Thoughts On Christian Nationalism

Posted on September 25, 2023 by thezman

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Over the last decade the usual suspects have directed a great deal of resources into anathematizing the term “Christian Nationalism.” One reason is the long war against Christianity in general that dates to the start of the last century. Since these people assume nationalism is a bad word, whatever they can attach it to becomes bad as a result of the linkage. This sort of linguistic guilt by association has been a popular tactic with the usual suspects for a long time.

Another attack is from the establishment churches and affiliated political operations, who worry that their people are getting wise to the grift. Like conservatism in general, social conservatism has been a massive failure. Since so-called Christian organizations have been at the forefront of the culture war, the rank and file are now looking around for an alternative way forward. The people who got rich off losing the culture war see Christian nationalism as a threat to their grift.

The idea behind Christian Nationalism is to provide an alternative moral authority that is in direct contradiction of the one used by the ruling class. No one talks about the moral authority of the ruling elite, especially the ruling elite, but it is assumed that they have some reason for promoting things like diversity and the sexual fads. Maybe it all boils down to bourgeois spite or maybe they think the cause of justice requires them to annihilate society, but whatever the authority, Christian Nationalists reject it.

That is where things get complicated. Within the Christian Nationalist subculture, you see Catholics and Protestants, which raises an obvious issue. You also see many within this space migrating to Eastern Orthodoxy. The reason for the latter is the people in the former are disgusted by the direction of their churches. Of course, you also have the churchless who rely only on their reading of Scripture. They tend to be the most vocal in the public square about their political intensions.

Putting aside the theological differences that exist within this subculture, the bigger question is how to square the Christian with the nationalism. The one thing all of these people would agree upon is Christ died for all mankind, so all men, regardless of race or ethnicity, can accept Jesus Christ and thus become a Christian. If your church is open to everyone, then it stands to reasons that your community is open to everyone, which contradicts the logic of nationalism.

This is where we bump into the elephant in the room. The big exception to the open-door policy is non-Christians. This is where the usual suspects come back into the story, as they claim Christianity is just a fig leaf for the nationalism. When they hiss the word “nationalism” they mean “fascism”, of course. In fairness to the usual suspects, the Christian Identity Movement was exactly this approach. Many of the most vocal Christian Nationalists today are hostile to Jews.

This is especially dangerous from the point of view of the usual suspects because this line of reasoning applies to the very idea of nations. If you want a nation, one with a single language, culture, and people, then you are seeking an exclusive society, rather than an open one. Just as a Christian society must be intolerant of non-Christians, a nationalist society must be intolerant of minorities. Otherwise, you open the foundations of society up to challenges from those minorities.

This brings us back to the eternal question. For Jews to maximize their opportunities in a society, it must not be exclusive of them or their activity. This is the Karl Popper – George Soros argument for the open society. The moral foundation must not be exclusive in any way, which eliminates both nationalism and Christianity from the moral foundation of the open society. Obviously, this logic benefits all minorities, not just Jews, but it also comes at the expense of the majority.

The logic of Christian nationalism puts them at odds with the bulk of modern Christians who are no longer Christian in the theological sense. Most are Judeo-Christian, a weird modern phenomenon that defines Christianity in terms of Israel. It is not unusual for ads like this one to appear on platforms that cater to modern Christians. Much of what modern Christians do is undisguisable from Zionism. That presents and an obvious problem for the people promoting Christian Nationalism.

That brings us back to the theological issue. The Christian Nationalists have a problem in that they think they must operate within the tradition of Christianity. That does not leave them a lot of room to operate. Even those who think Scripture is the only source of truth are faced with the fact that Scripture is a man-made thing. There are lots of lost and excluded books of the Bible. Someone decided to exclude things from Scripture, maybe even things lost to us entirely.

By accepting the framing of the past, they are limiting what they can do as both Christian and nationalists. There is no getting around the fact that the arc of Christianity has led to this point. The universalism is one problem, but the inherent individualism is another big challenge. if all men have an individual relationship with God and are judges as individuals, there is not much room for collective virtue. The virtue of the community will always came second to individual virtue.

What the Christian Nationalists face is a bigger task than reasserting or defending the idea of a Christian nation. They first need to revolutionize both terms. Their Christianity needs to break free of the traditional framing in order to avoid being trapped in a mode of thought that precludes nationalism. At the same time, they have to rethink the idea of nationalism so that it comports with and promotes the compassion that must lie at the heart of their new Christianity.

That sounds like an impossible task, especially given the makeup of the Christian nationalist subculture. These are people with homes and families, hardly the sort to overthrow the current order. On the other hand, Christianity was a revolutionary movement from the start. Nationalism, despite what the usual suspects claim, has also been a revolutionary cause. In other words, the Christian Nationalists are working with material that has always been dangerous to the status quo.

What makes it possible for them to think in these terms is the fact that the old forms are no longer working. The old regime is in crisis because the old systems and old moral claims are no longer working. The last time a world bestriding empire fell into crisis it gave birth to a new religious movement that eventually swept the world. Whether or not there is a theologian or even a charismatic leader ready to accept the challenge is unknown, but the ground is fertile for such a thing.

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The Spirit Of The Law

Posted on September 6, 2023 by thezman

In the Charles Dickens novel Oliver Twist, Mr. Bumble is told by the court that the law assumes his wife acts under his direction. Mr. Bumble responds with, “If the law supposes that, the law is a ass – a idiot”. The ass in this case is the donkey, an animal known for its obstinance. Over time the expression has been used to point out that the letter of the law can not only contradict the spirit of the law, but the law itself can contradict common sense and objective reality.

The more important point here though is that the law is an effort to formalize the commonly held moral code, a set of rules that determine what members of a society ought to do and ought not to do. It is not the moral code itself, but an effort to write it down on paper so it is clear to everyone. Fundamental to most ethical systems is the assertion that ignorance of the law is no excuse. You need to know the rules, which is why they are written down so that you can know them.

Despite the law seeming to be an ass, there is a logic to the law. That logic, like all systems, starts from some foundational items. These are the things that everyone in the law assumed to be true. For example, the Bill of Rights is supposed to be a list of starting points for understanding the limits of government. These are not supposed to be up for debate. As far as the law is supposed to be concerned, these are settled truths that cannot be challenged or violated.

This gets to an important point. Every system of oughts, the list of things you ought to do and the things you ought not do, begins with a set of eternal truths that rest on a recognized authority. Christians are free to eat pork because they do not recognize the moral authority of the Muslims and Jews. The prohibition against eating pork rests on the moral authority of those two religions. It is not an objective truth, but a subjective one that works only when you accept it.

The law is a system of oughts and therefore assumes an authority and that authority is supposed to be the Constitution but also tradition as expressed through precedent or the accumulation of court decisions. The Constitution is the starting point for what we all agree is the system of oughts. Precedent is the accumulated decisions over time on the things that were not expressly covered in the Constitution. Combined this makes up the system of oughts that define the morality of our society.

That last bit is what is often missed. Once something is formally put on the list of things you ought not do, it quickly becomes part of the informal list of taboos. The reason for this is that we naturally assume that in a democratic society the law reflects not only the general will but general morality. If the law says it is not allowed, it must mean that it is outside of that which is morally acceptable. In other words, once the court makes it against the law, it quickly becomes immoral.

An obvious example of this in action is homosexual marriage. Up until a few years ago people understood that marriage was about creating children. Since nature dictates how this is done, marriage must be one man and one woman. Then one day some people decided that the laws of nature are up for debate. Two men, it was argued, could be married, despite the biological impossibility of it. This group remained a ridiculous minority until they were able to get the courts to side with them.

In the blink of an eye, the issue of homosexual marriage went from absurd poke in the eye of Mother Nature to settled moral principle. Conservatives who opposed the idea then suddenly defended it. Even social conservatives have dropped their public opposition to homosexual marriage. You can see the change in moral attitudes in the polling on the issue. This absurd mockery of the laws of nature became part of the accepted moral code with the stroke of a judge’s pen.

Another example is the Brown decision. Central to the jihad against white people in this age are the novel moral principles invented by the court. In fact, the court not only created two new moral claims, but made those the controlling principles, superseding even those items written in the Constitution itself. As a result, the constitutional order went from a system of limits on government power to a system of demands on the white population of the country.

The same process is happening with the Bostock decision. In this case a majority of the justices agreed that discriminating against men pretending to be women so they can beat up girls on the soccer field is a form of sexual discrimination and therefore violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As Harvard professor Adrian Vermeule points out, this is a ridiculous claim on its face, but it also opens the door for adding yet another novel principle to the legal order.

As we have seen with other novelties from the court, it will not be long before this one sinks into the moral fabric of society. If you do not want your daughters pulverized by burly men in sundresses on the ball field, you will be shunned from polite society or maybe even suffer legal persecution. The fact that the Bostock decision was written by a so-called conservative judge, one anointed by the allegedly conservative Federalist Society and appointed by Trump is critical.

We used to worry about putting Catholics on the bench because it was assumed they would operate from Catholic morality, rather than the morality of high church Protestantism that informed the political order. It was assumed that judges were like all men, and they would operate from within a moral framework, formally expressed through organized religion until recent times. Catholics had Catholic morality, while Episcopalians had Anglican morality.

In other words, the text of the Constitution and the traditions and precedents that informed it were based on a moral framework that existed outside of it. The political system was founded by and for people who assumed a moral order based in high church Protestantism. It did not prohibit men dressed as women from beating up girls on the ball fields because no Christian people would ever conceive of such a thing, much less tolerate advocacy for it.

Once that morale framework was removed from the system, the Constitutional order was left without a moral foundation. It no longer had moral authority on which to rest the list of things members of society ought to do and ought not do. The political system was left to conjure one to replace it. The Brown decision and now Bostock rest on the moral authority of the new religion that has evolved since the middle of the last century, which promises salvation through universal liberation.

In the end, the law is a formalization of the moral code of a society. That moral code reflects the identity of the people who rule society. The foundation of which is either something outside of the human condition like the gods or the collective identity of the people who control society. Once the American ruling class abandoned Christianity as the moral foundation, it eventually settled on the collective identity of the ruling elite that emerged in the middle of the last century.

The trouble is, that ruling elite cannot settle on an exclusive identity as it is a hodgepodge of people from various tribes. Exclusivity therefore runs counter to their shared reality, so their new identity is the Open Society. It is a polite fiction but all ethical codes contain polite fictions. The new ruling elite is every bit as exclusive and discriminating as any ruling elite, it is just that they assume their calling is to usher in the Open Society, a world of free of discrimination and prejudice.

The Religion Of X

Posted on August 1, 2023 by thezman

Imagine if Elon Musk decides that he is a messenger from “Old Ones” sent to earth to start a new religion based around technology. The “Old Ones” are the spirits of Martians who have transcended this plane of existence. They have gifted Musk with certain abilities that have allowed him to become the world’s richest man, thus freeing him from all social constraints but also leaving him with the understanding of how normal people relate to the world and one another.

Musk’s new religion, the Church of All Worlds, combines the hedonistic elements of libertarianism with incomprehensible elements from Western epistemology to give the new religion a mysterious quality. Initiates learn the insider language of the religion and how to use the new phrases to signal their status in the religion. Most important, they learn that they are an elect chosen to ruthlessly rule over the rest of mankind and punish the weak for their weakness.

You see, in Musk’s new religion, he is the holiest of holy because he is the richest and most powerful man on the planet. Everyone’s holiness quotient is measured against the standard of Musk. Therefore, weakness and vulnerability are considered the worst sins and punished by the Church of All Worlds. This is not a religion promising salvation for the oppressed, but a religion promising the believers salvation from the oppressed by licensing violence against the weak.

For those sure that the word “religion” means only what they believe, this will not sound like a real religion. After all, the definition of religion is exactly what they believe, so by definition anything calling itself a religion that does not exactly match their beliefs is a false religion. Others might point out that Musk’s new religion lacks the essential elements of a religion like a liturgy or a holly book. Others will argue that the “Old Ones” business is just warmed over paganism.

Most people, however, will be troubled by the fact that his new religion seems to justify kicking people while they are down. This religion of the elect, or “master race” as Musk prefers to call his followers, is providing a justification for the strong to attack the weak, which is the opposite of what people think of with regards to religion. Thousands of years of conditioning have taught us that religion promises the weak salvation from the torments of this world, especially from the predation of the strong.

Sensing that his new religion is not working, he changes the name of the new religion from the Church of All Worlds to X. Atop his megachurch he has installed a giant neon X that you can see from space. He changes the definition of weak to include those who choose not to join the new religion. Their doubt is their weakness. The weak can enjoy earthly power if they give up their old ideas and join X. Those who refuse remain fair game, but the door is always open to them.

That sounds a bit better, even if the new name strikes everyone as stupid. His new religion still celebrates the abuse of the weak and vulnerable, but it gives them a path out of their condition. All they have to do is stop fighting the tides of history and they can enjoy the benefits of being on the winning team. Musk and his lieutenants will still be at the top and the material life for the convert will not change that much, but they will avoid having mobs of black-clad street activists attacking them.

In this way, Musk’s new religion incorporates that old Christian concept of salvation but retains the Nietzschean notion that the strong must dominate the weak. The believers still get to demonstrate their superiority by attacking the weak, but they get to view it as salvation from the wicked. The weak now have a clear path out of their condition, so if they remain in their condition, they must secretly reject the new religion. Their condition is proof of their rejection of and attack on the elect.

This new configuration also opens up whole new areas of scholarship for otherwise useless people to explain why the weak persist in their weakness. Weakness studies leads to weakness experts, who make a living explaining to the faithful why the weak are actually a threat to the strong. In fact, the weak are proof of a conspiracy against the strong, thus making the weak a public display of violence against the strong. It is a matter of self-defense for the strong to attack the weak!

Probably the most important innovation in the religion of X is that it turns success within the new moral order into proof of strength and moral fitness. Those at the top are free to think poorly of those below them, who are thankful for the reinforcement, as it justifies their own shabby treatment of those below them. In this way, everyone in the religion has a sense of moral superiority over someone, but also a strong motivation to maintain the rules of the new moral order.

The trouble with the religion of X is that it could run out of weak people, so it has to create a mechanism to make sure the supply of weak people is steady. This is where the weakness studies people really show their stuff. They police the lower ranks of the religion for troublemakers, declaring them weak while focusing the attention of the lower ranks on them. This maintains the supply of weaklings and serves as a reminder to the faithful that the price of strength is eternal vigilance.

Eventually, a schism develops between the wing of the faith that is in it only for the debauchery and those who are in it to destroy the world. The latter camp is actually stronger than the former camp, but they continue to insist they are the weaker party, which triggers a mob from the former camp to attack them. Musk is killed and the church collapses, leading to a civil war. This ends when a new powerful group, led by a man claiming to be a descendent of Musk restores order.

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Thoughts On The New Gods

Posted on July 10, 2023 by thezman

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Despite their many parallels in practice, we separate ideology from religion as two separate things that appeal to different aspect of man. Ideology is an integrated set of assertions, theories, and goals for achieving a social end, while religion is assumed to be a set of beliefs with a supernatural basis. The ideologue is focused on imposing changes in how we live as humans in a human society, while the believer is someone primarily focused on how the individual reaches the afterlife.

This distinction is entirely due to Christianity, which is a universal set of beliefs that apply to all individuals, even those unaware of it. Christians start with the belief that all people have an individual relationship with God. The point of life is to discover and embrace this relationship so that you can sit at the feet of God in the afterlife. As a result, we think of religion as a world-rejecting phenomenon. It is focused on what comes after this life, not how to improve this life.

This has not always been how religion works. What we used to call paganism was not particularly concerned with the afterlife. The religions of pre-Christian people were often world-affirming and specific to their people. A people had their gods to whom they could appeal for practical things like a good harvest or protection from the bad people on the other side of the valley. Their gods were tied to their identity as a people and their customs that gave meaning to their lives.

Some of the old religion still exists in this age. You cannot become a Druze, for example, even if you learn their religion. You have to be born into their faith in order to be accepted into their religion. Shintoism is not as strict, in terms of outsiders joining the religion, but for all practical purposes it is a Japanese faith. It is impossible to disentangle Shinto belief from Japanese identity. These are what people who study religion call folk religions.

Here is where you see the lines between religion and ideology blur. While Marxism does not possess a god or gods, it is not without its mystery. Marxist historiography is a central tenet of Marxism that must be accepted without proof. Then you have the assertion that this arc of history must bend toward communism. Of course, there is the assumption that all of mankind will eventually progress to the point where they join the rest of humanity in the communist paradise.

The similarities between religion and ideology have been noted many times, but always as a way to underscore the irrationality of the ideologue. The climate change people are compared to a cult, because they carry on as if they are worshipping Mother Earth and fear she is unhappy with mankind. Calling it a religion is a way to dismiss their claims to science and reason. Joe Sobran made the comparison between the Left and religion in his essay about the hive.

There may be another way of using this comparison. For example, the distinction made between universal religions like Christianity and folk religions like Shintoism provide an insight into why one triumphed over the other with some exceptions. Christianity pushed out paganism in Europe because it offered something that paganism either did not offer or did not address as well as the new religion. Similarly, Christianity has been a failure in Japan because it lacks something the native religion possesses.

A simple example is the Gaia worshippers. What is it about this doomsday cult that the believers find appealing? There is a money racket to it, for sure, but this is only possible because millions of people sense that the way we are living in the modern age is leading to some sort of supernatural doom. Is this belief appealing because it offers salvation from this world or is the appeal that it provides them with something to supplement their identity as a group?

If we take that last part a bit further and incorporate Gaia worship into the basket of things we call the Left, the result is a collection of beliefs that define a group of people and give them an elevated sense of status. Proof of their uniqueness is their membership in a group that holds these beliefs. They are on the right side of history because they carry their groceries in grimy canvas sacks and take their young children to drag shows at the local library.

Perhaps the appeal of what we call wokeness lies in the sense of identity it provides to people who live in highly conformist societies. The people who embrace these ideas are uniformly white, educated and upper-middle-class. They live in inorganic sterile suburban developments and work in fields with high levels of enforced conformity, like education, government, and corporate management. The folk nature of the new religion is what helps give their lives meaning.

On the other hand, it is possible that the new religion is the vestigial part of the old world-rejecting religion expressing through social fads. The gender stuff is a clear rejection of biological reality. Gaia worship is the rejection of human progress and civilization itself. The thread that runs through all of these social fads is their destructiveness to Western societies. The new religion of wrecking things appeals to people seeking an escape from this life.

The other appeal is that the destruction of the old order and the coming of the new world orders is full of uncertainty. The weirdness of these beliefs operates as a selection mechanism, filtering out anyone who questions the project. The new religion selects for those seeking the same shelter from the storm, but also those who think that when the storm passes, they will lead the way into the next phase of humanity. There is, after all, a whiff of Calvinism to all of this.

At this point, it is hard to know where the new religion will go or where it will end up on the folk-universal spectrum. What we can know is that new religions are like new ideologies in that they appeal to those unhappy with the present. Communism appealed to disaffected intellectuals and the urban industrial poor. Christianity appealed to provincials in the failing Roman empire. The reason this new religion appeals to the managerial class is they are unhappy with the present.

Religious Equity

Posted on June 22, 2023 by thezman

Recently the Supreme Court struck down an Alabama redistricting plan on the grounds that it needed one more black district. The majority claimed that the Voting Rights Act demands racial proportionality in congressional districting, even though it says no such thing and if it did, it would be unconstitutional. The courts follow the news, and these judges understand what happens when you question racial orthodoxy, so they invented a new reason to conform with orthodoxy.

While the trend toward threatening judges, as is common in other corrupt societies, is an interesting topic, what matters here is the proportionality claim. One of the ideological shadows over this age is an old claim by the post-Mark culturalists, or what used to be called the New Left, is this idea that equity demands proportionality. Equity is the claim that a just society requires all people to equally participate and equally benefit from the stuff that come from society.

Back in the old days when left-wing meant high taxes on rich people, racial antagonists would argue that representation should be by race and sex. Congress should be composed along racial and sexual lines. If thirteen percent of America is black, then there should be fifty-seven blacks in Congress. Since roughly half the adult population is female, half of Congress should be female. This idea never got far, but the concept is embedded in the calls for equity.

At this point it is common to note that it makes no sense to hurl men into the void for noticing race while also demanding racial filters be applied to all outcomes. If it is true that black people know things about blackness that only black people can know and that requires that they be proportionally represented in all matters to ensure they get what they deserve, then race is not just real, but it is the only reality. The same can be said of sex, which gets the same treatment.

The inherent stupidity of the new religion is the main appeal. Ingratitude and grievance are functions of intelligence. The smarter you are, the less likely you are to think the world is unfair or that you are owed more than you deserve. Stupid people prefer to think their condition is the fault of others. The more magical and mysterious the cause, the more appealing it is to the aggrieved. Disproving something nutty like institutional racism is like disproving paranormal activity or astrology.

Putting that aside, the proportionality idea is not without some merit. Politics is about normative trade-offs. There is no empirically correct tax code, for example. Taxes are collected to pay for government. Who pays those taxes is a moral decision. The same is true for all public policy. The right policy is not something that can be established by the scientific method. It is what the rich people who control government think is the right policy or what they hope will keep the peasants docile.

With that in mind, if you are going to have representative government, then the legislative bodies should reflect the moral diversity of the people. The easiest way to sort people in terms of moral outlook is by their religious affiliation. Jews will have a different moral code than Muslims or Buddhists, for example. While all religions share moral claims, they have important differences. If the differences were superficial, there would be no need for separate religions.

Here is a recent list of congressmen and senators by religion. Presumably, this is based on what the person says about his religious identity. Many no doubt lie. For example, Joe Biden claims to be a Catholic, but he actively promotes things that are specifically against Catholic dogma. Is Hank Johnson a Buddhist? He is the guy who thinks Guam might flip over if too many people stand on one side. Moron is not a religion, but it could probably describe many members of Congress.

With that said, the most represented faith in Congress is Catholicism. They make up 28% of the elected officials. Catholics are 21% of the population, so the Vatican is significantly overrepresented in Washington politics. The next group is listed as “Protestant unspecified” at 20%, which probably means the person grew up in a secular home with a Protestant history. If you add this group to those who have no religious identity, this cohort of American is well-represented.

The group not getting equitable treatment, using the language of the new religion, is the largest religious identity in America. Protestants are roughly 45% of the American population but only 35% of Congress. Again, many of the people calling themselves Episcopalian or Presbyterian are faking it like we see with Catholics. What are the odds that Senator Chris Van Hollen can name a single Episcopal church in his state, much less the last time he went to mass?

This raises another consideration. About 30% of Americans attend services regularly, which is usually defined as at least once a month. About a third of Americans attend services for events like weddings, funerals, and holidays. It is fair to assume that a good portion of that group would attend regularly if the churches had not succumbed to the modern disease. Why go to church when you can hear a similar sermon during half time of the football game?

Now, how many elected officials regularly attend church services? How many of them even believe in God? There is no data on this, but it is a good guess that only a small portion of elected officials are genuinely religious. Instead, their views on religion and morality reflect the people who bankroll their campaigns and control the important parts of the managerial state. If you want to have a good career in Washington, you best keep your religious views to yourself.

If you want to know why so-called conservatives fall for every left-wing social fad, there is the answer. These people are experts at talking about religion and morality, but they exist in a world that has a different moral order and a radically different moral code from the people over whom they rule. Congressman X instinctively puts a sodomy flag on his Twitter profile, because that is what everyone else he knows is doing. The fact that he claims to be a Baptist is not in the front of his mind.

The point of all this is that one major cause of the current crisis of trust is that the ruling class of America has a different and district moral code. This shows up in the normative decisions made by Congress and elected officials. If Congress truly reflected the morality of the people, much of what drives Americans crazy about national politics would not exist, much less be the center of debate. Our politics would reflect our shared moral code and our shared moral priorities.

One of the ironies of this age is the people hopping up and down about equity also rail against religion and religious people. Yet the most likely way of reaching some sort of equitable result would start with equity in Congress. If the house and Senate truly reflected the moral sensibilities of the people, many of the issue at the heart of the social justice demand would be resolved. Religious equity in Washington would go a long way toward creating a just society.

What Is Woke?

Posted on April 17, 2023 by thezman

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A small debate on-line was kicked off by this post from the venerable Paul Gottfried regarding the topic of Wokism. Gottfried pointed out that it is an error to confuse this new ideology with Marxism. While many of the thinkers who laid the groundwork for what we presently call Wokism were Marxists or came out of the Marxist intellectual space, this new ideology is not Marxism. Marxism and Wokism operate in separate intellectual domains and traditions.

This did not sit well with those in the bourgeoning industry that revolves around verbal antagonism toward Wokism. James Lindsay felt it necessary to call Paul Gottfried an idiot while dismissing his post entirely. Lindsay makes his living these days peddling the idea that Wokism is “Marxist-Fascism” which is completely nuts, but it appears that he has been driven insane in his effort to make sense of the material within post-Marx culturalism that informs this new ideology.

It needs to be said that Paul Gottfried’s dog probably knows more about this topic than Lindsay will ever know. Given Gottfried’s connection to Frankfurt School theorist Herbert Marcuse, he is as close as we get to an expert on the forerunners of this new ideology gripping the minds of the ruling class. Gottfried is also a world-renowned expert on fascism as an intellectual concept. Paul can be an idiot like everyone else, but on this topic, he knows more than most.

That said, there is a tendency of people on what we call the Right to engage in the same binary thinking we see with the people we call the Left. That means playing the old game of linguistic guilt by association. Since Lindsay’s intended audience has been trained to hear “Marxism” and “Fascism” as scare words, he associates Wokism with those two words to stimulate his audience. Wokism, Marxism and Fascism just mean “bad” to the people in that scene.

On the other hand, there is a segment of the civic nationalist space that insists everything can be reduced to money and power. Their theory is that the people with all of the money and power are doing this Wokism thing because they want even more money and power. In other words, there is no reason to think too much about these novel cultural fads. The people behind them do not really believe that destroying whiteness leads to the promised land.

There is another camp that has chimed in on this topic, mostly in response to those who chant about liberalism being the only antidote to Wokism. The claim from this camp is that liberalism or some aspect of liberalism, like individualism, is responsible for the phenomena we call Wokism. Some say Wokism is just the full expression of liberalism, while others say liberalism is the manure that fertilized Wokism. Either way, this weird new ideology is the result of Western liberalism.

There is an interesting contrast here with the Hazony camp, who argue that Wokism is just a new form of collectivism. He says the antidote to this collective ideology is nationalism, which he defines as a collective defense of the tradition, culture, and history of a people. Those blaming liberalism, however, think the answer is a dictator acting on behalf of the people to defend their traditions, culture, and history. Put another way, the answer is either “good” nationalism or “bad” nationalism.

The result of this debate is a muddled picture of Wokism that mostly serves as a platform for whatever is being promoted as an alternative. They all agree that Wokism is bad, but they do not agree on what it is or why it exists. Everyone agrees that the 20th century was a disaster, giving birth to this bizarre mind virus called Wokism, yet everyone agrees we have to go back to the 20th century to reanimate one of the dead ideologies, but which one is the point of contention.

Interestingly, there is little attention to the word “woke” and why it became the preferred label of the people in this new ideology. The generally accepted explanation for the term is that it broke out of black politics into the broader Left as shorthand for being aware of the reality of the system. That reality was oppression, first in the name of white society, but then in the name of the abstract concept of whiteness. Awareness of the reality behind this false reality is what it means to be woke.

Not only is there nothing Marxist about the origins of the term, but there is also nothing liberal about it either. If anything, the root is paranoia and delusion. To be woke is to dismiss reality as a trick by white people. You must substitute your own reality, your lived experience, as it were, for the false reality. This is the sort of thinking that used to be associated with conspiracy theories. At essence, Wokism is simply awareness of the great conspiracy that lies behind reality.

This strikes most people as insane, but there is a logic to it. The core assumptions of the people we call the Left are egalitarianism and the blank slate. They assume that all people come into this world with the same potential. People are shaped by family life, society, and experience. The great variation we see in people is due to these social forces molding people during their life. You are a product of your environment, which means inequality is the result of those social forces.

Obviously, if some people benefit from the rules and others suffer, then there must be a reason for the rules benefiting one group over another. From a black identity perspective, this is a much better answer than biology. The condition of blacks in America is no longer a product of biological reality and instead the result of a system that harms them to the benefit of white people. This not only justifies questioning the system, but it also justifies attacking the system.

Of course, this framing can work for any identity group, real or imagined, that views themselves as oppressed. Anti-Semites use the same logic to explain why Jews run the world, despite being a tiny minority. Reality itself is a part of the great trick being played upon the oppressed. The people behind this false reality use it and their control over the systems of power to benefit themselves as an oppressor class at the expense of whoever is feeling oppressed at the moment.

This is something the “blame it on Marx” camp has right. Wokeness has borrowed the idea of class conflict and applied it to identity politics. For Marx, the proletariat was the only legitimate class, but for the Woke, every identity group is legitimate, no matter how obscure, except for the oppressor class. This is why white people, especially white males, are not allowed to be “allies” unless they either adopt some novel identity or fully confess their sins as a member of the oppressor class.

Of course, the anti-liberals can point to the business about oppression and claim it comes from liberalism. Liberalism has always conceded that coercion is a necessary part of every society. The goal of politics should be to reduce coercion, which is the argument for both popular government and cooperative government. Taken to its logical conclusion, the goal should be a society free of coercion, which by definition is a society that is free of all oppression.

Wokism would amount to nothing more than bourgeois decadence if not for the fact that rich white people are acting on it. Striking the radical pose has been around since the birth of the American empire. Things like black identity politics or novel sexual movements have always been popular with the bourgeois radical, but it never amounted to much in terms of policy. What is new is that it is aggressively embraced by the ruling class, which should fall into the oppressor bucket.

That is the key to understanding the reality of Wokism. Why all of a sudden are oligarchs investing in things like Black Lives Matter, which raked in billions and did nothing but set cities on fire? Why is the Secretary of State lecturing Saudi Arabia on their intolerance of crossdressers? America puts the sodomite flag up on its embassies during homosexual month. We now have months dedicated to various identity groups, real and imagined.

In this regard, the reductionists are correct in that this new ideology does something for the people embracing it. They get something from it. The reductionists are wrong, however, in assuming it gets them money and power. They have money and power, so the last thing they should want is to undermine the system that provides them with all of the money and power. They are getting something from this new way of thinking, but it is not the stuff they already possess to excess.

That is the key to understanding Wokism. It is not so much what it is but what it does for the people who embrace it. For the managerial elite, it provides a sense of legitimacy to their place atop the social hierarchy. For the climbers dreaming of a perch at the top and those who gain satisfaction aping those at the top, it provides an ever-changing set of cultural fashions. Primarily, Wokism provides a way to distinguish who is inside and who is outside the dominant social group.

This is why you see the convert-adherent dynamic within Wokism. For some people, delving into the esoteric thought that underlies Wokism is a revelation that cuts them off from their old life and sets them off into a new life. For most, it is just the thing they need to do to operate within their social class. These are the adherents. They are often the most aggressive at enforcing the moral code because they connect it with their own standing inside their social class.

Of course, all elites have two primary concerns. One is the peasant revolt and the other is the palace coup. Wokism provides a defense against the former by putting the peasants on their backfoot, always defending themselves against an evolving set of moral codes that violate their sense of decency. Like the corporate HR department, Wokism is always ready for a new initiative to change the culture by preventing the people from discussing the current culture.

The other side of Wokism is it enforces discipline withing the managerial elite by demanding the converts and adherent focus on the moral code. Those people with Ukraine flags on their Twitter profile used to have a syringe and before that a mask and before that a BLM badge. From the entry level to the C-suites, the managerial class spends more time keeping track of the current thing than they do in performing whatever task they are assigned in the system.

This is not as much of a novelty as it seems. In the court of Louis XIV, the people in Versailles often participated in humiliation rituals. A part of who they were was their willingness to degrade themselves. It is an elite version of the Theodore Dalrymple observation about communist societies and political correctness. “A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.” Wokism provides a necessary enforcement mechanism to maintain elite solidarity.

What Wokism does is fill the role of religion for the ruling elite. If you go back and examine the language of abolitionists or New Deal reformers, you will find that the language is not particularly different from the language of Wokism. The main difference is the overt references to God and Christian morality. It is not hard to imagine the grievance studies departments singing a Woke version of the Battle Hymn of the Republic before every staff meeting.

Every elite needs a sense of legitimacy. This is what authorizes their use of force to coerce the people into compliance. “Because we can” is never enough. Elites must operate from “because we must” and Wokism not only provides the moral force behind their actions but justifies their position at the top. Their commitment to these social causes, to the liberation of man from the human condition, is proof that they deserve their position at the top, as leaders of the people.

Finally, we are left with the question of why this ridiculous collection of beliefs has filled the elite’s need for an organizing purpose. One reason is timing. The radicals that fled Europe in the middle of the last century arrived when the elite of the new American empire was in need of a new organizing ethos. Protestantism was no longer a good fit as Jews took up positions in the managerial elite. A new elite needed a new ideology, and the new radicalism was there to supply that need.

The necessity of the Cold War, however, limited the growth of this new religion among the elites, as the threat of nuclear war required serious men. When the fate of the world is on the line, you cannot afford to humor the man in a dress. Of course, the conflict with the Soviets provided all the required villains for the ruling class. In fact, a radical complaint in the Cold War was that anti-communism sucked all of the air out of the room, leaving no space for the new ideas.

The end of the Cold War removed that constraint. It also left a void in the ruling elite that what we now call Wokism was ready to fill. Now that we have reached the end of history, the ruling elite of the empire could get on with the project of liberating mankind from the oppression and unfairness of the human condition. Wokism is the new religion of this new ruling elite that exists to liberate humanity. From the war on Islam to the current war on Russia, Wokism is about freeing the world.

Many have noted that Wokism sounds like Gnosticism. That is because embedded in human experience is the desire to transcend this life. That sense becomes acute for those who rise to the top of society. If you possess God-like power over your fellow man, why not take the final step? Our managerial elite embraces Wokism because it promises to give them power over the human condition. When you can turn boys into girls, you have become a god.

In the end, this is where most of the critics of Wokism fall short. They cannot accept that vagueness as the answer. They insist that the Woke know why they believe what they believe or that they know it is all nonsense. None of this matters. Beliefs exist because they serve a purpose. For our present elites, Wokism fills a need, so they do not have to think about the logic behind it. If the time comes when Wokism stops filling the needs of the elite, they get a new religion, or we get a new elite.

Chasing The Dragon

Posted on February 1, 2023 by thezman

Recently, whoever owns the Dodge car brand announced that the brand would stop making sports cars in the near future. They will discontinue their line of muscle cars in favor of electric cars. Many other car makers have promised that they will soon cease making cars with internal combustion engines. Reminiscent of the Soviet five year plans, they are promising to be right with Gaia in five years. Like those five year plans this is unlikely to happen, barring societal collapse.

The main reason this will never happen is that electric cars are and always have been a stupid lie against practical reality. The stupidity lies in the fact that at the end of every green scheme lies a smokestack. There is no such thing as renewable energy so that leaves the only way we know to get usable energy, breaking atoms. The lie is that these new cars are better in some way. They are not. In fact, electric cars are inferior at all of the things that make normal cars useful.

This short post summarizes the more obvious problems with eclectic vehicles, but you could write a book on the topic. The cost of ownership is significantly higher to the user and even higher for society, if one thinks mountains of old batteries is a problem that society should mitigate against. Then there is the fact that they will forever be impractical for most people. The biggest problem is they will require trillions in infrastructure changes that will never happen.

Like the eBook, the electric car is a solution in search of a problem. In fact, the eBook is the place to start in order to grasp the lunacy of the EV. Deliberately swept down the memory hole is the fact that the same people who say the electric car is the future also said the eBook was the future. The claim was the reduced cost of making an eBook versus a real book would end printing entirely. The publishers would simply abandon the practice of printing books.

There is the first comparison to ponder. Hidden in the selling of the eBook idea was the claim that you would be forced to burn your paper books in favor of Amazon deciding what you could read. It was a form of the old communist line about capitalist selling the communists the rope they would use to hang them. In this case, the greed of the publishers would be used to enforce the eBook dream. Behind every radical project are men holding pistols, waiting for their chance.

We see an advanced version at work with electric vehicles. First the regime rolled out incentives for battery makers and car makers. Then they rolled out incentives for people to buy these cars. There are incentives for municipalities to install charging stations and find ways to encourage EV use. Now we are into the stick phase where car makers are getting bullied to stop making normal cars. The regime enjoys the carrot and stick approach, but they most really enjoy the stick.

In both the eBook and the eVehicle, we saw form up what amounted to a religious community in support of these novelties. When the eBook hit the scene, the same people who swore Starbucks made great coffee suddenly decided that they could only read off a device. It was the future! The same people who swore eBooks were the future are now saying the same thing with electric cars. They are the same people who swore masks and standing on one foot would prevent Covid.

The electric car and the electric book are two examples of the other side of the moral panic, which is the moral crusade. Both moral the panic and the moral crusade arise from the same desire among the people swept up in them. They are seeking both salvation and a sense of security. On the one hand, they want to be secure from whatever it is that is causing the panic, like climate change or Covid. On the other hand, they want to be seen as a good person, one of the elect.

For a very long time, almost all of human history in fact, religion was the vessel into which these aspects of belief were contained. Religion told the faithful that as long as they were pious they were going to be okay. Maybe that meant an afterlife or maybe it meant justice in this life. If they followed the rules, they would be safe. It also promised a little extra for those who were particularly pious. The public act of piety has been with us since Gobekli Tepe for this reason.

It turns out that reason, appeals to nature and historical inevitability are poor replacements for the supernatural. In the Christian era, the faith supplied all of the spiritual security one needed, because it truly sated the desire. It made clear what one could expect from salvation. Ideology, on the other hand, ironically enough, is like an opioid, in that it provides an initial euphoric satisfaction, but then an insatiable craving for even more of what it promised.

It turns out that we are plagued by these moral crusades and panics because the people behind them are like drug addicts. For them, modernity is an opium den in which the are condemned to chase the dragon for eternity. It is why during Covid so many of them had that same dead expression in their eyes you see from addicts. With their mask firmly on, they were in the only space where they were both free from the agony of desire and the ecstasy of the narcotic high.

Now that the high priest of the electric vehicle has revealed himself to be nothing more than an opportunist, the religion of the EV has been shaken. The people who told us the electrical car was the vehicle to spiritual satisfaction are now turning on the idea as a way to smite the evil Elon Musk. Of course, practical reality will eventually reduce the idea to a niche item, like the eBook. Somewhere, someone like Elon Musk is thinking about the next moral crusade to monetize.

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Welcome To The New Rome

Posted on December 12, 2022 by thezman

Note #1: I have multiple goodies up behind the green door this week. The schedule going forward will be two written pieces a week and one podcast. You can sign up at SubscribeStar or Substack.

Note #2: If you are looking for a book to read, you may want to buy the book A Walk in the Park: My Charlottesville Story. It is a first person account of the events by a couple of good guys who deserve your support. it would be a great Christmas gift.

Imagine you agree to play a game with someone and the first rule of the game is that your opponent sets the rules of the game and he can change the rules whenever he likes for any reason he likes. That would mean that no matter your mastery of the rules, you must always lose the game because your opponent will simply change the rules whenever necessary. You would spend all of your time learning rules that keep changing to put you at a disadvantage.

Similarly, imagine that you decide to build a house on another man’s property, without getting a fixed agreement on your use rights. Since the landowner could at any time tell you to remove your house or even deny you access to it, the focus of your life must be making sure that you are in good standing with the landowner. While technically the house is yours, in reality he sets the rules for how you use it. Like the game example above, your life is about complying with changing rules.

This is the situation for professional Christians. They have agreed to allow their opponents to set the rules of the moral framework. Like the guy building a house on another man’s land, they have built their church on progressive land. The professional Christian must always get permission to use his church. Or like the game example, he must spend his time making sure the tenets of his faith comport with the changing morality of the prevailing the moral framework.

You see it in this rather bizarre post at First Things. There are two main assertions made in the post. One is that racism, and the mythological concept of white supremacy, are the worst things possible. The other point is that it is the duty of Christians to purge those accused of these sins from the ranks of the political Right. To make this point, he piles on a guy named Thomas Achord, a headmaster of a private classical Christian academy, who was accused of blasphemy by the Left.

A feature of professional Christianity is to not only abandon a fellow Christian attacked by the enemies of the faith, but to also rush to the front of the line of bigots taking turns kicking the accused. Here is the execrable Rod Dreher taking some self-righteous shots at Thomas Achord. Like David French, Rod Dreher never misses an opportunity to promote his own virtue. He is who Emerson had in mind when he said, “The more he spoke of his virtue, the faster we counted the spoons.”

Note that Christian mercy never comes up when the Left starts howling for the blood of a Christian accused of violating the progressive faith. Professional Christians are like a pack of wild dogs. As soon as they sense a member of the pack is weak, they pounce on the poor fellow, tearing him to pieces. One cannot help but wonder if this behavior is solely to please the Left. Many of them, like Dreher and French, seem to take pleasure in these sadistic rituals.

Of course, the reason that professional Christians rush out these condemnations whenever one of their own has violated progressive dogma is to let the people holding the other end of the leash know they are a good boy. For professional Christians, what matters is remaining in good standing with the Left. These ritualized condemnations are a public act of piety – progressive piety. It is an affirmation that Christian piety must always rest on the moral foundations of the Left.

Another example of this sort vulgarity is this self-published video from Anglican priest in Nova Scotia Canada. If not for the collar, one would be forgiven for thinking Father Ed Trevors is a weirdo from the grievance studies department. In the description of this tantrum, he makes sure to post his pronouns. One thing missing from his public act of piety is a reference to Scripture. Like all Anglican priests, he is probably unfamiliar with the foundation text of his church.

Putting aside the vulgarity of these displays, the premise of the argument in that First Things article is anything but a Christian argument. Jesus Christ had plenty of chances to state his opinions about racism and white supremacy. He had nothing to say on the matter. His disciples wrote and spoke about the full range of the human dilemma but never bothered to mention anything about racism. Scripture is silent on the issue of race and the moral claims around it.

The reason for this is that these are entirely novel concepts conjured in the last century for purely political reasons. Even those on the winning side of the American Civil War lacked the racism concept. Lincoln famously said, “there is a physical difference between the white and black races that will for ever forbid the two races from living together on terms of social and political equality.” He repeated these claims throughout the Civil War to audiences on his side.

Now, there are people who will cherry pick lines from Scripture claiming that Jesus was very much opposed to racism. Never mind that the concept did not exist in the age of Jesus and his language lacked words for the concept. Even if one can make these leaps of logic, the reason for doing so is to make Christian morality match progressive morality, in order to please the people controlling public morality. Those who bothered to read their Bible should be thinking of Matthew 6:24 right now.

In fairness, the professional Christian can argue that Christians must live in this world and that means navigating around secular moral claims. That is clearly not what we are seeing with these people. Instead, their Christianity is just part of the sales pitch they use to convince Christian people to embrace secular morality. Once you accept this new class of sins as far worse than those in your theology, you have subordinated your theology to those creating the new class of sins.

Arguably the most challenging thing is this age is to be a Christian. Your enemies control the commanding heights of Western society. Your friends are always looking for a way to profit from their alleged defense of you. It is a good reminder that all moral frameworks must stand alone. In the case of Christianity, it means the logic of the faith must stand outside of and often opposed to the prevailing orthodoxy. Christianity now finds itself where it started. Welcome to the new Rome.

The Future Christian

Posted on December 7, 2022 by thezman

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A question that never gets asked is whether or not Christianity, however one wants to define it, can survive in the modern West. Those opposed to Christianity, which is the entirety of the managerial class, never discuss it. Actual Christians are aware of the challenges they face, but they just assume they are on the side of angels, literally and figuratively, so the question does not require an answer. If you are sure yours is the one true faith, then the survival question has been answered.

Looking at survey data, just three states, Alabama, Tennessee and Utah, have a weekly church attendance over 50%. On the other side, New Hampshire is the only state that has a majority who never attend services at all. Vermont, Maine and Massachusetts are all in the high 40% range and on their way to being majority non-Christian. Given that Yankeedom has ruled the country since Gettysburg, it is no wonder that the rest of the country is slowly losing its religion too.

In Europe things are bleak for the Christians. Four countries, Belgium, the UK, France
and the Czech Republic have majorities who have never attended church. Spain and the Netherlands are in the high 40’s. Poland and Ireland are the only two countries with a majority of church goers, but in both cases, the younger population has caught the modern disease and they avoid church. In Poland youth attendance is 27% and in Ireland it is at 33% according to recent surveys.

In fairness, there are a few modifiers to these numbers. One is how one defines regular church attendance. Most surveys break it down between weekly, multiple times per year, rarely and never. One can still identify as a Catholic, even if one is only going to mass on a monthly basis. Similarly, an adult that does not attend service, but went to church as a child and was baptized into the faith could still identify as a Christian, but not necessarily a practicing one.

The point being is that you can quibble with the numbers and whose survey is better, but the overall picture does not change. Christianity in the West is not just on the wane, but in many places, it is on the way out. When you shift from the private sphere to the public one, it is rare to find any discussion of Christianity. The Christians allowed on stage must profess an undying devotion to Jewish people, Israel and various myths and legends important to the Jewish people.

This void in the managerial class is being filled by people who define Christian as the bad whites they despise. The recent gay marriage bill made possible by the Republican party, allows the IRS to strip churches of their tax exempt status if they are not willing to play along with the homosexual marriage charade. Like the Obama health care bill, the point is mostly about attacking Christians. The people in charge want the believers to know that they are not welcome in America.

This is where the survival question comes into play. Most people who regularly attend services think they have a constitutional right to their faith. Evangelicals, for example, when they are not celebrating Israel, are waving the flag. These are people who not only think they are on the side of angels, but they also think they have the law on their side with regards to how they practice their faith. These people are completely unprepared to defend their faith from the coming assault.

Mainstream Protestantism has been thoroughly corrupted. On the east coast, the surest sign you are near an Episcopal church is the rainbow flag. That sect has given itself over completely to the worship of homosexuals. The Southern Baptist Convention now sounds like the grievance studies depart at a third tier state college. The Methodists are in a civil war over the usual questions. Of course, the Catholic church long ago succumbed to the pink mafia that took over the clergy.

The fact is, the Christian in modern America is under assault not just from the historical enemies of the faith, but from the institutions he has relied upon to defend religious liberty in America. The churches themselves have signed onto the programs that promise to make it impossible to be a Christian, at least one who thinks Scripture is more than just some pointless stories. Just as important, the believers seem to be psychologically unprepared for the fight.

From a purely secular and analytical perspective, religions evolve to solve the basic questions of human society. Religions help explain the natural world and provide authority to the customs and traditions of a people. Often, religion provides at least part of the answer to the central question, who are we? It is religion that helps people understand the observable world around them. That ranges from the natural phenomenon to the nature of human relations.

The modern West is increasingly defined by the deliberate avoidance of observable reality, along with prohibitions against noticing certain things. The authority for these prohibitions is mob rule, guided by an invisible hand that is on the list of things no one is allowed to mention. Christianity offers an alternative source of authority and Scripture encourages the believer to engage with the human condition. It is not hard to see why that invisible hand guiding the mob hates Christians.

This brings us back to the beginning. Can Christianity survive? The answer depends a lot on how one defines Christianity. Within this century the mainline churches will have disappeared, their nicer buildings having been made into museums. Baring a cataclysm that derails modernity, institutional churches are doomed. That will leave the believers to fend for themselves as ad hoc communities. They will have to redefine what it means to be a Christian in order to survive the onslaught.

That presents another problem. Most of the people who would join an ad hoc community of believers embraces the universalism and openness that has been the ruin of Christianity in the West. In a world where demographic reality is the defining feature, the refusal to recognize demographic reality is a suicide pill. In other words, if Christianity is to survive, it will have to become something different. Christians will have to find the authority for new survival skills within Scripture.

It is easy to see why Christians prefer not to think about this stuff. It is a complex problem that defies simple answers. It is a lot easier to type “Christ is King!” in a Gab post than think about these challenges. Like all the other problems facing Western people, the future does not lie in the past. Whatever comes next for Christians will be fashioned from what is available in the future. Like most Western traditions, the old Christianity will not survive the revolution.

The Dissident and the Christian

Posted on April 15, 2022 by thezman

It is fair to say that this is the worst time for Christians and Christianity in the West since the Roman empire. In order to promote equality, liberal democracy has created protected classes of people who cannot be criticized. The other side of this are people who must me mocked and ridiculed. Christians were the first group placed in this category and remain the popular object of ridicule in the West. There is no prohibition against overt hatred of Christians in most Western countries.

We are not feeding Christian to lions in gladiatorial pits, but you can be sure some elements of the ruling class have thought about it. Back in the Obama years, much of the health care bill was designed to torment Christians. For example, forcing Catholic groups to pay for abortions and prophylactics. There was no public health reason for these provisions. They simply satisfied the demented and sadistic impulses of the people who put together the program.

In some Western countries, practicing your faith is close to illegal. Päivi Räsänen is a Finnish politician. She was charged with crimes against democracy for tweeting out a picture of a Bible and quoting it in public. She was eventually acquitted by the courts, but that was not the point. Persecution is about the process. This was true under communism and is even more true under liberal democracy. Hell is being in the control of ideological fanatics staffing a bureaucracy.

The fact is the managerial elites of the West are not irreligious. Ideology is just religion that replaces God with man. Our elites are fanatics for liberal democracy and they will murder anyone who questions it. Christianity has always been their primary target because the Christian’s first loyalty can never be to man or the institutions and ideologies he creates. Liberal democracy, of course, demands absolute obedience to the state and the people who run the state.

It is not just the secular elites that make war on the Christian. The big churches have been taken over by the ideologues. Anywhere you see a rainbow flag it is either a gay bathhouse, a public school or a Protestant church. The Pope cares more about climate change than the Catholic faith. Even the Baptists have seen their organizations taken over by far-left radicals. The great challenge for most Christians is in finding a church that is not run by a far-left lunatic.

Culture is to a great degree a trickle down affair. The hostility toward Christianity among the Cloud People has infected the Dirt People. Church attendance has been in decline for a few generations. Close to 30% of Americans have no religious identity. This means they have no experience with religion. About 40% of people who still identify as Christian no longer attend church. Overall, about 40% of Americans still belong to a church and attend services on a regular basis.

In Europe, Christianity is just about dead. Only 1.4 percent of the population of England attends Anglican services every Sunday. Fewer than one-in-ten Germans say they believe in God. For most Europeans, Christianity is as alien as Islam. They know nothing about it, other than what is taught in history class. Given the entrenched self-loathing that has been imposed by America, Christianity is part of the hated past where evil Europeans tried to enslave black bodies.

It is not all bad news for Christianity. The faithful are slowly realizing that for their faith to survive this age, it must live outside this age. Christians are reverting to what all persecuted minorities must do. They are learning to live in the shadows and think of themselves as the outsider. Traditional Catholics seek one another out and form up shadow communities. Bible study in America is becoming a private affair organized by small local communities of believers.

These defensive measures are what will form the basis of a revival. Anything that is open to everyone is valuable to no one. Christianity was at its most powerful when it was exclusive and required sacrifice from the believers. One of the main reasons for the decline of the Western churches is their success. Once it was easy to be a Christian, it stopped being a powerful force in society. Its return to a persecuted, underground movement is the only path to renewal.

This presents a challenge and an opportunity in dissident politics. Many people waving the dissident banner have yet to shed their liberal disdain for Christianity. Some have manufactured bizarre conspiracy theories about the Church. On the other hand, many sober minded dissidents have soured on their faith, due to the take over of the churches by liberal democratic fanatics. One reason many dissidents have soured on the world is they have seen what happened to their churches.

In America, this is compounded by the problem of evangelical politics. In the 1970’s, in reaction to the cultural revolution, evangelicals decided to engage directly with politics in order to get their guys in office. This was a disaster. Many of the evangelical activist groups became profitable grifts for the leaders. The pols who took advantage of the evangelical vote sold out those voters. They convinced believers that their faith required them to accept liberal degeneracy.

The debacle of Christian political activism cannot be overstated. The neocons were able to take over largely with the support of evangelicals. Even now, after the disaster of the Bush years, many of these groups still care more about Israel than the condition of their own people. When the typical dissident sees stuff like this, he wants to hoist the back flag and start slitting throats. It is a reminder of just how easily these people were turned into weapons against the West.

That said, there is a slow rapprochement between the secular dissidents and the growing number of dissident Christians. The former is coming to understand the defining role not just of belief but of structured rational belief. The latter is coming to terms with the reality of their situation. For the West to survive and resurrect itself after the horrors of liberal democracy, it will need a new set of core beliefs, based in the old ways shaped by the experience of the crisis.

This is where dissident Christians can contribute the most to the cause. The sin of despair is one of the worst, because it is deliberate. One deliberately decides that salvation is impossible. It is the state immediately before suicide. The only reason to be a dissident it to maintain hope that through the struggle, reason and decency can be restored in the West. Without hope, the dissident has no reason to exist, which is why despair must become a mortal sin for dissidents.

You see more and more dissidents and dissident Christians willing to circulate in the same platforms. Gab has become the social media exchange for both dissidents and dissident Christians. Nick Fuentes and his groypers blend dissident political critiques with overt Christian beliefs. For the first time in a long time church attendance has ticked up in America. These are grim times for the defenders of civilization, but we still have hope because that is what must carry us through.

Happy Easter.

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