Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand lead the Reconquistadors, holding aloft a cross

For God and the Reconquest of the West! 

Charles Dodgson 

February 17, 2010 

Recently two articles in TOO have expressed diametrically opposed views of the proper place of Christianity in the fight to save the West demographically.  

Thomas Dalton outlines Friedrich Nietzsche’s critical view of Christianity and its origins. Nietzsche ridiculed the traditional religion of the West as senile and decadent and speculated that Christianity was invented by embittered Jews, especially St. Paul, to turn the lower classes against Rome and thus provide Israel with a degree of freedom from Roman rule.  

Michael Colhaze is loyal to Christianity. He attacks Nietzsche’s character and sanity, portraying his writings as fanciful and his superman ideal as monstrous social Darwinism. He praises Christianity for embodying the love and compassion of Christ that empowers believers.  

I have agreements and disagreements with both perspectives based on the criterion of what is good for the survival of ethnic groups that adopt Christianity, though my main interest is the corporate survival of Western peoples. I come down roughly in the middle of the two positions, though tilting decidedly towards a Christianity of the traditional variety informed by anthropology and genetics.  

Thomas Dalton, in his article “Nietzsche and the Origins of Christianity,” demonstrates considerable sympathy for the German philosopher  —  born 1844, died 1900. Dalton reveals aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy that will be attractive to many White advocates, as we shall see.  

Nietzsche began his treatment of Christianity with a bold accusation — that it is decadent, weak, and nihilistic. Dalton writes: “It led to a sickly, subservient, herd morality, and suffocated the quest for human excellence. Worst of all, it replaced a life-affirming naturalness with an otherworldly, life-denying negativism. It has become, in fact, ‘the greatest misfortune of mankind so far.’” 

Here Nietzsche must be radically wrong. The Church ministered to European peoples during our long resistance to Islamic aggression, our invention of science and industry, and our spectacular global expansion. That includes all three Christian worlds — Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox. The arrest of Western confidence and expansion and its accelerating contraction have coincided with the liberalization of Christianity or its actual suppression under communist regimes. I shall take up this theme again.  

The alleged disaster of Christianity can only be explained, Nietzsche thought, by understanding its Jewish origins. Jesus and the apostles were Jewish, as were Mark, Luke and Paul and the many unknown authors who contributed to the New Testament. This meant that Christianity is stamped with the Jewish character, which Nietzsche refers to as “race.” That character comes through in the slave morality embodied by the religion from the beginning, which Nietzsche interprets to be Paul’s strategy to subvert the masses of the Roman Empire, weaken Rome’s aristocratic grip on its far-flung provinces, and thus give Israel a chance to break free.  

It should be emphasized that this is speculation.  

For the success of this alleged strategy Nietzsche mainly blames the West. Dalton quotes Nietzsche: “There is no excuse whatever for their failure to dispose of such a sickly and senile product of decadence [as the Christian God].But a curse lies upon them for this failure: they have absorbed sickness, old age, and contradiction into all their instincts — and since then they have not created another god. Almost two thousand years — and not one new god!” 

Dalton states that a fitting — a fitness enhancing? — re-conception of religion needs to be “a truly uplifting, life-affirming, and ennobling enterprise — decidedly unlike Judeo-Christianity — and must never be taken as permanent and absolute truth. All superstitious, i.e. anti-natural, religions are out of the question. The human condition, and human ‘salvation’, must be firmly rooted in the present, physical world — the real world.”  

I wholeheartedly agree with the need for a religion that engages reality, especially the reality of humans as an evolved species with biological interests of survival and continuity. However I cannot accept such a negative depiction of the traditional religion of the West. At the same time I have difficulties with blanket praise for what it has become, which brings me to the article critical of Nietzsche.  

Michael Colhaze, in his article “Nietzsche and No End” turns Nietzsche’s critical blowtorch back on its inventor. Colhaze describes Nietzsche’s superman as “[a] kind of socio-Darwinian zombie whose general credo is the exact reversal of Christian ethics. Goodness is stupidity, compassion the dumbness of slaves, beauty ugliness, love utter contempt, gentleness dirt under his fingernail. In short, a two-hundred-fifty-page glorification of hate without any strings attached.” 

I agree that Nietzsche’s superman is not the sort of person to invite for dinner, at least to the family table. And would he be someone who could be relied upon? I also agree with Colhaze that this so-called superman evinces some social-Darwinistic values which should be rejected. But social Darwinism is not the same as modern evolutionary theory and it has never constituted the theory. In fact Darwin himself was interested in untangling the causes of morality and compassion, not abolishing them, even if at the same time he was quietly proud of his English and European identity and pessimistic about the potential of primitive races.  

It is one thing to criticize Nietzsche’s excesses, another to rubbish his call for a religion that respects reality. Colhaze does so by mischaracterizing the evolutionary process:  

a process similar to tossing an infinite amount of golf balls into the air, each numbered, and each falling accidentally into a hole with the corresponding number. 

The only alternative, Colhaze concludes, is an omnipotent God, “one whom I believe to be solely responsible for the world’s creation and its grandiose theatre, though not for the crimes of mankind which cause about ninety nine percent of all its suffering.” Actually the great majority of suffering is caused by competing life strategies, e.g. between predator and prey.  

Colhaze believes that Christianity delivers “man’s highest and most sublime aspiration. An aspiration to consummate, on a strictly personal level, Christ’s divine message of Love and Compassion. A message that is, for those who handle it calmly, an inexhaustible font of joy and inner certainty, a way of life that can brace adversities more thoroughly than any other. And a message that might one day, ’one day’ after many a summer, enable mankind to live in the Utopia we sometimes dreamt about when we were young.” 

The science of human bonding is converging remarkably on the moral truths of Christianity, especially the traditional Catholic ordering of love and duty. Christianity does distil and train a purity of attachment dependent on abstract intelligence. Since our ancestors converted at the urging and example of pioneer Medieval monks, we have been enjoined to nurture our families and local communities and to stand against the heathen at the city gate.  [more]