no longer. God has reformed Himself and become more tolerant. Another retort might be that this verse, incompatible as it is with God’s love, was never inspired by God to begin with and should be dismissed as not truly of divine origin.

The particular explanation that one adopts is not important as long as we understand that homophobia is an ugly crime that we must never accept. We cannot countenance it under any circumstances. We must never allow bigotry to cloak itself in the garments of religiosity or spirituality! A homophobic religion is not worthy of tolerance, but only of hatred and contempt! To persecute such a sick and dangerous cult would not be intolerant, but virtuous and vitally necessary! Intolerance warrants no tolerance and tolerating intolerance is arguably the greatest evil of our time.

1 Corinthians 6:9-10 is also used by homophobes and haters to attack the LGBT community. The verses read “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.”

Although abusers of themselves with mankind does explicitly refer to homosexual activity, and that is even more apparent in many other translations, these verses too could be rejected as incompatible with God’s love. Progressive Jews and Christians see the Bible as an evolving document. It must change and our interpretations of it must change with the times so that it remains relevant in every generation. To do otherwise would be to make ourselves prisoners beholden to an ancient literary work. Books are written by people, not by the hand of God onto stone! Good and evil or right and wrong are social constructs, evolving and changing over time.

Let us not forget, the Bible also calls shellfish unclean. Shall we all change our diets because of something that primitive nomadic, unwashed, lice-infested, neck bearded and barely literate peoples wrote several thousand years ago? Remember, these are people who owned slaves, sold their own daughters into slavery and murdered their family members and neighbours. Why? For worshipping the wrong supernatural sky buddies or picking up sticks on the wrong day. Hell, even saying that Asherah was Yahweh’s girlfriend was enough to warrant death for an Israelite! They were all, clearly, very far from perfect.

As Progressive Christians understand it, the Bible is the inspired word of God. However, it must evolve and be interpreted in light of present circumstances and conditions. It must not be rigid, unchanging, or seen as somehow inerrant. Likewise, Martin Luther King Jr., Ghandi, and Nelson Mandela were inspired by God. The Bible must not be seen as an exclusive or even primary source of truth in life. To do so would be to worship a book, to fall into the sin of bibliolatry. God is love, and therefore love and its daughters, tolerance and pluralism, and not the Bible should ultimately guide us. The Bible is an important literary work, but it only has value to the extent that it affirms humanist virtues.

Although religious fundamentalist homophobes like to claim Jesus Christ was a right-wing Christian who hated gays, the truth is far from that. Jesus opposed public prayer, and prayer in school. Jesus wanted to keep prayer in the closet and out of the public sphere “But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.” (Matthew 6:6 KJV.) Jesus said to keep prayer, and not homosexuality, in the closet, contrary to what so many bigoted and intolerant fundies proclaim!

We know that Jesus was a trained carpenter by Joseph the husband of Mary. It seems likely that along with building homes and furniture, Jesus offered decorating tips and ideas to clients. In his business, he would have had ample opportunity to discuss and explore interior decorating. No less an authority than Elton John noted that Jesus would have backed gay marriage and was gay himself.

In “The Secret Gospel of Mark” Jesus teaches a youth – who was wearing only a linen cloth over his naked body – the “Mystery of the Kingdom of God.” Obviously, Jesus was initiating him into his first homosexual activity! There can clearly be no other reasonable explanation. The Christian Church rejected this gospel as apocryphal, because of homophobia and intolerance!

Jesus Christ was a strong advocate of economic levelling and redistribution. He once told a rich man “And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” (Matthew 19:24) He predicted a world where the poor would one day rule and hold all property in common, while the rich one percent would come last, as punishment for their crimes. “So the last shall be first, and the first last…” (Matthew 20:16)

Jesus even drove the capitalists out of the Temple and forbade them from selling their wares there. (John 2:14-16) Jesus was also a renowned peace activist. (Matthew 5:9) Jesus said we are to be judged based on how we treat the least of his brethren. “And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” (Matthew 25:40) A rich man asks Jesus what he must do to gain eternal life. “Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.” (Matthew 19:21)

Clearly Jesus was a homosexual and a progressive who favoured economic levelling, banning public prayer, and who strongly denounced the rich. The guy was a radical Jewish liberal as the Bible shows, persecuted and hated by the conservatives of his time! Those conservative leaders ultimately instigated his murder, so great was their hatred of him! It is ironic that conservatives and right-wingers claim to follow his teachings. They do so by systematically ignoring or distorting most of them!

It’s time for progressives to take Jesus back. We should not allow the radical and extreme right to hold the memory of one of our own hostage! Let us reclaim Jesus, who no doubt, if he were alive today, would proudly march with us under a rainbow flag in an LGBT parade denouncing injustice, inequality and intolerance! At LGBT parades across the nation and around the world this year, the Christian LGBT community will march with banners proudly proclaiming “God is Gay!” in his memory!

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Christendom, Christianity, and Coulter

Coulter’s understanding that Africa is ultimately a global cultural “follower” reflects a more sophisticated understanding of reality than American Christians who act as if Africa will redeem the West for Christ. 

Because of her latest column about Christian missionaries in Africa and their role in bringing Ebola to the United States, Ann Coulter is being called “monstrous,” “sick,” a “detestable harpy” and a “bitter, vicious troll” – by the American Right. Coulter made the case that Dr. Kent Brantly and his nurse engaged in self-righteous moral preening for choosing to work in Africa.  In response, a cavalcade of screeching conservatives began wailing at a level unheard since Tumblr heard that someone called Lena Dunham fat.   

Coulter made the obvious point that by going to Africa, contracting Ebola, and necessitating a massively expensive effort to fly back to the United States for treatment, Dr. Brantly squandered millions of dollars that otherwise would have been used to save lives. In response, conservatives joined the Left to engage in a massive exercise in morally indignant wishful thinking. As Breeanne Howe, contributing editor at RedState put it, “He saved lives!  You put a price on that?”

He probably did, though not in the way Howe means. By inadvertently sabotaging charitable efforts in Africa, he may have saved many more African and European lives in the long term. After all, he sabotaged stubborn Western efforts to keep African populations at levels they can’t sustain. This overpopulation leads to the famines, resource wars, and monetary costs that plague them and us each and every day. He also accidentally cut the demand for African immigration into the West, thus sparing us the vibrant rapes, murders, and social disorder it entails. European children yet unborn thank you Dr. Brantly! And while we’re at it, probably some Africans too. 

Still, for the sake of argument, let’s accept Coulter’s premise. Dr. Brantly’s extravagance probably cost some lives in the short term at the monetary price of more than $2 million and counting, not including government expenditures.  Conservatives used to understand that however much we may sympathize with Dr. Brantly and his colleague’s suffering, “good intentions” are no excuse for harmful results. It would be demonic to gloat at Dr. Brantly’s suffering, a fate I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Yet the cold reality is that Dr. Brantly increased the potential that far more will die in the admittedly unlikely but quite possible scenario that Ebola is not contained in the United States. 

Besides the obvious cost/benefit argument, Coulter makes more substantial points that (not surprisingly) seem to have gone over the heads of American conservatives: 

  • In the long term, the fate of Christianity in Africa and the world will ultimately depend on its strength in the First World, what we once called Christendom. In Coulter’s apt phrase, “[A]ny good that one attempts downstream is quickly overtaken by what happens upstream.”
  • To choose to work in Africa instead of America isn’t an act of courage – it’s the easy way out.   As Coulter put it, “[I]f Brantly had evangelized in New York City or Los Angeles, The New York Times would get upset and accuse him of anti-Semitism, until he swore—as the pope did—that you don’t have to be a Christian to go to heaven. Evangelize in Liberia, and the Times’ Nicholas Kristof will be totally impressed.
  • Finally, African charity is a cheap way to garner social praise.  “There may be no reason for panic about the Ebola doctor, but there is reason for annoyance at Christian narcissism.”

Coulter’s understanding that Africa is ultimately a global cultural “follower” reflects a more sophisticated understanding of reality than American Christians who act as if Africa will redeem the West for Christ. Some “conservative” Episcopalians have aligned their ancient seats with the Church of Nigeria,  “traditional marriage” campaigners place their hopes on Uganda, and Christian missionaries compensate for the death of the Faith in the West by carving out a new Kingdom of God in the Dark Continent. All of this reflects surrender, rather than a crusading spirit.  It’s a way to be surrounded by helpless, dark skinned, agency-free mascots who, as a bonus, have never heard of Christopher Hitchens.

Of course, this is precisely the same way SWPLs use Africa. The only difference is that the pathological altruistic kick comes from racial cuckoldry rather than the Holy Spirit. With luck, you can even fail miserably at providing charity, thus allowing you to experience more of that sweet, sweet shame. As one white Huffington Post contributor (naturally) put it in a column bashing “little white boys” and “white girls,”


To her credit, while the author is still moral preening via the Huffington Post, at least she recognizes that her attempt to “help” was inefficient at best. Christian critics of Coulter seem completely unaware of this possibility in regards to Dr. Brantly.In their mind, only good intensions count.  More importantly, “respectable” conservatives (koshercons) see this as an opportunity to purge Coulter, ridding “the movement” of someone who upsets the open bar circuit when she gives anti-immigration speeches at CPAC

Ultimately, what is at stake is the focus of Christian morality. Christians historically considered their religion as part of the social order which defined and sustained that entity known as Christendom. This concept survived even the massive bloodletting that followed the Reformation and the collapse of the Christian consensus in the non-Orthodox West. Even well into the post-French Revolutionary era, there was an understanding of Christianity’s role that did not necessarily deny belief but also did not require it. As Napoleon Bonaparte said, “I do not see in religion the mystery of the incarnation so much as the mystery of the social order.” 

A traditional Christian has duties to his God, his family, his country (and sovereign), and his kin—none of which requires immoral behavior towards humanity at large. Traditionalists and Kinists are some of the few survivors of this kind of Christianity, which would have been recognized by men of sincere faith like Stonewall Jackson. God i
s the source of all, and as such, is also at the pinnacle of the great Chain of Being, a concept which is older that Christianity itself.  It’s this civilizational Christianity that Coulter is defending, however distantly.

One “Latino conservative” who goes by “SooperMeixcan” said, “So, ironically, Christianity would never have come to @AnnCoulter if early Christians thought the way she does.  That’s how stupid she is.” Of course, Christianity spread throughout the West and came to Ann Coulter – and the rest of us – because it was turned into a Germanic religion of Empire. Absent Constantine, we might be Odinists, Mithras worshippers, or Muslims—which is why Christians historically saw Constantine as an instrument of divine will, along with Charlemagne. 

The faith was spread to the European pagan and the foreigner through steel, not alms. “SooperMeixcan” is Christian because conquistadores forced it on his indigenous ancestors. Today, Christianity is dying in its Middle Eastern birthplace by the sword – and the Christian Right could not care less. One would think they could at least spare a hashtag.

 The god that is “worshipped” by many mainstream Christians can’t really be called “God” at all. It’s simply liberal morality conflated into the figure of a personality known as “Jesus,” or, if you are one of the more enthusiastic Judeo-Christians, “Yeshua.” Many Christians, like the conservatives at “Twitchy,” are content to engage in PC Judo in order to prove that they are the real universalists and the real liberals. The result is rather than a real religion, we get a floating deracinated abstraction – a belief in “Jesus” as your savior, however that is interpreted – which defines a global “community of believers.” Those “conservative” denominations that still exist take care to reinterpret Scripture at a stately pace, keeping behind the culture at large, but still moving in the same direction.

Therefore, to spread the belief in Christ as Savior to as many people as possible is more virtuous than trying to build a Christian community or nation at home – because community and nation ultimately don’t matter except insofar as they lead people to profess belief in the abstraction. Nor can many Christians even agree what social norms should be anymore. Even enforcing behavior such as supporting restrictions on sexual behavior or traditional gender roles becomes secondary to spreading the faith abroad. This only seems to intensify as the faith collapses at home. 

As even a casual comparison of the “Christianity” of Haiti, China, Nigeria, or South Korea shows, how the belief in “Christ” is understood is apparently not that important. To quote the one Bible verse all leftists know, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28 KJV)

But if modern Christianity leads to a moral structure ultimately indistinguishable from secular humanism, why not just dismiss the supernatural elements?  Well, exactly – hence the great secularization taking place throughout the West, and now even in America. Christians who ground their apologetics in trying to rationally explain the irrational concede the battle. As Coulter implies, if Christianity collapses in the West, its cultural colonies in the West will collapse too, and whether they are a generation or so behind the times in terms of feminism or gay marriage will make no difference to the survival of traditional moral values. What we will be left with is slave morality without a master, divine or otherwise.   

What conservatives and many American Christians are doing is simply playing for time. They can avoid the crucial struggles at the core of the global system by kidding around at the margins. As if in an unconscious parody of Marx, they are moving the process of History forward by trying to drag Africa out of barbarism into liberal modernity, and so sowing the grounds of their own irrelevance. By valuing abstract belief over civilizational order and identity, and seeking praise from liberalism rather than its destruction, the American Right is taking the easy way out. Getting Ebola is less morally terrifying than being called a bigot. And feeling like you helped someone (and getting lots of applause for it) is far harder than confronting the cold truths that human well-being rests upon. 

Both liberals and modern Christians (or do I repeat myself?) need Africa. It is the Passive Continent, always that which is acted upon, rather than acting for itself.  Whether it is the source of meaningless and poorly understood “conversions” or a tool to enhance the self-satisfaction of white liberals makes no difference. Far easier to save 10 African souls or build a well in a village than run a public school for one day in a typical American city. 

Be it for Christians or SWPLs, the African humanitarian trip is as pure of an expression of modernity as playing Clash of Clans on your cell phone.  It’s an indulgence – in both senses of the word. And if Africa didn’t exist, it would be necessary for them to invent it.   

To close with a reading from the Good Book,


“But Rabbi,” we can almost hear the modern disciples say, “what about our Facebook likes?”

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Patriot Games

Nations are defined through war.  Phony nations are defined through phony war – namely sports.  And in a time devoid of meaning, a corporate spectacle with flags is the closest the modern world can come to providing most people with a sense of identity. 


Most nations are less a creation of peoples than a creation of armies.  The multinational, multilingual monarchies of the Middle Ages slowly transitioned into the national armies unleashed by the French Revolution, who were gathered by conscription to spill the “impure blood” of the foreigners. “Us” and “Them” were determined on the battlefield.

However, the postwar world saw the end of “blood and soil” nationalism in the West. Nations transformed into units of economic competition, vaguely linked by international finance and watery doctrines of “human rights.” Mass immigration further complicates the process, as citizenship no longer reveals anything about a person’s race, religion, cultural heritage, or even language.

Yet nationalism persists – largely because we have nothing else to fall back on. Race is socially unacceptable and religion (at least Christianity) is dead as an organizing force for society. And so even as it is unimaginable that European youth will soon be drafted and sent forth to fight for their country, a rudimentary patriotism is still required to link the masses in the developed world together in a more or less orderly fashion. The flag and some vague concept of “values” usually serves, but underneath, the ghosts of Blut und Boden still linger. And this needs an outlet.

Enter the World Cup. The players sing the anthem of their fatherlands, echoed by hundreds of thousands of screaming fans.  Fans dress in their national colors. The game itself has a kind of mythic quality (outside the United States anyway), as fans will casually speak of games that took place decades ago or even refer to a single incident (like Maradona’s “Hand of God” goal). Rivalries, heroes, and cultures develop in a dull echo of the warlike past.

Absent war, concepts such as “national honor” are identified with the outcome of soccer games.  Sometimes, it is almost equivalent to war, with Argentina’s victory over England in 1986 interpreted as “revenge” for the Falkland Islands.

Germany’s crushing 7-1 defeat of Brazil (with the Netherlands putting the boot in 3-0 in the third place game yesterday) is seen as a national disgrace in the host country. Pictures of Brazilian fans giving rise to guttural cries of despair and horror could be mistaken for something coming out of Gaza.

Of course, these nationalist impulses are smoothly sublimated into the global governing census.  The stadium is festooned with appeals to “Say No To Racism.” FIFA investigates fans for chants that cross the line into politically incorrect territory. And frankly, it’s a good thing they did not see the danger of “offensive” WWII humor on Twitter during Brazil vs. Germany – though the Parasitic Class is whining about that now too.

Many of the players from historic European nations are non-White. Some of the players on the American team have almost casual connections to the United States, and even the coach is a German who formerly represented his real country both as a player and as a coach. As with professional sports in America, most players have nothing to do with the community they are ostensibly representing racially, culturally, or even geographically. The pageantry and patriotism of a World Cup is equivalent to the usual penalty in the Beautiful Game – it’s a big showy fake.

The flag waving is consciously used as a way to reconcile the White West to making peace with demographic dispossession, and the need for “us” to “win” is used as justification to dilute identity. The tactic has already been used successfully with rugby in South Africa and college football in the American South.

After France won the World Cup in 1998, the heavily non-White team was used as an argument to promote more immigration into the Republic and portrayed as a triumph of assimilation. Today, American politicians such as Nancy Pelosi argue that we need immigrants – because otherwise, we would have a terrible soccer team.  And reporters attack the – as of yet –unassimilated nations of Eastern Europe where players still have something to do with the country, and their fans haven’t learned that patriotism is supposed to be ironic.

Faux patriotism is even used to keep countries together.  Spain’s World Cup victory in 2010 presented a problem for Catalonians who wanted independence.  Belgium, the soulless husk at the center of the European Union, uses its soccer team as a club to beat Flemish nationalists and promote the continued existence of the phony kingdom.  And the reason Brazil has been hit so hard by its soccer defeat is because soccer was all they had to show to the rest of the world.  The country is the very exemplar of the multiracial nightmare White advocates have been warning against for decades, plagued with crushing social divisions, crime and inequality.  No wonder they care so much about kicking a ball around.

And yet, even people who should know better fall for the appeal of faux nationalist pageantry.  Websites from around the racialist right rejoiced at the German defeat of Brazil, as if the Bundesrepublik of Merkel was still the Fatherland of Bismarck, or as if winning the game meant that Turks would have to leave.  White racialists can even tell themselves that soccer possesses a more “White” and European sensibility than American basketball, and therefore give themselves approval to identify with certain teams.

Despite it all, faux nationalism tells us something, speaking to the deep roots of identity that can’t be explained, defended, or even described—only felt.  It means something that Mexican-Americans still can’t bring themselves to root for the American team.  It means something that Algerians in France riot after the Algerian team plays a game, even with the historic prominence of Algerians on the French team.  And it means something that many Europeans, especially Germans, feel it is permissible to be proud of their ethnicity in a sporting context—although they are ashamed of it in other circumstances.  Indeed, already the opinion monitors are cautioning people that Brazil feeling “national humiliation” because of a soccer loss is only a short jump away from countries adopting fascism, or something

Nationalism remains.  The old symbols still speak to the hearts of the masses.  What they mean to different people will always be fought and argued over but they have not lost their power.  The World Cup is a safety valve and a corporate scam – but it is also an expression of a force that is not yet spent.

This is a problem for a Dissident Right which is already moving beyond the old borders and identities of the past.  The Dissident Right in America has practically reached an intellectual consensus on an un-American position, from those who think the American Revolution was a mistake to White advocates pursuing the Sorelian vision of the ethnostate.  European Identitarians are working hard to transcend the national rivalries of the past.  And secession movements, in many cases supported by right wingers, are challenging the very existence of some of the most established and prominent countries in the world –from the United Kingdom to Italy.

However, most people opposed to the status quo are still nationalists, fighting to defend a romanticized past based on an already existing national institution.  The Americans opposing their own government in Murietta, CA wave the Stars and Stripes or even the flags of the military.  Parties like UKIP and the National Front pledge to defend the UK and France from a grasping European Union.  And Eastern European nations such as Hungary or Poland still have strong patriotic movements with mass constituencies that define their goals in terms of national independence, rather than some sweeping ideological revolution in the West.

Sports fandom is often expression of that peculiarly pathetic race cuckoldry that many White males seem comfortable with.  And it’s easy to simply say “Don’t watch the World Cup.”  But the faux nationalism of the World Cup is as much a reflection of the suppressed identity of the European peoples of the world as a perversion of it.  And it reflects the political and emotional reality that God may be dead in a historical sense, but the Nation lives.

Unfortunately, the nation-state of the modern West is as much an enemy of White people as a political expression.  We are supposed to believe that a country is somehow still the same even if the entire population is replaced – so long as the new population waves the same flag.  Yet at a gut level, one senses that people know what it is to be a real German, a real Frenchman…and even, (with apologies to Hulk Hogan) a real American.

The problem we face goes beyond either surrendering to soccer hysteria or congratulating ourselves for ignoring decadent mass culture.  It is about whether the Dissident Right can somehow build off populist patriotism and transform it into a true ethnonationalism, or whether the nations themselves should be discarded as reactionary debris obstructing the development of a new vision.  The former is largely the approach taken during the past six decades of failure.  But the latter, although more intellectually compelling, is likely to produce a “movement” with no resonance among the larger population.

The answer may be found in your own reaction over the last few weeks.  When you see a crowd overwhelmingly of your own race, waving the flag of your country, you may feel pride.  You may feel sickening disgust, knowing how your country is being betrayed, or how it betrayed you.  Or you may, like me, feel some kind of combination.  But the Dissident Right needs to make sense of that confusion because it’s not words or even philosophies that govern the world, but symbols and identity.

Their power is terrible.  Despite despising the values of the Bundesrepublik, despite raging at the weakness of the Last Men of the former Fatherland, despite my disgust for the whole politically correct spectacle… I can’t help but cheer for Die Mannschaft.  And hate myself for it.

And that’s not the worst of it.  I’m glad Team USA didn’t make it to the finals.  Because if they did, I know I’d be pulling for them even more.

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Why Metal is Right-Wing

I can say with confidence that heavy metal music has done far more to advance authentic right wing aesthetics, values, and yes, even philosophy, than all the failed institutions of the Beltway Right put together.


I grew up listening to metal. I have also had more than my fair share of interactions with various manifestations of the American Right for well over a decade.


Whatever the political opinions of the artists involved (if they even have any), metal belongs to the Right. From the most simplistic party sing alongs to the highly complicated creations of serious artists, metal repeatedly stresses themes of conquest, self-overcoming, strength, and conflict. If the primary value of the Left is equality, than the primary value of the true Right is hierarchy. The common thread between an anthem about drinking with girls to the heavy drone of doom meal is the rejection of egalitarianism and the pretty lies of modernity. If leftists can “Imagine” along with John Lennon a world where the Last Men loaf about all day where there is “above us only sky,” metal provides the battle songs for those things it’s still worth to “kill or die for.”

Metal is about seeking glory and excellence–Wagner for the working man. Even a leftist who tries to channel metal will find themselves presenting an image of strength, vitality, and self-glorification. Whatever the political beliefs of a left wing headbanger, the aesthetics betray them.

The same cannot be said for what passes as the conservative movement’s “aesthetics.”

Some Christian conservatives hate metal because of the anti-Christian beliefs and symbolism of certain people involved. Obviously, this paints the genre with too broad of a brush–it’s worth noting that the “Satantic” imagery of many early artists was used to symbolize evil as something real and something to be feared. This is a far more respectful treatment of Christian theology than the contemporary Christianity–which holds faith as simply a means to fit in the occasional day at an inner city homeless shelter, stripped of any divine significance. Besides, most Christian conservatives today seem more intent on competing for who can adopt the most half-starved African children to bring to their McMansion than ensuring a promising future for their own children. So we shouldn’t be too concerned with their cries about how “evil” metal is.

Even those authentically anti-Christian metalheads attack the faith from a different perspective than your usual campus leftist. Metal is filled with critiques of the Christian religion for displacing the indigenous spiritual traditions of Europe, for allegedly promoting egalitarianism, and for serving as a force of repression on extraordinary individuals. It echoes Oswald Spengler’s charge that Christianity was “the grandmother of Bolshevism.” This is hardly the same old recycled anti-Christian tripe.

Beyond the ideology and aesthetics, metal is profoundly a “localist” genre. Bands must develop a following and work their way up, rather than simply being imposed on all of us by some record producer at age 19. This goes for a lot of the “pirate radio” that first popularized the genre as well. What was best about local metal radio shows was that they were proudly local institutions. The announcers were amateurish, half the bands were unknown, you couldn’t get a decent signal once you left the confines of the city it was based out of, and it utterly lacked the gloss and professionalism of a major radio station. It was something unique, an acquired taste. You would actually find out about new bands or new songs from it–something you can hardly get from major radio today.

When conservatism was serious, local institutions were prized for their own sake, with communities serving as the proper basis for affection–the “little platoons” in Edmund Burke’s phrase. Today, conservatism is composed of 20-somethings making 20 something a year plotting to give deracinated corporations tax breaks. For me, it’s the same conflict as listening to a new band on a metal playlist or hearing the same Rihanna “song” yet again on a “professional” station. The latter can only be called “culture” by a true cynic and serves as evidence that popular choices are imposed from above rather than the spontaneous “free market” of conservative/libertarian fantasies.

Metal as a genre, even in its lowest form, relies upon musicianship. At its best, it can sublimate profound themes within complicated melodic structures. You can’t “fake” good metal. It’s no accident that many younger metalheads find that they “graduate” to classical when they get older, in the same way that the talented musicians who pioneered the genre owe a debt to the maestros of Vienna and Bayreuth.

In today’s popular music, you can substitute Ke$ha, Katy Perry, Rihanna, the animated corpse of Britney Spears, and whatever else they are promoting in and out of any given melody. It’s hard to say if anyone would even notice–as long as you keep the autotune on. The themes are predictable, the melodies hackneyed, the “message” cliched–express yourself, even (especially) when you have nothing to say. Popular music is the soundtrack to American-style democracy, and I can think of no greater condemnation. If I can slightly borrow a famous phrase, when someone tells me the pop station is “culture,” I release the safety catch on my revolver.

Clearly, if conservatism is about upholding the established order, heavy metal music is hardly the kind of thing champions of the long extinguished Ancien Regime would be comfortable with. Of course, that’s sort of the point. We don’t live in a world where the “Establishment” is patriotic landed aristocrats defending the interests of Church and Crown. We live in a world where Fortune 500 companies fund groups that combat “white privilege,” where multiculturalism has joined hands with Goldman Sachs, where the justification for this System is outlined for you in your mandatory diversity training in the classroom and the corporate boardroom. It’s their system, not ours. Why do we want to make it more efficient or cut their taxes?

Who cares?

The Right can’t look to Burke in this context–they should look to Burzum. The System must be dismantled and metal is the soundtrack to that Revolution–even if the people playing it aren’t aware of it.

Want to do something that will make a difference? Save the money you were going to waste on supporting another huckster conservative politician promising to save America, and go buy some metal records instead.

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Vatican Ups The Tolerance

In the latest episode of Pope Francis trying to prove that he is the Spiritual Bolshevik-in-Chief, the Vatican permitted the performance of Jewish and Muslim prayers within its sacred sphere today.



While the Church would never allow traditionalists to lead Masses in the Vatican, they’ll let people who don’t accept even the basic tenets of its religion to rent out the city for a day to make a meaningless gesture “for peace” in a land that will never know peace.

Put aside the religion debates within our circles for a moment and realize that this is a perfect symbol of the new faith of the Western world. A faith that treats every belief system as equal (unless they express White Identitarianism and condemn modernity), only stipulates that you be a “good” person (meaning following every guideline of the pervading politically correct dogma), orgasms to equality, demands tolerance for all (except certain evil White people and Boko Haram), opens up their sacred halls to foreign peoples, and celebrates the culture of the stranger while denigrating their own.

All the while knowing that these alien people would never extend the same generosity to Western religions.

In any case, it’s just another Monday in Pope Francis’ mission to spread egalitarianism to every corner of his Church.

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The God They Really Believe In

A conservative is someone who identifies with an institution but will not accept the means necessary to create or maintain it.  This especially extends to religion, where modern Christians will adopt the trappings of Sacred Tradition and the heritage of a particular denomination but enthusiastically condemn their own past.  What they want is simply for modernity to suffer them to exist.  What they worship is egalitarianism – and the “god” they invented is simply a marketing scam.  


L’enfant terrible Matt Heimbach and longtime white activist Matt Parrot operate the Traditional Youth Network, an organization that fights for “Traditionalism” with heavy Christian overtones.  Both Matts are converts to Orthodox Christianity, and incorporate their faith into their activism, with explicit role models including the Romanian Iron Guard, the Greek Golden Dawn, and to a lesser extent, Putin’s Russia.  To many reactionaries, Traditionalists, and white advocates, an Orthodox civilization with what Dugin calls the “Byzantine idea of the symphony of powers” is gradually forming a counter-bloc to the post-modern “West,” which seemingly defines itself by multiculturalism and sexual degeneracy.  This may be actually happening — or it might just be another example of the hard right falling into its classic error of seeing what they want to see.  (Ron and Rand Paul anyone?)

Whatever the case, despite the reputation of Heimbach and Parrot as primarily white advocates, much of the TYN’s energy is directed towards restoring a kind of old-fashioned Christian moralism.  They oppose feminism, homosexuality, and the breakdown of the family.  A true organic society, they argue, is opposed to both “rape culture” and “slut culture.”  Thus, a group of TYN activists, featuring a bearded Heimbach sporting an Orthodox cross, protested a “Slutwalk” at Indiana University.  As to be expected, they were attacked by violent leftists, giving us the amusing image of Matt Heimbach, Cross-Bearer, defending his comrades.  

Soon afterward, one Father Peter Jon Gillquist issued an “important message” to his congregation saying that Matt Heimbach had been excommunicated.  Normally, this would be private of course, but “as in the present case of Matthew Heinbach” [sic] it was necessary to trumpet his actions to the world.  “Heinbach” apparently was only received into the church because Father Gillquist did not know about Heimbach’s “nationalist, segregationist” views.  And after all, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28).”  

This is similar to the denunciation of Jewish convert “Brother Nathaniel” by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia on the same grounds that “there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all (Colossians 3:11).”

Naturally, various “Orthodox bloggers” hastened to make sure they were also counted among the elect.  A Father “Ernesto Obregon” implicitly compared TYN to a pedophile – perhaps an unfortunate insult for priests to be slinging these days.  Obregon also confessed he had a “nightmare” that TYN’s views would be seen as Orthodox.  As terrifying as it sounds,

“They continue to post very pro-White messages on their Facebook page. No, they do not post overtly anti-other ethnic group messages…Nevertheless, one finds direct links to more toxic groups…. one encounters messages very much in favor of each ethnic group being able to maintain its cultural identity, and encouraging people to marry within their ethnic group to preserve that identity and keep each ethnicity separate and clearly identifiable.”  

And we can’t have that.  At least among whites.  

Eric Jobe, a Ph.D candidate who mostly “specializes in Hebrew poetry, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Second Temple Judaism,” offers us some subtle and intellectual rhetoric that it is a “satanic delusion” to believe in racial integrity.  Also, “racism and ethnic nationalism is just such a malignant tumor and an infectious disease that has no place among the holy people of God.”

There’s also one Sister Maria Gwyn McDowell.  Sister McDowell is a “feminist [and] a student of liberation theology” with a “doctorate in Theological Ethnics from Boston College.”  She entertains herself by suggesting that the Theotokos is on the side of Pussy Riot and publishing other “anti-kyriarchal” amusements.  A real model of piety – and one who need have no fear of excommunication.

The most important response, however, is that of the American Conservative’s Rod Dreher who giggles about getting to use words like “repent” and “heresy” to attack “racism, anti-Semitism, and fascism.”  “When things like this happen in public, the Church must speak clearly and uncompromisingly about them,” Dreher intones.  Dreher also throws in a sneering reference to “neopaganism” for good measure.  No Church Militant for the “Crunchy Con.”

Interestingly, many of the self-proclaimed Orthodox Christians critical of TYN do not come from the customary Orthodox background of ethnic communities.  Fr. Gillquist is the son of Archpriest Peter Gillquist, who led a movement of former Protestant evangelicals into the Orthodox Church in America.  Dreher is a former Methodist who converted to Catholicism and then Orthodoxy.  Father Obregon,
another convert, is upset about “pro-White messages” but trumpets his Cuban ethnicity in the very name of his blog precisely because it is not a traditional Orthodox community.  And while “McDowell” claims to be a longtime member of the church, her participation in it seems to be characterized by her desire to change everything about it.  Not surprisingly, she
writes that members of her family were “Jewish… card-carrying communists.”  

Perhaps more than any other Christian denomination (not including the poorly attended “national churches” of Europe), the Orthodox Church is characterized by its close identification with national and cultural boundaries.  The explicit identification of the two is condemned as the heresy of “Phyletism.”  However, formal condemnation does not change the fact that Orthodox Church organizational bodies tend to be rooted in a particular community and even churches in the United States are closely linked to ethnic groups with a strong identity.  Like Mexicans coming to America or Yankees coming to the South, Dreher and his new friends are doing their best to turn their refuge into a carbon copy of the thing they once fled by condemning this.

More importantly, as even McDowell admits, the Orthodox Church is not exactly a bastion of egalitarianism.  It could even be called a particularly “kyriachal” institution.  Groups like the Black Hundreds and the Iron Guard were inspired by Orthodoxy and received the blessing of church officials.  St. John of Kronstadt was a member of a nationalist party and expressed his dedication to the Russian Tsar, as highlighted by TYN.  The Church Father St. John Chrysostom’s Adversus Judaeos  explicitly blames the Jews for the crucifixion and suggests that the “chosen people” of God are now Christians – “They became dogs, and we became the children.”

Of more relevance is the traditional Eastern Christian unity between church and state.  The Russian government and specifically the Russian Orthodox Church are pushing a new narrative of an Orthodox “Russian world” that will provide an alternative to the decadent West, much to the wailing of the media.  Patriarch Kirill explicitly identifies the mission of his church as a defender of a “Russian world” that is a “distinct civilization” based upon Orthodoxy.  Not surprisingly, possible ecclesiastical divisions among Orthodox communities are becoming a forerunner to possible political divisions in Ukraine.  

What is at stake is two differing ways of viewing the church, and in a larger sense, religion.  TYN sees the faith as a one element of a people composed of “faith, biology, and culture.”  A faith may be universally applicable, but it should support a people’s right to maintain its own separate existence.  It is an ordering principle for a people.  Whatever the theological truth of this, this is how most religions develop, particularly the Eastern Christianity characterized by strong links to the state and organized along national lines.  The Russian Orthodox Church of today sees itself in this way.  

The second way is to regard religion as a purely abstract creed that can be adopted by anyone.  This is at the heart of Jobe’s chest pounding about a “holy people of God” who may be from any background, but adopt certain beliefs.  It is the “proposition religion.” Jobe, McDowell, Fr. Obregon, and Fr. Gillquist reflect this in their oddly simplistic and emotional pronouncements that Orthodox Christianity mandates the destruction of white ethnic identity.  

The reduction of Christianity to “you are neither Jew nor Gentile, man nor woman” seems almost  designed to force non-suicidal whites to adopt explicit Identitarian religion and Neopaganism.  Dreher clearly senses this, hence his attack.  But Dreher is the most dishonest of TYN’s critics because he wants to have it both ways.  Dreher is pursuing what the late Lawrence Auster called an “unprincipled exception” to liberalism.  He wants a conservative denomination that reflects his interest in place and community and allow him a superficial dissent from political correctness once in a while.  However, he will not tolerate anything that has a definitive statement against liberal universalism.  

As Dreher’s own life shows us, Catholicism used to be the cliché conversion faith for American conservatives trying to look hard.  After all, it wasn’t that long ago when the Pope was condemning “Americanism” as a heresy.   However, that is increasingly hard to sustain when the contemporary Vicar of Christ tweets profound wisdom like “inequality is the root of social evil.”  Of course, that hasn’t stopped Catholic conservatives from maintaining the proud post-Vatican II tradition that whoever is Pope didn’t actually mean whatever the latest tripe he served.  But it has reduced the Church of Rome’s appeal.  Now the hot new thing is Orthodoxy, but the same hollowing out process has already begun, at least in America.

What is called “religion” in the modern world isn’t really religion at all.  It’s simply a collection of empty rituals that serve as variations on the same egalitarian theme.  Absent a direct connection to community, religion is viewed publicly like choosing a sports team or a favorite food – a private preference of little consequence.  The fact that almost all religions are identified with ethnic communities or a past connection to a regime or cultural order simply makes it easier for people to continue to align with it out of shallow nostalgia.  But the linkage is no longer explicit.  

As modernity runs its course, the churches actually serve as a necessary safety valve.  They give people the illusion of identity without the substance.  They present the form of Tradition while preaching a doctrine of destruction.  And they carry forward the existence of an institution while hollowing it out from the inside.  Those churches that try to cling to doctrine in the face of this usually fall into the trap of the “unprincipled exception” themselves – for example, hammering on the sin of gay marriage, while fanatically preaching about the evils of racism.  Far from being an obstacle to modernity, the churches are a ne
cessary facilitator, a tool to systematically render would be Traditionalists either impotent or counterproductive.

Before long of course, the institutions are exhausted.  What is, after all, the Unitarian Church other than a tax dodge for progressive activists?  What are the mainline Protestant churches but facilitators of mass immigration?  And what is the bulk of the Catholic Church today but yet another ornate temple to social democracy, albeit one that opposes abortion on the grounds of egalitarianism?  Those believers that are left are betrayed by their own shepherds.  Viewing the collapse of American churches, it seems that Orthodoxy is simply a generation behind.  Like American conservatism, American religion is a “game, a way of making a living,” in the words of Joe Sobran, another man who took the heritage of his church seriously and paid for it.

Dreher bases his career (such as it is) on the importance of “place,” but peoples create significance and meaning, not tracts of dirt or old buildings.  And peoples sustain a faith or doom it to oblivion.  Whatever the truth of a particular doctrine, once cut off from the ethnic roots that sustain it, a faith will either wither and die or transform into a golem like monstrosity that will choke the life out of the very community that gave it existence.

Joseph de Maistre, a great Christian reactionary, wrote that every people gets the government it deserves.  This may be true of the churches as well, as the denominations are drying up in the shallow soil of 21st century America, leaving the real seekers for Truth bereft.  Matt Parrot asks, “What does a man do when his championship of Authority and Tradition results in his traditional authority prohibiting his life’s work immediately and without warning?”  Perhaps the answer is that the authority he bowed to is not a real guardian of Tradition or legitimate authority.  Perhaps it doesn’t even have a stake in its own long term survival.  Perhaps, it doesn’t want to be saved from itself.

It is not for me (of all people) to answer which side “God” is on in this fight.  But I can say this with certainty.  Whatever God TYN’s critics worship, it is not the God of St. John of Kronstadt, St. John Chrysostom, or the soldiers that fought in the name of Holy Russia throughout the centuries.  It is not the God that sustained the monarchies of Eastern Europe, the oppressed Christians groaning under Muslim occupation for centuries, or even the Russian faithful of today.  

It’s just the politically correct god of the Market Place, decrying the newly invented sins of “racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia.”  It’s a god who doesn’t offer salvation or even damnation, but just passive aggressive lecturing.  It’s a god our rulers depend on even more than the most tyrannical autocrat of the past depended on his state church.  And if that’s the “God” we’re expected to bow to, I’d rather be a “heretic” – or a heathen.

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