Christianity

Monotheism vs. Polytheism

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This piece below was first published in Chronicles (A Magazine of American Culture), April 1996.

Can we still conceive of the revival of pagan sensibility in an age so profoundly saturated by Judeo-Christian monotheism and so ardently adhering to the tenets of liberal democracy? In popular parlance the very word “paganism” may incite some to derision and laughter. Who, after all, wants to be associated with witches and witchcraft, with sorcery and black magic? Worshiping animals or plants, or chanting hymns to Wotan or Zeus, in an epoch of cable television and “smart weapons,” does not augur well for serious intellectual and academic inquiry.

Yet, before we begin to heap scorn on paganism, we should pause for a moment. Paganism is not just witches and witches’ brew; paganism also means a mix of highly speculative theories and philosophies. Paganism is Seneca and Tacitus; it is an artistic and cultural movement that swept over Italy under the banner of the Renaissance. Paganism also means Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Charles Darwin, and a host of other thinkers associated with the Western cultural heritage. Two thousand years of Judeo-Christianity have not obscured the fact that pagan thought has not yet disappeared, even though it has often been blurred, stifled, or persecuted by monotheistic religions and their secular offshoots.

Undoubtedly, many would admit that in the realm of ethics all men and women of the world are the children of Abraham. Indeed, even the bolder ones who somewhat self-righteously claim to have rejected the Christian or Jewish theologies, and who claim to have replaced them with “secular humanism,” frequently ignore that their self-styled secular beliefs are firmly grounded in Judeo-Christian ethics. Abraham and Moses may be dethroned today, but their moral edicts and spiritual ordinances are much alive. The global and disenchanted world, accompanied by the litany of human rights, ecumenical society, and the rule of law—are these not principles that can be traced directly to the Judeo-Christian messianism that resurfaces today in its secular version under the elegant garb of modern “progressive” ideologies? Read more

Christianity and the Ethnic Suicide of the West

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Several comments on my post “What’s wrong with the Swedes?” mention Christianity as a problem in the dispossession of Whites. I agree that Christianity is part of the problem, but I think there are several difficulties with supposing that it is a root cause of the problem.

  • First and foremost, Christianity was the religion of the West during its expansion around the world. A century ago, with the exception of China, Japan, Siam, Korea, Ethiopia, and Liberia, the rest of the planet was dominated by Christian Europeans. Christianity was at least consistent with this incredible expansion and with the very large increase in the European population that occurred during this period of expansion. If anything, the decline of the West has co-occurred with the decline of religion among Western elites. If the world had stayed the way it was in 1960, no one would be talking about the suicide of the West.
  • Christianity has been many things throughout the centuries—an ideology of ethnic defense during the Iberian Reconquista, a pillar of exploitative monarchies and aristocracies in Europe and Latin America, a force for ethnic defense against usurious exploitation of peasants by ethnic outsiders at times during the Middle Ages, supporting slavery and segregation in the American South and apartheid in South Africa. Christianity has not had a consistent message of ethnic suicide or moral universalism. People on both sides of the slave trade in 17th–18th-century Britain were Christian. Both sides of the American Civil War were Christian.
  • Throughout history, Christianity has been quite adept at rendering unto Caesar—accommodating to the powers that be. In the U.S. and I suppose elsewhere in the West, Christians had much more influence on culture prior to the 1960s and the rise of the secular left — e.g., spearheading the successful drive to rein in Hollywood depictions of sex and Christianity beginning in the 1920s. But all that ended with the cultural revolution of the 1960s which was certainly not Christian in inspiration. Right now, the powers that be are the secular, multi-cultural, pro-non-White-immigration left, and one of their main goals is the eradication of public displays of Christianity and traditional Christian views on marriage and the family. Christianity itself has been corrupted by the secular left, most obviously in the case of the Second Vatican Council but also including the mainline Protestant sects. The Church had stood for cultural conservatism and had been a bulwark against Jewish influence for centuries.

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