“What is this, the Crusades in reverse?”— Jean Raspail

Christianity built the West, but a multicultural perversion of Christianity is bringing the West down. One of the most irritating aspects of modern politics is the way Christian leaders and commentators (although apparently not their flocks) have gone all in for Amnesty.

The Evangelical leadership, Southern Baptist Convention, and the current Pope all justify Amnesty through their own interpretations of Scripture. But perhaps Glenn Beck’s soccer ball-and-Teddy bear border handout is the most depressing recent example of self-destructive and yet oddly self-aggrandizing Christian charity [Glenn Beck to bring soccer balls, hot meals to illegals: ‘We must open our hearts’ by Tony Lee, Breitbart.com, July 8, 2014]

So it is probably inevitable that popular alternatives to Christianity will arise to serve as a source of cultural pride and identity for Americans—and for Westerners as a whole. The Norse god Odin is as good a choice as any to stand in where Christian leaders and traditions have fallen short.

Seriously. In a daring editorial move, Breitbart.com recently featured a modern reflection on the Norse god Odin: Report From Valhalla on the War of the Fourteen Centuries, penned by “Roland” of the famous poem, “Song of Roland” [February 14, 2015].

Who Would Do A Better Job Preserving The West?

Or…

Written from the vantage point of one of the Einherjar in Valhalla , Roland speaks with warriors from throughout Western history about the Muslim threat facing the West. Roland concludes that the West has grown weak, and that the strong need to fight.

Roland’s article is unusual because of its explicit appeal to Western culture and civilizational pride. There is none of the vague talk about universal “values” that usually defines the Beltway Right. And the appeal to the Old Gods is often taken as an almost clichéd appeal to the dreaded “far Right.”

But such an appeal might be necessary because of utter cowardice of what passes for modern Christianity. The collapse of the Faith was best described in the Jean Raspail’s, The Camp of the Saints, which presciently explained what would happen when an armada of Third World immigrants approached the shores of Europe.

One of Raspail’s character asks: “What is this, the Crusades in reverse?” The character, a consular employee, is attempting to stop the Third Worlders from leaving for Europe but encounters opposition from a group of “Western leaders” who created the crisis. Chief among them is a Catholic bishop.

The bishop wants to welcome the hordes of oncoming foreigners. In response, the consul excoriates him, saying:

They see right through you. For them, white skin means weak convictions. They know how weak yours are, they know you’ve given in. You can thank yourselves for that. The one thing your struggle for their souls has left them is the knowledge that the West–your West–is rich. To them, you’re the symbols of abundance. By your presence alone, they see that it does exist somewhere, and they see that your conscience hurts you for keeping it all to yourselves.[Camp of The Saints, online text, P. 10 ]

And that’s the contemporary global role of modern, Western, Christian leaders. They don’t seek to preserve a civilizational heritage. They don’t seek to protect their flocks. Instead, they serve as a beacon of guilt and gullibility to the world’s resentful. Instead of defending Christendom , they invite in actively hostile, resentful, and non-Christian minorities.

In other words, they wage the Crusades in reverse.

Implicitly, Christianity is seen as “Western” and its Crusades are viewed as a uniquely evil part of the Western past. Obama’s comparison of the Crusades to the actions of the Islamic State was a straightforward expression of the contempt all current Western leaders apparently hold for their own civilizational heritage.

Obama speaks for many Americans, and many Christians, when he lectures us to get down from our “high horse.” We’ve all heard this type of sentiment, sometimes even from our so-called conservative friends. “Who are we to judge?” is the battle cry of the modern weakling; the gutless mantra of a dying civilization.

There is probably no hope for the Christian leadership. But at the grassroots level, there are many who are literally prepared to fight. And there is no necessary link between the faith that built Western Civilization and the rot of self-hatred eating away at it today.

Christianity was not always monopolized by treasonous multiculturalists. Hence the pinnacle of Pat Buchanan’s famous “Culture War” speech in which he described visiting an Army compound set up during the 1992 Los Angeles riots:

They had come into L.A. late on the 2nd day, and they walked up a dark street, where the mob had looted and burned every building but one, a convalescent home for the aged. The mob was heading in, to ransack and loot the apartments of the terrified old men and women. When the troopers arrived, M-16s at the ready, the mob threatened and cursed, but the mob retreated. It had met the one thing that could stop it: force, rooted in justice, backed by courage. Greater love than this hath no man than that he lay down his life for his friend. Here were 19-year-old boys ready to lay down their lives to stop a mob from molesting old people they did not even know. And as they took back the streets of L.A., block by block, so we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country. God bless you, and God bless America.

When Buchanan said “God bless America,” he had in mind a nation with an identity and character to preserve.

Just over two decades later, the Christian leadership sits idly by while a once-Christian nation is reduced to Babel.

Individual Christians will have to be the ones to preserve our nation. The historic American nation might also find allies motivated by the broader civilizational heritage, identified (by all places) in Breitbart. The tradition of the North, with its emphasis on courage, warfare, and vengeance, provides a powerful compensation for today’s infectious cultural weakness.

Perhaps an appeal to the All-Father is what is needed to remind Christians of their own glorious past. After all, it wasn’t the milquetoast egalitarian Christians of today who took up the banner to defend the Cross with the cry of Deus Vult!

(Roland has followed up with an account of Odin’s conversation with Holger Danske, the King Arthur of Denmark, who is understandably unimpressed with his countryperson’s’s’ reaction to Muslim terrorism: Holger Danske: The Danes And The War Of The Fourteen Centuries, Breitbart.com, February 17, 2015)

Email Thomas Martel.