What is to be done about the Church?



Of course, I am speaking first and foremost of the Roman Catholic Church, who still fashions herself the ancient guardian and spiritual mother of the West, even as modern times have made her a profligate whore. The latter-day Catholic Church is thoroughly consumed by “social justice”—the Pope is a veritable Marxist!—and maintains relevance mostly by taking absurdly hard lines on particular issues of sexual morality. (The proscription of contraception, based on a bit of sophistry by which one might also deny the use of all of modern medicine, is certainly an unusual choice of hill on which to die.) Religious Catholics maintain a better sense of certain values—for example, prohibiting divorce and encouraging procreation—than most Europeans nowadays, but anyone truly seeking to preserve the traditions of Western civilization must admit that Rome has fallen into grievous doctrinal error, and in so admitting, makes himself as sure a heretic as Martin Luther. (Luther at least had Scripture on his side; restoring classical Church doctrine with the aid of Scripture would require disingenuity of which no decent man is capable, as I will show later.)



I am hardly qualified to speak on the spiritual errors of the Church, if indeed any have been made, but she has, even from the outset, been mistaken of her temporal (Earthly) role, which is actually one in which the literal truth of her theology is rather irrelevant. It was once remarked (supposedly by Seneca, though I have heard that proper attribution belongs to the 18th-century English historian who wrote Decline and Fall) that all religions are regarded by the commons as equally true, by the philosophers as equally false, and by the magistrates as equally useful. This being a blog about Earthly politics, unconcerned with the worlds above or below, only the perspective of the magistrates has any use to us here—and the magistrates see, of course, that the true temporal role of the Church is as guardian and arbiter of the values which permit civilization.



This particular Church, alas, apparently lacked the wisdom of the magistrates; judging from the volume of blood and ink spilt over the tiniest theological points, the authorities of the early Church presumably believed their religion to be literally and factually true. It was not for centuries that the Church embraced her role as the imperial government of Western Europe, and when she did, malcontents were not long in appearing. Henry VIII does not count—High Anglicanism was the result of a political dispute, and doctrinally identical to Catholicism—but Luther wrought a havoc on the Church from which it never recovered, and the worst of it was that he was right. Luther's great (and intolerable, for good reason) innovation was to make Christianity once more the property of the commons—to put its direction in the hands of people who believed in its literal truth. The Church was no longer guardian and arbiter but a salvor of human souls (as Christ had actually commanded it to be)—and, worse still, European contact with the Americas and Africa around that time opened a universe of unsaved savages to the forces of Western charity. The Catholic Spaniards who went to America came to conquer and enslave, with only the merest guise of a Christian mission; but the Protestant missionaries who came to Africa a few hundred years later went with the firm belief that the mere words of the Evangelion would, like some kind of incantation, transform an African into a European with dark skin. How did their approaches compare? The conquerors created a civilization that, though fraught with problems, resembles Spain more than the Aztec or Inca empires. The missionaries transformed the literal Garden of Eden into a useful approximation for Hell. I don't think I need say more.



The problem with the Church, it would then seem, is Christianity itself—not the metaphysical aspects, which might reasonably be combined with any temporal ideology, but the temporal teachings of Christ himself, which were ascetic, socialistic, universalizing, and eschatological (none of which are good things). The Christianity of the Apostles, as recorded in the New Testament, was based on renouncement of worldly pleasures and familial ties in anticipation of the imminent End of Time, which of course is a disastrous belief system for any society based in reality, where the Apocalypse is quite a long way off; and no amount of sophistry can change either of these facts. That is the problem with Christianity: eventually someone will read the Gospels. The Catholic Church, of course, tried its hardest to prevent this from happening; one of Luther's great heresies was to translate the Bible from Latin into the vernacular. But once the cat was out of the bag, there was no getting it back in; the people had realized that the religion which had been the bedrock of their society for the past twelve hundred years had little in common with the actual teachings of the man they worshiped as the Son of God, and most were too ignorant to realize that the former was far more important.



I oversimplify, of course—the Reformation was actually quite localized, and the Catholic Church has a billion adherents to this day—but from that day on, the Church's Earthly power (its only relevant power) was in retreat. I would even say that in the age of democracy, all churches are intrinsically Protestant, whatever regalia their priests may choose to wear—the model of civilization as a family in macrocosm, with King as father and Church as mother, has been smashed, and the arbiter of Western values has abdicated her throne. The Church of Rome may maintain the vestiges of the imperial government she once was, but she is no longer able to govern anything—even herself. The Gospels govern—and the Gospels in their purest form are toxic to Earthly civilization, as, of course, they were always meant to be. The Mother of Europe has always stood on sand.



Christianity's biggest redeeming feature, from the perspective of civilizational preservation, is the Old Testament, which makes modern anti-Semitism a curious phenomenon. Whether or not the financial antics of the Ashkenazim have been good for Europe, a king seeking a religion to preserve his people could do far worse than Judaism. The bronze-age barbarism of its legal system aside, the religion of the Jews has preserved their tiny tribe through captivities, conquests, diasporae and persecutions spanning five thousand years—far longer than Christendom seems likely to manage. The trouble with the Jews is that, by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, their outworn creed had become far easier to shed than theologically nimble Christianity, and this new population of de facto atheists calling themselves “Reform Jews” picked up the principles of universal brotherhood and social justice from their neighbors, the liberal English Christians; discarded the more conservative parts of Christian theology—the Jewish parts!—and re-exported it as the secular ideology of progressivism, which, cut free from its Judaic roots—by Jews!—proceeded to complete the conquest of the Old Testament by the New. This is perhaps why modern “conservative” Christians, Catholics especially, take such a firm, actually repressive stance on sexual issues—more even than the mediaeval Church, if certain historical accounts are to be believed—sex is the one issue where progressives have attacked ancient church dogma and not actually had the words of Jesus Christ on their side. Jesus actually said very little about sex, it turns out, but the Church must have a hill to die on that's not actually made of sand, and it seems this one will do.



The Church, then, is dead. Long live the Church.



There are those on the traditionalist Right who, recognizing the inherent dangers of evangelical Christianity, argue that we ought to go back to the true indigenous religion of the West—which they tend to claim would be Norse paganism, although a far stronger case can be made for the Greco-Roman variety in most countries, even such nominally Germanic ones as Britain. However, if fixing Christianity is impossible, restoring a sincere belief in Zeus or Odin would an order of magnitude more absurd yet. From the Senecan perspective, where all religions are equally true, equally false, and equally useful (that is, religion is only interesting to a ruler or philosopher of government as a vehicle for temporal laws, which are ultimately made by humans), there is nothing wrong with Christianity, as long as it is accepted that established and evangelical Christianity are clean different things, and it is the former which is the rightful—indeed, the indigenous—religion of the West. Whatever one believes about the nature (or even the existence) of God, it is clear that He (or we) created the Torah and the Tanakh for the Jews, the Gospels and the Epistles for the downtrodden of Ancient Rome, and the Church for the kingdoms of the West—each building on the previous but adapting it to the society it served. If this means the Pope must occasionally and subtly abjure the Scriptures, that was not always thought to be catastrophic—no more so than those Scriptures which occasionally and subtly abjure earlier parts of themselves.



And it is certainly clear enough that God did not intend for all peoples to follow Him in the same way. A faith which professes to be for all times and all races seems doomed to quickly universalize the race of its originators into oblivion. The Muslims believe in the universality of their religion more than anyone and yet it is thoroughly ethnic. When the Caliphate proselytized, it also conquered, raped, and viciously assimilated the natives until they were not merely Arabized but Arab, and the day a translation of the Qur'an is as valid as the original Arabic is the day Islam dies. Europeans historically have had little interest in the Arab sort of viciousness, but until quite recently we did have an interest in colonies and empire, motivated in large part by our belief in the universality of Christianity. We knew then, though, that our enlightened faith mandated us to rule benevolently over others, not to allow others to rule over us. Whether or not Christianity is the “one true” religion, one cannot afford to deny that it was created for the European nations and the European race—and if God had meant it to be practiced by Africans, Asians, and American Indians in countries free and clear of European rule, He would not have placed Christ on the fringes of Imperial Rome.



In my next post, I'll discuss in more detail where the Church went wrong and what a restored, properly established Church for Western civilization might look like.