Christianity

Anti-Racism Comes for the Church: The Case of Thomas Achord

A year or two ago, I received a large, unsolicited and apparently self-published book in the mail: Who Is My Neighbor? An Anthology in Natural Relations, edited by Thomas Achord and Darrell Dow. Neither name was familiar to me. Since my available reading time is somewhat constrained, I did no more than leaf through it at first. But I kept it on my shelf because the idea of “an anthology in natural relations” sounded worthwhile. The editors clearly felt that relations in contemporary America had become unnatural (in some sense), and in response they had assembled hundreds of short, simple texts on proper human relations from antiquity to the present day. Their anthology emphasized the Classical and Christian traditions, but included some material from Egypt, China, India, the Jewish tradition and more. There were chapters on God (or the gods), marriage, family and household (including slavery), local and political community, economics, education, literature, and other matters—much of the very stuff of human life.

I was sympathetic to the project. Contemporary man has no idea how unusual his moral notions appear within a broad historical context. This characteristically modern form of ignorance has been called the “provincialism of time,” and one of the purposes of education is overcoming it to some degree. Browsing such an anthology might even have therapeutic value for some of our contemporaries.

But I had mostly forgotten about this book when, browsing a dissident website a couple weeks ago, I came across an appeal to help the family of a man who had lost his livelihood due to thought crime. I made a small donation and searched the internet for further information on the case. This quickly led me to a number of posts about a certain Thomas Achord, an alleged “white supremacist” who had also been dismissed from his employment in November, 2022. That name rang a bell, and a quick check of my bookshelf confirmed that this second cancellee was indeed the co-editor of Who Is My Neighbor?

Until November of last year, Mr. Achord served as the headmaster of a small private school in Louisiana that is part of the Classical Christian Education movement. This is a traditionalist movement which stresses exposing the young to the Bible and other classic texts, in part through the study of Latin (and sometimes Greek). It provides pupils with an understanding that the world did not begin the day they were born, that their own generation is merely one link in a chain spanning centuries. This helps transmit to them a sense of identity and roots, as well as protecting them from faddish thinking. I have been sympathetic to the movement since it first came to my attention in the 1990s.

Late last year, an Englishman and Christian theologian named Alastair Roberts discovered that Achord had maintained a pseudonymous blog between January 2020 and August 2021. As is the way with pseudonymous writings, much of this material was more forthright in language than what Achord had published under his own name, although not inconsistent with it. Roberts criticized some of the pseudonymous posts, but his language was measured and he explicitly disavowed any desire to threaten Achord’s employment.

Roberts’ post was soon spotted by columnist Rod Dreher, however, whose children had attended Achord’s school. In addition to the material uncovered by Roberts, Dreher took exception to a chapter of Who Is My Neighbor? containing texts in support of the common-sense ideas that diversity promotes conflict and erodes social capital, while good fences make good neighbors. Dreher quickly decided such ideas made Achord a “vile racist” (as well as anti-Semite and misogynist) and “doxxed” him to the school, which panicked and promptly fired the father of four. Dreher acknowledges that Achord is quiet, modest, friendly, and talented; his ideas are Dreher’s only justification for getting the man dismissed.

Some circumstances may make this dispute appear surprising. Dreher is perhaps best known as the author of The Benedict Option (2017), a book advocating the formation by like-minded Christians of small face-to-face communities capable of withstanding the onslaught of mass culture and cultivating the virtues among the rising generation. This is similar to the goals pursued by the Classical Christian Education movement, so it is not surprising Dreher enrolled his own children in such a school.

But it also seems to overlap rather largely with the aims of Achord and Dow in editing their Anthology in Natural Relations. In the “Introduction” they write:

The subversion of natural and organic connections (family, nation, etc.) has spiritual implications. The goal is the subversion of Christian nations and the culture produced by Christendom. The way forward means recognizing that the world into which we are born includes families, institutions and nations that are structured hierarchically. Likewise our duties within those structures (i.e., justice) are hierarchical in nature. To live with piety is to accept our place in that structure of reality, favoring the near over the far.

Achord’s “racism” is presumably related to his advocacy of “favoring the near over the far.”

Achord and Dow drop a broad hint as to where the contemporary “subversion of natural and organic connections” such as nation and family is coming from by printing three quotes from the founders of communism on the back of their book:

Even the usual differences within species, like racial differences . . . can and must be done away with historically.—Karl Marx

The nationalities of the peoples associating themselves in accordance with the principle of community will be compelled to mingle with each other as a result of this association and thereby to dissolve themselves.—Friedrich Engels

The aim of socialism is not only to abolish the present division of mankind into small states and end all national isolation; not only to bring the nations closer together, but to merge them—V. I. Lenin

Marx speaks of races, Engels and Lenin of nations and nationalities, but the basic idea is the same: communism represents a form of universalism, a type of thinking which elevates the universal over the particular, extending even to outright hostility toward more particular forms of human association.

Speaking generally, each of us forms the center of a concentric series of spheres of attachment beginning with our immediate family and running through our extended family to our community (if we are still fortunate enough to live in one), and thence to nation, race, and the human species as a whole. Like communism, Christianity has a universal aspect, as illustrated by Christ’s Great Commission to “go and make disciples of all nations.” The parable of the Good Samaritan also makes clear that our rightful sphere of moral concern may include even perfect strangers. But unlike communism, neither Christ nor the Church ever expressed hostility to particular attachments as such, nor advocated abolishing the institutions on which they rest. It is compatible with Christianity to love your own wife more than your neighbor’s wife. The same principal applies to one’s children, and even extended family (for extended family was an important social fact in the ancient Near East where the Bible originated).

But what about race? This, of course, is the locus of disagreement between Dreher and Achord. So we must ask: do the Bible or Christianity view it as illegitimate to feel a greater attachment to one’s own race than to the other races of mankind?

In fact, the Bible does not have a great deal to say about race in the sense commonly intended today, viz., the three-to-seven major continental races of mankind, a sphere of belonging intermediate between the nation and the human species. There is not even any word for “race” in this sense in Biblical Hebrew or Greek. That is not surprising. The known world of Biblical times did not cover the entire terrestrial globe, so appreciation of the racial differentiation of mankind was limited.

What the Bible does refer to—in countless passages—is “nations.” And no Biblical author ever condemns patriotism or devotion to nation: “make disciples of all nations” obviously does not mean “abolish nations.” The same goes, historically, for the Christian church. Within living memory, e.g., Bishop Fulton Sheen used to remind his vast American television audience that one could not be a good Christian without also being a patriot. This was viewed almost as a truism at the time.

Any Christian serious about developing a Biblical view of race or race relations must proceed by careful study of what the Bible says about nations, adjusting it (if and where appropriate) to the broader category of race. What would be the likely result of such a study? Well, if we accept Steve Sailer’s definition of a race as “a very extended family that is inbred to some extent,” it is hard to see how anyone could simultaneously affirm family attachments as natural and good while condemning all racial attachment. Such is the view of “Kinism,” a nationalist- and racialist-compatible tendency within the contemporary church which seems to me consistent with scripture, church tradition and common sense.

Until recently, of course, there was no need of a special word like “Kinist” to refer to those Christians who believe in the legitimacy of particular attachments, because such belief was universal. But “antiracism” has long since invaded the church in force. Christians, like everyone else, grow up surrounded by shrill and sanctimonious denunciations of “racism.” This term, which is never defined, only dates back to the 1930s. It is variously ascribed either to Lenin’s sidekick Leon Trotsky or to Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish sexologist and early promoter of transsexualism who was also a strong communist sympathizer. The very least we can say about such men is that their thinking was not inspired by Christianity. Yet millions of white Christians like Rod Dreher assume that the communist-inspired notion of antiracism is not merely compatible with, but an actual requirement of, their faith! In effect, they believe an essential doctrine of Christianity, the “sinfulness of racism,” went unmentioned in the Bible or by any church leader for nineteen hundred years before being revealed to Christendom by some Jewish radical less than a hundred years ago.

Such extreme historical illiteracy is the perfect example of that “provincialism of time” and faddish thinking which, as I noted above, a proper education should help protect us against. And the Achord case seems to indicate that it has now gained a controlling interest in the Classical Christian Education movement. Thomas Achord realizes better than anyone what a tragedy this represents for both the church and our people. On his pseudonymous blog he lamented that those involved in Classical Christian Education

are scared, they’re aware that things are against them as Christians, as Westerners, perhaps they sense that things are against them as whites, but they don’t admit it. My concerns are that . . . they’ll be hoodwinked and guilted into tolerating Diversity, nonwhites [and] Marxism. I want to provide formal help, tools, resources for white-advocates to take back the West for white peoples by recovering a classical education.

But this is already disallowed in today’s church. If you feel any secret loyalty to race or nation, white man, Christian morality demands you be sniffed out, hunted down, professionally destroyed, and see the bread stolen from your children’s mouths.

After all, Christ commanded us to love one another.

*   *   *

You can assist Thomas Achord’s family here [link to: https://www.givesendgo.com/G9HF1]. But hurry: “antifascist” Christians are already pressuring the site to disallow donations to a “white supremacist.”

How to Create a New Elite

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).

Sweet Dreams of Christian Nationalism (But What About the Protestant Deformation, Globalist Churches, and Jewish Political Theology?) Part Two

Stephen Wolfe

Go to Part One.

Nations and Ethnicity

When discussing the meaning of nationhood, Wolfe rejects “the so-called creedal nation concept” according to which a nation is “united around a set of propositions that creedalists consider universally true or at least practically advantageous for all and so readily acceptable by all.”  His target is the “egalitarian themes and rights-talk” characteristic of mainstream American political discourse.”  He concedes, however, that his argument “does not preclude political or social creeds that serve to unite a people.”  He gives as an example of a “universally true statement” the proposition that “Jesus is Lord,” claiming that it “certainly serves to unite the people of a Christian nation.”  Wolfe claims that “Christianity is the true religion” as another example of a universally valid spiritual proposition.[1]  One wonders whether and how that spiritual truth was recognized during the religious wars of the seventeenth century in Europe or the American Civil War during the nineteenth century.

Wolfe acknowledges that such Christian propositions cannot and do not serve as the “foundation for nations.”[2]  The question then, of course, becomes: What is the foundation or basis for nationhood, Christian or otherwise?  Unfortunately, Wolfe never provides a clear answer to that question.  The cover of Wolfe’s book with the image of a cross radiating beams of light superimposed upon a map of the lower forty-eight United States suggests that his project will be focused upon an American version of Christian nationalism. But, as one of his critics observes, “the interior of his 478-page tome tells a very different story.  Indeed, America hardly comes up in the first nine [of ten] chapters, and much of what he writes could be applied to any Christian (by which he means Protestant) nation.”[3]

For Wolfe, it is axiomatic that every “Christian nation acknowledges God as the author of nations in general and as the providential author of their particular nation.”  But the “universal truths of Christianity do not nullify national particularity.  Each Christian nation has a distinct way of life.”  It is true, he says, “that fellow Christians, regardless of nationality, are united spiritually, as fellow members of the kingdom of God.” But this “is chiefly a heavenly or eschatological relation, made possible by grace, not nature.”  The spiritual brotherhood making man “fit for a heavenly kingdom” is not well suited to provide the practical tools (such as a common language) enabling the everyday cooperation between individuals and families necessary “to procure the full range of goods required for living well in this world.”[4]

While Wolfe recognizes the particularity of every nation, he locates the sources of that particularity in a “lived experience” shared by everyone, a “sense of familiarity with a particular place and the people in it.”  This “sense of we,” is not “rooted…in abstractions or judicial norms (e.g., equal protection) or truth-statements.”  He appears not to notice that he grounds his own argument in a general “truth,” applicable to all nations, tribes, and peoples, before and after the fall.  All of us, Christians and non-Christians alike, share “a pre-reflective, pre-propositional love for one’s own, generated from intergenerational affections, daily life, and productive activity that link a society of the dead, living, and unborn.”  Particularity, for Wolfe, is a property attached “to a people in place.”  He describes his concern for the “lived experience” of particular peoples in particular places as a “a sort of phenomenological topography.”[5]

He admits that the “idea of a nation is notoriously difficult to define, and identifying true nations is equally challenging.”  But he is careful to deny that nationhood can or should be identified “on the basis of a modern racialist principle.”  He disavows any suggestion that his position is “a ‘white nationalist’ argument.”  On his view, “the designation ‘white,’ as it is used today, hinders and distracts people from recognizing and acting for their people-groups.”  Having rejected the concept of race, Wolfe then uses “the terms ethnicity and nation almost synonymously,” if not necessarily very consistently.  His use of the terms as synonyms is especially confusing when he announces that he will use “nation…to emphasize the unity of the whole” since “every people-group has internal differences” (e.g. those based on class) “though no nation (properly speaking) is composed of two or more ethnicities.”[6]  Most readers, I suspect, would take the latter observation to imply that there can be no American nation.  After all, is not the United States today composed of a patchwork of different ethnicities (not to mention “races”)?

But Wolfe almost immediately begins to fudge the issue of ethnic and national identity.  “Ethnicity, as something experienced,” he declares, “is familiarity with others based in common language, manners, customs, stories, taboos, rituals, calendars, social expectations, duties, loves, and religion.”  All of these permit communication and completion of common projects.  What about blood ties?  According to Wolfe, while a “community of blood” may be “crucial to ethnicity.  But this should not lead us to conclude that blood ties are the sole determinant of ethnicity.”  He prefers to think of ethnicity or nations as a function of “soul” or “spiritual principle.”[7]

Accordingly, “the ties of blood do not directly establish the boundaries of one’s ethnicity.  Rather, one has ethnic ties of affection because one’s kin conducted life with other kin in the same place.”  In other words, if a Southern White man’s kin lived in a particular place alongside the extended families of Black slaves or sharecroppers, together they would leave “behind a trace of themselves and their cooperation and their great works and sacrifices.”  Both groups, White and Black, could then be said to share a common Southern or even American ethnicity because their collective kinfolk “belonged to this people on this land,” and were bound together by a common Volksgeist.[8]

Wolfe never specifies his own ethnicity.  Instead, he waves the issue away with the commonplace observation that “white Americans” often assign their ethnicity “to some distant European ancestry.”  The closest he comes to coming out of the closet is when he writes that “I might say that I’m Italian, German, and English” without making it clear whether that is an autobiographical fact or, instead, just a hypothetical example of a typical White American response to the question of personal “ethnic identity.”[9]  Perhaps Wolfe actually is just some random Euromutt castaway.  On the other hand, he could be related somehow to the prominent Anglo-Irish family of the eighteenth-century English Major General James Wolfe.

Once upon a time (not so very long ago), every English-Canadian schoolchild literally sang the praises of General Wolfe as “the dauntless hero” who “planted firm Britannia’s flag on Canada’s fair domain.”  Wolfe died on the Plains of Abraham near Quebec City, having defeated the French General Montcalm.  British North America was thereby rid (for a time) of a dangerous imperial rival.  Ironically, Wolfe’s victory smoothed the path of rebellious American colonists ready to break with the British Crown to create a continental empire of their own.

Many English-Canadians, including myself, would be proud to claim General Wolfe as an ancestor.  (Indeed, though I can boast no such connection, I have a large print of Benjamin West’s famous painting of Wolfe’s death hanging on the wall of my library).  Wolfe of West Point, however, prefers to believe that one’s genetic origins, while “not entirely irrelevant…say little about who you are, at least with regard to your everyday life.”  At most, they provide little more than “some mildly interesting fact you use in small-talk.”[10]

Relating ethnicity primarily to the topography of lived experience has the effect of obscuring the intertwined significance of history, biology, and culture.  Wolfe has no apparent interest in either in the historical origins or the “ethnic genetic interests” of his own people, whoever they might be.  Indeed, he writes that “Given my friendships and associations with people of different ancestry, I can say that being ‘white [much less of British ancestry] is unnecessary both to recognize themselves in what I describe and to cooperate with someone like me in a common national project.”[11]

Remarkably, in Wolfe’s mind, ethnicity can cross racial lines.  According to Neil Shenvi, Wolfe has affirmed in a personal conversation that “People of different ancestral origins can be part of the same ethnicity.”[12]  How else can Wolfe entertain the hope that an American Christian nationalism will emerge?[13]  Kevin DeYoung remarks that “the all-important concept of ‘nation’ sometimes operates in Wolfe’s thinking more organically like an ethnicity, sometimes more loosely like a culture, sometimes more locally like a love of people and place, and sometimes more traditionally like a nation-state with a recognizable set of laws, a governing magistrate, and the power of the sword.”[14]

Wolfe argues that all nations can be Christian nations seeking “their temporal and eternal good through their own civil arrangements.”  He devotes a chapter to defend the proposition that a Christian nation has “a natural law right to revolution against tyrants to that end.”  Of course, so long as “a legitimate ruler uses civil power to command what is just and the people disobey this command, they are disobeying God himself…because the law itself, though human, is an ordinance of God.”  But God does not bestow civil authority “to command what is unjust…for God’s ordinances to man are always just.”  It follows that no unjust command can bind the conscience.  A tyrant, “though he may have the appearance of civil authority, is but a man ordering fellow men to great evil.”  If necessary, forcible resistance to such commands may be justified.  Even a Christian minority may “revolt against a tyranny directed against them and, after successfully revolting, establish over all the population a Christian commonwealth.” [15]

In Wolfe’s Christian political theory, it is axiomatic that “although civil administration is fundamentally natural, human, and universal” it “was created to serve Adam’s race in a state of integrity, as an outward ordering to God.”  In our redeemed state of grace, “those who are restored in Christ are the people of God.  Thus, civil order and administration is for them.”  This raises the question of the political status of non-Christians in a Christian commonwealth.  Any answer to that question is a matter of prudence, recognizing, of course, that the civil administration “must guarantee equal protection and due process with regard to human things for all people…But this does not entail equal participation, status, and standing in political, social, and cultural institutions.”  Non-Christians cannot “be expected to take an interest in conserving the explicit Christian character and ends of these institutions and of society.”[16]

Wolfe invokes the Anglo-Protestantism practiced in Puritan New England as a source of inspiration in shaping any future Christian commonwealth.  There and in the new nation during the founding era, liberty of conscience was to be respected.  No one could be compelled to believe or profess the Christian faith.  The civil power dealt with heresy or dissent with a view to “practical considerations” relating to the “public harm caused by public error and on the limitation of civic action for spiritual reformation.”  Accordingly, the civil power acted not to wreak vengeance on the enemies of God but “as a means to safeguard the souls of those under the magistrate’s care.”  Punishment was meted out only to those who publicly sought to promote heresy and unbelief, to subvert the established church, to denounce its ministers, or to instigate rebellion against Christian magistrates.  The fundamental Anglo-Protestant view was “that the Gospel and religious belief cannot be coerced; it is a matter of persuasion, and one must decide for oneself.”[17]

What went wrong?  Why did the American republic not remain as a Christian nation, on the Anglo-Protestant model?  Wolfe’s answer in a nutshell is: modern R2K theory.  That is to say, the mainstream Anglo-Protestant view still rests upon a two kingdoms theology distinguishing church and state but the radical two kingdoms view is that only pastoral vocations in the church are part of God’s kingdom while the state rests on a natural law that applies in a neutral fashion to all men everywhere, Christians and non-Christians alike.  This, of course, begs the question: how did the R2K position come to dominance in the church?  To answer that question requires a realistic political ethnotheology of Christian nationhood, one willing to confront a number of highly-charged issues that Wolfe is at pains to avoid and obfuscate.  What was it about the Anglo-Protestant tradition that led to the erosion of its earlier determination to create and preserve a Christian nation in America?

The Elephant in the Room

One scholar suggests that WASPs were their own worst enemy.  According to Eric Kaufmann, the decline of Anglo-America was not due to external factors; in particular, it did not follow an organized campaign by rival ethnic groups seeking to challenge WASP hegemony.  He contends that the decisive “forces of dominant-ethnic decline” emerged instead “from within Anglo-Protestant America.”[18]  There is a large element of truth to the Kaufmann thesis. The modern American corporate capitalist society that emerged in the late nineteenth century was the unique product of the interaction between a kind of person, a kind of economy, and a kind of religion.[19]

Brian Gatton suggests that the most significant psychological and spiritual force driving WASPs to commit hari-kari was the other-directed nature of the “social self” fabricated by the corporate system.[20]  In the early modern period a God of Will was worshipped by the bourgeois individual of the Protestant ethic, whose enterprising ways helped the modern capitalist economy to take off.  But while the driven personality of the inner-directed Protestant supplied power on the runway, once in flight the economy relied on technique, not on character, to keep itself aloft.  As Donald Meyer put it in his study of the American gospel of positive thinking, “if at the center of nineteenth century social imagination stood a man, in the twentieth he was replaced by a system.”[21]

The dominant ethos of the Anglo-American corporate system depends upon a novel blend of psychology, economics and theology.  The economy became an object of religious devotion for the managerial and professional classes.  Today, in all sectors of society and culture, economic development has become an occasion for dependency rather than belonging.  Our abject subjection to the mysterious movements of the global economy parallels the relationship of Protestant believers to their “hidden God, the God of Will” who can be known “only in His works, not in His nature.  In an awful recurrence, we are returning to the situation of the early Protestants as an abyss opens up between us and an economy invested with all the attributes of divinity.  Its inner workings surpass ordinary human understanding. Among our elites and opinion leaders, insight, knowledge, and intelligence can do no more than serve the disembodied forces animating the society of perpetual growth.  It is not the courage or the strength of our political and corporate leaders, nor our respect for tradition that sanctifies the system.  It is faith alone.  Awesome and inscrutable, spectacular and self-propelling, the system invites adoration.[22]

No doubt the emergent other-directed character of the WASP middle-class was a uniquely Anglo-American adaptation to the organizational imperatives of corporate capitalism.  But if the home-grown “corporate self” provided the seed-bed for the cosmopolitan spirit of the Progressive Era, the WASP clerisy had plenty of help from other ethnic groups, especially Jews, in nurturing a full-blown cult of the Other.  Indeed, Kaufmann credits Felix Adler, a leading Jewish intellectual, with a leading role in awakening Progressive reformers to the possibilities inherent in this new pluralist vision of American national identity.[23]  In his own recent book, Whiteshift, Kaufmann, too, is remarkably sanguine about the demographic, cultural, and political impact of mass third world immigration on the future of the White majority in Anglo-American society.[24]

An interesting comparison can be made between Eric Kaufmann and Stephen Wolfe on the issue of immigration-induced cultural change.  In principle, Wolfe advocates limits on immigration from culturally alien sources, even though they might be Christian.[25]  Kaufmann, on the other hand, treats “white opposition to mass immigration as a problem to be solved, not as an expression of legitimate ethnic interests or democratic will.”  Both are confident, however, that, so long as the rate of change is less than alarming, assimilation of cultural outsiders will be possible.  Kaufmann merely cautions that whites must be allowed “some social space to express their identity.”[26]

Both are what Frank Salter describes as “ethnic traditionalists” in the sense that “they support immigration so long as the immigrants assimilate, regardless of the impact on [White] ethnic identity, even if [the White majority] eventually disappears.”[27]  It may be that the differences between them with respect to the scale of immigration reflect differences in their respective racial and ethnic identities.  Whatever the precise weight any given European ethnicity may have contributed to Wolfe’s identity, he is unquestionably White.  Kaufmann’s ancestry is noticeably more exotic: part-Jewish, part-Chinese, and part-Hispanic.  Perhaps that explains why Kaufmann promulgates the ideal of a “whiteshift” over the next century or two when he expects (and hopes) most Westerners will become “what we now term ‘mixed-race.’”[28]

For his part, Wolfe certainly does not actively promote race-mixing as an end in itself; nor, however, does he accept that a “community in blood” is “the sole determinant of ethnicity.”  Sensitive to accusations of “racism,” he is not opposed to intermarriage in principle.[29]  Nor does he approve inter-ethnic or inter-racial marriages merely as particular exceptions to a general rule requiring respect for ethnic and racial boundaries.  Hannah Arendt, by contrast, frankly accepts that “every mixed marriage constitutes a challenge to society.”  While opposing the legal prohibition (but not social disapproval) of interracial marriage, Arendt preferred to treat mixed marriage as a private matter between individuals “who have so far preferred personal happiness to social adjustment that they are willing to bear the burden of discrimination.”  On Arendt’s realist view, such discrimination is a necessary evil.  If people (and, presumably, churches) are not free to shun those whose private lives, social mores, or ethnic identity they disapprove, “society would simply cease to exist and very important possibilities of free association and group formation would disappear.”[30]  By contrast, Wolfe treats race-mixing as a positive good which, over time, will create the “bonds of affection” that will enable the formation of “various brotherhoods and tribes and shared or public pastimes.”  Nationhood, for Wolfe, is a spiritual phenomenon, not a matter of hematology.[31]

Despite their differences, however, neither Wolfe nor Kaufmann examine the role of ethnic rivalry (much less antagonism) between Jews and WASPs as a major contributing factor to the decline of Anglo-Protestant “cultural Christianity.”  Such reluctance to tackle the Jewish question directly is noteworthy given their joint preoccupation with the immigration issue.  After all, Jews led the long campaign to overturn the national origins regime (adopted in 1924), designed to radically restrict the numbers of immigrants to the USA from areas outside northwestern Europe.  Elsewhere in the Anglosphere, too, Jews have been active in promoting non-White immigration, especially after the passage of the 1965 Hart-Celler Act in the USA.

A secular, part-Jewish, cosmopolitan such as Kaufmann cannot be expected, perhaps, to highlight the prominent role played by Jews in undermining the institutional supports for Christian nationhood.  But, given the prominence that Wolfe gives to his discussion of “the good of cultural Christianity,” it seems strange that he completely ignores the issue.  Wolfe understands cultural Christianity as “the force that normalizes Christian culture,” even for many who neither attend churches readily nor publicly profess Christian beliefs.  It is a “social power” which “directs people to activities wherein they can procure the things of eternal life, both inside and outside the instituted church.”[32]

Much to the amusement of cosmopolitan urban sophisticates (“cloud people”), Wolfe holds up the fictional North Carolina town of Mayberry (home to the “dirt people” of the 1960s’ Andy Griffith Show) as the avatar of cultural Christianity.  This folksy, small town was “a community of few and small concerns, high social trust, and an ease of life.”  Wolfe remarks that “any American” watching that show today “cannot but feel nostalgia for an America lost by negligence and malevolence.”[33]

Note that Wolfe attributes the destruction of the world of Mayberry, a place where everybody went to church and probably “all the kids were above average,” to both negligence and malevolence.  But, surprisingly, even West Point graduate Wolfe declines to identify the foremost enemy of American cultural Christianity.  This reflects the fatal flaw in Anglo-Protestant political theology: the absence of an explicit ethnoreligion anchored in the history and destiny of the Anglo-Saxon peoples.  Jews are far more ethnocentric than even the ethnic traditionalist minority among WASPs.  The most important difference between Jews and Anglo-Protestants is the propensity of the former community towards a high level of what Salter labels “ethnic nepotism.”  In other words, Jews are much more likely to exhibit a strong belief “in the unity of family and racial kinship.”  Jewish parents are much more likely than WASPs to see their children as an essential “contribution to the immortality of their race.”[34]

Arguably, Jewish elites believe that it is in their ethnic genetic interest to dismantle the institutional supports for Christian nationhood and have pursued legal, political, and cultural strategies to achieve that end.  This campaign included a battery of legal challenges which successfully ended school prayers and bible reading.  A famous book entitled The Authoritarian Personality, sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, appeared in 1950 and inspired a multi-pronged attack on the Christian family which continues down to the present day.  Mass third-world immigration, feminism, pornography, contraception and abortion, and, more recently, transgender rights have all been weaponized by Jewish activists waging a concerted war on cultural Christianity.[35]

The reconstitution of Christian nations in the USA and the rest of the Anglosphere will require the emergence of a counter-elite ready, willing, and able to contest the Jewish Ascendancy, not just within the state, but also on the terrain of civil society, in the corporate sector, the media, academia, and the legal profession.[36]  Any such counter-elite must be driven by an ethnoreligious spirit if it is to have any chance of success.  The greatest weakness of Wolfe’s vision of Christian nationhood is that he treats the particularity of each people and place as adiaphorous, a thing indifferent, not affecting the universal spiritual unity of the kingdom of God.

Conclusion

For Wolfe, Christ redeemed humanity as a whole; the constituent elements of mankind’s transient life in this world were to be perfected by ordering the various Christian nations/ethnicities to Christ.  Wolfe takes it for granted that humanity has a telos in common, already known to Christian theology.  But what if race is not just a social construct but also possesses an intractably biological dimension?  What if the phenomenology of place is ultimately grounded in the evolutionary history of distinctive biocultures?  Race is a trinitarian phenomenon: race-as-biology, race-as-culture, and race-as-theology, all develop together within a complex differentiated historical process.  Every “people-group” (the tender-minded synonym for tribes, nations, and races) possesses its own language, culture, patterns of experience, and goals; they cannot all be squeezed together into the simplistic schematic structure of a neo-Augustinian metanarrative.

Anglo-Protestants desperately need to situate themselves within a theologically informed ethnohistory.  Such an ethnotheology must come to grips with biocultural science, with genetic similarity theory, and with a consciousness of the importance of ethnic genetic interests to the physical and spiritual well-being of their people.[37]  Only in that way can Anglo-Protestants hope to understand the rise, decline, fall, and possible restoration of Anglo-Saxon Christendoms throughout the Anglosphere.

As things stand now, Anglo-Protestant theology bears a large share of responsibility for the deformation of Christian nationhood.  Perhaps the most telling symptom of the present crisis is Wolfe’s claim that there can never again be a chosen nation or people.  No Christian nation today, he writes, can be “a holy nation in the sense that Israel was holy when under the Mosaic Covenant.  No nation today is God’s nation by some special divine command or by exclusive divine favor.”  Wolfe acknowledges that a people can only become or maintain themselves as a Christian nation “in an explicit sense, [by] an act of national will.”[38]  But here he is intellectually crippled by the idealist, other-worldly character of his historical and political theology.  A more realistic account of the origins of the Mosaic Covenant might understand it as a product of a historical process in which both divine command and national will were involved.

As one writer, who goes by the name of Jung-Freud, contends, “if Jews believed in many gods for different peoples as pagan folks did, then there would have been no need for the Covenant.”  Instead, Jews took a different path “out of boldness, imagination, arrogance, megalomania, or whatever,” they “came to believe in only one God for themselves.”  But they also taught their children that no other gods were real and that it was a grave sin to worship them.  But why would that one God favor the insignificant small-time people of Israel over all other tribes?  That seemingly insoluble puzzle made it necessary for the Israelites to come up with the Covenant.  Without it, “there was no guarantee that God would stick with the Jews.”[39]

In light of the heroic role of Anglo-Protestants in the foundation of the nations of the Anglosphere, why should they, too, not feel in their bones that they can and should enter into a special covenant with God?  After all, the process by which a people enter into covenant with the divine must be akin to what has long been known to the Orthodox Christian tradition as the experience of “theosis” or “deification.”  Perhaps, a “stateless” people, such as the ancient Israelites on their exodus journey to the Promised Land, is more receptive to communion with the divine.

But the Jews are not the only people to experience “statelessness.”  In our own time, the “nation-states” of the Anglosphere have been subordinated to the hidden hand of globalist plutocracy.  As a consequence, the Anglo-Saxon peoples, both “at home” and in the diaspora, are now de facto, if not yet de jure, “stateless.”  Perhaps providentially, certainly ironically, such political and cultural dispossession may have created the conditions for a spiritual renaissance.  WASPs may yet rediscover the ethnoreligious spirit that once moved Alfred the Great to look to Covenant as the essential medium for the collective deification of his embryonic Angelcynn nation.[40]

Given that possibility, it is no wonder that organized Jewry does everything in its power to demonize the ethnoreligious spirit of Christian nationalism throughout the Anglosphere.[41]  But let us not forget that such cultural subversion also successfully targeted once-great Christian nations such as Germany as well—with the active cooperation of the Anglo-Saxon nations.  Anglo-Protestant theology happily sanctified the thirty-year war waged on Germany.  Now re-educated, guilt-tripped, and thoroughly demoralized by a systematic process of Überfremdung, Germany remains securely under the thumb of the globalist American regime overseeing its proxy war on Orthodox Christian Russia.  “Our” phony victories in those wars should be sources of shame rather than pride.  Compare the negative, dysgenic, maladaptive impact of Anglo-Protestant Woke political theology with the positive, eugenic, and adaptive success of the Jewish political theology grounded in the Holocaust Mythos. In the one case, blasphemy laws are conceived as a violation of human rights; in the other, “condoning, denying, or downplaying” Jewish suffering is a shocking offence against the laws of God and man, alike.

It is long past time for Anglo-Protestant political theology to identify and clearly distinguish friend from foe in the holy war we are compelled to wage for the earthly survival and spiritual salvation of the Anglo-Saxon race worldwide.  God save the King.

Andrew Fraser taught constitutional law and history at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia for many years.  He is the author of The WASP Question (London: Arktos, 2011) and Dissident Dispatches: An Alt-Right Guide to Christian Theology (London: Arktos, 2017).


[1] Ibid., 119-120, 186.

[2] Ibid., 120.

[3] Mark David Hall, “The 500-Year-Old Case for Christian Nationalism” https://providencemag.com/2022/11/the-500-year-old-case-for-christian-nationalism/

[4] Wolfe, Christian Nationalism, 176, 199.

[5] Ibid., 120, 134.

[6] Ibid., 119, 135.

[7] Ibid., 136, 140.

[8] Ibid., 139.

[9] Ibid., 136.

[10] Ibid., 136

[11] Ibid., 119.

[12] Neil Shenvi, “Of Gods and Men: A Long Review of Wolfe’s Case for Christian Nationalism, Part III-Objections” https://shenviapologetics.com/of-gods-and-men-a-long-review-of-wolfes-case-for-christian-nationalism-part-iii-objections/

[13] Wolfe, Christian Nationalism, 431, 475.

[14] Kevin DeYoung, “The Rise of Right-Wing Wokeism” https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/christian-nationalism-wolfe/

[15] Wolfe, Christian Nationalism, 329-330, 334, 345.

[16] Ibid., 346, 392.

[17] Ibid., 390-392, 414-415.

[18] Kaufmann, Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, 4.

[19] Donald Meyer, The Positive Thinkers: A Study of the American Quest for Health, Wealth, and Personal Power from Mary Baker Eddy to Norman Vincent Peale (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1966), 177.

[20] Brian Gatton, “Hari-Kari of the Anglo Elite,” (2006) 25(4) Journal of American Ethnic History 181.  For more on the distinction between inner-directed and other-directed character types, see David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Emerging American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001 [original ed. 1961]).

[21] Meyer, Positive Thinkers, 177.

[22] Ibid., 177-178.

[23] Kaufmann, Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, 91-95.

[24] Eric P. Kaufmann, Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities (London: Penguin, 2018).

[25] Wolfe, Christian Nationalism, 199-204.

[26] Frank Salter, “The Ethnic Predicaments of the Shrinking White Majority,” (September 2019) 63(9) Quadrant 31, at 34-35.

[27] Ibid., 33.

[28] Kaufmann, quoted in Salter, “Ethnic Predicaments,” 33.

[29] Wolfe, Christian Nationalism, 139.

[30] Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,”[originally published in 1959] in Peter Baehr, ed. The Portable Hannah Arendt (New York: Penguin, 2000), 238-239.

[31] Wolfe, Christian Nationalism, 139-140.

[32] Ibid., 213..

[33] Ibid., 226.

[34] Salter, “Ethnic Predicaments,” 32-33.

[35] Simple internet searches for material on “the Jewish role” in each of those movements will yield ample evidence to support this proposition.  A more systematic academic introduction to these issues can be found in Kevin Macdonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Long Beach, CA: 1st Books, 2002 [originally published by Praeger in 1998]).

[36] Andrew Fraser, Reinventing Aristocracy in the Age of Woke Capital: How Honourable WASP Elites Could Rescue Our Civilisation from Bad Governance by Irresponsible Corporate Plutocrats (London: Arktos, 2022).

[37] Good introductions to these fields can be found in Frank Salter, On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethnicity, and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration (London: Routledge, 2006); J. Phillipe Rushton, Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective Third Edition (Port Huron, MI: Charles Darwin Research Institute, 2000); and Andrew Fraser, The WASP Question: An Essay on the Biocultural Evolution, Present Predicament, and Future Prospects of the Invisible Race (London: Arktos, 2011).

[38] Wolfe, Christian Nationalism, 176.

[39] Jung-Freud, “Why the Euraces (Or European Races) Need Their Own COVENANT(s) in a One-Truth and One-Power World” https://www.unz.com/jfreud/why-the-euracesor-european-races-need-their-own-covenants-in-a-one-truth-and-one-power-world/

[40] I deal with this question in Andrew Fraser, “Anglo-Republicanism and the Rebirth of British History: Why Virtuous WASPs Must Challenge the Corrupt Globalist Plutocracy Misgoverning the Anglosphere,” (Fall 2021) 21(3) The Occidental Quarterly 3-58.  Available online at: https://mq.academia.edu/AndrewFraser

[41] See, e.g., Rabbi Deborah Waxman, PhD, “Ethnonationalism is a Grave Threat to Democracy” https://www.reconstructingjudaism.org/news/ethnonationalism-is-a-grave-threat-to-democracy/

Sweet Dreams of Christian Nationalism (But What About the Protestant Deformation, Globalist Churches, and Jewish Political Theology?) Part One

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.

The Cuckoo Cult: Mainstream Christianity Is Now an Implacable Enemy of the White West

Judaism isn’t about worshipping God. It’s about worshipping Jews. And it’s so good at its job that it’s persuaded some Christians to take up Judeolatry too. Thanks to Jewish subversion at the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church went from asking God to lift the “blindness” of the “perfidious Jews” to mandating smarmy prayers for “our elder brothers in the Faith.” And yes, Jews would indeed like to behave like brothers to Christians, in the same way as Cain did when he murdered his brother Abel.

Stonetoss demolishes the concept of “Judeo-Christianity”

Jews have tamed and corrupted American Protestantism too. They’ve convinced millions of Americans to accept the oxymoronic concept of Judeo-Christianity, which has all the coherence and honesty of “carnivorous vegetarianism” or “The Jeffrey Epstein Foundation for the Welfare of Under-Aged Shiksas.” Jews are also hoping to tame and corrupt Islam. The Jewish Chronicle recently ran an article headlined “British Muslims need ‘reform’ version of Islam,” which described the launch of a “new Oxford institute” that “aims to defeat the extremists and enable proper social integration.”

The seeds of race-blind liberalism

The article was written by a Muslim shabbos-goy called Taj Hargey, who earnestly explained to his fellow Muslims that the “philosophical evolution” of Islam “is theologically endorsed, since ijtihad (analytical thinking) is an intrinsic Qur’anic precept, as exemplified by the trailblazing 9th-century Mu’tazilah, who championed rationalism, justice and liberty.” And Hargey welcomed “support from anyone — including fellow Abrahamic adherents — committed to life-affirming and humane perspectives.”

Blatant blasphemy: The violent criminal George Floyd is portrayed as Christ at a Catholic university after his self-inflicted death

Muslims aren’t going to be fooled. Unlike Christianity, Islam resists subversion and doesn’t attack the interests of its own adherents. Hinduism and Buddhism resist subversion too, as we can see from the robust reaction of Hindus in India and Buddhists in Burma to Muslim misbehavior. Hinduism defends Hindu India and Buddhism defends Buddhist Burma. Modern Christianity, in complete contrast, seeks to destroy the Christian West. It’s now a cuckoo cult dedicated to filling the West with non-White predators and parasites. So what’s gone wrong with Christianity? Or was Christianity wrong from the beginning? These famous verses by the Jewish St Paul could be said to contain the seeds not just of race-blind liberalism but of biology-blind transgenderism too:

3:28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. (Letter to the Galatians) 3:11 There is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all. (Letter to the Colossians)

Traditionalist Christians deny, of course, that those verses encourage race-blindness and transgenderism. But they can’t deny that those verses from the Christian New Testament are much friendlier to such pernicious ideologies than these verses from the Jewish Old Testament:

20:16 But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: 20:17 But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee. (Book of Deuteronomy) 31:17 Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. 31:18 But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves. (Book of Numbers)

In the Old Testament, the difference between Jews and non-Jews, between male and female, is literally a matter of life and death. In the New Testament, “Christ is all, and in all.” When you compare the Old and New Testaments, you shouldn’t be surprised that Jewish Israel is highly ethnocentric and has big fences on its borders to keep out non-Jewish “infiltrators.” Nor should you be surprised that historically Christian Britain is now heavily enriched with non-Whites and non-Christians. Even leftist newspapers like the Guardian sometimes report the pathologies caused by this ethnic enrichment:

Over 1,000 children in Telford were sexually exploited, inquiry finds

More than a thousand children in Telford were sexually exploited over decades amid the failure of authorities to investigate “emboldened offenders”, an independent inquiry into the scandal has concluded. The three-year independent inquiry into child sexual exploitation (IICSE) found that abuse was allowed to continue for years and children, rather than perpetrators, were often blamed. Issues were not investigated because of nervousness about race, the inquiry’s final report said, and teachers and youth workers were discouraged from reporting child sexual exploitation. (Over 1,000 children in Telford were sexually exploited, inquiry finds, The Guardian, 12th July 2022)

But the leftist Guardian didn’t mention the word “Muslim” or “Pakistani” in that article. It didn’t explain the phrase “nervousness about race.” How could it? If the Guardian were honest, it would have to admit that leftism has worked tirelessly to encourage “nervousness about race” and to deliver thousands of White girls, decade after decade, to non-White sexual predators. You can be sure that the feminists at the Guardian will not be writing hard-hitting articles about “rape-culture” in Telford.

Justin Welby, a perfect justification of Nietzsche’s contempt for Christianity

You can also be sure that no high-ranking cleric in the Church of England will be delivering a fiery sermon in condemnation of the Muslim rape-jihad in Telford. That would mean defending Whites and Christians, and the Church of England has no interest whatsoever in defending Whites and Christians. But the Church has reacted very noisily to the government’s heavily promoted — and worthless — plan to send illegal migrants to Rwanda to have their asylum claims assessed. Justin Welby, the invertebrate Archbishop of Canterbury, contrasted “the weekend of Easter celebrations with his antipathy towards the government’s Rwandan asylum plans.” According to Welby: “Easter is a season of life and hope, of repentance and renewal. And this season is also why there are such serious ethical questions about sending asylum seekers overseas. The details are for politics. The principle must stand the judgment of God, and it cannot.”

Welby is not an aberration

So Welby speaks up loud and clear in support of non-White migrants, some of whom will undoubtedly go on to commit serious crimes against the White British. But what will he have to say about the latest development in the Telford scandal? Nothing, of course. As Andrew Joyce so rightly said of Welby at the Occidental Observer: “At the heart of this disease [of white guilt and globohomo] is the Archbishop of Canterbury and leader of the Church of England, Justin Welby, a man who looks like ten minutes of manual labor would actually kill him. He is the definition of all that is wrong in modern Man.” However, I don’t think that Welby is an aberration. No, he’s the logical culmination of Christian universalism. And here’s an interesting example of that universalism from an Anglican book published in 1893:

Race-blind universalism from the Church of England in 1893

The book itself is called Home Words for Heart and Heath, and collects issues from the Parochial Magazine for St Paul’s in the university town of Cambridge. On the positive side, it’s a good example of how Victorians created even the simplest objects both for endurance and for beauty. I found it an aesthetic treat merely to pick the book up and begin leafing through it. But it wasn’t a treat to come across the engraving of “Little Jack and His Playmates” on a “Young Folks’ Page.” Anglicans in 1893 didn’t know where that kind of race-blind universalism would lead; in 2022, we can see its pernicious consequences all around us. The point of the engraving, taken “from a photograph,” is that the two little boys in the foreground look very similar apart from their clothing and skin-color. It’s a literal embodiment of “Ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” True, the little White boy is taller than the little Black boy, but that goes with his evangelism, as the accompanying text explains:

LITTLE JACK AND HIS PLAYMATES

“There’s not a child so small and weak
But has his little cross to take–
His little work of love and praise
That he may do for Jesus’ sake.”

One is reminded of the well-known children’s hymn in writing of Little Jack, the Boy Missionary. Jack was the son of Captain and Mrs E.C. Hore. He was only eleven weeks old when, in 1882, they started for Africa, in company with a number of other missionaries, including Bishop Hannington. The baby was carried in a wheelbarrow to Mamboia, then back to Zanzibar, and afterwards round a great portion of the African Continent: while he also accompanied his parents on many of their missionary journeys into the interior. He quickly became very popular with the natives, by whom he was known as the “little missionary,” and by his winning ways contributed much, it can hardly be doubted, to the success of his parents’ missionary endeavours. (Home Words for Heart and Heath, 1893, p. 95)

Whites are susceptible to sentimentality: a kitten from Home Words for Heart and Heath

Modern leftists would condemn the engraving and text for racism, paternalism and “white savior syndrome.” But if leftists were honest, they would recognize the Christian roots of a central leftist principle: “We’re all the same under the skin.” Of course, as I pointed out in my article “Rollock’s Bollocks,” the leftist insistence on the oneness of humanity contradicts the leftist insistence on the innate evil of Whites and the innate virtue of non-Whites.

Inversion = Evil

But that contradiction doesn’t weaken leftism: it’s simply an example of what George Orwell called doublethink, or the “power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” Leftism is about power, not principle, and contradictions are a feature, not a bug, of its hunt for power. Leftism took the dogma of humanity’s oneness from Christianity in order to deny the clear truth that Whites are intellectually, morally and culturally superior to Blacks. After that truth was denied by the oneness dogma, leftism took the next step and began to preach the dogma of White evil and non-White virtue.

In other words, leftism has inverted the truth about Whites and Blacks. And that inversion of the truth is a very clear sign of the true nature of leftism. As Vox Day has said: “Notice how evil always inverts. ‘The Light of the World’ became ‘the Dark Ages’. The revival of satanic darkness became ‘the Enlightenment’. And the enslavement of women to sin and self-destruction became ‘Women’s Liberation’. If you want to discern if something has satanic roots, look for the inversion. Once you spot it, you’ll scent the sulphur soon enough.”

Vox Day is himself a Christian and says that Christianity is vital for the salvation of the West. I think he’s right. But that salvation won’t come from mainstream Christianity or from mainstream Christians like Justin Welby. They are part of what will need to be swept away. Vox Day knows that and writes perceptively about mainstream Christianity and Jewish subversion at his blog. If you’re a regular reader of the Occidental Observer and the Unz Review, I recommend that you become a regular reader of Vox Day too. Christianity is central to the sickness, but will also be central to the cure.

Is Christianity Compatible with White Racialism?

It is a common misconception among many to assume that Christianity is against all forms of racialism, especially that of White identity or White racial advocacy. The Christian Faith, it is argued, stands opposed to “racism” and ethnic tribalism. Believers in Jesus throughout Europe and America are urged to be “non-racist.” They are to stand against any stripe of nationalism that favors one ethnic group or nationality above another. Along with everyone else in a deracinated society as ours, White Christians too believe that “race doesn’t matter.”

Yet, are such notions supported by the New Testament itself (hereafter, NT)? Has today’s “anti-racism” been the prevailing viewpoint throughout the history of the Christian Church?

I intend to demonstrate in this article that the NT does not deny racial differences among human groups, nor does it foster a multiracial and multicultural framework for the nations. I also want to show that popular prooftexts from the Old Testament (hereafter, OT) and NT cited in defense of open borders and receiving all foreign immigrants as “the Christian thing to do” is horribly misguided and serves to work against the testimony of Christians in their respective countries.

I write as a Christian in the Reformed Baptist tradition.

Are Racial and Cultural Differences Denied in the New Testament?       

Reading through the Gospels and Epistles, one discovers that they are not particularly concerned with the subject of race in the way Westerners are today. The NT doesn’t address contemporary racial questions in ways we might prefer. There is nothing about how a society should implement “equitable racial policies” for its citizens. There is not a word about national immigration policies. Absolutely nothing that would provide a framework or some direction on how racial matters should be solved.

Yes, there is the rule that we should “do unto others as we would have done unto ourselves,” but other than some general notions, there is nothing specific, concrete, and detailed in how Christians should deal with immigration, race-mixing, and other related matters.

The NT assumes the reality of race (in contrast to the idea that “race is just a social construct”), including that of racial and ethnic differences. But it doesn’t dwell on it. Race is not the paramount focus of the Bible’s message. It’s not even a minor concern of it. This is because Christianity is fundamentally a religious category, not a racial one.

Jesus, for example, was aware of the ethnic and geographical differences between Jews and other groups living in Palestine at the time. This is evident when he addressed the Syro-Phoenician woman in Mark 7:26–30. But He had no specific mission to solve “systemic racism.” He did address how people were to treat others when He spoke of “loving one’s neighbor” and “turning the other cheek.” Yet these exhortations were in the context of normal, everyday relations and not intended to serve as public social policies.

The apostle Paul was aware of the same sort of cultural and ethnic differences between Jews and Greeks. Yet at no point did Jesus and Paul attempt to erase or delegitimize genuine racial, cultural and ethnic differences among the groups they encountered.

Paul did not urge Jewish believers to abandon their Jewish culture or certain ethnic traditions that were unique to them as a people. In fact, Paul himself was quite proud of his ethnic pedigree as seen in Philippians 3:4-6 even though he thought that paled in comparison with “the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (v.8).

When Paul was maligned by false teachers who accused him of teaching other Jews who are among the Gentiles to “forsake Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children nor to walk according to the customs” in Acts 21:17, he was urged by James and the elders to ritually “purify” himself and the others with him so that “all will know that there is nothing to the things which they have been told about you, but that you yourself also walk orderly, keeping the Law” (v.24).

It is important to recognize that there is a historical transition occurring during this period from the Old Covenant to the New Covenant, and so naturally there is going to be some overlap between the two covenants. The Christian elders in Acts 21 did not want Paul’s message to be misunderstood, and they did not want people to reject it based on lies. As a form of concession, Paul subjects himself to a Jewish ritual cleansing to show he has not abandoned his people and culture.

This demonstrates that Paul was not against maintaining certain ethnic customs and traditions unique to Jews. He clearly maintained his Jewish identity. Likewise, he did not require that Gentile believers lose their unique ethnic and cultural identity either, except in those realms that conflicted with the Gospel message. Gentile believers were forbidden from idolatry, fornication, including eating meats that have been ceremoniously offered to idols (Acts 15:19–20).

These types of prohibitions are religious in nature, and not intended as a prohibition of all things ethnic or cultural. The natural deduction from it was that everything distinctive to them as a people was permissible. Greeks did not have to stop being Greeks, and Jews did not have to stop being Jewish. Paul had no interest in erasing ‘Whiteness,’ or ‘Jewishness,’ or ‘Greekness.’

In the same way, Whites do not have to cease being White and everything that goes along with their unique cultures and nationalities. Well-meaning but misguided Christians who urge Whites to jettison their Whiteness or “White privilege” are advocating things contrary to the NT. Interestingly, these same Christians never urge Blacks or Hispanics to do the same. Since Whites are a unique and distinct race from other groups, we can also advocate on behalf of our racial and cultural interests in the same way Blacks, Hispanics, Jews, and Asians advocate on behalf of themselves.

When Paul gave his speech to the Athenians in Acts 17:26 (“He made from one, every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times, and the boundaries of their habitation”), he clearly assumes that while we have all descended from Adam, there are legitimate boundaries of habitation (national borders) that separates us from each other. At no point does Paul argue that such boundaries should be torn down, nor that each nation should pursue a racial “melting pot” model for its citizens.

One could argue that it wasn’t Paul’s purpose in his speech to address immigration issues and racial diversity as it pertains to nations. True, but it’s interesting to observe that in the many public addresses Paul gives, including the various people he encountered during his missionary travels, there is not even one recorded occasion where he spoke of the need for miscegenation, racial and cultural diversity, or the blending of all people into some grand Utopian society. I think if it were so important for the nations of the world and vital to the Christian message, he would have said so. The fact that he never once did this sort of thing tells me that it’s not an essential of Christian belief.

The great fourth-century theologian, St. Augustine, did not have a particularly high view of Africans and he rightly recognized that they were very much different in terms of race. In his Exposition on Psalm 72, he states: “[T]he Catholic Church has been foretold, not as to be in any particular quarter of the world, as certain schisms are, but in the whole universe by bearing fruit and growing so as to attain even unto the very Ethiopians, to wit, the remotest and foulest of mankind.” So it would seem that Augustine wanted to convert everyone to Christianity while retaining the belief that some groups are decidedly inferior.

R.L. Dabney, an esteemed Southern Presbyterian theologian in the 1860s, wrote the following of Africans and of his concerns over miscegenation:

[T]his miserable career must result in one of two things, either a war of races, in which the whites or the blacks would be, one or the other, exterminated; or amalgamation. But while we believe that ‘God made of one blood all nations of men to dwell under the whole heavens,’ we know that the African has become, according to a well-known law of natural history, by the manifold influences of the ages, a different, fixed species of the race, separated; from the white man by traits bodily, mental and moral, almost as rigid and permanent as those of genus. Hence the offspring of an amalgamation must be a hybrid race, stamped with all the feebleness of the hybrid, and incapable of the career of civilization and glory as an independent race. And this apparently is the destiny which our conquerors have in view. (Discussions, Vol. III Philosophical, p.871)

The observations of St. Augustine, Dabney, and so many other Christians over the centuries were not “racist” and “hateful” tirades. Rather, their conclusions about Blacks were the result of serious contemplation and protracted observations of these people that has been similarly acknowledged by a host of intellectuals and philosophers throughout history.

Christians in prior centuries never thought their religion required them to abandon their race or that which was distinctive of them culturally and ethnically. They didn’t even think in such terms, and the very notion of race not being important would have sounded strange to their ears—its importance was taken for granted. The obsession of far too many Christians in our day with diversity being good and Whiteness being bad is a contemporary phenomenon. It’s just one more example proving that Christians have capitulated to the spirit of the age. It’s not proof of Christians thinking carefully and biblically about issues of race, but of being influenced by those who wish to culturally subvert the West—namely, Jews and their Gentile enablers.

Both Jesus (Matthew 23:37) and Paul (Romans 9:1-5) expressed a deep love for their own people. There is nothing to suggest that it was morally wrong either. Jesus even gave historical priority to His fellow tribesmen (Matthew 10:5-6; 15:24). Nothing about it was “racist” or “hateful,” at least not in the way most Americans seem to think. Yet, we must ask, if it was not wrong for Jesus and Paul, why would it be wrong for Whites to do the same?

When White racialists oppose Christianity on the grounds of what they see on the contemporary Christian scene, I can’t really disagree with them. It’s embarrassing to say the least. Yet, at the same time, I recognize that what they are rejecting is not authentic, NT Christianity, but in large measure a counterfeit version.

Today’s Charismatic movement with its “miracles, signs and wonders,” along with the Christian Zionism popular among evangelicals, are all false belief systems grounded on pretexts and misunderstandings of the Bible. Few churchgoers are even aware of how relatively new these movements are, and how the majority of Christians throughout the centuries did not believe any of these strange doctrines. That alone should make it automatically suspect by anyone sensitive to the Bible’s message.

White racialists who are anti-Christian wrongly assume that all Christians believe such things. They seem to have little awareness that most Protestant Reformed and Reformed Baptist churches have rejected such doctrines. The Russian Orthodox Church and the Greek Orthodox Church have rejected them as well. The sort of nonsense that passes for Christianity today is laughable if it were not so tragic.

Many pastors have rightly lambasted Christian Zionism, and there are a plethora of books written by Christian scholars refuting it as well. This lack of awareness among White racialists is due to their ignorance of Christian theology in general. They don’t understand the Bible’s redemptive history, and they possess even less knowledge of how to properly interpret such ancient texts (i.e., basic rules of biblical interpretation known as ‘hermeneutics’). Like so many of the Christians they condemn, they too are ill informed of the Christian Faith, its history, and its doctrines. Thus, they are largely rejecting a gross caricature of Christianity and not the real thing.

Biblical Texts Allegedly Supporting Mass Immigration to the West   

The “Great Commission” of Jesus in Matthew 28:19-20 to go into all the world and proclaim the Gospel is sometimes cited as support for allowing migrants and Third-World peoples into Europe and America. There is no doubt that Jesus’s words have an international scope and urgency to them. Christians are commanded reach out to all the nations of the world with Christ’s message of salvation. Salvation is not limited to White people alone, and in this sense the Gospel is universal or international in nature (Revelation 5:9-10; Acts 8:27-39).

Yet there is no imperative or hint that we should bring back any Third-World converts to our White nations! The apostolic custom was not to spread Christianity to far away countries and then assist them in immigrating to Jerusalem “for a better life,” but for missionaries to plant churches among the indigenous people in distant lands, appoint elders, and then move on to other regions where the same process is repeated. The indigenous Christians remained in their respective countries where they could minister to their own people in their own language. This was the role of Timothy in the NT who was not a “pastor” per se, but an apostolic assistant who planted churches under Paul’s mentorship.

One must also wonder how Christians can think they are “loving their neighbor” by encouraging hordes of low-intelligence, low-skilled, and non-assimilating Africans and Third-World peoples into their White communities. Blacks, especially, have strong natural proclivities toward violent crime. They are impulsive and they are not known to consider the consequences of their actions before doing them. Is it any wonder why America’s prisons are filled to the brim with young Black males?

How can any of this be good for Christians and their unbelieving neighbors? How can it be good for a nation to take in so many Africans and Muslims as does the U.S. and Europe? What kind of testimony are Christians providing to others when they encourage a host of social problems and skyrocketing levels of crime by their insistence that the West must allow migrants from all over the planet to immigrate? When Christians harbor illegal aliens from Mexico, as does the Catholic Church (Lutheran churches too), how does any of it comport with Paul’s words in Romans 13:1-7 for Christians to submit to the governing authorities? Why would American Christians encourage illegal aliens from Mexico and El Salvador to violate the sovereignty of our nation’s immigration laws? How “Christian” is it to justify such law-breaking?

In their “love” for their fellow man, these same Christians have tossed out their brains.

Some Christians argue that since “God is not partial nor a respecter of persons” based loosely on Paul’s words in Romans 2:11, therefore one’s race is inconsequential. Race doesn’t matter and shouldn’t matter to a Christian, so it is argued. We are all of the human race! But this completely misunderstands Paul’s argument in Romans Chapter 2. His point is that God’s judgment will not pass over those who condemn others for their behavior all the while doing the same (vv.1-3). God will not judge people based on arbitrariness or human partiality. He is fair in all He does.

Thus, Jews will be judged by the very Law they possess and claim to obey, while Gentiles who may not necessarily possess the Law in any codified form, will be judged “by the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness” (vv.14–15). In the end, God will judge “the secrets of men” because it’s “not the hearers of the Law who are just before God, but the doers of the Law” (v.13). These texts nullify the boasting of Jews who think that because they have the Mosaic Law, they are superior to the Gentiles.

Paul’s words in their context have nothing to do with race or racial diversity. It has nothing to do with national immigration policies.

Christians who promote multiracialism in America don’t seem to understand the concept of a nation. Contrary to what Democrats and even what many conservatives argue, America is not a “proposition nation,” at least not in the sense that merely having a set of propositional beliefs written on some document that we all give assent to makes us a nation.

Rather, a nation consists of blood and soil, a shared race or ethnicity, a common culture, a set of cherished traditions, often a shared religion, a common ancestry or lineage, a common history, and shared values. This was certainly how the American statesman and Founder, John Jay, viewed the newly formed republic: “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country, to one united people; a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manner and customs” (Federalist No.2, 1787).

Likewise, Thomas Jefferson in 1801 looked forward to the day “when our rapid multiplication will expand itself . . . over the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws; nor can we contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture on that surface.”

These citations hardly support the racial “melting pot” model that America would later morph into with its multiple languages, cultures, and ethnic groups all competing for dominance. Indeed, Christians who promote the diversity cult are contributing to the endless racial conflicts that plague America.

Yes, propositional beliefs are part of the mix, but it’s not the only factor nor even the most important one. One’s race always takes priority. If Christians don’t think so, they ought to inquire among the Israeli people on just how important a shared ethnicity and culture is. They might learn a thing or two.

One of the strongest proof-texts among Christians in support of mass immigration is found in the OT and how Jews were commanded to treat “strangers” (Leviticus 19:33-36). These people were basically foreigners, sojourners, or people traveling through or staying temporarily in the land of Israel. While they are permitted to live among the Israelites, they must also obey the laws of the land (Leviticus 18:26; 20:2). Are the millions of foreigners who have invaded the U.S. similarly required to obey the laws of our land?

Thus, God wanted the Israelites to be considerate and hospitable to foreigners who entered their land because “you were once aliens in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34).

Moreover, the way in which the subject of “strangers” is treated in the Mosaic Law strongly infers that it is a periodic and sporadic thing, something that happens every so often but is not normative. In America and most of Europe, unfortunately, mass non-White immigration is normative. They are flooding our once great nations, and they are producing more children than the indigenous Whites by far. It is projected that by the year 2030, Whites in the U.S. will be a demographic minority in the very country their ancestors founded.

OT passages that speak of “the stranger among you” cannot be twisted to support mass immigration no matter how hard one may try. Jews in ancient Israel knew back then as well as Jews in modern Israel know today that allowing any foreign group into one’s country in large enough numbers is a recipe for national suicide. The arrival of foreigners, then, ought to be restricted to a manageable number. These kinds of common-sense immigration policies are no longer followed in the U.S.

Any discussion of race and Christianity would not be sufficient without at least some reference to the Tower of Babel recorded in Genesis 11:1–9. This incident shows clearly God’s design for the nations, and there is no indication that it has been nullified under the New Covenant.

When American Christians promote non-White immigration to their country, they are not thinking about the social consequences of it in terms of crime and what kinds of repercussions it will have on the nation’s economy. They are not only uninformed about genuine racial differences, but they don’t bother to think how this might impact future generations of their own countrymen nor even the perpetuity of the Christian Faith in North America.

In the U.S. a growing number of the immigrants turn out to be Muslim which has a long historical record of hostility toward Christianity. This is especially the case in Europe where almost all of the migrants adhere to the Islamic religion. These sorts of practical considerations never seem to enter the thinking of Christians who advocate for more non-White immigration.

Paul’s words in Galatians 3:28 (“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus”) is another passage grossly misunderstood by Christian zealots eager to erase all racial differences. Their use of it reminds me of the old adage that states: “a text without a context is a pre-text.”

The words of the apostle in Galatians 3 denote the essential oneness of believers regardless of their class or economic status, including their ethnic makeup: “for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (v.28). Gentile believers should not fear that they possess a lower status in God’s eyes because they are not Jewish for “if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise” (v.29).

Besides, had Paul really believed that all racial and gender differences were mere “social constructs” and done away with in Christ, it seems strange that he would command the women to be “silent in the churches; for they are not permitted to speak, but let them subject themselves just as the Law also says. And if they desire to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is improper for a woman to speak in church” (1 Corinthians 14:34-35). In his letter to Timothy, Paul also declares “Let a woman quietly receive instruction with entire submissiveness. But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet” (1 Timothy 2:11-12). Evidently, not all ethnic and gender distinctions were erased in the way race-denying Christians imagine.

The Founders of the U.S. saw no contradiction between Christianity and the recognition of differences between the races. They did not view it as either “hateful” or “bigoted” to speak openly of such differences because it was common knowledge and readily apparent when one encountered those of other racial groups.

More than that, our Founders and some of the most respected Americans knew that Blacks and Whites were much too different in terms of intelligence and temperament. Any notion that the two races could exist peacefully together as equals in the same society was viewed as overly charitable and idealistic.

On the wall of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington D.C., there is a quotation from him that reads: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate that these people [Blacks] are to be free.” That’s where the quotation stops. But in the full quotation we are further told: “Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.” Truth is, Thomas Jefferson wanted Blacks deported and separated from Whites so they would be “beyond the reach of mixture.”

Many Christians would see Jefferson’s views as reprehensible and antiquated, but I think he foresaw many of the problems that would arise as a result of miscegenation and the kind of society it would produce.

Jefferson was not alone. Abraham Lincoln had very similar views: “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality . . . I will add to this that I have never seen, to my knowledge, a man, woman, or child who was in favor of producing a perfect equality, social and political, between negroes and white men.”

Before Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865, he was still seeking to colonize freed Blacks in America to Liberia (Haiti today) though the funds needed for his colonization project had run out by that time.

American Christians who refuse to acknowledge real and abiding differences between the races reveal that they are woefully uninformed of both their own Bibles, and that of their own history.

Racially naive Christians make the same mistake that Utopian liberals make. They want to create a nation that bypasses the realities of life and the natural order of things. Christians, like liberals, want a perfect world now—and doggone it, they’re going make it happen come hell or high water! They then create a mindset for themselves and implement social policies that intentionally place blinders over their eyes. Everything they see and hear is filtered through a false worldview that instantly jettisons any inconvenient truths about race.

In the case of Christians, it’s their failure to recognize the “already-not yet” teaching of the NT. Without going into complex detail, the NT teaches that while the kingdom has arrived, it has not yet reached its full expression. That will come in the future when the kingdoms of this world become the kingdoms of our Lord. Thus, while we see the kingdom now, we do not yet see it in its full glory. This is also known as the “inaugurated eschatology” of Geerhardus Vos who was Professor of Biblical Theology at Princeton Seminary from 1893–1932.

The point is that there is a day coming when all racial differences and conflicts will be set aside. Society’s greatest and most complex problems will one day be solved. They will no longer exist when we reach the eternal state. But that day has not yet arrived. Every attempt to go ahead of Christ and His timetable will prove to be futile.

In the meantime, Christians must face the harsh realities of racial differences, including the lies we’ve been fed about racial equality. This does not mean that we should enslave Blacks or anyone for that matter, nor parade around wearing white sheets with pointed hoods. Instead, it means we stop lying to ourselves. We recognize that there exists an on-going soft genocide waged against Whites throughout the West. Whites are obligated to resist it both for themselves and for their posterity. And if Christians really do love the Truth, they are obligated to resist such lies too.

Review of David Skrbina’s The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul’s Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Years

The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul’s Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Year
David Skrbina
Creative Fire Press, 2019

David Skrbina is a professional philosopher who was a senior lecturer at the University of Michigan from 2003–2018. In addition to the book under review, he has written and edited a number of books, including The Metaphysics of Technology (Routledge, 2014), Panpsychism in the West (MIT Press, 2017), and the anthology Confronting Technology (Creative Fire Press, 2020).

The Jesus Hoax attempts to convince the reader that there is no rational basis for Christianity and that the motivation for its main originator, St. Paul, was antagonism toward the Roman Empire. Within this framework, Paul was a Jewish nationalist whose goal was to recruit non-Jews to oppose the Roman imperium: “Since the biblical Jesus story is false, it was evidently constructed by Paul and his fellow Jews in order to sway the gullible Gentile masses to their side and away from Rome” (43). Indeed, Skrbina claims that Paul may have been a Zealot, i.e., a member of a Jewish sect dedicated to violent resistance against the Romans, concluding “it seems clear that he was an ardent Jewish nationalist opposed to Roman rule, as was the case with most elite Jews of the time” (37).

Skrbina argues that there is no convincing evidence for the truth of the Jesus story, either within the canonical New Testament or from non-Christian sources. The earliest reference from a non-Christian source is a paragraph from the Jewish writer Josephus dated to 93 recounting the basic story, that Jesus was crucified “upon the accusation of the principal men among us”—i.e., the elite Jews of the period. Here Skrbina raises a general issue: the earliest source for the passage from Josephus is from the Christian apologist Eusebius in the fourth century, and the oldest sources for the gospels themselves are dated much later than they were supposedly written (70–95), leaving open the possibility of redactions and interpolations. For example, the oldest copy of the complete Gospel of Matthew, which, as noted below, contains the most inflammatory anti-Jewish passage of all, dates from the mid-fourth century, well after Constantine had legalized Christianity in the Empire and anti-Jewish attitudes were rife among intellectuals like Eusebius and the Church fathers such as St. John Chrysostom.”[1] The extent of redaction and interpolation remains unknown and presents obvious problems of interpretation.

The first Romans to comment on Christianity were Tacitus and Pliny (~115), both of whom disliked Christianity. As Skrbina notes, “the Romans were generally tolerant of other religions, and thus we must conclude that there was something uniquely problematic about this group” (60).

And Skrbina is well aware that an analysis of the entire early Christian movement must be aware of Jewish issues, quoting Nietzsche: “The first thing to be remembered, if we do not wish to lose the scent here, is that we are among Jews” (34). He is quite accurate in his assessment of Jewish ethnocentrism: Jews “saw themselves as special, different, ‘select,’ and thus they put these ideas into the mouth of their God. Certainly, no one would deny a people pride in themselves. But these extreme statements go far beyond normal bounds. They indicate a kind of self-absorption, a self-glorification, perhaps a narcissism, perhaps a conceit. To be chosen by the creator of the universe, and to be granted the right to rule, ruthlessly, over all other nations, bespeaks a kind of megalomania that is unprecedented in history” (63).

Not surprisingly, such a people have often been hated by others, and Skrbina recounts the many examples of anti-Jewish attitudes and actions in the ancient world: “where the Jews settled amongst other peoples, they seem to have made enemies” (65), noting particularly the recurrent theme—a theme that continued long past the ancient world—of Jews allying themselves with ruling elites against the native population. I was particularly struck by a passage Skrbina quotes from recent scholarship referring to advice given in 134 BC to King Antiochus VII, the Greek ruler of the Seleucid Empire, to exterminate the Jews: “for they alone among all the peoples refused all relations with other races, and saw everyone as their enemy; their forebears, impious and cursed by the gods, had been driven out of Egypt. The counselors [cited] the Jews’ hatred of all mankind, sanctioned by their very laws, which forbade them to share their table with a Gentile or give any sign of benevolence.”[2]

Skrbina concludes that there is a “deeply-embedded misanthropic streak” in Jews that continues into the contemporary era, quoting the famous passage from Rabbi Yosef who, in 2010 stated, “Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world—only to serve the people of Israel. They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi [a man of high social standing] and eat” (Jerusalem Post, October 18, 2010). Skrbina: “There is something about Jewish culture that inspires disgust and hatred” (79).

Based on the extensive citations to the Old Testament, Skrbina concludes that the Gospels, commonly dated well after Paul’s writing, were also likely written by Jews. Skrbina notes that the latest-dated gospel, John, is addressed to “intra-Jewish squabbling” (41) over the issue of Jesus being the Messiah—obviously a view rejected by Orthodox Jews. In other words, John identifies as a Jew but as a Jew battling the Orthodox Jewish establishment. Importantly, John contains anti-Jewish passages that would echo down the centuries: Jews “sought to kill Jesus,” and the gospel represents Jesus as saying, “You [Jews] are of your father the devil… He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44) (41). Many contemporary scholars accept the view that anti-Jewish statements in the Gospels are intramural disputes about whether Jews or Christians were the chosen people of God.

Of course, there are many other anti-Jewish statements:

  • John 5:18: For this reason the Jews were seeking all the more to kill [Jesus], because he was not only breaking the sabbath, but was also calling God his own Father, thereby making himself equal to God.
  • John 7:1: After these things Jesus walked in Galilee: for he would not walk in Jewry, because the Jews sought to kill him.
  • John 7:12–13: And there was considerable complaining about him among the crowds. While some were saying, “He is a good man,” others were saying, “No, he is deceiving the crowd.” Yet no one would speak openly about him for fear of the Jews.
  • John 8:37: I know that you are descendants of Abraham; yet you look for an opportunity to kill me, because there is no place in you for my word.

And the most influential of all:

  • Matthew 27:25–26: When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but thatrather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it. Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.

Such sentiments are not only found in the Gospels. St. Paul: 

  • 1Thess 2:14–15: For ye, brethren, became followers of the churches of God which in Judaea are in Christ Jesus: for ye also have suffered like things of your own countrymen, even as they haveof the Jews: Who both killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men.

Skrbina, discussing the Gospel of Mark, notes that Paul et al. had two enemies, the Romans and non-believing Jews like the Pharisees who “wanted to kill Jesus” (95). Mark therefore blamed both, and Skrbina concludes that “Mark’s anger against his fellow Jews … got the better of him; for centuries afterward, Christians would blame the Jews for killing Christ, not realizing that the whole tale was a Jewish construction in the first place” (95).

Later in Matthew and Luke, “the anti-Jewish rhetoric heats up a bit; the Jews are called ‘a brood of vipers’ (Mat 3:7, 12:34, 23:33) and ‘lovers of money’ (Lu 16:14). And there are repetitions of the message of revolution, including armed confrontation (“I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” [Mat. 10:34]) and it depicts that the coming confrontation would split families.

Skrbina’s reconstruction of the trajectory of Christianity is presented as tentative (“I’ll not claim certainty here” [81]). For example, he imagines a soliloquy by Jewish patriot Paul asking, “What message could our ‘Jesus’ take to the masses,” answering “we need them to be pro-Jewish, not make them Jews–no, that would never work. We need something new, a ‘third way’ between Judaism and paganism. Maybe for a start, we could get them to worship our God Jehovah, and not that absurd Roman pantheon” (84; emphasis in text). And the whole point was to encourage revolt: “Throughout [Paul’s] letters we find numerous references to enslavement, revolution, insurrection, war, the importance of the disempowered masses, and so on. In the early Galatians we read of the need for Jesus to ‘deliver us from the present evil age’ ([Galatians] 1:4)” (90). Skrbina considers the following passage, from 1Corinthians 1:4 “decisive” (92): 

For consider your call, brethren, not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth; but God chose what is foolish to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are. (Skrbina’s emphasis)

Militancy increases in Luke and Matthew, both dated to 85. Matthew (10:34): “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

If one agrees with Skrbina on all this, then he suggests that you “go to your local church leaders and confront them with the evidence (or lack thereof). Their response will confirm everything you need to know. Then, make it clear to them that you have been swindled” (112). And: “Christians need to own up the fact that they have been swindled, and then see if anything can be salvaged of their religion. Keep the social club, do charity work, help the poor—just dump the bogus metaphysics” (116). 

Discussion

Since I am not a believer and since I am quite cognizant of Jewish efforts to manipulate the beliefs and attitudes of non-Jews—the thesis, after all, of The Culture of Critique—I am quite open to Skrbina’s interpretation. However, there are a few things that bother me. 

Liars? In Skrbina’s view, the entire project was based on lies, lies made possible by Jewish contempt for non-Jews. In a section titled “Paul, Liar Supreme,” we find “The Gentiles were always treated by the Jews with contempt. … They could be manipulated, harassed, assaulted, beaten, even killed if it served Jewish interests” (99). The gospel writers were also likely liars: “Even in ancient times, people were not idiots. How could Mark accept without any apparent evidence or confirmation, such fantastic tales? And accept them so completely that he would write them down as factual truth, as real and actual events? And then how could the same thing happen three more times, to three different individuals?” (106). And Paul is even more unlikely to have actually believed what he was writing because he was so close to the events he wrote about, and because he was a “clever man. How could he possibly have fallen so completely for a bogus Jewish messiah that he would dedicate his life to spreading the story?” (106).

This is presented as an issue of cleverness, and it is certainly true that there is a small but consistent negative correlation between intelligence and religiosity.[3]  But the weakness of the association—explaining around four percent of the variance—indicates that there are plenty of intelligent people who are quite religious. This would have been even more likely in the ancient world—a context in which religion was taken very seriously, where miraculous events were taken for granted by many, and where there wasn’t already a long history of philosophical skepticism about religion, as there is in the contemporary West. Or consider the medieval period in the West that produced highly intelligent believers, such as St. Thomas Aquinas or William of Occam. Or the ultra-religious but very intelligent Puritans who settled New England and quickly founded Harvard University and the other elite Ivy League universities. We live in an age where science has become the height of respectability—hence the attempts to manipulate what can pass as scientific to serve other interests and have a dramatic impact on contemporary culture. However, the cultural context has been much different in the past, and I suspect that correlations between intelligence and religiosity would have been approximately zero in many historical periods.

Another issue related to lying is martyrdom. The proposal that Paul and the gospel writers were liars must deal with the issue of “Who would die for a lie? … as Jews, they were all, already, under persecution from the Romans. As extremist, fanatical Jews they were willing to do anything and suffer any punishment, in order to help ‘Israel’” (110). It’s certainly true that Jews died and were enslaved in droves when the Romans put down the Jewish uprisings, and this was presumably on the minds of the putative gospel writers (the first Roman-Jewish war was in 70), so the extreme altruism of martyrdom for the benefit of the group seems possible, particularly among Jews—there is a long tradition of Jewish martyrdom that continues to be an important aspect of Jewish identity. However, stories of martyrdom in both the Christian and Jewish traditions may well be at least exaggerated if not entirely apocryphal (e.g., here) because of their usefulness in creating a strong sense of ingroup identity.

Again, there are the questions of who wrote the New Testament and when was it written, including possible redactions and interpolations. I am not at all a scholar on the New Testament, but I note that a recent scholar, Robert Price, dates the first collection of St. Paul’s letters from Marcion in the second century, with the authorship of some letters highly contested, and a strong possibility of interpolations by later collectors:

The question of authorship would have little bearing here one way or the other. In this process, interpolations were made and then gradually permeated the text tradition of each letter until final canonization of the Pastoral edition (and concurrent burning of its rivals) put a stop to all that. … But the first collector of the Pauline Epistles had been Marcion. No one else we know of would be a good candidate, certainly not the essentially fictive Luke, Timothy, and Onesimus. And Marcion, as Burkitt and Bauer show, fills the bill perfectly. Of the epistles themselves, he is probably the original author of Laodiceans (the Vorlage [i.e., original version] of Ephesians) and perhaps of Galatians, too. Like Muhammad in the Koran, he would have read his own struggles back into the careers of his biblical predecessors.

But there are other scholars who continue to uphold the view that the New Testament is a reliable account, or at least reliable enough (see, e.g., Craig L. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the New Testament: Countering the Challenges to Evangelical Christian Beliefs). I am certainly not in any position to evaluate what continues to be a very contentious area which has been covered in minute deal for at least 200 years, often by highly motivated scholars. At this late stage of scholarship, it seems unlikely that a consensus will ever be reached, especially because a great deal of the scholarship may well be motivated by a desire to defend deeply held religious beliefs—or dispute them; e.g., Blomberg describes himself as “a Christian believer of an evangelical persuasion” (xxv), which doesn’t mean that he is incorrect, but indicates that he would be motivated to defend his beliefs.

Given all this complexity I take that path of humility in trying to assess these issues, resulting in my being an agnostic about the historicity of the New Testament, whether whoever wrote it were liars, and what their real agendas were. I am persuaded that there is no consensus on what was actually written in the first century, and I accept the possibility that the writings that survive as the canonical writings of Christianity may well include later redactions and interpolations that reflect very different perceptions and interests from those of the putative first-century writers.

The Anti-Jewish Statements in the New Testament. I noted above that there are quite a few anti-Jewish passages in the New Testament, including from St. Paul himself. Skrbina claims that “The scattered anti-Jewish statements in all the Gospels—especially John—more reflect an internal Jewish battle over ideology than an external, Gentile attack” (107–108). This is a common scholarly view, but if you are trying to recruit Gentiles to your movement to serve Jewish interests, would you really want to litter your writing with anti-Jewish statements? In fact, these statements, particularly the claim that Jews committed deicide, have been used by Christians against Jews throughout the succeeding centuries, most notably “His blood be on us, and on our children.” Although the major outbreaks of anti-Semitism have always involved far more than Christian religious beliefs—they have typically occurred during periods of resource competition of various sorts (MacDonald, 1998)—I have no doubt that Christian beliefs about Jews fed into and exacerbated anti-Jewish attitudes, especially in the past when vast sections of the European population were deeply religious—e.g., during the Middle Ages when religious beliefs motivated the Crusades and long, arduous pilgrimages to sites where miracles were said to have occurred. It was a period when, e.g., Notre Dame de Paris, the symbol of traditional France, was adorned with anti-Jewish imagery.

Ecclesia (right) and Synagoga, illustrating Jewish blindness in rejecting Christianity

Indeed, Jewish perceptions of the anti-Jewish nature of Christian theology have resulted in Jewish activism to essentially rewrite or reinterpret the New Testament in their interests. Antonius J. Patrick summarizes this strand of Jewish activism in his review of Vicomte Léon de Poncins’ Judaism and the Vatican: An Attempt at Spiritual Subversion:

The pronouncements on non-Christian religions and the declaration Nostra aetate passed in the Fourth Session of the Council (1965) accomplished almost all that the Modernists had hoped for. In effect, these pronouncements repudiated nearly two thousand years of Catholic teaching on the Jews. Ever since, the Church has continually bowed to Jewish pressure in regard to its liturgy, the naming of saints, and in the political realm—its most infamous decision in the latter being the recognition of the state of Israel in 1994.

Poncins, who closely covered the Vatican II proceedings, wrote of the declaration:

. . . a number of Jewish organizations and personalities are behind the reforms which were proposed at the Council with a view to modifying the Church’s attitude and time-honored teaching about Judaism: Jules Isaac, Label Katz, President of the B’nai B’rith, Nahum Goldman, President of the World Jewish Congress, etc. . . . These reforms are very important because they suggest that for two thousand years the Church had been mistaken and that she must make amends and completely reconsider her attitude to the Jews.

The leading figure in the years prior to the Council was the virulent anti-Catholic writer Jules Isaac, and he played an active role during the Counsel. “Isaac,” Poncins describes, “turned the Council to advantage, having found there considerable support among progressive bishops. In fact, he became the principal theorist and promoter of the campaign being waged against the traditional teaching of the Church.”

Isaac had long before begun his hostile campaign to overturn Catholic teaching on the Jews with his two most important books on the subject: Jésus et Israel (1946) and Genèse de l’Antisémitisme (1948). Poncins accurately summarizes the main thrust of these works:

In these books Jules Isaac fiercely censures Christian teaching, which he says has been the source of modern anti-Semitism, and preaches, though it would be more correct to say he demands, the ‘purification’ and ‘amendment’ of doctrines two thousand years old.

Moreover, whatever the beliefs and motives of St. Paul and the Gospel writers, the Church had essentially become an anti-Jewish movement by the fourth century when Catholicism became the official religion of the Roman Empire:

The proposal here is that in this period of enhanced group conflict, anti-Jewish leaders such as [St. John] Chrysostom [who retains a chapel named after him at St. Peter’s basilica in Rome] attempted to convey a very negative view of Jews. Jews were to be conceptualized not as harmless practitioners of exotic, entertaining religious practices, or as magicians, fortune tellers, or healers [as had been the case previously], but as the very embodiment of evil. The entire thrust of the legislation that emerged during this period was to erect walls of separation between Jews and gentiles, to solidify the gentile group, and to make all gentiles aware of who the “enemy” was. Whereas these walls had been established and maintained previously only by Jews, in this new period of intergroup conflict the gentiles were raising walls between themselves and Jews….

The interpretation proposed here is that group conflict between Jews and gentiles entered a new stage in the 4th century. It is of considerable interest that it was during this period that accusations of Jewish greed, wealth, love of luxury and of the pleasures of the table became common (Simon 1986, 213). Such accusations did not occur during earlier periods, when anti-Jewish writings concentrated instead on Jewish separatism. These new charges suggest that Jews had increasingly developed a reputation as wealthy, and they in turn suggest that anti-Semitism had entered a new phase in the ancient world, one centered around resource competition and concerns regarding Jewish economic success, domination of gentiles [especially enslaving gentiles], and relative reproductive success. …

Jews were increasingly entering the imperial and municipal service in the 4th century until being excluded from these occupations in the 5th century—an aspect of the wide range of economic, social, and legal prohibitions on Jews dating from this period [particularly prohibitions on Jews owning Christian slaves—itself an indication of the superior wealth of Jews]. These factors, in combination with traditional gentile hostility to Judaism (because of its separatist practices and perceptions of Jewish misanthropy and perhaps of Jewish wealth), set the stage for a major anti-Semitic movement. The proposal here is that this anti-Semitic movement crystallized in the Christian Church. (Separation and Its Discontents, Ch. 3, 96, 98, 99)

It is quite possible that the anti-Jewish statements in the New Testament are interpolations made much later by anti-Jewish writers motivated by resource competition and Jews enslaving Christians. If so, the liars were not Paul and the Gospel writers, but Christians concerned about Jews in the third and fourth centuries. J. G. Gager suggests that the extant literature from the early Church was deliberately selected to emphasize anti-Jewish themes and exclude other voices, much as the priestly redaction of the Pentateuch retained from earlier writings only what was compatible with Judaism as a diaspora ideology (J. G. Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism: Attitudes toward Judaism in Pagan and Christian Antiquity (Oxford, 1983), 7; N. deLange, “The origins of anti-Semitism: Ancient evidence and modern interpretation,” In Anti-Semitism in Times of Crisis, S. L. Gilman & S. T. Katz (NYU Press, 1991, 30–31). It’s quite conceivable that, rather than reflecting real intra-Jewish squabbles in the first century, as suggested by Skrbina, these early works were deliberately embellished in order to emphasize anti-Jewish themes in the originals—or they were completely fabricated—at a time when these writers had become strongly anti-Jewish for reasons that would not have been salient in the first century. In any case, this possibility is highly compatible with the view that there was a qualitative shift toward the conscious construction of a fundamentally anti-Jewish version of history during the formative period of the Catholic Church.

Consequences of the Lies. Skrbina ends by claiming that Paul’s lies were successful: “It took a few hundred years, but when enough people fell for the hoax, it helped to bring down the Roman Empire” (122). And he describes the lies as a “mortal threat”: “eventually drawing in 2 billion people, becoming an enemy of truth and reason, and causing deaths of millions of human beings via inquisitions, witch burnings, crusades, and other religious atrocities” (101).

I have never seen a scholarly argument that the institutionalization of the Catholic Church contributed importantly to the fall of the Empire. The Eastern Empire, although losing substantial territory to the Muslims, was only overthrown in 1453 after centuries of battling them. However, it’s certainly a reasonable idea given that Christian religious ideology was the polar opposite of thoroughly militarized Indo-European culture upon which Rome was built. Ancient Greco-Roman culture was fundamentally aristocratic and based on ideas of natural inequality and natural hierarchy. Thus, Plato’s “just society” as depicted in The Republic was to be ruled by philosophers because they were truly rational, and he assumes there are natural differences in the capacity for rationality—a modern would phrase it in terms of the behavior genetics of IQ and personality. Aristotle believed that some people were slaves “by nature” (Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 52), i.e., that the hierarchy between masters and slaves was natural. Reflecting themes common in Indo-European culture emphasized by Ricardo Duchesne (The Uniqueness of Western Civilization), the ancients prized fame and glory (positive esteem from others) resulting from genuine virtue and military and political accomplishments—but not labor, because laborers were often slaves and the rightful booty of conquest.

So the Christian ethic of prizing meekness, humility, and labor was quite a change. Within Christian ideology the individual replaced the ancient Indo-European family as the seat of moral legitimacy. Christian ideology was intended for all humans, resulting in a sense of moral egalitarianism, at least within the Christian community, rather than seeing society as based on natural hierarchy. Individual souls were seen as having moral agency and equal value in the eyes of God—a theology that has had very negative effects in the contemporary world.

However, universalism and the Christian virtues of meekness and humility are not the only story and indeed, as Skrbina notes, the sword also makes an appearance in the New Testament. In the Middle Ages Christianity was Germanized (James Russell, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, Oxford, 1996), making it much more compatible with an aristocratic warrior ethnic. And in the medieval period and beyond, Christianity facilitated Western individualism and essentially ushered in the modern age of science, technological progress, and territorial expansion (Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest People in the World, 2020; MacDonald, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, 2019).

As a direct result, Christians who had a firm conviction about their beliefs eventually conquered the world and have been responsible for essentially all of the scientific and technological progress that created the modern world. Indeed, in his The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich argues that the medieval Church invented Western individualism by insisting on monogamous marriage and by “demolishing” extended kinship relations, presented by Henrich as an attempt to understand, as phrased in his subtitle, How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (Harvard, 2020). I have quite a few objections to his approach (see here), but he is certainly correct that the Church was influential in opposing the power of extended kinship groups and preventing concubinage and polygyny among elites, thereby facilitating a relatively egalitarian marriage regime. Essentially Henrich ignores the ethnic basis of Western individualism that reaches back into pre-historic Western Europe and is certainly reflected in the classical Western civilizations of Greece and Rome. Henrich also ignores genetic influences on IQ and personality. But I agree with a much weaker version—that the Church facilitated Western individualism and so helped give rise to the modern world (Chapter 5 of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, 2019).

So it’s not entirely a story of “causing deaths of millions of human beings via inquisitions, witch burnings, crusades, and other religious atrocities.” But the sad reality is that contemporary Christianity, or at least the vast majority of it, is utterly opposed to the interests of the people who have historically made it their religion. For example, Prof. Andrew Fraser has interpreted fundamental Christian texts in a manner consistent with an ethnic form of Christianity (e.g., “Global Jesus versus National Jesus”, and in The Sword of Christ (2020; this book seems to have been banned by Amazon), Giles Corey attempts to rescue an ethnically viable Christianity from the ruins of contemporary, leftist-dominated Christian theology. As I note in my preface:

Religious thinking is by its nature unbounded—it is infinitely malleable [so that, for example, redactions and interpolations on the New Testament could easily have been adapted to create a fundamentally new theology]. It is a dangerous sword that can be used to further legitimate interests of believers, or it can become a lethal weapon whereby believers adopt attitudes that are obviously maladaptive. One need only think of religiously based suicide cults, such as People’s Temple (Jonestown), Solar Temple and Heaven’s Gate. Mainstream Christianity from traditional Catholicism to mainstream Protestantism was fundamentally adaptive in terms of creating a healthy family life. It was compatible with a culture characterized by extraordinary scientific and technological creativity, [territorial expansion], and standards of living that have been much envied by the rest of the world. …

Corey is well aware that contemporary Christianity has been massively corrupted. Mainline Protestant and Catholic Churches have become little more than appendages for the various social justice movements of the left, avidly promoting the colonization of the West by other races and cultures, even as religious fervor and attendance dwindle and Christianity itself becomes ever more irrelevant to the national dialogue. [Guillaume Durocher notes that only 6–12 percent of the French population are practicing Catholics, indicating that Catholicism cannot be blamed for France’s current malaise.] On the other hand, [American] Evangelicals, a group that remains vigorously Christian, have been massively duped by the theology of Christian Zionism, their main focus being to promote Israel. [In general, they have rejected an explicit White identity or a sense of White interests.]

Until the twentieth century, Christianity served the West well. One need only think of the long history of Christians battling to prevent Muslims from establishing a caliphate throughout the West—Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours, the Spanish Reconquista, the defeat of the Turks at the gates of Vienna. The era of Western expansion was accomplished by Christian explorers and colonists. Until quite recently, the flourishing of science, technology, and art occurred entirely within a Christian context.

Corey advocates a revitalization of Medieval Germanic Christianity based on, in the words of Samuel Francis, “social hierarchy, loyalty to tribe and place (blood and soil), world-acceptance rather than world-rejection, and an ethic that values heroism and military sacrifice.”  This medieval Christianity preserved the aristocratic, fundamentally Indo-European culture of the Germanic tribes. This was an adaptive Christianity, a Christianity that was compatible with Western expansion, to the point that by the end of the nineteenth century, the West dominated the planet. Christianity per se is certainly not the problem.

The decline of adaptive Christianity coincides with the post-Enlightenment rise of the Jews throughout the West as an anti-Christian elite, and Corey has a great deal of very interesting material on traditional Christian views of Judaism. Traditional Christian theology viewed the Church as having superseded the Old Testament and that, by rejecting the Church, the Jews had not only rejected God, they were responsible for murdering Christ. …

In fact, intellectual movements of the left—disseminated throughout the educational system and by the elite media—have exploited the Western liberal tradition. The intellectuals who came to dominate American intellectual discourse and the media were quite aware of the need to appeal to Western proclivities toward individualism, egalitarianism, and moral universalism by essentially creating a moral community that appealed to these traits but also served their interests. A theme of The Culture of Critique is that moral indictments of their opponents have been prominent in the writings of the activist intellectuals reviewed there, including political radicals and those opposing biological perspectives on individual and group differences in IQ. A sense of moral superiority was also prevalent in the psychoanalytic movement, and the Frankfurt School developed the view that social science was to be judged by moral criteria.

The triumph of the cultural left to the point of substantial consensus in the West has created a moral community where people who do not subscribe to their beliefs are seen as not only intellectually deficient but as morally evil. Moral communities rather than kinship are the social glue of Western societies. Westerners, being individualists and relatively unconcerned about the prospects of their kin beyond their immediate family, willingly punish other Whites who oppose their moral community, even at cost to themselves (altruistic punishment). Their main concern is to have a good reputation in their moral community which is now defined by the media and the educational system—a moral community that was created by hostile elites out of fear and loathing of the traditional White American majority (see Culture of Critique, Ch. 7).

Finally, Skrbina asks, “Can it really be beneficial to accept a myth as truth? Can one really live a happy, successful, and meaningful life dedicated to a false story or a lie?” (16). I think that the answer is that yes it can. As an evolutionist, my working hypothesis is that when it comes to the realm of ideas, evolution does not aim for truth but rather for success in continuing one’s family and increasing the prospects of one’s tribe. Certainly the religious beliefs of other groups, say Muslims, Jews, or Mormons, may well be false and based on inventions. But the people believing in these lies have often done very well in evolutionary terms and are continuing to do so. Ashkenazi Jewish eugenics proceeded for centuries in a religious context, resulting in a highly intelligent elite able to wield vast influence throughout the West. Islam expanded over hundreds of years, controlling vast territories, with leaders rewarded by large harems and many descendants; Islam is now rapidly expanding in Europe and has higher fertility than native Europeans. It’s well known that seriously religious, fundamentalist Christians in the West have more children on average than non-Christian Europeans, which is certainly adaptive. But they are also more likely to swear fealty to the interests of Israel and in general they are entirely resistant to being informed about the negative effects of multiculturalism or about Jewish cultural influence (whose effects they despise) or even Jewish traditional hostility toward Christianity.

And it can scarcely be doubted that Catholicism and mainline Protestantism have been completely corrupted and actively subverted so that millions of White Americans have been swept up by the multiculturalism and replacement-level immigration as moral imperatives. Jewish activism has certainly been part of this, but traditional Christian universalism and moral egalitarianism are also part of the equation. One might say that Christianity, despite periods when it was highly adaptive, carried the seeds of its own destruction—a chink in its armor that made it relatively easy to subvert once the culture of the West had been subverted by our new hostile elite.

So, in my view, it’s a complex story, and one that is far from finished.


[1] Kevin MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (AuthorHouse, 2003; originally published: Praeger, 1998), Ch. 3.

[2] Quoted in Emilio Gabba, “The Growth of Anti-Judaism or the Greek Attitude toward the Jews.” In W. D. Davies & Louis Finkelstein (Eds.), The Cambridge History of Judaism. Vol. 2: The Hellenistic Age (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 614–656, 645).

[3] Miron Zuckerman, et al., “The Negative Intelligence–Religiosity Relation: New and Confirming Evidence,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 46, no. 6(2020): 856–868.