Operation Excalibur: Back to Church, Bucko! Part 2

For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. (Hebrews 4:12)

Go to Part One

Toward an Alt Right Biblical Theology

As teen-agers many secular humanists on the Alt Right probably rejected one or other of the millenarian visions of Christian theology (pre-, post- or amillennialist) available to the average suburban church-goer.  For these folks, the Bible situates us within as-yet-unfinished story.  We are awaiting the end times; we just cannot agree on when or how the Day of the Lord will come.  But what if there is another, better way of reading the grand narrative set out in the Bible?  Perhaps God knows how to tell a story.  Perhaps the biblical narrative is set in historical time with a beginning, a middle, and an end that has already come and gone.

On that assumption, it seems to me that there is a good fit between the embryonic cosmology of the Alt Right and the eschatological views of a dissident school of predominantly white Anglo-Protestants known as “preterists” (from Latin, praeter or “past”).  The covenantal eschatology (from the Greek eschaton, or “end times”) espoused by preterists holds that biblical prophecies promising that the Lord would come again in judgement (the Parousia) were fulfilled with the destruction of the Temple in AD 70.  On a preterist reading of Scripture, the Day of the Lord occurred in real historical time.  The forty-year interval between the Passion of Christ and the Parousia marks the Exodus of the righteous remnant from Old Covenant Israel.  In that period, the apostles preached the gospel to the ends of the earth, thereby fulfilling the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20).

In the Last Days of the Old Covenant age, the New Jerusalem came down to earth, forever supplanting the Temple made with hands.  A new heaven and new earth took its place.  Within a reborn cosmic temple, the saints of Old Covenant Israel as well as those who had “fallen asleep” in Christ in the first century were resurrected from the dead.  No, the physical bodies of Abraham and the prophets did not rise magically from the grave.  Rather, the long-promised, long-awaited spiritual communion of the Old Testament saints with the Body of Christ (now incarnate in the early Church) was consummated.  The providential telos, the divine point and purpose of Old Covenant Israel had been fulfilled.  What relevance, then, has preterist eschatology to the desperate need in our time for an Anglo-Protestant political theology?

Preterism stands in sharp contrast to the futurist cosmologies hitherto shaping the Anglo-Protestant imagination.  Covenant eschatology rejects the millennialist presuppositions embedded in conventional Christian philosophies of history.  Futurist eschatology conceives salvation history as a linear movement back to God, from the Fall to the redemption of the body at the end of time.  But on a preterist interpretation, the history of post-AD 70 Christian nations, like that of empires and civilizations, can follow a cyclical pattern.  Such Spenglerian models of civilizational rise and decline are popular on the Alt Right.  Accordingly, even agnostics on the Alt Right can agree with preterist Protestants that a new age in the history of mankind dawned with the biblical transition between the Old and New Covenants.

The rise of Christendom, provided a providential seedbed for the development of European Christian nationhood.  Every Christian nation finds both a spiritual warrant and a worldly warning in the providential history of Israel.  The biblical narrative centres on the rise, fall, and resurrection of a stubborn and stiff-necked people.  Israel according to the flesh fell from grace. Subsequently, the Israel of God became a light unto European Christendom.  Biblical theology is, almost by definition, ethno-theology.  The Alt Right must help white Anglo-Protestants to grasp the ethno-religious moral of the Bible story.

Neither creeds and confessions nor the most passionate millenarian faith in the Second Coming can override biblical truth.  Jesus came, as promised, in the first century to render judgement on historical Israel when it had filled up the measure of its sins (Matthew 23:32).  He made no promise to return somehow, somewhere else, some thousands of years in the future.  As a matter of practical theology, therefore, we are on our own.  Perhaps as clans, tribes, and races we are placed in history, provided with the opportunity and an inborn moral imperative to regenerate ourselves as a holy nation, using the exemplary history of ancient Israel as a spiritual starting point.

The nineteenth English historian, J.R. Seeley, contended that the true Bible of every Christian nation should be found in its own history.  If there were such an indigenous English Bible, Alfred the Great might be celebrated in churches today as an Angelcynn David, the sainted hero who saved his Christian nation from barbarian invaders.  Unfortunately, the Anglo-Protestant clergy has failed utterly to create such national monuments.  Given the absence of any such stock of accumulated spiritual capital, preterists and the ethno-patriots of the Alt Right will have much to teach and learn from each other about the meaning—indeed the possibility—of white Christian nationhood.

What is to be Done?

Fortunately, the basic building blocks for a theologically tenable and spiritually satisfying Alt Right Christianity are readily available.  Excuse the self-promotion but a copy of Dissident Dispatches combined with a good study Bible would not be a bad place to begin one’s faith journey.  One should also mine the archives at Faith & Heritage and listen to podcasts at the Godcast.  For those already red-pilled on the American myth of the Redeemer Nation, I particularly recommend a trip into the eye-opening and thought-provoking world of covenant eschatology.  A good place to start that journey there is with the You Tube channel of Don K. Preston.  Thus, armed with the elements of a patriotic, politically-realistic, and historically-grounded white Anglo-Protestant ethno-theology, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Alt Righters can set off confidently to church.  With the help of God, they might be able to re-awaken the now-dormant revivalist spirit among white Anglo-Protestants.

It is a simple act of Christian charity for the Alt Right movement to engage, individually and collectively, with fellow whites who happen to be church-goers.  These people have been almost completely detached from their historic ethno-religious identities by deliberate, high-intensity campaigns of psychological warfare and cultural subversion.  Many church leaders actively promote the rising tide of colour in every white nation.  At best, the institutional response of Anglo-Protestant churches to the demographic displacement of their white parishioners typically amounts to little more than unilateral moral disarmament.  If the white Anglo-Protestant peoples are to be resurrected from the dead, they must re-imagine and re-invent the experience of Christian nationhood, outside and apart from the unholy matrix of the transnational corporate welfare state.

The Alt Right has ample intellectual firepower, if not yet the political will or sufficient spiritual depth, to help white Anglo-Protestant church-goers to recover from their collective ethno-amnesia.  The American nation-state (like every other European-descended country in the Anglosphere) is now permanently fractured along racial lines.  White Anglo-Protestants are systematically exploited, displaced and tormented by both the hostile élites set above them and the sullen, rapidly multiplying minorities below.  People on the Alt Right have woken up from the American Dream.  But most of our fellow whites remain trapped in the “air-conditioned nightmare” sanctified by millennialist myths of American exceptionalism.  To set themselves free, white Anglo-Protestants are sorely in need a Christian political theology grounded in the biocultural realities of racial differences and inter-ethnic rivalry.  In its first lesson, such a political theology would go back to basics: Surprisingly, even the nicest, most inoffensive white Christian peoples have real enemies, some of whom pretend to be our best friends, perhaps even our big brother.

Lessons in Micro-Political Theology

In persecuting Bishop Pepe, the Anti-Defamation League taught me a much-needed lesson in micro-political theology.  The forced sacrifice of Bishop Pepe in the politically-correct cause of philo-Semitism revealed the power and willingness of organized Jewry to interfere in my own personal affairs as well as with our collective freedom of religious expression.  I learned that powerful Jewish organizations such as the ADL, operating on a global scale, now police and have the power to prohibit use of counter-cultural memes generated on the internet.  It also seems that dissident memes giving symbolic expression, even implicitly, to prototypical forms of Christian cosmology will attract censorious attention.

Strangely enough, the Alt Right Pepe resembles the frog-like deity of an ancient Egyptian cult heralding the imminent victory of light over darkness.  The religious significance of the Pepe meme has been given explicit recognition in the contemporary internet cult of Kek.  There, Pepe represents the second Person of an implicitly Christian Trinity. No surprise then that the Jewish Anti-Defamation League called for the legal crucifixion of Bishop Pepe.  One can only be thankful that His Holiness was resurrected as the heroic image of Excalibur.

Both evangelical Protestants and Alt Right activists have something to learn from the Passion of Bishop Pepe.  Was Pepe really an expression of anti-Semitic “hate speech”?  Is the ADL campaign to outlaw Alt Right Pepe “anti-white” or “anti-Christian”?  What does covenantal eschatology tell us about the status of the modern Israeli state or, more generally, of those who claim to be Jews in the eyes of God?  These are not dumb questions.  Confronting such issues openly and honestly is the central task of an Alt Right political theology.  Doing so is not likely to win one many friends, at least in the short term.  Few white Anglo-Protestants recognize Jews, individually or collectively, as the ancestral foe of every Christian nation, much less as their political enemies in the present.  Typically, when pressed, they will insist that God still honours his covenantal relationship with Israel according to the flesh.

By contrast, many early Christians simply took it for granted that the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in AD 70 represented the final victory of the Body of Christ over his enemies in the Synagogue of Satan (Revelation 3:9).  In their eyes, this historical event heralded the cosmic victory of light over darkness.  Nowadays, evangelical Anglo-Protestants, especially, find themselves trapped in a fallen world of sin and darkness.  Their Christian hope is that the final victory will be achieved in the last days, at the end of the Church Age when Christ will come again.  It may well be up to the Alt Right to bring heaven down to earth.  The mission of the Alt Right, should it choose to accept it, is to spark the resurrection of the Church from the dead, not in a Rapture event next year, or in the far-distant future, but rather in the here and now. 

Andrew Fraser is a retired law teacher. For many years, he taught constitutional law and legal history at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He recently completed a degree in theology.

 

27 replies

Comments are closed.