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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.
This post has all the trappings of a spectacular gotcha without any of the substance. You seem to have latched onto one phrase, "the faith of your fathers," and interpreted it in the most literal possible way as any religion held by any of one's ancestors. This enables you to score a formal "win" by pulling an Uno Reverse card. But, for all of your shared blood, the Anglo-Saxons might as well have lived on Mars for how much cultural, moral, or otherwise organic connection that you have (or could) with them. By contrast, the culture in which you now live and the moral concepts in which you were inculcated are, at their roots, Christian through and through. Christianity is the faith of your fathers in a much stronger sense than Celtic druidism or whatnot could ever be. Even the pathos that you invoke on behalf of the poor pagans forced (strongarmed!) by Christian kings into converting gets all of its bite from a uniquely Christian emphasis on freedom of faith. (And before you object that this is a modern innovation, read some pre-Constantinian theologians like Tertullian and look into the shitshow over the [post-Constantine] execution of Priscillian.) Likewise the sympathy for these put-upon underdogs "[wrestling] against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." ("Underdogs" who would probably have taken your pity as the highest insult.) If you are going to hold to the "faith of your fathers" in your chosen sense, then you should defend that without relying on tropes and attitudes that they would have found "alien and alienating."
I would also point out that it is highly dubious whether the violence visited upon outlying northern backwaters was remotely necessary "to get us to the point where you can claim that Christianity is the only banner worth mustering under." First, that this was in fact the way things went down doesn't mean they couldn't have easily gone another way had Christians remained pacifistic. Empires tend to like solving problems with violence even where inefficient. Second, Christianity had already conquered one of the largest, richest, most intellectually-vital polities the world had ever seen, and it did so more or less peacefully. Unless you have a grossly inflated conception of British power to resist cultural diffusion (pre-Christian Roman accounts do not paint a flattering picture), I doubt the ultimate result there would have been much different had leading Christians stuck to their initially peace-loving ways. (Compare the fantastic success of private Christian missionaries across the globe in the post-colonial era.) Finally, even granting the dubious supposition that these places would never have been converted peacefully, we have no good reason to believe that their un-Christianized versions would have reached the heights that their Christian versions did, instead of remaining the tribalistic minor powers that they had been to that point. So Christianity would most likely still have remained the only banner worth mustering under even if the Celts had never come to be mustered under it.
If the first generation of anglo-saxon Christians did something good by abandoning the faith of their fathers for a better faith, that takes the punch out of the accusation that Hoff is abandoning the faith of his recent ancestors, if he is doing so for something better.
Pre-christian rome involved in many ways tolerated worship of other gods, and was polytheist with varied practices. Christianity was, as noted above, harsh on worship of any other gods. I'm not sure it's uniquely christian, exactly? I'm not familiar with the general works of tertullian, but priscillian practiced a heretical form of christianity, as opposed to rejecting it. Religious freedom in an expansive modern sense came later as christianity transitioned towards religious tolerance, and universalism, and then agnosticism, and there being negative reactions to executing a heretic doesn't change that given he was executed.
Eh, rome itself achieved its size and trade without christianity, there's no reason to presume it's necessary.
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