Christianity

I try not to attack Christianity for two reasons: firstly, in Britain to attack Christianity is like a kick to a tramp’s ribs, a pointless attack on a man who is down and out; even professional atheists, such as Hitchens and Dawkins, seemed to enjoy more mileage in America where there was once a native Christian strain with its own peculiar virility.

America’s residual sincere Christianity represented the fact that she was not totally decadent circa 2003; today, she has arrived where Britain was in 1897—Oscar Wilde and all—and so the notorious “religious right”, a bogeyman since Reagan’s time, was really a last hurrah; just as the Victorians founded The Salvation Army in a last evangelical spurt before Britain nosedived into full collapse.

Secondly, I try not to attack Christianity because I dislike almost all the people who attack it—they are worse than the Christians. In Britain, people who are seriously against Christianity—want to abolish Church of England schools, for example—are always cranks; they belong in the same league as earnest republicans or people who insist we need a codified constitution (autism: Britain doesn’t have an “unwritten constitution”; the British Constitution is written in parts, such as acts of Parliament, and in other respects exists as unwritten traditions—what we don’t have is a codified constitution).

These three types—the anti-Christian, the republican, and the constitution-bore—live in their own little worlds where they pretend we really live in 1630 and Prince Charles exercises some untrammelled power over us, or that the Church of England has the same emotional power in the population as in Henry VIII’s time, or that somehow a codified constitution represents a novel breakthrough in political science, as if The Federalist Papers were hot off the presses.

Taken together, this makes me an anti-anti-Christian. I feel Christianity is a non-issue: I went to an extremely conservative Catholic school where pupils talked about “the proddies” (we hated them), delighted in owning the local high school for girls in a debate about abortion (“It’s all down to the baby-killing BBC,” quipped the headmaster), complained that other pupils “Jewed” you out of money, and where one Spanish pupil goose-stepped around singing Francoist marching songs. Yet but one pupil there believed Christianity was real, for all the rest it was a cultural identity they were born to; and in every other respect they downloaded porno, trusted science, and expressed orthodox opinions.

In response to the above, a Christian would say: the fact people do not act in a Christian way and don’t believe in it—except culturally—says nothing about Christianity itself; it says they’re bad Christians, or that Christianity is in disrepair there—and one person is still enough to start with, even Jesus worked with just two disciples at a certain point. Yet my point is not to offer the above as a refutation as regards Christianity, but more to provide a general sense as regards the extent to which Christianity is believed today.

Indeed, I sometimes wonder, given the extent to which Christianity is against nature, whether it has ever been believed except by a handful; for you can turn a state over to your religion if a determined activist core wishes it—and then everyone else will have to play along, possibly for centuries. Yet to be an “anti-Christian” in the contemporary West is a game played for obscure psychological reasons, as an arcane status gambit; and possibly through sheer social incompetence. Christianity is so dead in the West that to be seriously against it is peculiar, as the “atheist fedora” meme demonstrates. Serious anti-Christian atheists exist because to spend your time in a Voltaire rehash is a protection against the nihilistic maw that opens up when you really drop religion—better to tilt at the few game Christian windmills who passively play along than to stand before total black static.

Emotionally, after I peeled away my Christian indoctrination, I realised I’ve always been pagan. I feel most religious in nature, around stone circles, with the stars, and feel enlivened by Greek and Hindoo gods. Church has always felt like a suffocation to me: no matter how beautiful the church, it feels as if it chokes me; it chokes me like the womb, Christianity is the religion of love—smother love, the mother Church. However, paganism is deader than Christianity—so I would never call myself a pagan. The problem with paganism is that its rites and traditions have been completely extirpated in Europe. This means that what is retailed under the label “pagan” tends to be a domain for ugly people or racial nationalists.

Wiccans are degraded Christians for whom Christianity is not feminine enough; so whereas paganism was generally more masculine than Christianity we find in Wicca ugly people who want to undermine “the patriarchy” and who are feminists who want to dress up their political beliefs with pentagrams. The racial nationalist pagans are certainly more masculine, but again they really want to use paganism to advance their politics—they have no depth.

I once saw a professed pagan and racial nationalist YouTuber who mentioned, as he described the gene frequencies on his computer screen, that an owl had landed outside his window in daylight. For him, this was an incidental event; for the genuine pagan this would’ve had huge import—it would’ve been the most important event that year, augury was central to pagan practice. Our YouTuber had witnessed an important omen; except, really, he was a modern—and as a modern he was more Christian than pagan, for it was the Christians who did away with augury as sorcery. What was real for him was the gene frequencies. Paganism does not exist; and what retails itself as paganism is more Christian than not, being an offshoot from progressive liberalism—and you will be surprised to find quite how feminist “total Nazis” are.

Christianity is the same as progressive liberalism—“wokeness” represents an offshoot from Christianity. It isn’t true to say that “Jesus was a Palestinian refugee who hung out with sex workers and was the first socialist”—yet although strict Christianity will refute the above sentiment the basic Christian ethos is more “socialist Jesus” than not. Christianity came to Rome when Rome was decadent, just like progressive liberalism it spread among spoiled Roman matrons—the amphora aunts. It was a counter-signal novelty, a religion that preached meekness in a martial society—a religion that said that the arc of history bent towards the Second Coming.

Christianity is a feminine religion: it threatens Heaven or Hell, yet the threat remains distinctly abstract—as with a mother who impotently wags her finger, “Just wait until Dad gets home.” Christians are right to say that man is fundamentally evil—they underestimate how evil he really is—yet they ask for us to feel bad for our sins and wallow in shame that may or may not be relieved. The masculine attitude is that if you do something wrong don’t do it again or try to do it less often—and so improve, by which we mean increase your capacity for action. Christianity invites you to masochistically wallow in wickedness—unsure if you are forgiven or saved; and this masochism represents the feminine position—it invites weakness.

Christians prefer the word to the image; and, like resentful women, they smash images where they find them—for they fear that man could make artefacts that are objectively more beautiful than a woman; and so Christianity must destroy beauty, being against nature—and when it does not, as with Roman churches, it is because it has been patched by paganism (every Italian city saint being a pagan god in disguise).

Christians infiltrated the education system, the imperial court, and the bureaucracy from which lofty heights they extirpated their enemies. In a tactical parallel with progressivism, Christianity presents itself as the religion of meekness, love, and kindness—except when you disagree with it and it has the whip hand, at which point it has zero tolerance. Thus pathetic emotional appeals for tolerance as regards issues such as same-sex marriage—interlarded with pitiful stories about persecutions—are followed by zero tolerance for the old order once the necessary laws have been passed.

Ironically, paganism, though it didn’t preach mildness and love, managed to be more tolerant and kind; and it was so because it didn’t purport to represent “one truth” and instead only demanded that people respected the rites of the various city gods—paganism was agnostic as regards beliefs. Christianity’s insistence that there is “one truth”, combined with the view that you must believe the religion’s doctrines, led to the fierce wars of religion—and to totalitarianism. This is the problem with all the Abrahamic faiths, only safely contained in Judaism because the Jews do not seek to convert people—and, indeed, for them Abrahamic faith is pagan; it is their particular tribal God and it has been to their disadvantage that billions of people around the world decided to take him up, for they decided that they were the real Jews—the Chosen People—and, therefore, the “old Jews” had to get the chop.

Christianity led to nihilism: its determination that there was one truth to seek begat the scientific method; and the scientific method ate Christianity, and when it ate Christianity—since the Christians had stamped out all other faiths—there was nothing. If religion is about the maintenance of rites passed down the generations then it can amble alongside the scientific method and philosophical disputation; if your religion is “the truth”, then if challenged and found faulty it shatters—and this is what has happened to Christianity.

Those not prepared to defend old-style Christianity with “cope” have transferred their allegiance to progressive liberalism—a religious innovation from Christianity that enhances slave morality, takes its “the first will be last” to its logical conclusion, within a non-metaphysical framework that supposedly gels with science. We are still at war with the Christians: progressivism is nihilistic Christianity; it has swallowed most churches and it has developed so that there are even “atheists” who functionally live out this modified Christian ethos.

On the other side stand masculine men: the same people who were always sceptical of all religion or who saw religion as a practical rites-based activity to augment consciousness. These men, real men, find the feminine-Christian ethic rebarbative, undignified, and silly but go along with it because they are conservative in nature—and perhaps because they judge that overall old-style Christianity does relatively little harm, perhaps even produced some attractive music and art. Yet the crisis in the West remains a dispute between feminine Abrahamism with its fanatical cult of weak ugliness and masculine paganism with its focus on the objective, beautiful, and natural.