As with woke politics, nobody has ever believed Christianity except a tiny fanatical minority who imposed their views on everyone else—as with woke, socialist, and progressive views, Christianity is a degenerative tendency in the West. Take this quote from Lord Salisbury, the last genuine Conservative Prime Minister and a man who had a vision of Jesus that confirmed his Anglican faith for life: “[In the US, money-lust]…prevails universally and operates not only to the exclusion of literature and refinement but to the destruction of good faith, honour, gentlemanliness, high feeling, and in fact all those substitutes for Christianity which until Christianity supersedes them, it is so necessary to maintain.” What Salisbury has basically said in that statement is that in the real world we need to practice aristocratic virtues—pagan virtues—until such time as Christianity, this chimerical idea, can be attained.
This is no different to the man today who makes minimal obeisance to woke politics and, if absolutely pushed, makes a non-committal statement to the effect that “it would be good if we had more women engineers and pilots, I’m sure it will happen sooner or later.” In other words, Christianity—as with communism—constitutes a “nice idea”, but in the real world we will continue with the aristocratic and pagan virtues since we prefer not to die; to live out Christian values without hypocrisy, as with Pol Pot’s Marxism, constitutes suicide; hence Christians are always hypocrites—ironically, the very thing Jesus inveighed against. Yet what does Christianity have to do with Jesus really?
Per Nietzsche, communism represents Christianity without Christ—a non-metaphysical promise to implement “full Christianity” in the material life here and now. I have always been troubled by conservative Christians because my experience has been that they act like pagans in practice, except a tiny number of recent converts who tend to take the whole business fanatically and to be regarded askance by “inherited” Christians. This is because the right, being reality, ultimately constitutes paganism; it just holds to what remains of Christianity—really, today, what is retailed as “the Judeo-Christian legacy”—as a sort of more substantial How to Make Friends and Influence People because it is not so bad as a collection of values as outright secularism and atheism; and because, minimally, you can find in Christianity more residual pagan elements than in outright rationalistic atheism.
So, for example, you could take Christ to be a seasonal god—a god of the seasons, as with Mithras and Apollo—whose death and resurrection stands for nature’s four seasons. To embrace Christ is to live in accord with nature, since nature does not tolerate hypocrisy—it only appears to do so for a time. This would account for the tension between Jesus and the Jews: the Jews made an explicit commitment to abandon agricultural life, nature, and bury themselves in books—with penalties for people who carried on as farmers; and this is a recipe to breed hypocrisy and lawyerly tricks into yourself—Jesus came to rescue the Jews from this hypocrisy and return them to nature, though they refused him and so became that most unnatural people.
Perhaps this “natural Christ” has been somehow scrambled in the message, scrambled by St. Paul Nietzsche would say—yet if a conservative is a Christian it is really this “natural Christ”, the pagan elements within, say, Catholicism (bread and wine from the rites of Mithras and the multiple saints as substitute genii loci) that speaks to him. Yet in a way this natural Christ is at odds with the main body of Christian teaching, with some of Christ’s pronouncements about the last being first—and, further, a natural Christ becomes no more special than any other nature god. At any rate, Christianity is perhaps best described as “patched” to make it workable in reality, though the patches make it somewhat inconsistent.
Christianity insists on one truth—as with the progressives and the socialists—and refuses to let there be any other view; as with woke ideas, its constituency centres around hysterical sentimental women, weirdo intellectuals, and the ugly and deformed—the slave class; a most unnatural class, in fact. The early pagans were right to say the Christians were atheists, since the Christians denied the other gods—and insisted on their one God, a bigoted position. As atheists in the Christopher Hitchens line used to say, “We got rid of Thor and Horus, so why not get rid of one last God and make it complete?”. And this is consistent with Christianity’s inner logic: deny all gods except one highly intellectualised notional God that on rational examination is difficult to support and finally—as Nietzsche observed—eat the last God with science, derived, as Christians proudly yet moronically say, from Christianity’s will-to-truth. The final end point for Christianity was always universal atheism, as Salisbury and Nietzsche (and Dostoevsky, most thoughtful people in the 19th century in fact) foresaw—after which, the deluge; total nihilism.
I doubt that Europeans have ever really taken to Christianity, just as I think only a tiny fanatic band believes in woke ideas and everyone else goes along because they fear to lose their jobs or to face other social sanctions. Kings converted to Christianity and then imposed the religion top-down so there was never any organic feel to conversion—the folkways often remained. Yet particularly in the Northern European countries, Germany and Britain, it took very few centuries after conversion before autists—Luther and Calvin—unpicked Christianity for inconsistencies. Pretty soon the English had a “national Church” that held that God was an Englishman—a negation of Christianity’s universal principles, really; a de facto return to “paganism” pushed forward by the monarchy and the aristocracy—no longer happy with universal Christendom. In my view, Europeans have little affinity for Christianity naturally and put up with it, as with woke ideas, to please “the wife” or to avoid the sovereign’s wrath—it is an artefact from Rome’s decadence, a cultural deadweight.