Is Christianity to Blame?

It has become quite a widely-held position amongst the Alt-Right that fault for the loss of identity and in-group loyalty and even the self-sabotage of Western societies is the result (the inevitable result, as some would even have it) of Christianity. Some of those who hold this viewpoint even go so far as to attempt to resurrect or at least extract certain elements of the pre-Christian religions of Europe. However, I find this view to be mistaken and is based upon an historical horizon that stretches scarcely more than a single century into the past.

I have to disagree that the self-destruction of Europe and the West in general has anything to do with “pure Christian altruism,” to use the words of one commenter in his reply to this post by Sean Gabb. However, the commenter himself acknowledges that the established Christian churches have been corrupted to the point of unrecognizability. Europeans and their colonial cousins were far more Christian in the past than they are today or than they have been for the last hundred years… and yet it is precisely over the course of this recent period (a period characterized by growing agnosticism and a continual drifting away from the teaching of Christian doctrine, culminating in a policy which the Catholic Church ambiguously describes as “ecumenism” and in a predominantly irreligious West) that the flood gates have been opened.

More than once in history it was precisely the glue of Christianity that united Europeans to repel invasions from outside of Europe. It is quite hard to imagine that Jan Sobieski would have brought his army to Vienna to join in the battle against the Turks or that the Franks would ever have come to the aid of the Greeks in the First Crusade had either of them remained pagan. Certainly the pagan Greeks and Romans did not view their fellow Europeans as “fellows,” at all. They were barbarians to them. Far more civilized, in their eyes, were the Persians and Mesopotamians. The concept of Europe as a distinct entity was only possible thanks to the acceptance and growth of Christianity.

It was not from the Orthodox Christian Churches (East or West) that the present disease of the Western mind was spawned. Rather, it came from the proliferation of leftist ideologies, born out of Christian heresies – perversions of the faith – and which primarily spread first amongst the lay clergy of the Church and which eventually cast aside the notion of a deity altogether, while retaining and continuing to develop their own perverted dogmas. It is this development which has brought us to our present circumstances. But these Christian trappings are just that – trappings. These ideologies are no more genuinely Christian than the Nazi’s fabricated paganism genuinely reflected the ancient religions of their pre-Christian ancestors.

These materialist dogmas don’t acknowledge the universal equality of souls, because they don’t recognize the existence of souls in the first place. Instead, they demand the universal equality of living bodies and that demands the death of a fundamental Christian doctrine, the principle of subsidiarity. It demands the death of locality and of the distinctiveness of cultures, languages, race and even gender. Everything must be melded together, everything turned fluid. Everything that is exclusive must be shared, everything separate must be combined. Christianity tells us that natural distinctions such as these are the result of an intentional act of creation by an omniscient and loving deity, and that therefore these distinctions represent something that we ought to celebrate and for which we ought to give thanks. The leftist ideology which assaults these differences chalks up all distinctiveness to an accident, and one which might be and indeed should be remedied by human intervention.

The achievement of this satanic goal requires the construction of a universal, totalitarian, temporal institution to bring about the transformation. In other words – world government. Our adversaries are busily erecting a veritable Tower of Babel, and they’re laying the foundation right here in our home countries. An inherently un-Christian project.

From the Jacobins of the 18th and 19th centuries to the national socialists, fascists, and Bolsheviks of the 20th, the leftists have sought to create equality by smashing unevenness by force. The native populations of Europe are far less distinct today than they once were, and much of this evolution was brought about by physical force. But where first the attainment of uniformity by eradication of the other failed, the left now seeks uniformity by self-immolation.

It is not Christianity that has caused Europeans to cut their own throats, it is the inversion of Christianity. By rejecting Christian doctrine – that is, by rejecting the spiritual nature of Christianity, what remains is a sentiment without context. The longing for equality in an uneven physical world and the expiation of an original sin without a savior to carry it away or a spiritual Father to forgive it. Just how does one expiate sin in the absence of a spiritual realm? The actions of leftists have answered this question for us – by the extirpation of the sinner. Everything has been turned on its head. And if they have their way, everything that is good and beautiful and distinctive in the world will be ground down, pulverized, and cast into oblivion with as little concern for what was demolished as a carpenter shows for the sawdust he blows from the surface of a piece of wood he’s just smoothed out as he conforms its shape to his satisfaction.

Let me ask this. When a man falls ill with cancer, do we say that it is his body that makes him sick? No. It is the corruption of his body – a disease – which imperils his life. The same is true of the relation of Christianity to the present state of affairs in Western societies. A belief system has been corrupted and turned malignant. But that does not mean we ought to cut out all the healthy tissue along with the tumor. My advice to some particular elements in the Alt-Right would be to shave your Viking beards, walk into an European Cathedral and admire its beauty instead of venerating and imitating those who despoiled them in the past, while raging, vapidly, against those who would despoil them in the present. Could that which inspired their construction really have been so pernicious as you think? Your ancestors, in time, didn’t seem to think so.

“Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will Be Done on Earth…” is, no doubt, a dangerous sentence fragment. Taken with the rest of the verse, however, it is inspiring. Indeed, it inspired much of European cultural achievement. Stripped of its context, it is terrifying. Whose kingdom and whose will? That is precisely the problem of the secular universalism of the neo-liberal faith. This will is now man-made and arbitrary, subject to continual evolution, but at any given moment it is considered infallible. Moreover, that will is made real on the face of the earth by an unwavering, righteous kingdom, deaf to the wails of vanquished infidels. It is a will that apparently has found it necessary to attack traditional Christianity since its inception and has succeeded, for the most part, in impeding the further teaching of orthodox doctrine. Is it really wise to offer our assistance in this effort?

Indeed, a kingdom is in the offing. But it is not of God. And its princes are Legion.