The River vs. the Open Road

…the innate conservatism of youth asks neither poverty nor riches, but only immunity from change. – The Golden Age by Kenneth Grahame

If we can judge by the literature of that century, and we can, the 19th century was the century of war between principalities and powers. God and the devil were going at it hammer and tongs. Melville put it quite well: “The light is greater hence the shadow more.”

European man entered the 20th century spiritually exhausted and very much under the spell of satanic ‘isms. The first world war was one of the most startling proofs of Satan’s new dominance over the hearts and minds of the European people. In sheer number of adherents and societal influence, Satan had triumphed over our Lord. The old Faith still had an influence; it had not been thoroughly eradicated, but it would no longer be the centerpiece of Western Civilization. It would now be an underground faith, hidden in the subterranean vault of the European heart.

In every Christian century preceding the 20th century, there were the Athenian intellectuals who treated the Christian faith as foolish or childish, but the sneer of the intellectuals did not affect the Christian faith of the great mass of European people. In the era of the Enlightenment, for example, despite the deism of the philosophers, the faith of the common people remained intact. It is in the 20th century that we see, for the first time in European man’s history, the great mass of people adopting the faithless faith of the intellectuals.

What does it mean when we say a man has a faithless faith? It does not mean that he flat out denies Christ. What it means is that he hedges on all the crucial doctrines of Christianity. Nikos Kazantzakis, in The Last Temptation of Christ, gives us an example of Western man’s faithless faith. In the novel (I didn’t see the movie, but I suspect it was quite different from the novel), Kazantzakis, who revered the person of Christ, presents us with a Christ who is something more than man but also something less than God. Christ does bring Lazarus back to life, for instance, but as a scarecrow Lazarus, not completely alive, and not quite dead. Such is the faith of the modern European.

One doesn’t need an encyclopedic knowledge of ancient civilizations, just a little commonsense will do, to see that when a particular people loses their faith their civilization declines. European civilization retained its vitality when Athenian skepticism was confined to a few intellectuals, but when that skepticism became part of the common culture, the civilization that was once an all-consuming fire became a dying ember.

Of course we can’t artificially recreate the old European faith in order to restore European civilization. That’s not how things work. First comes faith, after which all those things are “added unto” us. But if the European were to embrace Christianity, full and free without let or hindrance, it would not entail the acceptance of a way of life or mode of being that was completely alien to him. It would merely entail the opening of the subterranean vault of his heart and letting his childlike faith in Christ back into the light of day.

It is painfully clear, however, that European man does not want to bring Christianity back into the light. He wants it to remain in the cellar. Yes, occasionally he’ll refer to Christianity when it supports his liberalism, but it is not his guiding light; reason is. And he persists in the belief in his own reason, despite the fact that the evidence is in. Man cannot live a moral life, or any kind of life, when reason alone is his guide.

If, in modern times, they who own the restraint of philosophical discipline alone have not given way to such grossness of conduct, it is because those principles of religion, which they affect to despise, have impressed on the public mind a system of moral feeling unknown till the general prevalence of the Christian faith; but which, since its predominance, has so generally pervaded European society, that no pretender to innovation can directly disavow its influence, though he endeavours to show that the same results which are recommended from the Christian pulpit, and practised by the Christian community, might be reached by the unassisted efforts of that human reason, to which he counsels us to resign the sole regulation of our morals.

In short, to oppose one authority in the same department to another, the reader is requested to compare the character of the philosophic Squire in Tom Jones, with that of Bage’s philosophical heroes; and to consider seriously whether a system of ethics, founding an exclusive and paramount court in a man’s own bosom for the regulation of his own conduct, is likely to form a noble, enlightened, and generous character, influencing others by superior energy and faultless example; or whether it is not more likely, as in the observer of the rule of right, to regulate morals according to temptation and to convenience, and to form a selfish, sophistical hypocrite, who, with morality always in his mouth, finds a perpetual apology for evading the practice of abstinence, when either passion or interest solicit him to indulgence.

--from The Lives of the Novelists by Walter Scott

The delusion that reasoning man can function quite well without Christianity was always the delusion of a segment of European intellectuals. And they never were forced to see it for what it was: a delusion. But now that European man en masse has fallen prey to the same delusion, we must look at it. Why, if reason is sufficient, does European man want to prostrate himself before the gods of color? What is missing in his rational self-sufficiency that makes him go whoring after the savage races? He misses a vital faith and he thinks that the blood orgies of the heathen can provide him with the vitality that he lacks. He thinks this because he has cut himself off from the wisdom of his race. The white man rejected the pagans’ faith because they saw God only in nature. In contrast, the white man saw that God was the animating force behind nature and His motivating principle was mercy and not sacrifice. When Christianity becomes a philosophy, the neopagan is right: it lacks vitality. But when it is a faith, it has the vitality to renew lives and the world. Let the neopagan who doubts the vitality of Christianity ask himself this question: Who fights the more fiercely for the fair maiden – the Christian knight who loves her or the pagan warrior who wants to possess her for a night?

What the European liberal finds out when he goes a whoring with the “vital natural races” is that “where man is not, nature is barren.” He needs the Christian fairy land, not heathendom. Take a walk through the forests of Arden or share the oars with Ratty on his river. In those worlds, blood is sacred because it is animated by His spirit. And nature is revered because it houses His Kith and Kin.

It is sad that with our Lord’s words before us, “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven,” we still turn to “adult” theologians and philosophers for guidance. It would be much better for our souls if we turned to those poets of the West who retained, in the face of the emerging atheism of the 20th century, their childlike faith.

In The Wind in the Willows (1908), Kenneth Grahame writes a poetic defense of Christian Europe. The white Europeans in The Wind and the Willows are Ratty, Mole, Badger, Mr. Toad, and all those animals who adhere to the same code as the four heroes. In the outer wood are the weasels and the stoats, the savage hordes of color, who do not see, when they view the ancient dwellings of the Europeans, home and hearth. They see only something to be plundered. And they get their chance when Mr. Toad, obsessed with his “cleverness,” decides that “the plowed furrow, the frequented pasture, the lane of evening lingerings,” cannot compare to the open road. And what Toad abandons, the weasels and stoats take. But they can do nothing but destroy, like the blacks in Rhodesia and South Africa; they can’t maintain or restore an ancient European dwelling. It is Ratty, Mr. Badger, and the Mole, who help Toad regain his ancestral dwelling. They face the barbarians of color and defeat them. They are greatly outnumbered, but they prevail because they fight for the homely virtues which only the European knows and treasures as his source of strength. The antique European has no magic talisman. He possesses something of infinitely greater value: a faithful heart. When Ratty declares his love for his river, he describes my love for antique Europe:

“I beg your pardon,” said the Mole, pulling himself together with an effort. “You must think me very rude; but all this is so new to me. So—this—is—a—River!”

“The River,” corrected the Rat.

“And you really live by the river? What a jolly life!”

“By it and with it and on it and in it,” said the Rat. “It’s brother and sister to me, and aunts, and company, and food and drink, and (naturally) washing. It’s my world, and I don’t want any other. What it hasn’t got is not worth having, and what it doesn’t know is not worth knowing.”

Toad’s open-road philosophy leads us to the savage horde barbarism of the stoats and weasels. Ratty’s river leads us back to His Europe.

The Twin Towers of Atheism

There are two separate stories in David Satter’s excellent book, Age of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union (Knopf, 1996). There is the story of how the Soviet Union maintained its system of terror against its own citizens; this story is told by the victims, many of whom Satter knew personally. He does an excellent job in presenting the victims’ stories, stories that bear repeating. Solzhenitsyn, of course, has already done yeoman’s work in depicting the plight of the millions upon millions who were victims of the Communist regime.

The second story that Satter reports is one that has not received as much attention, and it concerns the citizens who remained loyal to the Soviet Union while their friends and family members were sent to the Gulag and psychiatric hospitals. What did they think? Why did they finally cease to believe in the Soviet system? This makes for a very interesting story. Satter went throughout Russia in both the pre-glasnost days and the post-glasnost days. Besides talking to victims of Soviet terrorism, he talked to the average Russian ‘Joes,’ the ones who had never been sent to prison or to psychiatric hospitals.

What Satter reports is, at first reading, unbelievable; but after reflection, it squares with what one knows about history and human nature. What Satter found was that the average Russian Joe supported the Soviet regime; he believed the official lie. Russians were willing to put up with bread lines and cramped housing because their government told them conditions were worse everywhere else. They believed the Afghans had invited the Russians into their country to protect them, and they believed that Lenin was a saintly, heroic man.

It was glasnost that changed everything. Gorbachev had no intention of unleashing the forces that would topple the Soviet Union. He was a typical Communist party hack. He thought he could use glasnost as a policy to defeat his enemies within the party, but when the information flow started, when devoted teachers discovered that everything they had been teaching for years was a lie, when citizens learned that Lenin was not a saint but a man with the blood of millions on his hands, when Soviet citizens actually started to visit Western countries – well, then the sacrifices the citizens had made during the years of communism seemed to be worthless. If they were not building the socialist utopia, what were they doing? Where was their metaphysic? Glasnost destroyed the Soviet Union. And the man who ushered it in for his own political reasons, Gorbachev, went down with it.

Echoing what Dostoyevsky and Berdayev have said about the Russian people, Satter maintains that the Russian people need a messianic religion. Russian Orthodoxy was replaced by messianic communism. When the belief in communism was taken away from them with glasnost, the Russian people went looking for a new god:

“In this context, glasnost could not but destroy the Soviet system. It was not that any one revelation proved critical for the regime. It was rather that the very idea of truthful information could only shatter the system of collective delusion that treated the regime as the ultimate arbiter of truth and the Soviet system as the realization of mankind’s historical destiny, in which each citizen was privileged to take part. In creating the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks accepted all three temptations rejected by Christ in the wilderness. But they gained the loyalty of the Soviet people by hiding the fact that they did so in the interests of Satan. The Soviet Union fell because when the long-deceived Soviet people realized, as a result of glasnost, who they had been serving in reality, they threw off their mental bondage to an evil system and began seeking other gods.” (p. 418)

Satter makes no predictions as to what new gods the Russian people might seek. There are anti-Western, Russian nationalist factions that talk about building their own ‘Star Wars’ missiles and conquering Alaska. There are the Western-style materialists, the former Communists, and a tiny minority of Solzhenitsyn-style, Orthodox Christians.

And that last point is the significant one. The majority of Russians did not reject communism in order to return to Christianity, they rejected communism for American jeans and Big Macs. A patriotic Russian Christian now faces, in the seductive American heresy, a more subtle and potentially more dangerous adversary than communism; the American democratic heresy is more dangerous than Russian communism because the American heresy destroys the will to resist. The Russian communists assert, “There is no God,” and send those who contradict them to prison. And in prison many break, but those who don’t become like steel.

In contrast, the rulers of our American democratic oligarchy do not deny the existence of God. Instead they co-opt Him (1): God exists and he is a democratic, racially egalitarian, universalist god. The seductive logic of that assertion tends to produce hapless jellyfish, who flop around and proclaim their contentment. And in order to assure their government and themselves of their “Christianity,” the democratic jellyfish spout racial egalitarian and universalist cant whenever they are asked to speak.

So, we have our own “delirium” in this country. And we need to resist it just a fiercely as the Christian remnant in Russia resisted communism. If we view books such as Satter’s merely as cautionary tales about the evils of communism, we miss the point. The moral of the Russian communist story is that man cannot live without God. And the addendum to the American democratic story is that man needs the living God, not a phony, democratic, multi-racial caricature of God.
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(1) One gets a picture of two devils sent out from hell to try and corrupt the souls of men. One devil is sent to Russia and one to the United States. The Russian devil goes head-on against God and introduces Marxist atheism. He gets C- results. Satan is not very pleased with him. On the other hand, the American devil does not tackle God head-on. He uses the name of God to sell all his Satanic ‘isms’ – like capitalism and racial universalism. When he reports back to hell, he receives an A+ and is given a promotion.

Clan Europe

Richard Nixon was certainly not an integral hero from a Walter Scott novel, and Ronald Reagan with his ‘city built on a hill’ rhetoric and his ‘trickle down’ economic theories was not a great champion of Christian Europe. Nevertheless, I think both Nixon and Reagan had a residue of traditional, Christian, European blood left in their veins; they were not completely post-Christian. In contrast, Bush Sr., Clinton, and Bush Jr. were and are completely post-Christian. All three strike me as caricatures of human beings, examples of the new technocratic, post-Christian men forged by Satan and incapable of acting in any way contrary to Satan’s wishes.

Only the white European can be a technocratic man, because only the white European walked away from paganism. And he can not go back. He can go forward (in a decadent, sci-fi sense) or he can be faithful to his blood and become an integral Christian man, but he cannot become a pagan again.

In a wonderful epic poem, “Harold the Dauntless,” Walter Scott describes, through Harold the Dauntless, European man’s struggle from paganism to Christianity. Harold’s father is a full-blooded, pagan hero.

List to the valorous deeds that were done
By Harold the Dauntless, Count Witikind’s son!
Count Witikind came of a regal strain,
And roved with his Norsemen the land and the main.
Woe to the realms which he coasted! For there
Was shedding of blood and rending of hair,
Rape of maiden, and slaughter of priest,
Gathering of ravens and wolves to the feast:
When he hoisted his standard black,
Before him was battle, behind him wrack,
And he burn’d the churches, that heathen Dane,
To light his band to their barks again.

But even a full-blooded pagan can get tired of all that hacking, hewing, and pillaging.

Time will rust the sharpest sword,
Time will consume the strongest cord;
That which molders hemp and steel,
Mortal arm and nerve must feel.
Of the Danish band, whom Count Witikind led,
Many wax’d aged, and many were dead;
Himself found his armor full weighty to bear,
Wrinkled his brows grew, and hoary his hair.
He lean’d on a staff, when his step went abroad,
And patient his palfrey, when steed he bestrode.
As he grew feebler, his wildness ceased,
He made himself peace with prelate and priest;
Made his peace, and stooping his head,
Patiently listed the counsel they said.
Saint Cuthbert’s Bishop was holy and grave,
Wise and good was the counsel he gave:--

“Thou has murder’d, robb’d, and spoil’d,
Time it is thy poor soul were assoil’d;
Priests didst thou slay, and churches burn,
Time it is now to repentance to turn;
Fiends has thou worship’d, with fiendish rite,
Leave now the darkness, and wend into light:
O! while life and space are given,
Turn thee yet, and think of Heaven!”
That stern old heathen his head he raised,
And on the good prelate he steadfastly gazed: --
“Give me broad lands on the Wear and the Tyne,
My faith I will leave, and I’ll cleave unto thine.”

Count Witikind’s conversion is only a tenth-part sincere, and his pagan son is naturally appalled.

“What priest-led hypocrite are thou,
With thy humble look and they monkish brow.
Like a shaveling who studies to cheat his vow?
Canst thou be Witikind the Waster known,
Royal Eric’s fearless son,
Haughty Gunhilda’s haughtier lord,
Who won his bride by the ax and sword;
From the shrine of St. Peter the chalice who tore,
And melted to bracelets for Freya and Thor;
With one blow of his gauntlet who burst the skull,
Before Odin’s stone, of the Mountain Bull?
Then ye worship’d with rites that to war-gods belong,
With the deed of the brave, and the blow of the strong;
And now, in thine age to dotage sunk,
Wilt thou patter thy crimes to a shaven monk…”

Harold is banished by his father and sets out to carve a pagan name for himself even more fearsome than his father’s name. And he succeeds. He stands virtually alone against Christendom and heathendom, and he triumphs. But he was not quite alone. Harold, unknown to him, is beloved. Disguised as a male page, a Danish maid named Eivir remains true to Harold in his disasters and his triumphs. It is when Harold’s pagan god threatens Eivir that Harold realizes the inhumanity and the insufficiency of paganism.

“Harold,” he said, “what rage is thine,
To quit the worship of thy line,
To leave thy Warrior-God?—
With me is glory or disgrace,
Mine is the onset and the chase,
Embattled hosts before my face
Are wither’d by a nod.
Wilt thou then forfeit that high seat
Deserved by many a dauntless feat,
Among the heroes of thy line,
Eric and fiery Thorarine?—
Thou wilt not. Only can I give
The joys for which the valiant live,
Victory and vengeance—only I
Can give the joys for which they die,
The immortal tilt—the banquet full,
The brimming draught from foeman’s skull.
Mine art thou, witness this thy glove,
The faithful pledge of vassal’s love.”

“Tempter,” said Harold, firm of heart,
“I charge thee, hence! whate’er thou art,
I do defy thee – and resist
The kindling frenzy of my breast,
Waked by thy words; and of my mail,
Nor glove, nor buckler, splent, nor nail,
Shall rest with thee – that youth release,
And God, or demon, part in peace.”—
“Eivir,” the Shape replied, “is mine,
Mark’d in the birth-hour with my sign
Think’st thou that priest with drops of spray
Could wash that blood-red mark away?
Or that a borrow’d sex and name
Can abrogate a Godhead’s claim?”
Thrill’d this strange speech thro’ Harold’s brain,
He clenched his teeth in high disdain,
For not his new-born faith subdued
Some tokens of his ancient mood:--
“Now, by the hope so lately given
Of better trust and purer heaven,
I will assail thee, fiend!” – Then rose
His mace, and with storm of blows
The mortal and the Demon close.

Just any Danish maiden, so long as she is comely and fair, will no longer suffice for Harold. He loves a distinct personality in Eivir, and he needs the God-Man, who loves distinct personalities, if he is to save Eivir.

Scott held abstract theory in religion in the same contempt he held abstract theory in politics. But he believed in and revered the non-abstract Christianity of Harold the Dauntless. There is no dichotomy, as the ‘New Age’ pagans would have us believe, between the European Christianity of Walter Scott and the Christianity of the early Church; they are one.

The current group of presidential candidates simply mirror our society. Hillary and McCain are both products of the post-Christian epoch of the white man’s history. They have reverted to paganism, but they add an even sicker, technocratic dimension to their new paganism. Hillary is a votaress of Cybele without the sensuality, and McCain is a devotee of Mars without the passion. Cold, sterile abortions and massive bombing raids represent the new technocratic Cybele and Mars.

A demented Mau Mau like Obama could only rise to prominence in a post-Christian society. He alone among the candidates comes from outside the European tradition. He is not post-Christian; he is pure barbarian. He would be imprisoned or exiled in a truly Christian society, but in a post-Christian society, he is a god.

There is one benefit to be derived from living in a society that has gone completely over to the devil. You have clarity. Let me use Nixon and Reagan as examples again. When you see some Christian remnants in such men, you think about working within existing structures and building on that remnant of faith. But you don’t know how far to go with a mere glimmer of hope. “At what point do I give up on men on the brink of the abyss of post-Christianity and forge on without them?” When the post-Christian Bushes and Clintons come to power, there is no longer any doubt; one can draw the sword and throw the sheath away.

My experience in the Roman Catholic Church mirrored my experience with American democracy. I kept making excuses for the actions of the pope and bishops, hoping for some glimmer of faith within them with which a man could unite and do battle against the barbarian and neo-pagan world. But at every turn, they were against the old Europe of the God-Man and for the New World Order of the barbarians and techno-barbarians. And that is a tragedy, but it is better to know that men whom you thought were allies are indeed your enemies than to have false friends at your back.

It has been rightly said of liberals that they make complex issues simple and simple issues complex. The issue of European identity is not complex. It is simple. Black barbarians have never shown the slightest capability of understanding the true Christianity. When they rule, they extinguish mercy and charity, and whether they profess voodoo or Christianity, the practice of their religion always results in barbarism. And the post-Christian technocrat has given us the barbarism of the machine. Under their rule, European man has suffered the same plight as laboratory rats. He has been dissected and then discarded.

It’s crystal clear now: good vs. evil. The Europe of Walter Scott and all the unsung, dauntless, Christian Harolds is our Europe. Our enemies are those who oppose its restoration. And those enemies are legion. But what choice is there? If we abandon Europe, we abandon Him. And that would truly be the unpardonable sin.

Of course we will never fight effectively against Satan if we hold back, afraid to fight, because we allow the false, outward piety of his minions to deceive us.

An evil soul producing holy witness
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
A goodly apple rotten at the heart.
O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!

If we have hearts that still bleed at the thought of helpless Christian men and women being tortured by black barbarians, we will strike back against the barbarians, despite the protests of the man holding the mitre. And when George Bush turns his back on the white people at home and launches bombs on innocent civilians abroad, we should oppose him despite his ‘born again’ exterior. It is not confusing! If we still have hearts connected to Europe, when it was Europe, we will always instinctively strike back at Satan no matter what outward form he assumes. And now, when everything seems especially hopeless, is the time to strike back at Satan and his minions – for the logic of fairyland tells us that it is when hope seems nearly gone that “God’s relief by us is surely won.”

The Unbreakable Link Between European Culture and Christianity

Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (Harvard University Press, 1998) by Edward J. Larson is not a partisan work; the author is not anti-evolutionist, but he does present an objective account of the Scopes trial and the prior and subsequent liberal and fundamentalist lobbying that went on before and after the trial. The debate is ongoing, and the topic has eternal consequences, so I can think of few non-fiction works more deserving of a reading than this book.

The author gives us a little background about the Christian fundamentalist movement, explaining that it came about in response to modernist interpretations of scripture. He also gives us a brief summary of the Darwinian concept of evolution and its status at the time of the 1925 Scopes “monkey” trial.

What happened in Dayton, Tennessee as depicted by Larson was something very different from the current liberal folklore. The basic facts were these: Tennessee passed a law that made teaching Darwinian evolution as fact instead of as mere theory illegal. The law was on the books but not enforced. By pre-arranged plan, Scopes, an inconsequential part-time teacher, in conjunction with the ACLU, decided to challenge the law. Scopes taught evolution as fact and invited the authorities to prosecute him. They did. William Jennings Bryan, populist, anti-capitalist, and anti-evolutionist, was the leader of the prosecuting team. Ironically, the ACLU was not interested in the religious aspect of the case but wanted to challenge the notion that a state’s right to control what was taught in its public schools was not as important as an individual’s right to free expression. Larson notes that at the time -- 1925 -- the Supreme Court had not yet discovered the establishment clause of the 14th Amendment which forbade the teaching of religion in the schools. Darrow entered the picture against the wishes of the ACLU. His interest was in the science vs. religion aspect of the case.

The popular liberal view of the case’s disposition is that Bryan and the prosecuting team won a minor legal victory while Darrow and company won a great victory for humanity, etc. The actual facts were quite different. Larson notes that people at the time were equally divided about who had won. The fundamentalists thought Bryan had won, and many of the middle-of-the-roaders thought Bryan had at least held his own. Only the most hardened atheist liberals, like H. L. Mencken, thought Darrow and company had won a resounding victory against the fundamentalists.

Two popular works of fiction, however, changed the popular opinion of what actually happened at the trial: Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen Twenties and the infamous play and movie, Inherit the Wind. Both works were shameless liberal travesties of the truth, and Larson presents them as just that.

Larson also gives us the aftermath of the trial. The ACLU, during the Warren era, had more individual rights’ decisions go in their favor and against religion than they ever had deemed possible in 1925. Bryan died five days after the trial ended and would be repudiated much later by Jerry Falwell and other Protestants because he was anti-capitalist and because he wavered on the ‘twenty-four hour, seven days’ creation theory. Scopes, on the other hand, got a free graduate education and a free ride throughout the rest of his life as a result of his accidental, phony, and liberal-credited martyrdom.

Larson points out that the evolution issue has not died. The fundamentalists are still fighting the battle, only now the fight, as Larson points out, is not to keep evolution out of the schools but to put creationism in.

Larson, interestingly, also notes that Roman Catholics were on the sidelines during the evolution debate, their church allowing them some leeway between the liberal position and the fundamentalist one. My own sympathies are with William Jennings Bryan, and I think the Catholics err when they cozy up to the evolutionists. “He does not win who plays with sin,” or with monkeys, for that matter. I also think of Herman Melville’s thoughts on the subject: “If Luther’s day expand to Darwin’s year, Shall that exclude the hope—foreclose the fear?”

The question always arises, when dealing with the issue of evolution, “Why couldn’t God have set the evolutionary process in motion and when it was completed, breathed life into the first man? Wouldn’t that be just as much of a miracle as the creationists’ story?” Of course it would have been just as much of a miracle, but that isn’t the point. God did not choose that method of producing the first man, that is, if we can trust the scriptural account. Ah, there is the rub. The evolutionists do not trust the scriptural account. And if you were to ask them why they don’t credit the scriptural account of creation, they would claim, as a reason for their disbelief, that the scriptural account of the creation of man is unscientific, which usually ends all argument. Who wants to be unscientific?

In one of his many masterpieces, Language is Sermonic, Richard Weaver points out that every society has God words and devil words; these are words that come to mean much more than the dictionary definition of the word. He suggested that ‘democracy’ had become a God word, just as ‘reactionary’ had become a devil word.

I would suggest that ‘scientific’ has become a God word. The dictionary defines it thus:
“Of, relating to, or employing the methodology of science.” But the liberals who run our society mean something quite different when they use the word. When they say something is scientific, they mean that it is true, and true in a self-evident, empirically, discernible way. That is why the liberals claim they reject the Biblical view of the creation; it is not scientific. And it is certainly true that the truth of the Biblical account cannot be proved ‘scientifically’; it is a matter of faith. What kind of faith would it be if it wasn’t unseen? But it is equally true that the liberal’s belief in evolution is a faith, not a scientific fact. They accept on faith the existence of the empirical fact of an actual missing link that proves the Darwinian theory. So it is an issue of two competing faiths, not one of faith vs. scientific fact. And when two faiths collide, the final arbiter is the heart of man. What do our intuitions about the nature of existence tell us? Well, we feel in our hearts, and we observe in the hearts of others, a divine presence. From that touchstone of reality, we begin the journey that leads to the foot of the cross. And from that point we accept, on His word, the revealed truth of the creation of the world. It is not scientific fact; it is something more certain; it is faith.

In contrast, the faith of the liberal does not square with reality. Liberals intuit no divine presence in themselves or in other human beings and view the natural world as something that sprang into existence without purpose or design. And yet their faith operates by one absolute, inexorable law: the law of hate. Bryan put it quite well: “The Darwinian theory represents man as reaching his present perfection by which the strong crowd out and kill the weak.” All the blather from the liberal leftists about peace and love is just that – blather. Undergirding their faith is hate. Their forerunners, the liberal capitalists, were simply blunter about their social Darwinism.

Now let’s venture beyond the parameters of Larson’s book and look at the fundamentalist movement today and see how that movement helps or hinders the white Christian. The term, fundamentalist, is a relatively new term. Protestant Christians started using it in the early 20th century to distinguish themselves from the Christians who did not believe in the inerrancy of the scriptures. I have no statistics on the subject, but I would guess that initially, in the early part of the 20th century, fundamentalist Christians were a rather sizeable minority nationwide and quite probably a majority in the South. But by the later part of the 20th century and certainly now in the 21st century fundamentalists represent a very tiny minority of those who call themselves Christian.

While agreeing with the fundamentalists on the inerrancy of scripture, I must say that the modern fundamentalists such as the late Rev. Falwell and the prolific author Henry M. Morris (The Long War Against God) have preserved Holy Scripture at the expense of Christianity. And I say this because the fundamentalists, as represented by Falwell and Morris, have in the name of creationist theology jettisoned the European cultural heritage. This might seem like a minor thing; after all, what is a cultural heritage compared to the Holy Bible? But in cutting us off from the European cultural heritage, they have cut us off from the living God who is the source of the Holy Bible. Let’s backtrack a little.

Martin Luther, the first fundamentalist, maintained that any man who read the Holy Scriptures with a sincere desire to comprehend their contents could know the truths of divine revelation. In contrast the Catholic Church maintained that no man could know the truths contained in the Holy Bible unless they were properly interpreted by the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. Divine revelation came, in the Catholic Church, from scripture and tradition properly interpreted by the Church. In theory, I agree with the Catholic Church in that it seems rather dicey to allow individuals to pursue the Gospels on their own and come up with a proper metaphysic. But in practice, I agree with Martin Luther, because from personal experience and observation, I have learned that an individual has a better chance alone with his Bible than he does with the ‘pope-to-bishop-to-parish-priest-to-parishioner’ system. But the fundamentalist and the Roman Catholic have both overlooked the one element of the faith that is anterior to the acceptance of the inerrancy of scripture or the acceptance of the inerrancy of the Church’s interpretation of scripture. That overlooked element is the essential element: the human factor. In jettisoning the European cultural heritage, which is done when anyone mentioning the words ‘white’ or ‘Anglo-Saxon’ or using phrases like ‘white man’s burden’ is lumped with Hitler, the fundamentalist and the ‘inerrancy of the Magisterium’ Roman Catholic deprive man of his basic intuition about the nature of reality. Contained within the European cultural heritage is the truth that there is first that divine intimation in our heart and then the sympathetic connection with a divine element in the hearts of our kith and kin. Without that intuition and sympathy, we have no way of knowing or of caring about the truths of divine revelation.

It seems, to the fundamentalist, that he can jettison the 19th century Southern whites and the ‘white man’s burden’ type of Brit of the 18th and 19th century. “They are mere dross, forerunners of Hitler,” fundamentalists Falwell and Morris maintain. (The Catholic jettisons Cortez.) “All we need is the Holy Bible.” But the Bible is an unopened book, and the Roman Catholic Church is an empty building without the spirit and blood of the old European.

It is ironic that the fundamentalist, who deplores the liberal’s faith in evolution, is compact with him on the issue of the European cultural heritage. Both maintain that the European’s actions toward other races and his intuitions about the nature of reality were in error. But then how can we have faith in anything? If the one civilization that took Christ into its bosom is not essentially correct about the nature of man and his relation to God, then aren’t we all doomed to either Beckett’s despair or Montaigne’s skepticism?

The fundamentalist is certainly correct; the evolutionists must be opposed. But he is not fundamental enough. Man is a fish out of water if he is severed from his fundamental intuitions about the nature of reality. The European cultural heritage confirms our heartfelt intuition that Christ is the focal point of human history. If we are severed from that heritage of the white man, we will descend to the spiritual level of the apes whom Darwin says are our progenitors. Presumably the fundamentalists would not like to see that happen, but then they should stop trying to Negroize Christianity and return instead to the segregationist, hierarchal, fundamental faith of their European forefathers.