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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27166 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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I think you’re referencing a few different trends.

  • The distaste for Christianity on parts of the dissident right is substantially Nietzschean, it precedes mass immigration. That perspective would say that the West is still post-Christian and still deeply embraces slave morality in policy areas like homelessness, justice, welfare, immigration, foreign policy and so on. Nietzsche is a very popular figure on the intellectual hard right. The argument in this case isn’t that Europeans aren’t capable of being tough under Christianity, clearly they are (and of course all of the greatest ages of Northern European civilization occurred in the Christian era) but that Christianity has an inexorable tendency toward worshipping victimhood and guilt that eventually led to cultural modernity, which these people broadly dislike.

  • The internet led to a small resurgence of pagan LARPing among largely young whites in a way often tied to Nordic black metal. Not all of this is far-right really, but much of it is. Varg Vikernes is obviously a major figure in both worlds and a pagan missionary of sorts. Naturally these people blame Christianity for destroying ancestral European paganism, and they blame this for hurting Europeans in various ways for arguably religious reasons. There is also obviously a hostility towards the fact that in Christianity an aspect of God is embodied in an unambiguously Jewish man and that much Christian ritual and scripture is descended from Judaism. This did not bother earlier generations of Christian antisemites, but…

  • Residual Christian antisemitism largely ended after WW2, certainly as a matter of policy. The Pope officially renounced it along with the entirety of mainstream Catholicism, and so did most large Protestant denominations. Over time, some, like American Evangelical Christianity, even embraced a quasi-philosemitic and certainly staunchly pro-Israel worldview. Even denominations that saw less ideological evolution like Orthodox Christianity significantly reduced their hostility to Jews. If you were an antisemite in 1900 it was quite easy to find a Church that agreed with you. In 2020, certainly in the United States, you would be hard pressed and would have to rely on a few small splinter groups that are very far from mainstream Christianity and not well-distributed around the country. This both led to a dislike among antisemitic dissident rightists for Christianity in general and a desire for some kind of certainly-not-Jewish alternative, which eg. Scandinavian paganism obviously is.

  • As secularism increased and religious observance decreased in the West, the ingrained ideological hostility to paganism as savage or backwards (and certainly as ‘wrong’) declined with it. Young men aren’t afraid of going to hell if they become pagans, so the ‘ward’ against ‘deconversion’ is lessened. That said, pagan or quasi-pagan cults have had a long history in esoteric European intellectual circles, certainly back to the 19th century if not before. The popularity and then decline of New Age religions starting in the 1940s and 1950s may also be related to this.

We have a few dissident rightists here who are hostile to Christianity so hopefully one will come along and answer your question more accurately.

The internet led to a small resurgence of pagan LARPing among largely young whites in a way often tied to Nordic black metal. Not all of this is far-right really, but much of it is. Varg Vikernes is obviously a major figure in both worlds and a pagan missionary of sorts. Naturally these people blame Christianity for destroying ancestral European paganism, and they blame this for hurting Europeans in various ways for arguably religious reasons. There is also obviously a hostility towards the fact that in Christianity an aspect of God is embodied in an unambiguously Jewish man and that much Christian ritual and scripture is descended from Judaism.

I think the lack of a religious alternative makes the idea of trying to remove Christianity from western culture more or less a nonstarter. Until there’s a robust religion that comes out of Pagan thinking in a real pagan way, with an unapologetic pagan way of think (that is, a religious and philosophical movement in authentic paganism that doesn’t have its origins in either Christianity or as a reaction to Christianity), then you can really build outward from it. Judaism is its own thing and always has been, and it’s not really a LARP of a dead religion that exists only in distinction from Christianity and Islam. Jews have their own thing. My experience of paganism is that it’s a LARP that no one takes seriously, and certainly don’t behave as though they believe in Odín, Thor, Zeus, or Athena. They don’t have a sense of reverence for their deities, the sense of them as having wants that you might not like. No sense that you can’t just pick and choose.

And I think that matters because like it or not, the best innovation the Abrahamics have is that their texts are canon and inspired and thus it gives a bulwark against it being twisted into whatever form the elites want. The Torah, the Bible and the Quran are explicit in what they say, and thus cannot be easily interpreted to not mean what the text says it means. Islam can never allow pork. It’s in the book, and the book is from God and not changing for the whims of the rest of the world.

The Pope officially renounced it along with the entirety of mainstream Catholicism

Well, it wasn't just a single Pope who completed that process after WW2! ;)

We have a few dissident rightists here who are hostile to Christianity so hopefully one will come along and answer your question more accurately.

I would have said most of them are, to be honest. There are a bunch of... well, the language I use here will be controversial, but I would say racialist, anti-semitic, alt-right or neo-Nazi type posters and it is entirely unsurprising to me that those people hate Christianity. It is in their interests to try to roll Christianity together with other movements, in order to promote rejection of Christianity.

I find it morbidly absurd sometimes. The woke hate Christianity, and argue that Christianity is patriarchal, homophobic, deeply linked to white supremacy, and so on. They only see good in Christianity if it is consciously reformed and purged of those supposedly far-right-supporting elements. On the other end of the spectrum, the far-right also hate Christianity, and argue that Christianity is weak, universalist, over-compassionate, the source of the cultural rot and hatred of strength and vitality that is enervating the West, and so on. They in turn can only see good in Christianity if it is consciously reformed and purged of these supposedly far-left slave-morality elements.

It's strange to be hated by the far-left for being rightist, and hated by the far-right for being leftist. Judith Butler writes a whole chapter of Gender Trouble condemning the pope and attacking that retrograde Christianity, and then you pop over here and it's all about how Christianity is destroying the West because it doesn't hate Jews and/or black people enough. Quite a surreal experience.

Once again I'm reminded of a bit from Chesterton, from chapter VI of Orthodoxy:

A thing might have these two opposite vices; but it must be a rather queer thing if it did. A man might be too fat in one place and too thin in another; but he would be an odd shape. At this point my thoughts were only of the odd shape of the Christian religion; I did not allege any odd shape in the rationalistic mind.

[...]

I wished to be quite fair then, and I wish to be quite fair now; and I did not conclude that the attack on Christianity was all wrong. I only concluded that if Christianity was wrong, it was very wrong indeed. Such hostile horrors might be combined in one thing, but that thing must be very strange and solitary. There are men who are misers, and also spendthrifts; but they are rare. There are men sensual and also ascetic; but they are rare. But if this mass of mad contradictions really existed, quakerish and bloodthirsty, too gorgeous and too thread-bare, austere, yet pandering preposterously to the lust of the eye, the enemy of women and their foolish refuge, a solemn pessimist and a silly optimist, if this evil existed, then there was in this evil something quite supreme and unique. For I found in my rationalist teachers no explanation of such exceptional corruption. Christianity (theoretically speaking) was in their eyes only one of the ordinary myths and errors of mortals. They gave me no key to this twisted and unnatural badness. Such a paradox of evil rose to the stature of the supernatural. It was, indeed, almost as supernatural as the infallibility of the Pope. An historic institution, which never went right, is really quite as much of a miracle as an institution that cannot go wrong. The only explanation which immediately occurred to my mind was that Christianity did not come from heaven, but from hell. Really, if Jesus of Nazareth was not Christ, He must have been Antichrist.

And then in a quiet hour a strange thought struck me like a still thunderbolt. There had suddenly come into my mind another explanation. Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation (as has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall. Old bucks who are growing stout might consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who were growing thin might feel that he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance. Perhaps Swedes (who have pale hair like tow) called him a dark man, while negroes considered him distinctly blonde. Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre. Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad—in various ways.

(I have omitted Chesterton's specific examples - he has half a dozen or so - for reasons of space, but you can easily check them.)

It's as if the same pattern plays out again. Christianity is both too racist and not racist enough, too Western and not Western enough, too Jewish and yet also too anti-semitic, and so on, in every category, both far-left and far-right beat it with the same stick.

Or maybe it's the only sane thing in the room.

It's strange to be hated by the far-left for being rightist, and hated by the far-right for being leftist.

It's less strange if you consider that far-left and far-right are not polar opposites, but instead something approximating Stalinists and Trotskyites: members of a coherent ideological tribe, sharing basic values in common, driven to mutual hatred by surface details.

I'd tend to agree with this, yes. It's been cited far too many times before, but the old woke versus racist skit still rings true. In some cases the overlap is even stronger.

I recently found myself reading Yasmin Nair on Palestine, and was struck by this line:

Liberal Zionists are, I believe, taken aback by constant reminders that their pallid views are now exposed as insufficient for these times, as the world literally marches past them, losing patience with their weak discourse about concepts like “human rights” and “freedom of expression.”

I'm sure I don't even need to say what it resembles. The portrayal of liberalism as weak and self-defeating, the obsession with a putative Jewish conspiracy controlling the nation, the call for violent revolution - ultimately it reminds me of many of the Motte's own far-right posters. Even on the psychological level, when we find themes like the validation of anger, praise of strength and aggression, the sense of the whole culture as a kind of malicious conspiracy against one, the felt sense of solidarity with an almost-wholly-imagined public, even an online culture that's saturated with memes, affected irony, and deliberate overstatement to either signal in-group loyalty or trigger propriety-obsessed centrists...

The mirror is there. The far-left and far-right share basic values, even if they're sitting in different camps.

It is an incredible irony that Christianity was the root of antisemitism for so long, but in America the Evangelicals are extremely strong Zionists.

The center is always attacked by the extremes, which doesn’t indicate correctness.

Christianity is a large set of possible beliefs and so it’s very easy to choose one’s own adventure. As a former believer, there’s a lot of good and bad in there.

Frankly, I wish the GOP would prefer a more WASPy Christian candidate than Trump, but MAGA is low class Christianity and a bit too forgiving.

Or maybe it's the only sane thing in the room.

Or simply that Christianity is not one thing. Some versions of Christianity can be too blood-thirsty and some versions too meek, some too triumphalist, some too obsessed with slave morality. And to the extent that every Christian is different, we can change Lewis's example a little. It is not just many men speaking of one man, it is many men speaking of many other men.

Catholicism and Orthodoxy are different, and each have their own different sects and churches and local differences. If you ask me to describe Christianity I am likely to talk about it in the context of the Christian conflict in my home nation. That is going to be very different than a Greek orthodox in Crete, or a Baptist in Alabama. Not just because the viewer is different, but so too is the thing being viewed.

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