We don’t know what pastors and catechists of the last several decades expected when they let parochial schools lapse into public schools with crosses. Hopefully they didn’t intend to leave three generations in a state of de facto heathenry. Whatever their intentions, that was the result.
Replacing older generations whose Christian faith sustained Western civilization with people whose only concept of the Church comes from Netflix has had dramatic effects–some foreseeable, others unexpected.
Contra the rapidly dwindling ranks of atheists, humans need to believe in something. Combined with that perennial truth, it’s easy to see how the dereliction of Christian formation swelled the ranks of the Leftist Death Cult. The analogous problem on the Right didn’t become clear until more recently. It was the Cult’s ascent that’s brought to light a small but raucous contingent of right-wing dissidents who oppose the Cult, but not on religious or moral grounds. On the contrary, their only reason for opposing the Cult boils down to a desire to indulge their vices free of official interference. The Cult is in charge now, so these heathen sensualists oppose it as the main obstacle between them and the unrestricted enjoyment of their creature comforts.
That’s the reason for the right-wing heathen’s intellectual schizophrenia. He’ll grant that the West was Christian, since that’s an indisputable historic datum; he’ll even concede that abandoning the faith left a vacuum which the Death Cult filled. But he’ll twist himself into a pretzel to avoid the conclusion that returning to Christ is necessary to restore the West.
Living the Christian faith means giving up your vices. It also entails self-sacrifice. The heathen right-winger knows at least this much about Christianity, that’s why he craves the benefits of living in a Christian society while fighting tooth and nail against the obligations of living in one.
It’s also why heathen dissent has racked up an impressive list of failures in its rather short run and is doomed to repeat them. Like Conservatism before it, wignat-ism cannot explain why it seeks its stated ends. Conservatism operated wholly within the Liberal paradigm but defined itself by opposition to certain Liberal programs. When asked why, for instance, displaying the Ten Commandments in federal courthouses was protected under the First Amendment but erecting Satanic statues in state capitols wasn’t, they were reduced to arbitrary muttering. People rightly saw that Conservatism was internally inconsistent and incoherent. It had no compelling ‘why’. The best Conservatives could do was appeal to economics, but fiscal arguments assume a more or less functional society. They are useless in the face of fanatics hell bent on tearing society down.
Those fanatics, on the other hand, have a definite and compelling ‘why’. Theirs is a hostile and expansionist cult which locates the source of all suffering in the sins of white people. If the evil can be rooted out at the source, they conclude, all misery and injustice will end forever, and we shall have utopia at last!
Insane? Yes. Horrifying? Yes. Compelling? Yes.
So compelling that the government is on stage 3, and the media on stage 6, of the Ten Stages of Genocide.
Showing up to a holy war without a religion ensures defeat before the enemy is even engaged. Again, wignats should take the object lesson of Conservatism on this front.
It’s not like the Death Cult makes a secret of what it considers the only religious threat to its hegemony. That’s why its shock troops targeted statues of saints, and its water carriers in government used the lockdowns to cancel Mass.
The phenomenon of a formerly Christian civilization falling to the Death Cult does not militate against a return to the Church. Right-wing heathens who argue against Christianity on this basis betray their ignorance of basic Christian teaching. Not only does the fact that individuals and whole peoples have turned their backs on Christ not damage Christian doctrine in the slightest, only Christian doctrine can satisfactorily explain why once-Christian peoples could abandon the faith. Mankind’s radical freedom to accept or reject God stands at the heart of Christian moral theology. It is precisely that freedom which makes true faith and true love possible.
Those who demand guarantees of the end of history are just as utopian as the Death Cult. They’re sure that adopting the right set of ideas will turn society into a permanent amusement park where they can pursue their preferences forever. Even less realistically, they’re convinced that restoring pre-1965 demographics alone will establish an eternal state where everyone always has the right ideas.
What the wignats have always missed is that the exact same critiques they level at the Church even more conclusively disprove the sole sufficiency of an ethnostate. The US was more than 80% Christian before the Death Cult took over. It was also more than 80% white. To claim that these statistics disqualify the former but not the latter is to be guilty of an unprincipled exception.
Like all utopians, wignats ignore the doctrine of the Fall–a Christian dogma that even Sartre accepted because it’s so self-evident. The same teaching explains why all efforts to build a permanent, stable society have failed and why all such future attempts will fail.
But the complementary and opposite dogma, that Christ came to save man from sin through His Cross and Resurrection, also offers reliable hope that not even the triumph of the Death Cult can defeat Christ’s people, for we have a God who has defeated death.
For a compelling vision of a post-Death Cult future, complete with giant robots, read my martial thriller Combat Frame XSeed:
Well said. I just had to look up “wignat”.
You’re on a list now.
The death cultist chants, “Rayciss whaipipo!”
And the atheist right complains, “Fundie Christpipo.”
A lot of the heathen right began as Reddit atheists who were driven out of their fever swamp by the Death Cult.
It’s evident in their autistic fedora mode of argument.
Brian
Very trenchant.
So our role is confessor:: live our lives as witnesses to the Word just as our first century predecessor did.
I’ll need to read up on that time period and then think about devotions to practice.
I’ve always been partial to the Sacred heart of Christ the king.
I also need to read the Hours too
xavier.
A simple step everyone should take is, first thing in the morning, offering up all the merits due your pious acts that day in reparation for sins against the Sacred Heart.
Interestingly, I was just reading an excerpt from the Italian philosopher Augosto Del Noce’s Critique of Modernity where he said that sometime in the 1950s the West stopped arguing against communism by appealing to faith, family and tradition, but by appealing to the superior economic and scientific results of free markets and free inquiry. (Libertarianism, anyone?) Del Noce asserted this was a victory for materialism; the bourgeois West had accepted the metaphysical basis of Marx. All that remained was quibbling over how best to proceed.
The choice really is Christ or Chaos.
James Kalb reached much the same conclusion in The Tyranny of Liberalism. He traces the fatal flaw in Conservatism back even farther, to the origins of Classical Liberalism.
The core assumption that Conservatism shares with the Death Cult is that freedom, defined as the ability to pursue one’s personal preferences without coercion, is absolute. What they both miss is that freedom per se cannot be an absolute because its value is solely determined by the inherent worth of the goods it grants access to.
Left-Liberalism has always embraced this contradiction and plowed ahead on the inevitably disastrous course. That’s why Liberalism corrodes tradition.
Conservatives try to have it both ways and predicate their principles on appeals to freedom but then try to restrict certain freedoms with appeals to tradition, which is schizophrenic.
By the end of the Cold War, the Left had obviously lost the 19th-20th century economic debate. They pivoted to social issues while fifth columnists like Buckley made sure Conservatives kept relitigating old battles.
I love these type of comments, because it reveals other books to read. Would you ever make a blog about certain Non-Fiction works of the sort both you and Carlos mentioned?
Exactly. And this is why, despite the fact that they have good ideas on many things, I can never fully agree with people like Carl Benjamin or Razorfist. They simply don’t realise that their solutions contain the seeds of the enemy within them, and will inevitably lead us back to where we are now. Classical Liberalism is merely the larval form of Wokeism – or in other words, Wokeism comes from carrying Classical Liberal values to their logical end point. The only way to “stay at Classical Liberalism” is simply to refuse to think and try to stop everyone else from thinking forever.
They’re both tragic figures, in a way. Sargon rode Gamergate to fame but couldn’t move past it. Razorfist bet heavy on riding Stephen Crowder’s coattails to a sinecure with ConInc, only to be left in limbo by Crowder’s implosion.
Casualties of GG and MAGA respectively.
“Our rallying point must be from outside the world. If it is inside the world and in accordance with its ways, it is the easiest thing for the enemy to just pick the other side.” -Doug Wilson