Until Liberaldom Is Ashes

“And the LORD was angry with Solomon, because his heart was turned from the LORD God of Israel, which had appeared unto him twice, And had commanded him concerning this thing, that he should not go after other gods: but he kept not that which the LORD commanded.” – I Kings 11: 9-10

Recently while doing my monthly check of the news, I saw a panel of experts discussing the economy. All agreed that the national debt had reached crisis proportions and all agreed that no one in the Republican or Democratic parties was really addressing the problem of the national debt. The experts went on to explain that if really intelligent people (like themselves) were consulted, and if peripheral issues such as illegal immigration and abortion were not allowed to distract the nation from the one big economic issue, all might yet be well.

Let’s give the panel members the benefit of the doubt and assume that when they said intelligence was needed they really meant what was needed was wisdom, which is greater than mere intelligence. Is wisdom enough? Solomon was the wisest of all the kings of Israel, yet he destroyed Israel by marrying heathen princesses and placing images of Ba-al, Ashtoreth, Chemosh and Molech in full view of the Temple of the Lord. All this the wise Solomon did to please his wives. And in order to maintain his wives and himself in luxury he taxed his people beyond their ability to pay. So it seems that even if the wise panelists could be put in charge, we would not reduce our national debt by one dollar. Something besides mere wisdom is needed to rule a country.

Let’s go back to Solomon. What was that wise man's fatal flaw? He did not love God as his father David did. David’s sins were scarlet, but he never ceased loving the Lord and trying to do His will. If we permit legalized murder in the form of abortion, and if we permit national genocide in the form of legal and illegal colored immigration, are we doing the will of God? And if we are not doing the will of God, how can we expect to “turn the economy around”? Solomon was left one tribe out of the twelve for “the sake of your father David.” Will the Europeans even be allowed to rule their own tribe? Do they even want to?

It’s insane to talk about reducing the national debt in our modern Babylonian state. Concern about leaving one’s children with enormous debts is a Christian concern. The post-Christian debauchee views existence much like Louis XV of France: “After me, the deluge.”

The deluge has come, and we would be fools indeed to look to the people who caused it to rescue us from the deluge. Conservative and liberal alike have bid us view issues of sound economics and knowing the will of God as distinct and separate issues. But they are one issue. And in saying that, I do not mean to imply, as some preachers do, that we can get stock tips from the Bible or that faith breeds wealth. What I do maintain is that the right type of economy comes from a people who are concerned with knowing and doing the will of God. Life is a vale of tears no matter what the economic system, but human suffering can be eased by the proper, the Christian, ordering of society. Goldsmith makes this point in his poem “The Deserted Village”:

In all my wanderings through this world of care,
In all my griefs -- and God has given my share --
I still had hopes, my latest hours to crown,
Amidst these humble bowers to lay me down;
To husband out life's taper at the close,
And keep the flame from wasting, by repose:
I still had hopes, for pride attends us still,
Amidst the swains to show my book-learn'd skill,
Around my fire an evening group to draw,
And tell of all I felt, and all I saw;
And, as a hare, whom hounds and horns pursue,
Pants to the place from whence at first she flew,
I still had hopes, my long vexations past,
Here to return -- and die at home at last.

O blest retirement, friend to life's decline,
Retreats from care, that never must be mine,
How blest is he who crowns, in shades like these,
A youth of labour with an age of ease;
Who quits a world where strong temptations try,
And, since 'tis hard to combat, learns to fly!
For him no wretches, born to work and weep,
Explore the mine, or tempt the dangerous deep;
No surly porter stands, in guilty state,
To spurn imploring famine from the gate;
But on he moves to meet his latter end,
Angels around befriending virtue's friend;
Sinks to the grave with unperceived decay,
While resignation gently slopes the way;
And, all his prospects brightening to the last,
His heaven commences ere the world be past!

Let’s suppose a European such as myself got to sit on that panel of experts. And let’s further suppose I tell the panel of experts that, “We can never wipe out our national debt so long as we ban the master of the revels, Jesus Christ, from the body politic.”

What would be the panelists’ reaction? The reactions would vary from condescending smirks to indignant scowls, but none of the panelists would say, “By George, you’re right! We have left out the Son of God – what an oversight!”

I know that the case will be made that religious faith must be kept separate from economics because men fight over religion. Yes, men do fight over religion, but then they fight over economics as well. A man is dead without a poetic vision of life that stems from his faith. How can he make good decisions about anything important if he deliberately narrows his vision in order to exclude the silken, poetic thread of life, faith.

In the one great religious poem of the 20th century, C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis emphasizes that Aslan, the Christ figure, is not a tame Lion. The religious impulse is pure fire and desire; it can lead a man to heaven or, if diverted from its true source, to hell. Rev. Dimmesdale in Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter allows his passion for God to become a passion for another man’s wife, but ultimately his passion finds its true home, at the foot of the Cross.

The poetic impulse, our passionate desire for something more than nature, for the transcendent, has always been considered dangerous by the managerial philosophers and theologians. Plato wanted to ban the poets from his Republic, Martha wanted Mary to stop her dreaming and help with the dishes, Aquinas wanted to keep God within the confines of his syllogisms, the born-againers want to confine religious passion to their single-room apartment, and on it goes; religious formalism has always been at war with religious faith. There were and are good reasons for leaving Christ out of the pictures; He is, after all, not a tame lion, and men who follow Him tend to be rather unpredictable and hard to handle. But what is the alternative? The alternative is the soul-dead ant heap of humanity called 'modern Europeans'.

The Europeans died when, like Solomon, they separated religious passion from wisdom. Solomon was the wisest of the wise, but he became a fool because his passion was for heathen women and heathen gods. The Europeans’ love for the Negro and the gods of the colored people made Christendom into Satandom, and no economic policy can succeed that does not confront this blasphemy.

The Christian Platos who so thoroughly banished passion from their Christian republics did not know what they were spawning. Man needs to be passionate about his faith. If he can’t be passionate about Christianity because the Christian Platos forbid it, then he will become passionate about some other god, or many other gods. The modern Christians bring blacks into their churches because they can’t be passionate about the Son of God, but they can be passionate about the black man. We should not seek to end Negro worship by abandoning Christ, as the neo-pagans so aggressively demand; we should abandon the abstract, passionless Christianity of the dried-up religious experts of the Western world.

In my freshman year at college, my assigned roommate was a chess enthusiast. He subscribed to several chess magazines and belonged to the college chess club. I had never played chess before in my life, yet when I played the chess enthusiast in a game, I won. I didn’t win because I was a natural-born chess genius, I won because my unorthodox play confused my very logical roommate who was used to a more traditional, logical game. My victory, quite understandably, irritated my roommate. I hadn’t technically violated any of the rules, but I didn’t, in his judgment, “play the game correctly.” I think the managerial-type theologians have, over the Christian centuries, been irritated with Christ. “You’re not playing the game correctly,” they tell Him, but then they had no reason to expect Him to be a tame Lion. And they have no right to demand that His followers be tame lions either.

Dostoyevsky wrote so eloquently in “The Grand Inquisitor” chapter of The Brothers Karamazov about the conflict between the clerical formalists who can’t abide what, in their eyes, is the whimsical and irresponsible behavior of Christ who plays the part of the passionate Pied Piper, imploring His people to respond in kind to His passionate love song:

“'So that, in truth, Thou didst Thyself lay the foundation for the destruction of Thy kingdom, and no one is more to blame for it. Yet what was offered Thee? There are three powers, three powers alone, able to conquer and to hold captive for ever the conscience of these impotent rebels for their happiness--those forces are miracle, mystery and authority. Thou hast rejected all three and hast set the example for doing so. When the wise and dread spirit set Thee on the pinnacle of the temple and said to Thee, "If Thou wouldst know whether Thou art the Son of God then cast Thyself down, for it is written: the angels shall hold him up lest he fall and bruise himself, and Thou shalt know then whether Thou art the Son of God and shalt prove then how great is Thy faith in Thy Father." But Thou didst refuse and wouldst not cast Thyself down. Oh, of course, Thou didst proudly and well, like God; but the weak, unruly race of men, are they gods? Oh, Thou didst know then that in taking one step, in making one movement to cast Thyself down, Thou wouldst be tempting God and have lost all Thy faith in Him, and wouldst have been dashed to pieces against that earth which Thou didst come to save. And the wise spirit that tempted Thee would have rejoiced. But I ask again, are there many like Thee? And couldst Thou believe for one moment that men, too, could face such a temptation? Is the nature of men such, that they can reject miracle, and at the great moments of their life, the moments of their deepest, most agonising spiritual difficulties, cling only to the free verdict of the heart?”

Yes, “the free verdict of the heart” is what is missing from modern Christianity. When the European of the old stock, the European with a heart that still loves, returns from exile, the liberal world will hear the sound of the same hosannas that made Satan tremble and gave life to the European people. It is useless to proscribe passion; it will out. In the counter-revolution, we will oppose the liberals’ passion for their heathen gods of color with our passion for the Son of God. The passionate European, the European who loves and hates with all his heart, is the Trojan horse within the walls of Liberaldom, and he will not sheath his sword until Liberaldom is ashes. +

Till We Have Built Jerusalem

And they shall see his face; and his name shall be in their foreheads. – Rev. 22: 4

I recently read Charlotte Mary Yonge’s Reasons Why I Am a Catholic and Not a Roman Catholic (1901). I infinitely prefer her brand of Catholicism to Leo XIII’s brand of Catholicism, but my preferences are meaningless and Miss Yonge’s points are moot because neither Yonge’s Catholicism nor Leo XIII’s Catholicism have survived past the 1960’s.

Is this the proof that both versions of the Faith were false? Well, I don’t think the fact that a Faith has not survived is proof that it is false. Islam has retained more of its core than Christianity, but that does not, in my judgment, make Islam true and Christianity false. A religion can only be judged false when it fails the Shakespearean test: the test of reality. And in that test Christianity still stands as the one true religion. But when we are talking about Anglo-Catholicism and Roman-Catholicism, we are not talking about the Faith itself, we are talking about two organizations’ claim that they have preserved the original Faith of the Apostles. In that regard, the Anglican Church and the Roman Catholic Church have been shown to be false claimants; neither have preserved the faith of the apostles (nor for that matter have the Orthodox Church or the Protestant churches). What seems to be missing in all the churches is a desire to see Christ whole, in His divinity and His humanity. And consequently where each church goes wrong is in attempting to incorporate only a portion of Christ’s personality into their theology.

We have all had the experience, particularly in this age of pop psychology and pop theology, of being put into a category that doesn’t really suit our personality completely or that is a totally false category. Our Lord had similar problems with the apostles. St. Peter had to be rebuked: “Get thee behind me, Satan,” and none of the apostles were trusted to impart Christ’s message until after Pentecost. And St. Paul needed a personal revelation before he could understand the personality of Christ. Of course not even a personal revelation would have done him any good if he hadn’t already been struggling to live a life of the spirit.

I think the image that appears to block our encounter with the living God is the false abstracted portrait of God that original sin paints. The remedy, as I have suggested before, is to journey through that labyrinth called the human heart. Anything that impedes the Shakespearean journey turns us not toward God but toward Satan, even if it is called Roman Catholicism, Traditionalism, Orthodoxy, Anglo-Catholicism or Protestantism. (1)

When I look at the churches in the nineteenth century, I see much that is admirable, but I see none that have carried their admirable visions of Christianity into the 20th or 21st centuries. They have all renounced the integral Christ for an abstracted Christ that suits their mundane and often sinister earthly political purposes.

“Another cause inflamed the minds of the nation at large, no less than the tempting prospect of the wealth of England animated the soldiery. So much had been written and said on either side concerning the form of church government, that it had become a matter of infinitely more consequence in the eyes of the multitude than the doctrines of that gospel which both churches had embraced. The Prelatists and Presbyterians of the more violent kind became as illiberal as the Papists, and would scarcely allow the possibility of salvation beyond the pale of their respective churches. It was in vain remarked to these zealots, that had the Author of our holy religion considered any peculiar form of church government as essential to salvation, it would have been revealed with the same precision as under the Old Testament dispensation.”

– Walter Scott in A Legend of Montrose

What Scott observes in the zealots on every side of the British religious wars, a tendency to make the forms of worship the faith itself, has destroyed Christian Europe.

The forms of worship are not the faith itself. They exist only to lead us to the object of worship. You cannot worship the Latin Mass or the ‘born again’ experience without eventually becoming the leading character in a tragedy, the tragedy of a man without a vital faith. European man became, when he embraced formalism, a second-hand man, incapable of coming to grips with any aspect of existence directly.

Some years back I quoted Henri de Lubac, who said that modern man had lost his appetite for God. If that appetite returned, de Lubac claimed, then belief would return. But how can one hunger for any of the rationalized, second-hand gods presented to us by the so-called Christian churches? Their gods are Mr. Rogers and Tash. The antidote for such false faiths is the folk wisdom of the West, which says the human heart contains the secret treasure that will forever remain hidden from the academics. And therein lies the key to the de-Christianization of our churches and our culture: the Church has become academized as has our society. The Christian folk have passed out of existence. Without them there can be no genuine Christianity as it once existed in Europe. We are still reaping the bitter harvest of idea-religion, spawned by the Greeks and brought into the Church for its destruction by Aquinas.

Those who would be Christian folk cannot wait for the churches to break out of their bondage to the academy, which is a bondage to Satan. They must turn away from the academy, which is the modern church and the modern world, and start on the slow but sure journey through the human heart that our European ancestors made so long ago.

I have conservative nationalist literature dating as far back as 1979 in which the reader is urged to stop illegal and legal colored immigration by writing to his local congressmen. Why do such actions never work? Because we cannot stop an invasion by placing a form of government above the interests of our people. The cry should be, “In the name of our God and our people, this invasion must be stopped!” Fortunately Alfred the Great didn’t have a congressman to write to; if he had, he never would have become Alfred the Great.

Quentin Compson in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury asks his father how he knows life is meaningless. The drunken, nihilist father responds that he knew about the meaningless of existence at the moment tragedy became second-hand. Quentin’s father is a modern European. His death in life is the result of the triumph of formalism in the Christian churches. The Christian faith is a two-edged sword. If it is seen whole and taken to heart, it is our salvation. But if Christianity is dissected, decompartmentalized, and turned into a formalized system, it becomes a virulent poison.

It would be disastrous to follow the advice of the neopagans and jettison Christ in order to save the white race. Christ was, is, and always shall be our only hope. He is our only hope because He is the living God. But jettison the worship of the modern icons of modern, Christless Christianity, such as racial egalitarianism, democracy, and Tridentinism, we must.

The guardians at the gates of the various Christian churches can all present an apologia for their right to be called the true heirs of the apostles. But are they the heirs of the apostles? The apostles lived and worked with the Lord during his life on earth, and they told the Christ story after His death and resurrection. It seems that the heirs of the apostles are the Europeans who lived with Christ on a daily basis and wove the Christian story into the seamless garment of their culture. How can churches who demean and denounce that culture and its people be the heirs of the apostles? They can’t, and they are not. Was the rock, against which the gates of hell would not prevail, an institution with a rational, systemic schema of salvation? Or was the rock St. Peter’s declaration of faith? “Thou are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

Faith, the faith that moves mountain, comes from those who have seen the face of Jesus Christ. Do we see His face in the liberal, white-hating, country-club churches of the modern world, or do we see that precious Face in the lives and culture of the ancient Europeans?

Europe is being engulfed by barbarians of color because white Europeans no longer desire to see the face of Jesus Christ. Gone is the patriotic desire of William Blake:

Bring me my bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire.

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

The end result of a second-hand faith is Satanism. The liberals are openly satanic, and the half-way house Christians are unable to resist them because they have a second-hand faith. And when life is viewed from such a standpoint, the dramatic conflict between good and evil is seen as a fairytale that mature, thinking people have left behind. But that is what I love about Ratty’s Europe. It is childlike and Christ-centered. In that Europe, Christ is real, the devil is real, and Christian Europe is a living, breathing entity as well.

The children of darkness have given up their religion of the heart for the religion of the mind. This goes against the wisdom of the race. The white man has always preferred the leaden casket over the one of gold and the one of silver; the cottage in the woods to the sumptuous palace; and the blood of the Lamb to the magic talisman. Let the sons and daughters of this ‘new age of enlightenment’ keep all their magic talismans: rationalism, science, and multiculturalism. The European will stay with the European cottage in the woods that contains the things he loves. And his childlike attachment to the things he loves will keep him bound to the Sacred Heart Who speaks to men through the little things that the clever men and women have discarded. The old fairy tales are correct: the faithful heart always triumphs over the satanic mind. +

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(1) I don’t think one has to have read Shakespeare (although it helps) in order to follow the Shakespearean way to God; however, I do think it is the only way. We must strip away false layer after false layer from our hearts till we get to its center. And then – well – and then we find He has been there all along.

Unchurched

I have been told, at different times in my life, that I was not a Catholic by official representatives of all three major branches of the Catholic Church, the Novus Ordo branch, the traditionalist branch, and the Eastern Rite branch. It angered me each time it happened, but it angers me no more. I’ll gladly give them the title of Catholic and call myself an unchurched Christian.

What the churchmen and their lackeys fail to realize is that faith takes precedence over incorporation into the Church. I needed to believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God before I had an interest in joining their church. I had a vision, not a blinding, pure vision like St. Paul’s, but a misty one that gave me hope for an even clearer vision in the future. And the process of belief is not radically different for a cradle Catholic. At some point the “vision thing” must come into play. Mere mechanical reception of the sacraments will not sustain a person who has not moved, through his own free will, toward the light.

I entered the Catholic Church because I thought my vision of the faith was in line with the professed doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. When I discovered, over the course of twenty-seven years, that my faith and Catholic doctrine were incompatible, it was not hard to decide what to jettison. Faith in Him is much more precious to me than the right to be called a Roman Catholic.

If I wanted, I could twist the documents as the traditionalists do to show how in theory I am really a Roman Catholic and those other guys are not. But the Church’s faith is more than its stated faith as expressed in various church documents. It is revealed in how the Church interprets and how the Church practices what is stated in the documents. And in that regard if I stated my main objection to the Catholic Church since the Middle Ages, it would be this: I object to the Church’s consistent and methodical de-emphasis of the importance of belief in Christ in favor of incorporation into the Roman Catholic system. The system, in Roman Catholicism, is more important than the person of God, and as an inevitable consequence, more important than the person in the pew. The impersonal faith of the Roman Catholic Church is diametrically opposed to the personal faith of St. Paul whom the Catholic Church claims to revere as a saint. Dostoyevsky, who had much in common with St. Paul, points out the extreme dichotomy between Christianity and Roman Catholicism in the Grand Inquisitor section of The Brothers Karamazov.

The Church de-emphasizes Christ and extols pagan philosophy in defiance of the hungry everyman who desires mercy and not sacrifice. It’s true that worldly success is more readily obtained within an organization such as the Catholic Church, but what is worldly success? Was not the whole world, before the coming of Christ, sickened unto death with a hope that was in this world only?

Protestantism as a reaction to Christless Catholicism was a necessary one. To be freed from the tyranny of pagan philosophy was a great blessing. But the desire for worldly success subverted much of the reaction. Calvinism, hatched by an organizational mind and adhered to by those with faith in this world only, gave Protestantism an anti-Christian taint that has still not been removed. It is certain, however, that there is a Christian undercurrent to Protestantism that has blessed the world. The sincere Protestants, pejoratively called ‘Christers,’ have kept alive an appreciation for the personal Savior that St. Paul saw and heard on the road to Damascus. It’s easy to sneer at the born-again types who talk about a personal relationship with Christ because they are so often the victims of mere enthusiasm rather than the recipients of divine grace. But their theology is correct: Christianity is about a personal relationship with Christ; it is simply harder to achieve than the born-again types understand.

The Master’s words about Faith and the child go to the heart of the issue. Before we are polluted with some organization’s explanation of the story, we hear the Christ story and we fall in love with the hero of that story. I know it was like that with me. And when I heard the Presbyterian Church’s explanation of the Christ story, I never quite believed what they were saying about my hero. When I returned to the Christian faith, having lost it when assaulted by the scientific world, it was to the Faith of my childhood that I returned, not to the Presbyterian Church. Catholicism only entered the picture because I thought, erroneously, that the faith of my childhood and Catholicism were compatible.

When C. S. Lewis wrote Pilgrim’s Regress, an allegorical tale of his return to Christianity, Tolkien told him that he hadn’t really converted at all, that he had simply returned to puritanical Irish Protestantism. But Tolkien, being a paganized Catholic, did not understand Christianity. Lewis had not returned to Irish Protestantism, he had returned to that first, pure, clean vision of Jesus Christ that was vouchsafed to him as a child. And he held to that vision the rest of his life, despite onslaughts from Tolkien, academia, and the brave new scientized world that surrounded him.

It certainly has been a master stroke of the devil to use the machinery of the Catholic Church to lead men and women away from Christ. But that’s what comes from aligning one’s church with the two smarter, but crueler older brothers and jettisoning the third dumb brother. It seems we never will believe that “the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.” But some Christians once believed it, and lived and died with contempt for the wisdom of the world. Like the forty just men in the old Jewish tale, they were and are the leaven of the church, and they don’t reside exclusively in one denomination.

There will always be some heroes of the Faith who will wade through the swamp of Catholic paganism and climb the mountain that leads to Christ. And they will do this because they hear a personal God of love calling them and not because a clerical salesman has invited them to join a religious country club for V.I.P.s.

The Sons of Martha have grown cruel. They have forgotten the gentle rebuke of the Savior and have made practical, worldly wisdom the whole sum of the Faith. Now, when the Church and the world it worships is more maniacally aligned than ever before against all things spiritual, is the time to assert one’s belief in the Fairy Prince to whom the Sons of Mary as well as the practical Sons of Martha owe their existence.