In “A Mythology for the New Right”, C.B. Robertson discusses how the New Right ought to orient itself towards Christianity:
“Given what religions are, and the purposes they serve, it would seem that the way to choose one’s religion is not to choose it, but to accept the religion you have been born into. It would be better to attempt to save your faith, through an act of heroic mythological creation — informed by a deep understanding of the tradition lying beneath it — than to abandon it in favor of another religion that appears to be more convenient to your own purposes. At the same time, we must always be willing to reexamine our faith, and question whether the religion we currently hold is truly in line with the identity we were born into.”
I like the author’s discussion of framing one’s choice towards religion as one of familial allegiance. Is doing otherwise akin to trying to choose one’s own family? IOW, it can’t be done; such things are inherited not chosen. (This is part of the Burkean tradition of conservatism.)
There is a good argument for saying that a white male in the U.S. wantonly embracing, say, Odinism, may appear like a ‘rational choice’ for person X, the question is whether one can truly choose (out of rather thin air) a religion. At what point does Nietzschean self-creation become a variant of post-60s, Boomer, “self-actualization”, with religion-as-lifestyle-choice, not to mention LARP-ing?
Were we trying to ‘rationally’ create a society from scratch, we might debate which religion we ought to choose, but such a scenario is not the case, never was, and never will be. You can’t create Man anew; you can’t create a Year One ala the French Revolution. We know where that often leads.
“[T]he spirit of the New Testament is entirely at odds with the legalism of Judaism and Islam as practiced, or that all religions are at some point derived from other religions which arose somewhere else.”
This is a crucially important distinction. In the modern era, however, we have seen the primary problem with Christianity be its pathological altruism and the dire social consequences thereof. What white Christians need to do is reign in this suicidal impulse. Enlightenment Rationalism comes with dangers when people believe that from-the-ground-up Reason is all that is legitimate for building, say, a philosophical or political system. The horrors (e.g., 20th century Communism) or misguided attempts (e.g., libertarianism) that can come with such a ‘faith’ in one aspect of Reason is borne of a faith in such Reason. The flip side of this coin is Christianity’s unchecked altruism, unmitigated by Tradition and inherited Wisdom. As such, Christianity tragically cut us off from our connection to the Greeks. Both the Rationalists and the Christians would benefit from an Aristotelian virtue ethics approach.
Christianity (figurative Christianity, not biblical literalism) is something of a Rorschach test. Most whites who identify as Christian have little knowledge of the arcana of theology. They have a very loose sense of Christian dogma, its very basic contours, and I would argue such individuals can more easily be swayed to New Right perspectives than, say, those rare Christians steeped in theology.
Yes, church attendance and even self-identification as Christian is plummeting across the West, but Christianity itself (its basic tenets, symbolism, and mythological structure) is so deeply ingrained in Western culture that it’ll be around for a very long time to come. Hence, it’s more constructive for the New Right to find common cause with Christianity (or at least with ‘Christians’) than to reject Christianity outright as a ‘Semitic’ religion, etc.
