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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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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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