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In response to my last post, @FCFromSSC hit me with his trademarked signature move - “Hlynka was right about you” and then further clarified:
To which I replied:
(My separate exchange with Hlynka himself on the same topic can be found here.
FC promised a more detailed rejoinder from him would be forthcoming, but while he charges up his special move, I want to get out ahead of him and open a separate conversation, since I think this line of discussion is sufficiently divergent from the thrust of my original post - and might be interesting to users who would otherwise have no reason to weigh in on an inside-baseball rumination on white identitarianism - that it’s worth its own top-level post.
First off, I want to point out that it’s very rich for you, as a Christian specifically, to impugn me for “abandoning the faith of [my] fathers”, when getting millions of people to abandon the faith of their forefathers was literally the entire way Christianity spread across Europe. Like, the conversion of the pagans is a central element of the narrative of early Christianity, and was considered - rightfully so - a spectacular win for the faith. Every one of those Germanic and Celtic converts was repudiating the entire spiritual infrastructure which had sustained his or her ancestors for millennia, and I’m pretty sure you don’t look down on them for it. On the contrary, you celebrate this act of betrayal as an unalloyed liberation - a brave and enriching act. And to be clear, while a not-insignificant number of those early conversions were sincere and entirely voluntary acts of conscience undertaken by individuals, I think the evidence strongly suggests that the lion’s share of these conversions involved, let’s say, ambiguous consent.
That’s because Christianity was the globohomo, elite-imposed ideology of its day. The story of how it spread throughout Europe is pretty well-documented. Adopting Christianity was a way for the ruling class of a given polity to integrate that polity into the vast political-financial-mercantile patronage network linking an ever-expanding patchwork of formerly-sovereign peoples with the hyper-wealthy urban centers where the power centers behind the ideology were situated. For a Germanic or Slavic or Celtic king who agreed to publicly bend the knee to his new Christian backers - sorry, to accept baptism - it was generally a calculated political move and a way to secure access to resources, influence, and patronage, for himself and his court. Generally there would be a transitional grace period in which the normie citizens of the polity would be strongly encouraged to convert voluntarily; after that - and sometimes skipping that step entirely - laws would begin being passed, formally outlawing any public practice of the old faith, any display of its symbols, etc. And if some of the folks out in the boonies or in the vassal states started to get uppity and refused to abandon the faith of their forefathers, oftentimes the Christian power centers would just openly slaughter them - the Saxon Wars and the Northern Crusades are illustrative examples - and gleefully destroy their sacred symbols and houses of worship in front of them until they understood that resistance was futile. (Look how much clout good ol’ Saint Boniface earned himself by chopping down Donar’s Oakand using the timber to build a church to the new god in town, just to flex on the poor worthless chumps and rubes he had just helped conquer.)
My ancestry is pretty much 100% Anglo-Saxon as far back as I can trace it, which is a long way back. (Shout-out to FamilySearch.org, the extensive and meticulously-documented ancestry database operated by the Mormon Church.) As you’ve probably gathered, I’m very interested in the history of pre-Christian European religion, so I’ve tried to do some research into the religious practices of the early Anglo-Saxons, before they were converted to Christianity. It is surprisingly difficult to find much reliable information about what they believed in those days - certainly nothing like the comparatively well-attested beliefs of Norse pagans. That’s because within 80 years of the first conversion of an Anglo-Saxon regional king, the entire rest of the kingdoms were ruled by Christian kings - after they fought brutally-bloody battles to slay the remaining pagan kings and replace them with pliant Christian vassal kings - and those kings set right to work outlawing the practice of the thousands-of-years-old religious traditions of their subjects. This included literally destroying their sacred objects, burning their sacred groves to the ground and dismantling their temples, and even punishing the private practice of personal veneration at trees and wells by private individuals. This was a comprehensive crushing of the native religion and ideology of the normal working people, imposed by effete aristocrats who were tired of being looked down on as backward hillbillies by their betters on the continent. (Is any of this sounding familiar to you yet?) And it wasn’t enough to just outlaw the practice for openly pragmatic reasons - to say, “I’m banning this because if I don’t,
our ESG score will get downgraded and the EU will cut our fundingthe Pope will excommunicate me. Nope, they had to officially declare that the old gods - who, again, less than eighty years ago everyone on this fucking island, including the kings and clergy who were making and enforcing these laws, were worshipping - were actually demons. They had been demons the whole time! The agricultural/fertility goddess we all used to get together and sing songs to in hopes that she would bless our crops and keep our wombs fecund? It was a demon! The talisman you wear around your neck, depicting the minor household spirit your grandmother taught you watches over your family’s homestead? A demon! That grove of sacred trees in which you would often sit in silent contemplation, connecting with the numinous and the sublime? You guessed it: treemons!(And as far as I’m aware, that’s still a mainstream orthodox take on pagan gods, right? That they were in fact real, disincarnate supernatural/spiritual entities - not just juvenile figments of the imagination - but that rather than gods they had actually been malevolent demonic agents the whole time, corrupting the souls of the pagans for millennia before Christ came? I know there have been other theological approaches to what exactly pre-Christian religion was and how we should feel about their gods and myths, but I’m not totally hip to where the general consensus lies at this point.)
And I say all of this without commenting at all about whether or not the truth claims of Christianity are valid or not! One’s interpretation of these events, and one’s assessment of whether or not the people’s of Europe were better off after being forcibly converted to “an alien and alienating worldview” than they were before certainly depends a lot upon one’s assessment of the relative value of the new worldview in question. I just want to point out that men like Widukind, full of piss and vinegar and unwilling to bend the knee and “abandon the faith of his forefathers” were butchered, and their children and wives forced upon penalty of death and imprisonment to enthusiastically affirm the new worldview, to get us to the point where you can claim that Christianity is the only banner worth mustering under.
I'm going to try to steelman some of FC's points. I don't necessarily fully agree with these, but I think they have some merit. First, most of your comment seems to be premised on the idea that the objection is to converting all. You keep repeating and extrapolating the phrase "abandoning the faith their forefathers" as if that, itself, is FC's core argument: that converting to a different faith is bad/traitorous. This is an inherently relativist perspective, trying to be fair and treat all belief structures equally. No Christians ever object to the notion of conversion in general, it is always a position that Christianity is actually true/good, and other religions, therefore conversion to Christianity is good and conversion away from it is bad. It's possible to make all sorts of objections to this position, but the fact that you argue from a relativist perspective suggests you (or maybe FC, or both) are missing the point.
Second, independently from whether Christianity is true/good in some objective sense, there's the additional issue you don't seem to notice which is a simple pragmatic alliance. Currently, Christianity is in the middle of being conquered by wokeism. These are the two major factions argument FC seems to be putting forth, or maybe a steelman of their position, is that Christianity, as the defender and the prominent force for thousands of years, is the most realistic faction capable of actually defeating wokeism. The criticism is not just that you didn't choose his prefered faction, but that, in the middle of a war between two major powers, you joined a minor third party with no hope of defeating either. If you want to defeat woke-ism, you need to ally with or preferably join the Red Tribe for real, not play third party half-ally half-enemy where you're fighting against both.
Personally, I'm less optimistic than these arguments would imply about how realistic it is for Christianity to make a comeback and defeat woke-ism without significant Blue-Tribe support. More realistically, I'm hopeful if we can defend for long enough then woke-ism will eventually collapse on itself and/or mutate into something less horrible and/or the Blue Tribe will come up with something less horrible which can outcompete woke-ism, which will then conquer and take over everything and be worse than Christianity but better than current woke-ism and our society won't collapse. But I do think that Christianity has a powerful defense against woke-ism that non-woke atheists lack, which is a strong mostly-objective morality system. We know what is right and what is wrong, and when progressives make moral arguments it's relatively easy for us to A. not be seduced by their arguments, and B. make strong defensive arguments against them. And while these arguments aren't necessarily convincing to non-Christians if they rely on biblical principles which are not shared by non-Christians, but sometimes they are. I don't think most atheists have the same level of moral conviction (a lot of Christians lack it too), which is why they keep ceding more and more ground to the leftists over time. A lot of people don't care that much about moral philosophy, but they don't want to be a bad person. If they don't already know what's right and wrong then they let someone else tell them what to do, the only question is whether it's the church or the diversity officers. And, despite all of its many flaws throughout the years, if they're not going to think for themselves then I'd rather have people listen to the church than an alternate source.
These are good points, but my larger thesis here is that the method by which Christianity spread, and the political and economic model employed by those spreading it, strikingly mirrors the way that Blue ideology is colonizing and homogenizing Red countries and regions today. Furthermore, the people resisting forceful conversion to Christianity by their own local cosmopolitan elites were precisely the Reds of their day. They were salt-of-the-earth normal people, defiantly clinging to their proud ancestral traditions. They weren’t even allowed to continue to practice their religion privately; the state knew that in order to secure long-term the power and legitimacy of its new ideology, it had to stamp out any displays of the old worldview, no matter how comparatively feeble.
If Red and Blue are to have any meaning in a macro-historical context - if they refer to recurring psychological archetypes or discrete clusters which we can observe in humans of any time period, rather than simply being petty expressions of context-dependent political conflicts between modern Americans - then it’s incredibly instructive to notice these parallels, because it suggests that there is nothing inherently Red about Christianity, and I would say that it also suggests that the success of the Red project moving forward has no inherent connection to the success or failure of Christianity specifically.
Except it wasn't though. By the time of the Edict of Milan Christianity was already so prevalent in the Roman Countryside and amongst the urban working class that many modern historians posit that Emperor Constantine's conversion was in fact a cynical ploy to cut his rivals off at the knees by buying the loyalty of the plebs. It wasn't the "salt of the earth" who were resisting conversion (that phrase itself bein an explicit reference to Christ's Sermon on the Mount BTW), it was the cosmopolitan elites who were trying and failing to suppress it.
This in turn plays into my wider thesis because it's clear from these posts that you yourself are operating under the assumption that the woke's theories about culture and society are fundamentally accurate and correct. You say you're frustrated by people like me "not making the effort to evaluate our actual arguments", but what people like you don't seem to understand is that people like me don't share your moral relativism. We don't buy into your pseudo-Marxist/Hegelian framework of "colonization" and class/racial interest, we roll our eyes at "elite theory" and and other such nonsense. What is there to for us to even evaluate in light of such a core disagreement? It's not like this is our first lap around this particular track. We've already heard all of your arguments from the woke and have rejected them as invalid.
Your dismissal of red and blue tribe as mere "psychological archetypes" rather than distinct cultures with their own histories, beliefs, approaches, etc... Is simply the cherry on the sundae as it's exactly what one would expect from a disciple of the globohomo agenda. Christianity may not be inherently "red tribe" but Christianity is a major component of the red tribe's history and culture and you discard these factors at you peril.
I made it abundantly obvious in my post that I was referring to the Christianization of Western and Northern Europe, and not the initial conversion of Rome and its immediate surroundings. All of the examples I provided were clearly about the regions outside of direct Roman rule, so you bringing up Rome is either an intentional dodge - because you’re not conversant in the history of the regions and era that I’m talking about, or because you don’t have a counterargument against my interpretation of the events in question - or (once again) a failure of reading comprehension on your end.
As for everything else here, you’re correct that we have incredibly orthogonal worldviews. I’m primarily interested in questions about whether or not Red and Blue are analytical categories that can be applied to people across a wide geographical and temporal field of comparison - was Oliver Cromwell a Blue? Was Charlemagne? Whereas you are very intent on keeping the conversation about these categories firmly rooted in the specific cultural and political context of the modern United States. As a result of this fundamental difference in analytical frameworks, you’re probably correct that you and I are indeed doomed to always talk past each other.
Ultimately I would love for someone in my faction - probably not me personally, since you very obviously find my specific style very grating - to convince you that we’re not your enemy, but rather an ally of convenience, with whom you’re going to have to coexist both before and after the eventual victory of our coalition. We’re Blues, but we’re not leftists, and that means we’re not your real enemy. I truly do believe that, and I haven’t given up hope that one of us will eventually break through to people of your inclination.
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You're attributing a huge amount of capacity to early Medieval states that didn't really exist. It's generally accepted that pagan practices with a Christian gloss persisted for a long, long time after formal conversion. I've seen some historians claim that the countryside in most of Europe wasn't really converted in anything but name until AFTER the Middle Ages, more or less just in time for the Protestant Reformation.
Medieval Catholic Christianity was able to maintain such religious unity over a large area by essentially being hands off once the temples were torn down and the churches put up. Just morph your old cults into veneration of some newly discovered local Saint and you're good to carry on more or less unchanged (for example: It's entirely possible that the Irish Saint Brigid is more or less literally a religio-translation of the pre-Christian Irish goddess Brigid). All the same practices and festivals can be held in all the same places, just with a different name in the middle.
It's always easier to add the cherry on top to an already existing edifice and then claim that you made the whole thing, this certainly being how people remember it. You don't need to convert people properly, only strike at their capital, force them to do an exclusively Christian act such as undergoing a Mass, to then be able to claim that all their leftover superstitions are just variations on the Christian religion. Inverting a thing is the easiest way to prove master over it, whilst still allowing it to appear mostly as it once was. The final
Too fervent proselytizing will summon up a force to oppose it; far better to just cut off the head, as here was done through mainly inducements, there not being any strong reason for an Anglo-Saxon ruler to remain stolid in his mystic beliefs lacking both depth and expediency as they did, and then to allow the remnants to follow, trusting that there won't be any strong counter movement.
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Christianity seems to have originally been most popular among lower middle class urbanites, and to have been adopted by the elites following the discrediting of traditional Roman religion due to a series of system shocks(beating out competitors to do so; notably Manichaeism). From thence it spread by state force. This is not the work story
Christianity spread outside the Roman Empire through conversion that looks a bit more like woke, it’s true. Inasmuch as the early Middle Ages can be similar it is similar, I’ll give you that. But the analogy breaks down because woke mostly doesn’t see itself as a competitor to Christianity(except ‘fundamentalism’, whatever that means)- woke types mostly think going to a Christian church on Sunday is well, good, and even admirable. They happen to be competitors with Christianity for a dominant ideology, but progressives don’t seem to have any problem with going to a catholic or SBC or Mormon church. And there’s prominent woke individuals who go to all three, and at least the first two have woke individuals in important positions. I mean yes it’s difficult to be a good catholic or baptist or Mormon while being woke. But wokes mostly don’t believe that and have no issue with sufficiently pro-woke people who are Christian, even if they are members of quite conservative denominations(again unless those denominations get declared fundamentalist like the OPC or SSPX or the baptist Bible fellowship or one of the old calendarist groups, but that’s more of a declaring themselves to be an enemy thing).
By contrast Christianity explicitly demands that the old pagan gods be repudiated, in those words.
The primary problem with your own explanation is that wokeness is subversive by design. The woke "don't seem to have a problem" with someone going to a church if and only if the church is a woke church. You kind of hint at this but is important to be explicit about this. They are fine with people who go to a woke church because wokeness is subversive by design and they know that the primary focus of worship will be wokeness (Critical Social Justice), not God. They are then Catholic or SBC or Mormon in name only. Like you say "it's difficult to be a good Christian while being woke", I would go further and say, actually "woke Christian" is an oxymoron, you can only worship one God, and if you're a "woke Christian" it means you're not worshipping God of the Bible, which is why the woke don't care. There's not "woke Christian churches" but "woke churches which have the aesthetic trappings of Christianity". Liberation theology specifically was designed to do this. The Southern Baptist Convention is undergoing a major schism right now over this kind of thing. A major incident that lead to the schism was that in 2019 the SBC adopted "Resolution 9" which basically said that the SBC will adopt Critical Race Theory as "analytical tools" - except Critical Race Theory is a totalizing ideology (or part of an ideology) which can never accept subordination. It Is directly competing with Christianity.
In practice many nominally Christian communities were functionally pagan for centuries after their apparent conversion. Pagan rituals and worship would coexist alongside Christianity in remote Alpine villages and dense Baltic forests for many centuries after conversion.
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This only applies to people who go to church but nothing more. People who actually follow the teachings of the church are considered homophobes and misogynists who want to deny women reproductive rights
Fr James Martin SJ might be heretical, but he colors far enough inside the lines to avoid formal censure and seems to be generally well regarded among the woke. There’s similar figures among the Mormons and SBC.
And of course this ignores the total thrust of my point, which is that Christianity considers paganism’s morality or lack thereof to be a strictly secondary concern to its opposition to pagan worship itself, which the woke do not have to Christian worship, including the worship of generally quite conservative sects and the woke maintain Allies in good standing among many of these groups.
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