Currently, the #1 article on TAC is Rod Dreher’s piece titled “Christians, Take The Alt-Right Seriously”, which is itself a riff on Michael Rose’s recent piece in First Things titled “The Anti-Christian Alt-Right”. Rose writes:
The alt-right is anti-Christian. Not by implication or insinuation, but by confession. Its leading thinkers flaunt their rejection of Christianity and their desire to convert believers away from it. Greg Johnson, an influential theorist with a doctorate in philosophy from Catholic University of America, argues that “Christianity is one of the main causes of white decline” and a “necessary condition of white racial suicide.” Johnson edits a website that publishes footnoted essays on topics that range from H. P. Lovecraft to Martin Heidegger, where a common feature is its subject’s criticisms of Christian doctrine. “Like acid, Christianity burns through ties of kinship and blood,” writes Gregory Hood, one of the website’s most talented essayists. It is “the essential religious step in paving the way for decadent modernity and its toxic creeds.”
At Counter-Currents, Greg Johnson does publish articles defending various Christian traditions, in addition to reawakening awareness of long neglected counter-enlightenment figures whom would otherwise be lost to history. Johnson promotes a ‘big tent’ white identitarian philosophy, with a healthy exchange of ideas between the differing strands of the Dissident Right. For instance, I have written a few pieces at Counter-Currents, including an interpretation of the recent movie Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017), which I see as a modern day allegory for the crossroads Christianity finds itself at.
I disagree that the Alt Right is necessarily anti-Christian. The Alt Right is, however, critical of where Christianity appears to be now: namely, a pathological altruism which sows the seeds of its own displacement and demise (e.g., millions of non-white ‘refugees’ leading to racial displacement and a soft white genocide across the West.) The question of at what point ‘the problem’ started (whether at the inception of Christianity or at some other point in Christianity’s development/adaptation in the West) is very much an open one.
To say “Richard Spencer is evil” (as Dreher does) is a bit much. I disagree with Spencer on a lot. He’s not the ‘Leader’ of the Alt Right, despite both his own self-promotion as such and the MSM’s Alinsky-ite glee that they can affix a face to the Alt Right for use in their dismissive, straw-man stories on the Alt Right ‘Nazis’. Spencer may be wrong on things, perhaps on a lot of things, and you may even see him as fundamentally misguided, but I wouldn’t characterize him as ‘evil’.
The Alt Right (more accurately described as the Dissident Right) has a myriad of different voices. Counter-Currents, for example, contains serious articles and opinions with notable intellectual fodder, and does not engage in the uber-trolling of more juvenile sites like Andrew Anglin’s distasteful ‘The Daily Stormer’. It’s important to make this distinction. (I do recommend George Hawley’s book on the Alt Right as being, for the most part, a generally fair representation of the different factions/voices/dynamics/arcs of the Alt Right.)
On a sidenote, critics of the Alt Right need to actually read some of the associated seminal texts, and contend with the ideas therein. To use one important book as an example, folks should actually read Dr. Kevin MacDonald’s seminal, scholarly work The Culture of Critique (a book which has been as eye-opening to me as Popper’s falsifiability thesis, Hayek’s theory of knowledge, and Wittgenstein’s truth tables) and contend with its theses in an empirical way, rather than simply casting ad hominem attacks against the author as being an ‘anti-Semite’, which is something SJWs, the SPLC, and mainstream conservatives universally do. MacDonald’s thesis is descriptive, not normative. It doesn’t say what ought to be done. There are some on the Alt Right (e.g., Jared Taylor, Peter Brimelow) who believe MacDonald’s central thesis can be incorporated into a wider, more Civic Nationalist-styled, ‘citizenist’, white majority framework, and there are others who don’t. But, we ought to be able to debate MacDonald’s very salient observations. Instead, the mainstream conservative movement pretends it doesn’t see the 800 lb gorilla in the room, let alone actually debate whether or not that 800 lb gorilla has a disproportionate representation among our elites and a subsequent disproportionate influence on our Culture. (It is worth noting that France, for example, has a much longer intellectual tradition of conservatives seriously debating aspects of the JQ.)
At the end of the day, the Alt Right is an organic, leaderless, online social force that, given the current stifling cultural environs of Political Correctness, will likely stay that way for the foreseeable future.
