Intro: Below is my essay published first in 1995 in quarterly CLIO (A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History). In view of century-long and still ongoing scholarly disputes about the genesis of totalitarian temptations, intellectual repressions, as well as modern “wokeism” in the EU and US – it may be worthwhile to reexamine the  debate between proponents  of monotheism and polytheism (“mono-poly”!) from a new vantage point. Which is the genuine religious and intellectual homeland of Whites in America and Europe?  Athens or Jerusalem? The Bible or Homer?

* * *

With the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine to Christianity, the period of pagan Europe began to approach its end. During the next millennium the entire European continent came under the sway of the Gospel — sometimes by peaceful persuasion, frequently by forceful conversion. Those who were yesterday the persecuted of the ancient Rome became, in turn, the persecutors of the Christian Rome. Those who were previously bemoaning their fate at the hands of Nero, Diocletian, or Caligula did not hesitate to apply “creative” violence against infidel pagans. Although violence was nominally prohibited by the Christian texts, it was fully used against those who did not fit into the category of God’s “chosen children.” During the reign of Constantine, the persecution against the pagans took the proportions “in a fashion analogous to that whereby the old faiths had formerly persecuted the new, but in an even fiercer spirit.” By the edict of A.D. 346, followed ten years later by the edict of Milan, pagan temples and the worship of pagan deities came to be stigmatized as magnum crimen. The death penalty was inflicted upon all those found guilty of participating in ancient sacrifices or worshipping pagan idols. “With Theodosius, the administration embarked upon a systematic effort to abolish the various surviving forms of paganism through the disestablishment, disendowment, and proscription of surviving cults.”(1) The period of the dark ages began.

Christian and inter-Christian violence, ad majorem dei gloriam, did not let up until the beginning of the eighteenth century. Along with Gothic spires of breathtaking beauty, the Christian authorities built pyres that swallowed nameless thousands. Seen in hindsight, Christian intolerance against heretics, Jews, and pagans may be compared to the twentieth-century Bolshevik intolerance against class opponents in Russia and Eastern Europe-with one exception: it lasted longer. During the twilight of imperial Rome, Christian fanaticism prompted the pagan philosopher Celsus to write: “They [Christians] will not argue about what they believe-they always bring in their, `Do not examine, but believe’. . .” Obedience, prayer, and the avoidance of critical thinking were held by Christians as the most expedient tools to eternal bliss. Celsus described Christians as individuals prone to factionalism and a primitive way of thinking, who, in addition, demonstrate a remarkable disdain for life.(2) A similar tone against Christians was used in the nineteenth century by Friedrich Nietzsche who, in his virulent style, depicted Christians as individuals capable of displaying both self-hatred and hatred towards others, i.e., “hatred against those who think differently, and the will to persecute.”(3) Undoubtedly, early Christians must have genuinely believed that the end of history loomed large on the horizon and, with their historical optimism, as well as their violence against the “infidels,” they probably deserved the name of the Bolsheviks of antiquity. As suggested by many authors, the break-up of the Roman Empire did not result only from the onslaught of barbarians, but because Rome was already “ruined from within by Christian sects, conscientious objectors, enemies of the official cult, the persecuted, persecutors, criminal elements of all sorts, and total chaos.” Paradoxically, even the Jewish God Yahve was to experience a sinister fate: “he would be converted, he would become Roman, cosmopolitan, ecumenical, gentile, goyim, globalist, and finally anti-Semite. “(!)(4) It is no wonder that, in the following centuries, Christian churches in Europe had difficulties in trying to reconcile their universalist vocation with the rise of nationalist extremism.

Pagan Residues in the Secular City

Although Christianity gradually removed the last vestiges of Roman polytheism, it also substituted itself as the legitimate heir of Rome. Indeed, Christianity did not cancel out paganism in its entirety; it inherited from Rome many features that it had previously scorned as anti-Christian. The official pagan cults were dead but pagan spirit remained indomitable, and for centuries it kept resurfacing in astounding forms and in multiple fashions: during the period of Renaissance, during Romanticism, before the Second World War, and today, when Christian Churches increasingly recognize that their secular sheep are straying away from their lone shepherds. Finally, ethnic folklore seems to be a prime example of the survival of paganism, although in the secular city folklore has been largely reduced to a perishable commodity of culinary or tourist attraction. (5) Over the centuries, ethnic folklore has been subject to transformations, adaptations, and the demands and constraint of its own epoch; yet it has continued to carry its original archetype of a tribal founding myth. Just as paganism has always remained stronger in the villages, so has folklore traditionally been best protected among the peasant classes in Europe. In the early nineteenth century, folklore began to play a decisive role in shaping national consciousness of European peoples, i.e., “in a community anxious to have its own origins and based on a history that is more often reconstructed than real. “(6)

The pagan content was removed, but the pagan structure remained pretty much the same. Under the mantle and aura of Christian saints, Christianity soon created its own pantheon of deities. Moreover, even the message of Christ adopted its special meaning according to place, historical epoch, and genius loci of each European people. In Portugal, Catholicism manifests itself differently than in Mozambique; and rural Poles continue to worship many of the same ancient Slavic deities that are carefully interwoven into the Roman Catholic liturgy. All over contemporary Europe, the erasable imprint of polytheist beliefs continues to surface. The Yule celebration represents one of the most glaring examples of the tenacity of pagan residues. (7) Furthermore, many former pagan temples and sites of worship have been turned into sacred places of the Catholic Church. Lourdes in France, Medjugorje in Croatia, sacred rivers, or mountains, do they not all point to the imprint of pre-Christian pagan Europe? The cult of mother goddess, once upon a time intensely practiced by Celts, particularly near rivers, can be still observed today in France where many small chapels are built near fountains and sources of water. (8) And finally, who could dispute the fact that we are all brain children of pagan Greeks and Latins? Thinkers, such as Virgil, Tacitus, Heraclitus are as modern today as they were during the dawn of European civilization.

Notes

1. Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture (New York: Oxford UP, 1957), 254-55, 329.

2. T. R. Glover, The Conflict of Religion in the Early Roman Empire (1909; Boston: Beacon, 1960), 242, 254, passim.

3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Antichrist, in Nietzsches Werke (Salzburg/Stuttgart: Verlag “Das Berlgand-Buch,” 1952), 983, para. 21.

4. Pierre Gripari, L’histoire du méchant dieu (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1987), 101-2.

5. Michel Marmin, “Les Piegès du folklore’,” in La Cause des peuples (Paris: édition Le Labyrinthe, 1982), 39-44.

6. Nicole Belmont, Paroles paiennes (Paris: édition Imago, 1986), 160-61.

7. Alain de Benoist, Noël, Les Cahiers européens (Paris: Institut de documentations et d’études européens, 1988).

8. Jean Markale, et al., “Mythes et lieux christianisés,” L’Europe paienne (Paris: Seghers, 1980), 133.

……………………………………………………………………………………………

Marx, Moses and the Pagans in the Secular City (part 2)

Modern Pagan Conservatives

There is ample evidence that pagan sensibility can flourish in the social sciences, literature, and arts, not just as a form of exotic narrative but also as a mental framework and a tool of conceptual analysis. Numerous names come to mind when we discuss the revival of Indo-European polytheism. In the first half of the twentieth century, pagan thinkers usually appeared under the mask of those who styled themselves as “revolutionary conservatives,” “aristocratic nihilist,” “elitists”-in short all those who did not wish to substitute Marx for Jesus, but who rejected both Marx and Jesus.(9) Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger in philosophy, Carl Gustav Jung in psychology, Georges Dumézil and Mircea Eliade in anthropology, Vilfredo Pareto and Oswald Spengler in political science, let alone dozens of poets such as Ezra Pound or Charles Baudelaire-these are just some of the names that can be associated with the legacy of pagan conservatism. All these individuals had in common the will to surpass the legacy of Christian Europe, and all of them yearned to include in their spiritual baggage the world of pre-Christian Celts, Slavs, and Germans.

In the age that is heavily laced with the Biblical message, many modern pagan thinkers, for their criticism of Biblical monotheism, have been attacked and stigmatized either as unrepentant atheists or as spiritual standard-bearers of fascism. Particularly Nietzsche, Heidegger, and more recently Alain de Benoist came under attack for allegedly espousing the philosophy which, for their contemporary detractors, recalled the earlier national socialist attempts to “de-christianize” and “repaganize” Germany. (10) These appear as unwarranted attacks. Jean Markale observes that “Naziism and Stalinism were, in a sense, also religions because of the acts that they triggered. They were also religions insofar as they implied a certain Gospel, in an etymological sense of the word . . . Real paganism, by contrast, is always oriented towards the realm of sublimation. Paganism cannot be in the service of temporal power.”(11) Paganism appears more a form of sensibility than a given political credo, and with the exhaustion of Christianity, one should not rule out its renewed flourishing in Europe.

Paganism Against the Monotheist Desert

Two thousand years of Judeo-Christian monotheism has left its mark on the Western civilization. In view of this, it should not come as a surprise that glorification of paganism, as well as the criticism of the Bible and Judeo-Christian ethics-especially when they come from the right-wing spectrum of society-are unlikely to gain popularity in the secular city. It suffices to look at American society where attacks against Judeo-Christian principles are

frequently looked at with suspicion, and where the Bible and the Biblical myth of god’s “chosen people” still play a significant role in the American constitutional dogma. (12) Although the secular city has by now become indifferent to the Judeo-Christian theology, principles that derive from Judeo-Christian ethics, such as “peace,” “love,” and “universal brotherhood,” are still showing healthy signs of life. In the secular city many liberal and socialist thinkers, while abandoning the belief in Judeo-Christian theology, have not deemed it wise to abandon the ethics taught by the Bible.

Whatever one may think about the seemingly obsolete, dangerous, or even derogatory connotation of the term “European paganism,” it is important to note that this connotation is largely due to the historical and political influence of Christianity. Etymologically, paganism is related to the beliefs and rituals that were in usage in European villages and countryside. But paganism, in its modern version, may connote also a certain sensibility and a “way of life” that remains irreconcilable with Judeo-Christian monotheism. To some extent European peoples continue to be “pagans” because their national memory, their geographic roots, and, above all, their ethnic allegiances-which often contain allusions to ancient myths, fairy tales, and forms of folklore bear peculiar marks of pre-Christian themes. Even the modern resurgence of separatism and regionalism in Europe appears as an offshoot of pagan residues. As Markale observes, “the dictatorship of Christian ideology has not silenced those ancient customs; it has only suppressed them into the shadow of the unconscious” (16). The fact that all of Europe is today swept by growing nationalism bears witness to the permanency of the pagan sense of tribal historical memory.

In European culture, polytheistic beliefs began to dwindle with the consolidation of Christianity. In the centuries to come, the European system of explanation, whether in theology or, later on, in sociology, politics, or history gradually came under the sway of Judeo-Christian outlook of the world. David Miller observes that Judeo-Christian monotheism considerably altered the Europeans’ approach to the social sciences as well as to the overall perception of the world. In view of these changes, who can reassure us about our own objectivity, especially when we try to understand the pagan world with the goggles of the postmodern Judeo-Christian man? It is no wonder that when paganism was removed from Europe the perceptual and epistemological disruptions in sciences also followed suit. Consequently, with the consolidation of the Judeo-Christian belief, the world and the world phenomena came under the sway of the fixed concepts and categories governed by the logic of “either-or,” “true or false,” and “good or evil,” with seldom any shadings in between. The question, however, arises whether in the secular city-a city replete with intricate choices and complex social differences that stubbornly refuse all categorizations-this approach remains desirable. (13) It is doubtful that Judeo-Christian monotheism can continue to offer a valid solution for the understanding of the increasingly complex social reality that modern man faces in the secular city. Moreover, the subsequent export of Judeo-Christian values to the antipodes of the world caused similar disruptions, yielding results opposite from those originally espoused by the Westerners, and triggering virulent hatred among non-Western populations. Some authors have quite persuasively written that Christian ecumenism, often championed as the “white man’s Christian burden,” has been one of the main purveyors of imperialism, colonialism, and racism in the Third World. (14)

In the modern secular city, the century-long and pervasive influence of Christianity has significantly contributed to the view that each glorification of paganism, or, for that matter, the nostalgia of the Greco-Roman order, is outright strange or at best irreconcilable with contemporary society. Recently, however, Thomas Molnar, a Catholic philosopher who seems to be sympathetic to the cultural revival of paganism, noted that modern adherents of neo-paganism are more ambitious than their predecessors. Molnar writes that the aim of pagan revival does not have to mean the return to the worship of ancient European deities; rather, it expresses a need to forge another civilization or, better yet, a modernized version of the “scientific and cultural Hellenism” that was once a common reference for all European peoples. And with visible sympathy for the polytheistic endeavors of some modern pagan conservatives, Molnar adds:

The issue is not how to conquer the planet but rather how to promote an oikumena of the peoples and civilizations that have rediscovered their origins. The assumption goes that the domination of stateless ideologies, notably the ideology of American liberalism and Soviet socialism, would come to an end. One believes in rehabilitated paganism in order to restore to peoples their genuine identity that existed before monotheist corruption. (15)

Such a candid view by a Catholic may also shed some light on the extent of disillusionment among Christians in their secular cities. The secularized world full of affluence and richness does not seem to have stifled the spiritual needs of man. How else to explain that throngs of European and American youngsters prefer to trek to pagan Indian ashrams rather than to their own sacred sites obscured by Judeo-Christian monotheism? Anxious to dispel the myth of pagan “backwardness,” and in an effort to redefine European paganism in the spirit of modern times, the contemporary protagonists of paganism have gone to great lengths to present its meaning in a more attractive and scholarly fashion. One of their most outspoken figures, Alain de Benoist, summarizes the modern meaning of paganism in the following words:

Neo-paganism, if there is such a thing as neo-paganism, is not a phenomenon of a sect, as some of its adversaries, but also some of the groups and chapels, sometimes well-intentioned, sometimes awkward, frequently funny and completely marginal, imagine … [What worries us today, at least according to the idea which we have about it, is less the disappearance of paganism but rather its resurgence under primitive and puerile form, affiliated to that “second religion,” which Spengler justifiably depicted as characteristic of cultures in decline, and of which Julius Evola writes that they “correspond generally to a phenomenon of evasion, alienation, confused compensation, without any serious repercussion on reality. (16)

Paganism, as a profusion of bizarre cults and sects, is not something modern pagan thinkers have in mind. A century ago, pagan philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had already observed in Der Antichrist that, when a nation becomes too degenerate or too uprooted, it must place its energy into various forms of Oriental cults, and simultaneously “it must change its own God” (979). Today, Nietzsche’s words sound more prophetic than ever. Gripped by decadence and rampant hedonism, the masses from the secular city are looking for the vicarious evasion in the presence of Indian gurus or amidst a host of Oriental prophets. But beyond this Western semblance of transcendence, and behind the Westerners’ self-hatred accompanied by puerile infatuation with Oriental mascots, there is more than just a transitory weariness with Christian monotheism. When modern cults indulge in the discovery of perverted paganism, they also may be in search of the sacred that was driven underground by the dominating Judeo-Christian discourse.

From Monotheist Desert to Communist Anthropology

Has monotheism introduced into Europe an alien “anthropology” responsible for the spread of egalitarian mass society and the rise of totalitarianism, as some pagan thinkers seem to suggest? Some authors appear to support this thesis, arguing that the roots of tyranny do not lie in Athens or Sparta, but are traceable, instead, to Jerusalem. In a dialogue with Molnar, de Benoist suggests that monotheism upholds the idea of only one absolute truth; it is a system where the notion of the enemy is associated with the evil, and where the enemy must be physically exterminated (cf. Deut. 13). In short, observes de Benoist, Judeo-Christian universalism, two thousand years ago, set the stage for the rise of modern egalitarian aberrations and their modern secular offshoots, including communism.

That there are totalitarian regimes “without God,” is quite obvious, the Soviet Union for example. These regimes, nonetheless, are the “inheritors” of the Christian thought in the sense as Carl Schmitt demonstrated that the majority of modern political principles are secularized theological principles. They bring down to earth a structure of exclusion; the police of the soul yield its place to the police of the state; the ideological wars follow up to the religious wars. (17)

Similar observations were echoed earlier by the philosopher Louis Rougier as well as by the political scientist Vilfredo Pareto, both of whom represented the “old guard” of pagan thinkers and whose philosophical researches were directed toward the rehabilitation of European political polytheism. Both Rougier and Pareto are in agreement that Judaism and its perverted form, Christianity, introduced into the European conceptual framework an alien type of reasoning that leads to wishful thinking, utopianism, and the ravings about the static future.(18) Similar to Latter-day Marxists, early Christian belief in egalitarianism must have had a tremendous impact on the deprived masses of northern Africa and Rome, insofar as it promised equality for the “wretched of the earth,” for odium generis humani, and all the proles of the world. Commenting on Christian proto-communists, Rougier recalls that Christianity came very early under the influence of both the Iranian dualism and the eschatological visions of the Jewish apocalypses. Accordingly, Jews and, later on, Christians adopted the belief that the good who presently suffer would be rewarded in the future. In the secular city, the same theme was later interwoven into modern socialist doctrines that promised secular paradise. “There are two empires juxtaposed in the space,” writes Rougier, “one governed by God and his angels, the other by Satan and Belial.” The consequences of this largely dualistic vision of the world resulted, over a period of time, in Christian-Marxist projection of their political enemies as always wrong, as opposed to Christian-Marxist attitude considered right. For Rougier, the Greco-Roman intolerance could never assume such total and absolute proportions of religious exclusion; the intolerance towards Christians, Jews, and other sects was sporadic, aiming at certain religious customs deemed contrary to Roman customary law (such as circumcision, human sacrifices, sexual and religious orgies). (19)

By cutting themselves from European polytheistic roots, and by accepting Christianity, Europeans gradually began to adhere to the vision of the world that emphasized the equality of souls, and the importance of spreading God’s gospel to all peoples, regardless of creed, race, or language (Paul, Galatians 3:28). In the centuries to come, these egalitarian cycles, in secularized forms, entered first the consciousness of Western man and, after that, entire humankind. Alain de Benoist writes:

According to the classical process of the development and degra-dation of cycles, the egalitarian theme has entered our culture from the stage of the myth (equality before God), to the stage of ideology (equality before people); after that, it has passed to the stage of “scientific pretension” (affirmation of the egalitarian fact). In short, from Christianity to democracy, and after that to socialism and Marxism. The most serious reproach which one can formulate against Christianity is that it has inaugurated this egalitarian cycle by introducing into European thought a revolutionary anthropology, with universalist and totalitarian character. (20) One could probably argue that Judeo-Christian monotheism, as much as it implies universalism and egalitarianism, also suggests religious exclusiveness that directly emanates from the belief in one undisputed truth. The consequence of the Christian belief in theological oneness-e.g., that there is only one God, and therefore only one truth-has naturally led, over the centuries, to Christian temptation to obliterate or downplay all other truths and values. One can argue that when one sect proclaims its religion as the key to the riddle of the universe and if, in addition, this sect claims to have universal aspirations, the belief in equality and the suppression of all human differences will follow suit. Accordingly, Christian intolerance toward “infidels” could always be justified as a legitimate response against those who departed from the belief in Yahve’s truth. Hence, the concept of Christian “false humility” toward other confessions, a concept that is particularly obvious in regard to Christian attitude toward Jews. Although almost identical in their worship of one god, Christians could never quite reconcile themselves to the fact that they also had to worship the deity of those whom they abhorred in the first place as a deicide people. Moreover, whereas Christianity always has been a universalist religion, accessible to everybody in all corners of the world, Judaism has remained an ethnic religion of only the Jewish people. (21) As de Benoist writes, Judaism sanctions its own nationalism, as opposed to nationalism of the Christians which is constantly belied by the Christian universalist principles. In view of this, “Christian anti-Semitism,” writes de Benoist, “can justifiably be described as a neurosis.” Might it be that the definite disappearance of anti-Semitism, as well as virulent inter-ethnic hatred, presupposes first the recantation of the Christian belief in universalism?

Notes :

9. About European revolutionary conservatives, see the seminal work by Armin Mohler, Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland, 1919-1933 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972). See also Tomislav Sunic, Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right, prefaced by Alain de Benoist(Arktos: 2011).

10. See notably the works by Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (München: Hoheneichen Verlag, 1933). Also worth noting is the name of Wilhelm Hauer, Deutscher Gottschau (Stuttgart: Karl Gutbrod, 1934), who significantly popularized Indo-European mythology among National Socialists; on pages 240-54 Hauer discusses the difference between Judeo-Christian Semitic beliefs and European paganism.

11. Jean Markale, “Aujourd’hui, l’esprit païen?” in L’Europe paienne (Paris: Seghers, 1980), 15. The book contains pieces on Slavic, Celtic, Latin, and Greco-Roman paganism.

12. Milton Konvitz, Judaism and the American Idea (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1978), 71. Jerol S. Auerbach, “Liberalism and the Hebrew Prophets,” in Commentary 84:2 (1987):58. Compare with Ben Zion Bokser in “Democratic Aspirations in Talmudic Judaism,” in Judaism and Human Rights, ed. Milton Konvitz (New York: Norton, 1972): “The Talmud ordained with great emphasis that every person charged with the violation of some law be given a fair trial and before the law all were to be scrupulously equal, whether a king or a pauper” (146). Ernst Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen and Gruppen (1922; Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1965), 768; also the passage “Naturrechtlicher and liberaler Character des freikirchlichen Neucalvinismus,” (762-72). Compare with Georg Jellinek, Die Erklärung der Menschen-und Bürgerrechte (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1904): “(t)he idea to establish legally the unalienable, inherent and sacred rights of individuals, is not of political, but religious origins” (46). Also Werner Sombart, Die Juden and das Wirtschaftsleben (Leipzig: Verlag Duncker and Humblot, 1911): “Americanism is to a great extent distilled Judaism (“geronnenes Judentum”)” (44).

13. David Miller, The New Polytheism (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 7, passim.

14. Serge Latouche, L’occidentalisation du monde (Paris: La Découverte, 1988).

15. Thomas Molnar, “La tentation paienne,” Contrepoint, 38 (1981):53.

16. Alain de Benoist, Comment peut-on etre païen? (Paris: Albin Michel, 1981), 25.

17. Alain de Benoist, L’éclipse du sacré (Paris: La Table ronde, 1986), 233; see also the chapter, “De la sécularisation,” 198-207. Also Carl Schmitt, Die politische Theologie (München and Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1922), 35-46: “(a)ll salient concepts in modern political science are secularized theological concepts” (36).

18. Gerard Walter, Les origines du communisme (Paris: Payot, 1931): “Les sources judaiques de la doctrine communiste chrétienne” (13-65). Compare with Vilfredo Pareto, Les systèmes socialistes (Paris: Marcel Girard, 1926): “Les systèmes métaphy-siques-communistes” (2:2-45). Louis Rougier, La mystique démocratique, ses origines ses illusions (Paris: éd. Albatros, 1983), 184. See in its entirety the passage, “Le judaisme et la révolution sociale,” 184-187.

19. Louis Rougier, Celse contre les chrétiens (Paris: Copernic, 1977), 67, 89. Also, Sanford Lakoff, “Christianity and Equality,” in Equality, ed. J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapaman (New York: Atherton, 1967), 128-30.

20. Alain de Benoist, “L’Eglise, L’Europe et le Sacré,” in Pour une renaissance culturelle (Paris: Copernic, 1979), 202.

21. Louis Rougier, Celse, 88.

Reinventing Aristocracy in the Age of Woke Capital: How Honourable WASP Elites Could Recue Our Civilization from Bad Governance by Irresponsible Corporate Plutocrats
Prof. Andrew Fraser
Arkos Media 2022.

Conventional conservatives have recently discovered the perils of “woke capital.” Meanwhile, Andrew Fraser has been writing about this issue for over twenty years. Back in January USA Today ran a piece explaining: “Why conservatives are fighting ‘woke’ corporations.” In the style of that publication the article reports: “Corporate is the target of right-wing America.” The story goes on to cite a report describing “American corporations [as] hyper-politicized and corrupt.” For example, “the nation’s top money managers – BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street – are pursuing an ideological agenda at the expense of financial returns.” [1]  Professor Fraser believes he has a solution for the above problem.

Andrew William Fraser [b. 1944) has spent decades studying, teaching, and writing about law, government, and economics. The volume under consideration here, his fifth book, is a revised and expanded edition of an earlier work Reinventing Aristocracy: The Constitutional Reformation of Corporate Governance (1998).[2] He has also contributed articles to this journal as well as other publications. The Canadian born Fraser taught for many years in the Department of Public Law at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He had previously earned a BA and LLB from Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario; a LLM from Harvard; and a MA from the University of North Carolina. More recently, and in retirement, he earned a degree in theology. The author was one of the few academics with the temerity to publicly oppose non-White immigration to Australia. He was a presenter at the 2006 American Renaissance conference.

Fraser’s basic thesis is that a reconstituted corporate governance could be the genesis for a new aristocracy within the Anglo sphere. A mandated shareholders’ senate, self-selected among those with a certain level of ownership and a willingness to serve, would have the authority to guide corporate conduct for the common good. Eventually this corporate aristocracy could extend its influence to other social institutions. The author has admitted that such a scheme is, “to say the least, a bit off the beaten track” (xxxvii).

Fraser is rightly concerned about growing corporate power which he believes could be a larger threat to freedom than governmental authority. Certainly their increasing size, globalization, and use of technology has expanded corporate reach. For some the advantage of the author’s plan is that it would curtail corporate power without increasing state power. And malicious state power is a greater menace than malicious corporate power if for no other reason than the state’s predominant physical force. But it is difficult to imagine corporations reforming themselves without some outside entity intervening, and the state is the only institution with the potential to do so. In any case wouldn’t it be wonderful if the corporations were on our side.

The author traces the origins of the corporate problem to the division between ownership (shareholders) and control (management) which began back in the nineteenth century.  Fraser repeatedly criticizes the managerial class for failure to take responsibility for their actions. But isn’t the real problem the perverted way in which managers see their civic responsibility – witness the millions given to organizations such as Jesse Jackson’s PUSH and BLM. This largess is partly public relations/protection money, but the managerial class has largely bought into the new Left’s diversity and inclusion ideology. Certainly Fraser is well aware of this, evidence the term “woke capital” in his title.

The author’s goals are worthy, but his means are questionable. I remain unconvinced by his corporate approach. He sees the necessity of aristocracy, but within a republic. He even has some sympathy for monarchy. These forms may be compatible by resurrecting the idea of mixed or balanced government which dates back to classical antiquity and greatly influenced the Founding Fathers. Mixed government includes the rule by one – a king or president, the rule by a few – an aristocracy or senate, and the rule by many – the commons or the people. Today such a design is anathema to “our democracy.”

Leadership is key to historical change that is almost always brought about by a relatively small number of dynamic agents whether they be Hellenes, Puritans, or Bolsheviks. This is consistent with the iron law of oligarchy. So the fundamental change we seek requires a new elite. But not all elites are aristocratic, and aristocracies take decades, even generations to develop. A true aristocracy would be defined not just by authority, but by civic virtue. They would lead not just politically, but also culturally. An alternative to the corporate route sees a successful revolutionary cadre becoming the new governing class that would eventually evolve into an aristocracy of civic and cultural leadership.

Would Fraser’s corporate senates be the seed germ for a new aristocracy? He writes: “Denunciation of the managerial regime serves no useful purpose unless it arises out of a movement aiming to create a new ruling class” [emphasis in the original] (xxxiv). Thus his proposal can only be accomplished as part of a wider radical change. He reiterates that “the restoration of . . . a WASP ruling class will require much more than the stand-alone reformation of corporate governance” (xlv). Well, it is good to have a plan because the corporate may be the institution most resistant to change when change comes. The present globalized managerial elites of woke capitalism have “endowed the demonic power of revolutionary Communism with a new lease on life.” The Left is “now in bed with corporate oligarchies” (xxxviii). The combination of Left-wing fanaticism with cold-heart capitalism is a malevolent mixture.

The author believes Whites are now “the new kulaks in the global racial revolution” (xli).  The Kulaks, of course, were the more prosperous and progressive Russian and Ukrainian peasants who became scapegoats for the shortcomings of communism. They were wreckers and spoilers, the saboteurs of the socialist dream who needed to be crushed. This leads Fraser to the topic of biological Leninism or bioleninism, a relatively new and interesting term. To secure his revolution Lenin needed to dispossess, drive out, or kill the best Russians of his generation. The neo-Marxists of today may have similar plans for the White middle class because “White European-descended peoples” could “provide the biocultural seedbed for a rival counter-revolutionary ruling class” (xli). It’s good that, at least in the above passage, Fraser refrains from using the term Anglo-Saxon or the acronym WASP. He is an Anglophile which is fine, but those designations are too restrictive to be useful within an American context where the largest European ethnicity is German. Madison Grant, the great racial ecologist writing hundred years ago, had little use for the term Anglo-Saxon. Writing fifty years ago the prescient racial theorist Wilmot Robertson thought the acronym WASP was redundant and unflattering. There are no non-White Anglo-Saxons, and wasps are nasty buggers, especially if they are wearing yellow jackets.

Several pages later Fraser again narrows the parameters for his revolutionary strategy: “One indispensable prerequisite for a renewed WASP ascendency . . .  is the concomitant rebirth of ethno-religious spirituality in a post-creedal Anglican church” (xlvi). Okay, here is where the professor goes more than just “a bit off the beaten track.” But he is half right. Along with political change we desperately need a “concomitant rebirth of ethno-religious spirituality,” but I hardly think even a “post-creedal Anglican church” is the vehicle for this rebirth. True – a religion must have an element of faith, otherwise it is just a philosophical system or ideology. So we need faith in a higher power, but moving forward any spiritual rebirth should be largely naturalistic, based on science and the western aesthetic. Talk about cultural continuities of long duration as the Annales school does: Venus de Milo represents feminine beauty that can still be appreciated 2100 years later.[3]

The above discussion pertains to the Preface and Introduction of Reinventing Aristocracy. Much of the main text expands on issues previously raised. In chapter one Fraser restates his goal “to reinvent the theory and practice of aristocracy” (1), even if this scheme “seems utterly quixotic” (2). The author appears conflicted as to whether a reformed corporate governance will be the genesis of this new aristocracy, or just one of the manifestation of a new political-social paradigm. If it is the former than I agree the scheme seems “utterly quixotic.” Fraser believes that “civilizing capitalism is not a matter of subordinating the corporate economy to the state” (3) although this appears to be the logical solution. Let businesses tend to business. Corporations are economic organizations, so it is natural that they would have a strong incentive to maximize short-term profits and long-term corporate value. The problem is corporations have taken their eye off the economic ball and embraced the neo-liberal, neo-Marxist political agenda. Politics makes strange bed fellows.

In Chapter 2 – Corporations and the Economic Logic of Efficiency – the author returns to the subject of a mixed system of government.  The monarchy, the aristocracy, and the people constitute the “natural social orders of a mixed and balanced polity” (35). The division into threes brings to mind the work of the French philologist Georges Dumézel who saw a tripartite model as deeply embedded in western psyche. He dates this ideology back to Proto-Indo-European culture with its division of the sacral, the martial, and the material. Christianity was westernized with the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The three orders – those who pray, those who fight, and those who labor – were central to medieval thought. Today we have the three branches of government – executive, legislative, and judicial – as well as three levels of government – federal, state, and local. The forms remain, though the content has become corrupted.

In Chapter 3 – Corporations and the Political Realities of Power- Fraser recognizes that “the modern business corporation is governed not just by the economic logic of efficiency, but also by the political realities of power” (75). Doesn’t this suggest that rather than self-regulation, government intervention will be needed to reform corporate governance? Shareholders are usually a large, diverse group, geographically dispersed, and often with limited interest in the enterprise beyond economic gain. Capitalism, a very dynamic economic force that is also capable of being socially injurious, requires strong government regulation, perhaps corporatism.

In Chapter 4 – Corporations and the Constitutional Genesis of Civic Authority – the author concedes that: “To propose that a class of bourgeois shareholders be transformed into a senatorial elite is to risk one’s political credibility” (123). This in view that “we face the ’coming tyranny of an economic regime of unaccountable rulers, a totalitarianism not of the political sphere but of the economic’” (126).[4] To me this evokes an image of masses of consumer wage slaves, without clear ethnic, cultural or even sexual identity, held in debt bondage to international capitalists.

Though radical, Fraser is essentially conservative. He points out that when formulating a governmental structure “we have the historical memory of countless untried and failed alternatives still available to us” (130). Sounds probable, but it would have been interesting to cite some examples of these untried or failed alternatives that may now work in new environment. The Right should always seek guidance and inspiration from the past, but present conditions and future aspirations need to be paramount in our thinking. A bit further on Fraser quotes Alain de Benoist: “The Right has lost its main enemy: Communism. The Left has chosen to collaborate with its own: capitalism. Having long since committed itself to uncontrolled capitalist development, the Right’s defense of the traditional values of family, patriotism, and authority has been confused, hypercritical and ineffective” (153).  Like an unrequited lover, the Right remains loyal to corporate capitalism, a system that has turned against it. Fortunately this uncritical attachment may finally be loosening as evidenced by the USA Today article cited above.

In the Epilogue: The Rebel in Paradise Ltd., the author indulges in some wishful thinking, as most of us do from time to time. He believes there are some “rebel capitalists ready to become the vanguard of a reflexive and responsible ruling class” (173). Who are they? Where are they? More musings: “It may be . . . that objective conditions for a spontaneous spiritual awakening are ripening in the old White Commonwealth countries” (176). Perhaps so, Fraser knows the old Commonwealth better than I, but I see little indication of this in neighboring Canada.

Reading Reinventing Aristocracy is a bit like panning for gold – you will find some valuable nuggets, but you’re going to have to work through a lot of granular material. This is partly due to repetition, and as mentioned above, some seeming contradictions. Is Fraser’s new corporate elite the catalyst for radical change, or merely one manifestation of that change? Capitalism is portrayed as both a hostile force and the source for constructive leadership. The process to go from the former to the latter is not entirely clear. On the plus side it is good that the author highlights the threat posed by international capitalism, and the fact that change comes from changing elites. I would like to learn more about ethno-religious spirituality and bioleninism. The book is most likely to appeal to those interested in business law, economic and legal history, and adjacent issues.

---

[1] Jessica Guynn, “Why GOP declared war on wokeness,” USA Today, January 6, 2023, B7.

[2] Also by Andrew Fraser: The Spirit of the Laws: Republicanism and the Unfinished Project of Modernity (1990); The WASP Question: An Essay on the Biocultural Evolution, Present Predicament, and Future Prospects of the Invisible Race (2011); and Dissident Dispatches: An Alt-Right Guide to Christian Theology (2017).

[3] For a discussion of Western ethno-spirituality see: Nelson Rosit, “Ernst Haeckel Reconsidered,” The Occidental Quarterly, v. 15 no. 2 (Summer 2015) 81-96.

[4] Here Fraser quotes Gary Teeple, Globalization and the Decline of Social Reform (1995).

Introduction

Weak-willed Anglo-Protestants in Canada meekly acquiesced in official recognition by their federal government of Jewish political theology in the form of the Holocaust mythos.  This is hardly surprising in light of their failure a few years earlier to resist repeal of a milquetoast Criminal Code provision prohibiting only the most egregiously vulgar displays of blasphemous libel.[i]  Having already surrendered the historical theological hegemony of Protestant Christianity in English Canada, Anglo-Protestants hardly seem likely to resurrect the ethnoreligious mythos which inspired the Old English church of their medieval ancestors.  Such Protestant pusillanimity stands in stark contrast to the aggressively ethnocentric political theology of organized Jewry, not just in Canada, but across the entire Anglosphere.  If contemporary WASPs had any self-respect, they would rush to remedy the absence of a spiritually compelling, bioculturally adaptive, Anglican/Anglo-Protestant ethnotheology.

Optimism on that score is probably unwarranted, however.  Few WASPs know or care much about their ethnoreligious origins.  Even most members of the Anglican church believe that it came into being with the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation.  It was then that Henry VIII formally broke with Rome for reasons of state.  Before then, the ecclesia Anglicana had been absorbed within the institutional framework of a papal monarchy asserting universal jurisdiction.  Allied with a French-speaking, Anglo-Norman ruling class, the Roman Catholic papacy had no reason to preserve the explicitly ethnoreligious character of the Old English Church.  Nor did the break with the papacy precipitate an Anglo-Saxon ethnoreligious revival; beyond replacing the Pope with the King as the formal head of the Church of England, the new state religion retained its traditional commitment to the catholicity of the Three Creeds enshrined in the Thirty-Nine Articles.  But, whatever the intentions of those who set the Protestant Reformation in motion, over the next few centuries, the combined impact of English and American Protestantism deformed beyond recognition the very idea of Christian nationhood.

As James Kurth writes, the doctrinal base of the Anglo-Protestant Reformation “protested against the idea that the believer achieves salvation through a hierarchy or a community, or even the two in combination.”  Of course, the reformed Church of England “accepted hierarchy and community for certain purposes, such as church governance and collective undertakings [but] they rejected them for the most important of purposes, reaching the state of salvation.”  Protestant reformers held that “the believer receives salvation through an act of grace by God.”  It is divine grace that “produces in its recipient the faith in God and salvation that converts him into a believer.”  Hence, “reformers placed great emphasis on the Word, as revealed in the written words of the Bible.”  They denied that only a priestly hierarchy could deliver the right interpretation of the Bible to individual believers.  Indeed, authoritative hierarchies were more likely to impede the work of divine grace upon individual believers seeking a direct relationship with God through personal study of the Holy Scriptures.[ii]

The initial “Protestant rejection of hierarchy and community in regard to salvation spread to their rejection in regard to other domains of life as well.”  From the beginning, “some Protestant churches rejected hierarchy and community in regard to church governance and local undertakings.”  Nowhere were such anti-institutional tendencies more pronounced than “in the new United States, where the conjunction of the open frontier and the disestablishment of churches in the several states enabled the flourishing of new unstructured and unconstrained denominations.”[iii]

Over the past five-hundred years, the Protestant faith gradually lost its spiritual intensity, a process which began when salvation by grace was replaced by the “half-way covenant” in which grace could be evidenced by works.[iv]  Then, even “the idea of the necessity of grace began to fade.”  Once “work in the world was no longer seen as a sign of grace but as a good in itself,” good works offered the promise of personal salvation.  The transformation of religious experience into a personal relationship to God was an early expression of Anglo-Protestant individualism.  In our own time, the transformation of religion into a personal and private matter has culminated in the recognition of universal human rights as the sacred birthright of every individual.  According to Kurth, “this means that human rights are applicable to any individual, anywhere in the world.”

Thus, “the ultima ratio of the secularization of the Protestant religion” has become an “expressive individualism” in which the imperial self is free to express his/her/its “contempt for and protest against all hierarchies, communities, traditions, and customs.”  In other words, Kurth writes, “the long declension of the Protestant Reformation has reached its end point in the Protestant Deformation,” producing a religion without God, “a reformation against all forms.”[v]

Expressive individualism in America was inspired by the romantic-humanistic ethic prevalent among Progressive reformers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most of whom were middle-class WASPs.  But it was the massive wave of immigration from southern and central Europe which provided the raw material enabling the WASP clerisy to manufacture the cosmopolitan spirit characteristic of urban America during the Progressive Era.

Confronted with the tightly-packed masses of immigrants in New York and Chicago, middle-class reformers learned “to interpret Protestant Christianity in a very peculiar, almost secular way.”  In adapting “the tenets of egalitarian humanism to their polyglot, culturally-charged context,” the reform movement established “settlement houses” to assist alien newcomers in adjusting to life in America.  Anglo-Protestant reformers such as Jane Addams and John Dewey led the campaign to recognize and accept immigrant cultures “as a ‘gift’ to the American amalgam.”  They implored the American nation “to shed its Anglo-Saxon ethnic core and develop a culture of cosmopolitan humanism, a harbinger of impending global solidarity.”[vi]  Other Anglo-Protestant reformers such as William James urged their fellow WASPs to embrace a pragmatic approach to religious experience, choosing whichever “type of religion is going to work better in the long run.”  It did not matter much whether God was dead, so long as “we form at any rate an ethical republic here below.”[vii]

An American century later, Kurth notes that, by then, almost every nation with a Protestant religious tradition has “by now adopted some version of the human rights ideology.”[viii]  One might add that the many manifestations of Anglo-Protestant humanism in various corners of the Anglosphere do not always maintain logical consistency.  In Canada, for example, the offence of blasphemous libel was removed from the Criminal Code in the name of the universal human right to free expression just four years before the decision to criminalize anyone who condones, denies, or downplays the Jewish Holocaust.[ix]  No-one should be surprised to learn that organized Jewry overwhelmingly approved both pieces of legislation.  After all, Jews are now held up as exemplary victims of those who would deny or abuse human rights.  At the same time, however, neither measure appears to have encountered any serious opposition from Anglo-Canadian Protestants, even though both (especially taken together) would have been interpreted as deformations of Christian nationhood by earlier generations of Protestants in English Canada.  Almost everywhere in the Anglosphere, such Protestant deformations of traditional Christian mores have been consecrated, sooner or later, by globalist churches with the full support of the Holocaust industry.

All too often, either the Church of England or its Anglican successors in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States have been in the vanguard of that moral declension.  We need to understand the historical roots of such dysgenic institutional behavior.  Unfortunately, even the recent rise to prominence of “Christian nationalism” in the USA is unlikely to reverse the Protestant Deformation.

Christian Nationalism, American-Style

A recent book by Stephen Wolfe making The Case for Christian Nationalism has much to recommend it.[x]  As an unapologetic paleoconservative, the author blames the postwar Global American Empire (GAE) for undermining Christian nationhood at home in the USA, perhaps terminally.  “In the New America,” he observes, “the ground of patriotic sentiment is away from the Old America.  Thus, civic holidays, national heroes, memorials, and patriotic events are all colored according to the grand narrative of progress.”  Even mainstream conservatives are committed to the progressivist narrative of US history, so much so that they are the staunchest supporters of the military which, they believe, fights to defend “the American way of life.”  But, despite his experience as a West Point graduate serving in the U.S. army in the world-wide “fight for democracy,” Wolfe now advises young men not to get “blown up in the name of liberal imperialism; shed blood to open up markets for Netflix and Pornhub; [or to] make the world safe for dudes in dresses.”[xi]

He holds the GAE responsible for undermining the moral and cultural foundations of Christian nationhood.  Not only has the imperial regime imposed homosexual marriage upon all the states by judicial fiat, it also steeps young minds in critical race theory and gender-bending ideology.  Meanwhile, the floodgates have been opened to a tidal wave of non-Western immigration, further eroding the once-dominant Anglo-Protestant character of American national identity.  Nevertheless, in opposition to the relentless onslaught of nihilistic disenchantment, Wolfe holds out the hope that Christian nationalism could inspire a “true revolt against the modern world.”  He believes in the possibility of “the pursuit of higher life—both the life to come and a life on earth that images that life to come.”  Indeed, he insists that Christians can still regard the world as their “inheritance in Christ.”  With undisguised passion, Wolfe presents Christian nationalism as “a collective will for Christian dominion in the world.”[xii]

But what prevents Christians from exercising the biblical mandate to exercise dominion over this world?  The problem, as Wolfe sees it, is essentially psychological.  American Christians “have been so conditioned to affirm what we feel to be good that the feeling determines for us what is true.  Conversely, we deny any thought that we feel is bad.”  Some beliefs, notably Christian nationalism, are psychologically more difficult for churchgoers to entertain than others.[xiii]

Most Anglo-American Protestants, for example, have long been conditioned, by both church and state, to regard religion as a private and personal matter.  Wolfe’s vision of Christian nationalism cuts across the grain of those habits of religious privatism.  For example, Wolfe calls upon civil government to protect and preserve the exclusively Christian identity of the nation by penalizing “open blasphemy and irreverence in the interest of public peace and Christian peoplehood.”  Few mainstream Christians will be “comfortable” with his argument that “Sabbath laws are just, because they remove distractions for holy worship.”[xiv]

Similarly, Wolfe’s case for upholding the legitimacy of traditional gender hierarchies has already attracted accusations of “misogyny.”  On this issue, however, Wolfe pulls no punches.  He declares that Americans “live under a gynocracy—a rule of women.”  He concedes that this “may not be apparent on the surface, since men still run many things.  But the governing virtues of America are feminine vices, associated with certain feminine virtues, such as empathy, fairness, and equality.”  Any such defense of “toxic masculinity” runs contrary to feminist norms eagerly enforced by the established secularist regime.  But Wolfe remains unrepentant, declaring flatly that the “rise of Christian nationalism necessitates the fall of gynocracy.”[xv]

Inevitably, therefore, the very idea of Christian nationalism represents an existential threat to the Woke liberal regime.  Wolfe bluntly characterizes “the secularist ruling class” as “the enemies of the church and, as such, enemies of the human race.”[xvi]  At the same time, he recognizes that to resist the moral and political consensus enforced by a godless regime, Christians must summon the hitherto absent strength of will necessary to affirm what is true even when it causes them enormous psychological discomfort.

To his credit, Wolfe admits that many Christian leaders deliberately undermine political action in opposition to the secularist regime.  Instead, they “advance a sort of Stockholm syndrome theology” which excludes “Christians from public institutions” but requires them “to affirm the language of universal dignity, tolerance, human rights, anti-nationalism, anti-nativism, multiculturalism, social justice, and equality.”  Wolfe deplores the fact that any Christian who “deviates from these dogmas” faces exclusion from the ranks of respectable churchgoers.[xvii]  What, then, is to be done?  Wolfe turns to Christian political theory in search of an answer.  Unfortunately, the result, even for many of his Christian readers, leaves much to be desired.

Nationalism and Christianity

Wolfe’s book has attracted wide interest in a multitude of online reviews and podcast discussions.  Understood as a political program, Wolfe’s conception of Christian nationalism is often pronounced DOA, dead on arrival.  For example, Neema Parvini, author of The Populist Delusion, dismisses Christian Nationalism as a “political fantasy.”[xviii]  In fairness, however, Wolfe himself readily agrees that, on the national level at least, the idea has little chance of success.  He does not present the book as a viable “action plan.”[xix]  Instead, he sets out the principles that should guide any Christian nation.  Wolfe’s preferred model of Christian nationalism is grounded in a Reformed Presbyterian version of two-kingdoms theology which distinguishes between God’s redemptive work of salvation and his providential governance of earthly affairs.

Accordingly, he defines Christian nationalism in the following manner:

Christian nationalism is a totality of national action, consisting of civil laws and social customs, conducted by a Christian nation as a Christian nation, in order to procure for itself both earthly and heavenly good in Christ.[xx]

In other words, “Christian nationalism is nationalism modified by Christianity” which is to say that “the Gospel does not supersede, abrogate, eliminate, or fundamentally alter generic nationalism, it assumes and completes it.”  Apart from Christianity, therefore:

Nationalism refers to a totality of national action, consisting of civil laws and social customs, conducted by a nation as a nation, in order to procure for itself both earthly and heavenly good. [xxi]

According to Wolfe, “the specific difference between generic nationalism and Christian nationalism is that, for the latter, Christ is essential to obtaining the complete good.”  The ordering of people to heavenly life would have been “a natural end for even the generic nation” but for the fall.  “Had Adam not fallen, the nations of his progeny would have ordered themselves to heavenly life.”  Following the advent of Christ as the Redeemer, “the Gospel is now the sole means to heavenly life.”  If nations are to achieve their “complete good,” even “earthly goods ought to be ordered to Christ.”  Without Christ, pagan and secularist nations may be “true nations but they are incomplete nations.  Only the Christian nation is a complete nation.”[xxii]

Wolfe situates all nations and nationalisms, Christian or otherwise, within a Reformed Presbyterian vision of salvation history.  Wolfe describes his argument as a “Christian political theory” rather than a “political theology” grounded in his own biblical exegesis.  His understanding of Scripture relies instead upon the work of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Reformed theologians.  That Reformed tradition developed within a metanarrative framework established by Augustine of Hippo (354–430 AD).  Augustine and the later Reformed tradition posit a fundamental metaphysical distinction between the City of Man and the City of God.  Both interpret Scripture through the lens of a Hellenistic hermeneutic envisioning the creation ex nihilo and future destruction of the earthly world as the appearance and foreordained disappearance of corruptible material existence following the Day of Judgement.[xxiii]

Augustine’s neo-Platonic cosmology presupposed the absolute dependence of both mankind and the material world itself upon an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent God.  Following in Augustine’s footsteps, Wolfe believes that modern Americans seduced by the delights of mortal life in Mammon have wandered far from heavenly goods, thereby losing sight of “the invisible things of God.”  Given the inherent difficulty mortal beings experience in apprehending such invisible divine “objects,” Wolfe, too, recognizes our spiritual debt to the revealed Word of God.  He holds fast to the Augustinian doctrine that, guided by the light of the Gospel, Christian nations should view their entire existence as a journey towards the unchangeable heavenly life, and their affections should be entirely fixed upon that.[xxiv]

It follows that “politics” in every Christian nation must be understood as “the art of establishing and cultivating necessary conditions for social life for the good of man.”  The point of a Christian political life comes from God; it must aim to create civil governments capable of shoring up the social order “for man’s complete good.”  In other words, the difference between generic nationalism and Christian nationalism is that the latter “expresses a Christian nation’s will for heavenly good in Christ and that all lesser goods are oriented to the higher good.” [xxv]

Presented in such universalistic, all-encompassing terms, Wolfe’s “Christian political theory” transforms “politics” into “public administration.”  Civil government, he says, must aim to identify the most effective earthly means within any given society to realize a heavenly destiny common to faithful believers in every Christian nation.

Action versus Behavior in Political Theory

In this context, the “totality of national action” is better understood as a socially ordered system of behavior premised upon the existence of one common interest, i.e., the interest of every Christian society not just in its own earthly survival and collective vitality but also in the heavenly salvation of every believer.  Public administration, as distinguished from politics, may become detached from natural persons and lodged instead in a social life-process which requires that human behavior conform to the developmental needs (both spiritual and material) of society.  Wolfe seems unaware that “politics,” strictly speaking, originally required the institutionalization of a realm of freedom in which civic action became possible.

The distinction between “action” and “behavior” was central to Hannah Arendt’s political theory.  In her view, “action” was the means by which the individual could distinguish himself from others in the public realm.  For a citizen to leave the private sphere of the household “to devote one’s life to the affairs of the city demanded courage” because entry into the “political realm had first to be ready to risk his life, and too great a love for life obstructed freedom, was a sure sign of slavishness.”  With the administrative victory of society over the public realm, the possibility of individual action gives way to the statistical regularities of human behavior, while the equality of men possessed of the acknowledged right to reveal themselves in their own distinctive public persona becomes degraded into conformism to the assumed common interest of society as a whole.[xxvi]

Not only does Wolfe’s “Christian political theory” fail to offer an “action plan,” it fails even to recognize the existential need for a public realm.  It is only in such a res publica that individuals, families, tribes, and nations are able to distinguish themselves, one from the other, through exemplary modes of civic action.  Such recognition of the distinctive character of political life has been the exception rather than the rule in human affairs.  Arendt may have been concerned primarily with the phenomenology of politics, but she well understood that the unique character of a civic mode of action was first discovered in ancient Greece, most famously in the Athenian polis.[xxvii]  To fully understand the early experience of politics and its decline in the totally administered societies characteristic of the modern transnational corporate welfare state, it is necessary to study, not just its biocultural preconditions but their historical development and the history of theological-political subversion.  Unfortunately, Wolfe’s argument treats Christianity, nationalism, politics, and civil government in generic, free-floating terms altogether detached from the biocultural history and theological presuppositions of any particular Christian nation.

Christian Meier observes that “ever since the Renaissance it has been possible to use the word politics to designate any action of which the state is capable.”  Wolfe simply assumes that this modern sense of the term effectively delimits its meaning, past, present, and future.  In classical Athenian democracy, however, the polis became identical with its citizens and “the majority of citizens gained supreme authority (with the help of those nobles who placed themselves in their service).”  For Aristotle, the word political meant “appropriate to the polis.”  His concept of politics denoted it as “the science of the highest good attainable through human action.”  Politics presupposed the unity of the citizenry as a whole: “the general civic interest…transcended all particularist interests.”  As a consequence, “there was no way in which anything resembling a state could establish centralized power or state institutions that were divorced from society.”[xxviii]

This great experiment in participatory politics rested on the “importance of familial and religious piety in Athenian democracy.”  Indeed, “those who failed in their familial, religious, or military duties” could be excluded from the polis.  The civic unity of the polis “was founded on family, patriarchy, community, military courage, common ancestry, and an intense patriotism.”  Indeed, it has been said that Athenian democracy was based upon a prototype of “racial citizenship.”  In contrast to other Greeks, “Athenians claimed to be racially pure…having supposedly sprung from the Attic soil as true autochtones.”  Bolstered by that myth of autochthony, the direct democratic politics associated with Athenian citizenship “was grounded in strong racial identity and pride in one’s lineage.”  In short, Athens was “a spirited and nativist democracy” in which even prominent residents not of Athenian blood (such as Aristotle) were excluded from citizenship.[xxix]

There was also an important geopolitical dimension to the character of the Athenian polity.  This can be seen in the contrast between Athens and Sparta.  In the eyes of an imperial power such as the mighty, multinational, military monarchy of Persia, Athens and Sparta represented a Greek power which “was that of patriotic, fractious little republics, defined by civic freedom.”  The particular forms of civic power in each city-state emerged out of very different geopolitical circumstances.  Sparta was a land power characterized by autarchy, hierarchy, community, and a rigorous military discipline organized to guard against the danger of rebellion by an enslaved population of helots.  Athens was a sea power in which international trade and a strong navy encouraged a commercial culture, democracy, individualism, and technology.[xxx]

Guillaume Durocher suggests that “Athens embodied the long-term superiority of dynamic commercial, democratic-individualist, and technologically advanced systems over static, austere, hierarchical-communitarian, and primitive ones.”  Like the modern, Anglo-Saxon thalassocracies in Great Britain and the United States, Athens was “dynamic and expansive in peacetime” while “able to adopt sufficiently hierarchical-communitarian characteristics in wartime.”[xxxi]

At the same time, the high level of social solidarity in both polities and its vital contribution to their respective war-fighting abilities gave the Greeks a sophisticated and distinctive understanding of the friend-enemy distinction.  A bright-line distinction was drawn between one’s enemies inside the polis and outsiders threatening society as a whole.  The modern German jurist Carl Schmitt identified the difference between friend and foe as the existential essence of politics.  He took note of the gradations in the Greek understanding of enmity encoded in the koine dialect of ancient Greek and later carried over into the New Testament.  Unfortunately, the linguistic precision of the Greek original was lost when translated into English or German.  As we have seen, Wolfe relies upon English versions of Reform theology for his rare forays into biblical exegesis.  He may never have recognized, therefore, that the (mis)translation of Matthew 5:43-44 conceals a fundamental fault line between idealist and realist political theologies.

When Jesus enjoined his followers to “love your enemies,” he was not laying the moral foundation of Christian pacifism.  Wolfe is no pacifist, however; he vigorously defends the martial virtues “as a necessary feature of masculine excellence.”[xxxii]  Nevertheless, like most Christians, Wolfe strenuously resists the temptation to build our identities by discriminating between “us” and “them.”  Having internalized the anti-discrimination ethos of the civil rights revolution, many Christians mistakenly believe that Jesus asked his followers to “love” their persecutors.  As a matter of fact, he merely urged them to “pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” (Matt.5:44).  Carl Schmitt took a more realistic view of the Sermon on the Mount.  He tackled the translation issue, clarifying what Jesus meant when asking his audience to love their “enemies.”  In the Greek original, Jesus uses the word echthroi to denote persons who might be “private” or “personal” enemies of their fellow citizens (or, in this context, fellow Jews engaged alongside him in a spiritual battle to fulfill the law of Old Covenant Israel).  He was not talking about the “public” or “alien” enemies (polemoi) of the Jewish people as a whole.[xxxiii]

Unless one keeps that distinction in mind, Christian charity can easily degenerate into a pathological altruism incapable of addressing existential threats to one’s nation as such.  Christian nationalism should be based upon a realist political theology which, in turn, should ground itself in a multi-dimensional understanding of the history and biocultural foundations of every Christian nation.

The Origins and Ends of Mankind in History and Christian Mythology

History can be understood as an intellectual discipline providing narrative or analytical accounts of past events based upon the empirical investigation of more or less reliable sources.  It is worth noting that “scientific” history in this sense was the product of two Greeks writing in the fifth century BC.  According to R.G. Collingwood, Herodotus and Thucydides “quite clearly recognized both that history is, or can be, a science and that it has to do with human actions.”  Their histories were not legends; they were research.  They were “an attempt to get answers to definite questions about matters of which one recognizes that one is ignorant.”[xxxiv]  Nothing could be further from this methodology than Wolfe’s universal, one size fits all, and thoroughly unscientific schema of salvation history.

Needless to say, the study of human biocultures is also a scientific enterprise which relies upon the empirical study of interactions between biological and cultural phenomena as they have evolved within various population groups.  By contrast, Wolfe’s account of Christian nationalism simply presupposes a neo-Augustinian vision of the divinely-ordained stages of the salvation history of mankind, a generic “Christian narrative of creation, fall, redemption, and glorification.”[xxxv]  This story presents the past, present, and future of humanity in general as it unfolds in four stages: a state of integrity; a state of sin; a state of grace; and, finally, the state of glory.

Wolfe’s speculative account of the prelapsarian state of integrity is truly breathtaking in what one critic describes as its intellectual irresponsibility.  He spends an entire chapter describing the sort of “civil fellowship” that Adam’s progeny would have arranged but for the fall.  As Bob Stevenson observes, Wolfe’s vision of the prelapsarian world rests on the biblical account found in

61 verses, comprised of 1,253 words describing the world before our first parents saw the goodness of the forbidden fruit, took and ate.  If we only include the parts where humanity exists—and thereby human society, sociability, diversity of gifts, normative roles etc.—that number is reduced to 36 verses, consisting of 764 words.[xxxvi]

It is impossible to construct an account of what a counter-factual prelapsarian world would look like on the basis of those 764 words.  Wolfe’s uses his own reason and imagination to reconstruct the structure of the unfallen world that might have been.  Wolfe contends that families, tribes, nations, and cultural diversity would all have been natural in the original state of integrity.  So, too, would have been hierarchy and the need for the masculine leadership and the martial virtues essential to self-preservation.  Wolfe’s portrait of the state of integrity calls to mind the image of the sinless noble savage and is equally devoid of evidence grounded in physical or cultural paleo-anthropology. Wolfe appears to be one of those Christians for whom it has long been “standard doctrine that every member of the human race is descended from the biblical Adam.”  How interesting, therefore, that it was a seventeenth-century “Calvinist of Portuguese Jewish origin from Bordeaux” who challenged Christian orthodoxy with the “beguilingly simple” claim “the human beings existed before the biblical Adam.”[xxxvii]

The impact of Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676) on theological hermeneutics was such that many modern Christian scholars now accept that, in Hebrew hermeneutics, Adam need not be, and probably was not conceived as the first human being (see also Andrew Joyce’s comments, here and here).  On that reading, sin was in the world well before Adam.  Adam’s story was not about universal human origins but rather about the origins of Israel.  Having been created at the exodus and brought to the promised land of Canaan, Israel was bound by a law which it disobeys, suffering exile as a consequence.  In this way, “Israel’s drama—its struggles over the land and failure to follow God’s law—is placed into primordial time.”[xxxviii] In other words, the biblical Adam is better understood in mythical terms as proto-Israel.

In any case, after the fall, according to Wolfe’s rendition of the orthodox Reformed hermeneutic, the world becomes subject for the first time to sin, creating the need to augment the powers of civil government to suppress sin and maintain civil order.  With the advent of Christ, however, the redemption of mankind becomes possible and “Christians take up the task of true and complete humanity.”  Wolfe contends that “restorative grace sets the redeemed apart on earth—constituting a redeemed humanity on earth—and, on that basis, Christians can and ought to exercise dominion in the name of God.”  In that way, “grace perfects nature.”  Christians “are perfected for heavenly life but also restored in their perfection for obedience in earthly life.”[xxxix]  Wolfe never considers the possibility that the mission of the historical Jesus was limited in scope: i.e., the redemption of Old Covenant Israel, not humanity at large.

---

[i] Few people were ever prosecuted for blasphemous libel in Canada, the last in 1935.  This was probably a consequence of the giant loophole in s. 296(3) of the Criminal Code: “No person shall be convicted of an offence under this section for expressing in good faith and in decent language, or attempting to establish by argument used in good faith and conveyed in decent language, an opinion on a religious subject.”  There is a similar exemption [see, s. 319(3)(1)(c)] in the recently enacted law prohibiting denial, downplaying, or condoning of the Holocaust.  One might reasonably expect more vigorous efforts to be pursued by organized Jewry in contesting the application of that exemption clause whenever cases of public skepticism or outright denial of the Holocaust are deemed threatening to their theopolitical interests.

[ii] James Kurth, “The Protestant Deformation and American Foreign Policy,” (1998) 42(2) Orbis 221, at 225-226.

[iii] Ibid., 227.

[iv] Perry Miller, “The Half-Way Covenant,” (1933) 6(4) New England Quarterly 676.

[v] Kurth, “Protestant Deformation,” 229, 236.

[vi] Eric P. Kaufmann, The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 95-98.

[vii] Eugen McCarraher, Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 15.

[viii] Kurth, “Protestant Deformation,” 237.

[ix] For the common law background to s.296 of the Criminal Code (as it then was) and an illustration of the liberal conventional wisdom successfully calling for its repeal ten years later, see Jeremy Patrick, “Not Dead, Just Sleeping: Canada’s Prohibition on Blasphemous Libel as a Case Study in Obsolete Legislation,” (2008) 41 University of British Columbia Law Review 193.

[x] Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2022).

[xi] Ibid., 435-438.

[xii] Ibid., 443, 447-448.

[xiii] Ibid., 454-455.

[xiv] Ibid., 31.

[xv] Ibid., 448, 454.

[xvi] Ibid., 455-456.

[xvii] Ibid., 4-5.

[xviii] Neema Parvini, “Christian Nationalism Is a Political Fantasy” December 1, 2022 https://chroniclesmagazine.org/view/christian-nationalism-is-a-political-fantasy/; see also, The Populist Delusion (Perth: Imperium Press, 2022).

[xix] Wolfe, Christian Nationalism, 433.

[xx] Ibid., 9.

[xxi] Ibid., 11.

[xxii] Ibid., 15.

[xxiii] Augustine, City of God Against the Pagans, ed. And trans. R.W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), bk. XX, ch.1, 965.

[xxiv] Cf., Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, (Radford, VA: Wilder Publications, 2013), 12-14, 22.

[xxv] Wolfe, Christian Nationalism, 89, 180.

[xxvi] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 36, 40-44; see also, Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

[xxvii] Christian Meier, The Greek Discovery of Politics trans. David McLintock (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

[xxviii] Ibid., 14, 20-21.

[xxix] Guillaume Durocher, “Athens: A Spirited and Nativist Democracy,” (Fall 2018) 18(3) The Occidental Quarterly, 74-75, 78; See also, Susan Lape, Race and Citizen Identity in the Classical Athenian Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), ix, 59.

[xxx] Ibid., 72.

[xxxi] Ibid., 73, 80.

[xxxii] Wolfe, Christian Nationalism, 76.

[xxxiii] Cf. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political trans. George Schwab (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1976), 28-29.

[xxxiv] R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 17-18.

[xxxv] Wolfe, Christian Nationalism, 41.

[xxxvi] Bob Stevenson, “The Case for Christian Nationalism: A Review (Part Two).” https://bobstevenson.net/the-case-for-christian-nationalism-a-review-part-ii-84384e87eab1

[xxxvii] David N. Livingstone, Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 5, 26,33.

[xxxviii] Peter Enns, The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say About Human Origins (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2012), 65-66.

[xxxix] Wolfe, Christian Nationalism, 100, 101, 110-111.