Christ or Thor

What a bother all this explaining is! I wish we could get on without it. But we can’t. However, you’ll all find, if you haven’t found it out already, that a time comes in every human friendship, when you must go down into the depths of yourself, and lay bare what is there to your friend, and wait in fear for his answer. A few moments may do it; and, it may be (most likely will be, as you are English boys) that you never do it but once. But done it must be, if the friendship is to be worth the name. You must find what is there, at the very root and bottom of one another’s hearts; and if you are at one there, nothing on earth can, or at least ought to sunder you. – Thomas Hughes

There is only a tiny remnant of white people willing to speak up for and defend the white race. For this reason, the white Kinist pagans and the white Kinist Christians have been (for the most part) very careful to avoid excessive criticism of their allies’ metaphysics. I think that is a wise policy. So I will name no names in what follows, but I will (to the best of my ability) lay before the right wing pagan the reason why Christ, and not Thor, should lead the Kinist movement.

The pagan right wing place the blame for the demise of the white man on Christianity, claiming it is responsible for white guilt, racial universalism, and egalitarianism. And they are right, up to a point. Organized Christianity, in the latter part of the 20th century, was the inspiration for racial universalism and egalitarianism. If there had been no Christian churches, there would have been no integration, no Mau Mau running for president, and no black people, who were not servants, in England, France, Holland, etc.

The case seems to be closed: Christianity is guilty. But what if I bring up the white Southern Christians of the 19th century? Were they universalists and racial egalitarians? And what about the British in the 18th and 19th centuries? They were Christian, and yet they were not universalists and egalitarians. In fact for the most part, Christian Europeans were opposed to racial egalitarianism throughout most of their history. They viewed Christianity as an apartheid faith. Anthony Jacob speaks for most European Christians of the past when he writes:

Naturally, abominations such as these could never supplant established religion—particularly the religion, Christianity—unless race-mixing were to succeed. None the less people already quite commonly repeat that all religions are fundamentally the same; which they most certainly are not. Politically we already have our full-fledged hybrid faith. Politically we are already the sacrificial victims on the altar of Equality, the victims of the Cult of the Underdog, whose armies of misshapen votaries are chanting their liberal paeans in the Temple of Humanity, and whose brazen deity, a Hinduesque eight-legged Mongrel, is leering down upon us triumphantly through swirling clouds of sanctimonious incense and pseudo-scientific nonsense; representing the victory of quantity over quality, of hybridism over nobility, of shapelessness over shapeliness.

It is surely not wise for the Church to pander to this idolatry. Even if Christianity were to be the religion only of a select few, it would be none the worse for that. Has it ever been anything else but the religion of a select few, and can it ever be anything else? Christianity is the religion of the White and not the non-White peoples, who debase it even where they accept it. They might pay lip-service to it where the white man is strong and his institutions accordingly respected, or where it has obtained a form of superstitious hold over them. But they can no more accept and comprehend essential Christianity than the white man can accept Shamanism. This, above all, makes it all the more reprehensible that the Church, instead of recognizing this, should swing round viciously upon the white man and hold him to blame for it—that white man upon whose unadulterated identity Christianity exclusively depends.

But the right wing pagan intellectual has an explanation for the seeming contradiction between 20th century Christianity and the Christianity of the preceding centuries. The right wing pagan agrees with the modern liberal and declares that the modern Churches are preaching the correct Christianity; they believe it is people like me and like Jacob who have misinterpreted Christianity. Of course the right wing pagans prefer the conclusions I draw from Christianity to the one’s the liberals draw, which is why they disagree with me politely. But they do disagree. Why? They give the following reason for their disagreement: They claim that the original Christianity was a universalist, racially egalitarian faith, and the Germans (by which they mean most of the Europeans) changed, when they embraced Christianity, the faith from a universalist, egalitarian religion, to a home, hearth, and nation type of religion. The Germans, they claim, fashioned a new image of Christ based on their image of the hero-God.

The Nordic religion was not a religion of dread, or of magic formularies to propitiate hostile powers. Instead of covering its temples with frescoes of the tortures of the damned, it taught people not to be afraid of death. Its ideal was the fellowship of the hero with the gods, not merely in feasting and victory, but in danger and defeat. For the gods, too, are in the hands of fate, and the Scandinavian vision of the twilight of the gods that was to end the world showed the heroes dying valiantly in the last hopeless fight against the forces of chaos—loyal and fearless to the last. It is an incomplete but not an ignoble religion. It contains those elements of character which it was the special mission of the Nordic peoples to add to modern civilization and to
Christianity itself. – Trevelyan

I certainly prefer the Germanic Christ to the modern churches’ vision of Christ, and so do the Kinist pagans. But the Kinist pagans claim that the Germanic Christ is not the Christ of “primitive” Christianity but the Christ of German or European addition. This is false. The Christianity that was preached to the Europeans was not primitive apostolic Christianity, it was Greek philosophic Christianity. The churchmen of the 5th, 6th, and 7th centuries had adopted the Greek philosophical mode of apologetics. These churchmen forgot that St. Paul had failed to convert the Greek intellectuals who wanted to make Christianity into a philosophical treatise. “To the Greeks, foolishness.” The Germans did not change primitive, apostolic Christianity; they redirected philosophical Greco-Roman Christianity back to its original primitive apostolic origins and away from the bloodless sterility of Greek philosophy. The Germans certainly never completely purged the Church of its Greek element -- the intellectuals were always waiting in the wings to intellectualize the faith to death -- but they did place Christ the Hero-God back in His proper place as the head of the Church.

In essence, the Kinist pagans agree with the modern liberal Christians: the Christianity that we see espoused in the modern churches (they say) is the true Christianity. What evidence can I show to the contrary? First, there is my own witness. Christ the Hero-God is the God I see when I look “through the eye.”

Secondly, there is the witness of our European forefathers. The Kinist pagan respects their creativity in fashioning themselves a new type of Christianity, but he does not respect their intuitive grasp of reality. To them, Christ was real. He spoke to their inmost hearts; He was not a figment of their imaginations.

And thirdly, the Old Testament, the Gospels, and the epistles of St. Paul all confirm the faith of the Europeans. God is presented in the Bible as a Hero-God, not as a philosopher or theologian. You cannot sever the old European from the Faith, because his Faith and the apostolic Faith are one.

We must ask ourselves why the Kinist pagan calls the Greco-Roman Christianity of the 5th, 6th, and 7th centuries the ‘primitive Christianity.’ Why does he not call it what it was: namely, Greco-Roman Christianity. I think the answer lies in the pagan Kinists’ obsession with intelligence tests. The pagan Kinist bases his case for the separation of the races on the superior intelligence of the white man. So, if he denounces the Greek philosophical tradition, he renounces what he views as the distinct, unique feature of European man: his intelligence. But intelligence is a very superficial attribute. It is European man’s deep, heartfelt intuitions about the mystery of existence that sets him apart from the other races. His greatness does not consist in the bridges he has built, in the buildings he has constructed, nor in the machines he has invented; it consists in his vision of God. He saw the true Hero-God and he made Him the focal point of his civilization.

Most alliances where there is no shared religious faith are very tenuous. The Kinist pagan is always worried that the Kinist Christian is going to perceive that modern Christianity is the ‘true’ Christianity and then abandon the Kinist cause, saying, “Lord, I’ve seen the light. I once was a racist, but now I’m saved.” And to do the pagan Kinist justice, I must say that I’ve seen such conversions from Kinist Christian to Universalist Christian. On the other side, the Kinist Christian is always worried that the materialist philosophy of the pagan Kinist will ultimately put him in the camp of his materialist, philosophical, liberal cousins.

The problem with the pagan Kinist and the liberal Christian is the same. They see existence through the blinders of philosophical abstraction. Their eyes can only see straight-forward logic. “A religion can only be universalist or local and clannish; it cannot be both.” But the poet sees existence quite differently. The poet, who is the true European man, sees that Noah’s sons were all his sons but they were not all on an equal footing. Shem and Japheth were separate and distinct from Ham. And St. Paul called all men to believe in Christ and attain salvation, but He showed no desire to abolish hierarchical structures and distinctions between slaves and masters. (See Dabney’s book, A Defense of Virginia and the South.)

The European at his best always thinks in poetic images. He overcame, in his poetic imagination, the difficulties which the Greek mind had with the Incarnation. The European saw that far from being foolishness, Christ was the only possible solution to the riddle of existence. That a man, who was both man and God, could conquer death and all the forces of hell out of love for a people, whom He loved not as abstractions but as distinct personalities, was logically impossible; but poetically it spoke to the European at the deepest recesses of his being. What is more Kinist than to desire the immortality of the kith and kin we love? And what cause is more important than keeping the vision of the Hero-God who guarantees their (and our) immortality. Let’s give the last word to the Gentle Bard.

Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts,
Which I by lacking have supposed dead,
And there reigns love and all love's loving parts,
And all those friends which I thought buried.
How many a holy and obsequious tear
Hath dear religious love stol'n from mine eye
As interest of the dead, which now appear
But things removed that hidden in thee lie!
Thou art the grave where buried love doth live,
Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone,
Who all their parts of me to thee did give;
That due of many now is thine alone:
Their images I lov’d I view in thee,
And thou, all they, hast all the all of me.

-- William Shakespeare