03/30/2023
Also by Kevin Sullivan: Stephen Wolfe’s THE CASE FOR CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM — A Christian Patriot On The National Question
Oswald Spengler famously remarked that “Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism,” meaning that the faith of our fathers implicitly endorsed Marxist universalism and egalitarianism. Unhappily enough, more than few young conservatives agree, and link the rise of modern radical leftism to traditional Christian principles. Christian leftists also agree and think the life and teachings of Christ implicitly endorse their ideology, not least Open Borders: “Jesus was a refugee, too!” But in a new book, Assailing the Gates of Hell: Christianity at War With the Left, Jan Adrian Schlebusch, head of the Reformed Christian Pactum Institute, shows that authentic Christianity is genuinely right-wing, a bulwark of tradition, and incompatible not only with Marxism and its variants but also even (he argues) with classical liberalism. Christianity is not ambivalent about the survival of nations, and it certainly does not demand Open Borders.
Most “conservative” Christians, particularly professional apparatchiks in Conservatism Inc., and its CuckChristian subsidiary, ignore demographic realities and the Great Replacement for fear of being called “racist.” Thus, Schlebusch writes that “the main reason why the right is losing the culture war” is because of the “government policy of allowing mass immigration from the Third World,” which, to the delight of Treason Lobbyists, “not only demographically replaces the white populations of Western nations in order to undermine their social cohesion and Christian cultures, but also literally imports their own voters.”
And, he argues, “open border immigration polices lead to socio-political disasters” and the “feminist worldview with its aversion to children leads to national and cultural suicide.”
Schlebusch, a South African who has watched the mass rape and murder of his people in the name of “multicultural democracy,” has condensed several centuries of intellectual history into a concise primer about the West’s predicament and what Christians should do about it.
Schlebusch reprises Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn and others in explaining that modern leftism is the misbegotten, ideological love-child of the Enlightenment and French Revolution. He opens with a discussion of liberalism as the philosophical foundation for political and cultural leftism, and connects their history with Satan’s lie in the Garden of Eden. The serpent told man he could be his own God and make himself the measure and standard of all things. This desire for divinization — and sovereignty, to make our own moral law, lies at the heart of modern leftism.
Grounded upon the individualism and egalitarianism implicit in social contract theory, liberalism represented an assault on the traditional social order. Christendom was thick with institutions that mediated between the individual and the state. Writes Schlebusch:
The nuclear family is not the only social and covenantal structure ordained by God. … We are all part of a specific ethnic group, in which God placed us in order that we may be prioritized by some when we need help and so that we can prioritize others when they are in need. … All of these — the nuclear family, the clan (or extended family), the community, the nation (ethnos) and the church — are social realities and covenantal structures ordained by God to not only protect us as individuals, but also to help us and those around us flourish to the glory of God.
But old-fashioned liberalism viewed these structures as impediments to freedom and individual sovereignty. That individualism ultimately spawned radical leftist, collectivist ideologies, which in turn assaulted and destroyed those mediating institutions, leaving the individual naked before the collective.
Marxist materialism, Schlebusch writes, represented an attack on revelation and a frontal assault on Christian moral, social, and cultural order. Philosophical Materialism “presupposes atheism” and “shapes the Marxist worldview, and is manifested not only in its economic theory, but also in its philosophy of science, its historiography, and its understanding of human society.”
Abandoning transcendence and moral absolutes such as good, evil, and justice, men were to believe, would be a great step toward “enlightenment.” It was Progress. Licentious abandon was the result, and the authority of religious and cultural institutions shifted to scientists, who became a new priestly class as the West entered an “Age of Reason” divorced from divinely revealed truth.
Edmund Burke rightly called it a “new conquering empire of light and reason,” and predicted the dawn of an age of “sophisters, economists, and calculators.” A modern example close to home: Fauciism — the worship of an 80-year-old self-dealing government bureaucrat who peddled potentially deadly vaccines to fight a “pandemic.”
Though Marxism in its totalitarian Communist species captured Russia and China, it failed to prevail in Europe. Driven by economic determinism, Marxists believed that the oppressed workers would ultimately become alienated from the capitalist class and overthrow it. But in World War I, working-class doughboys, Tommies and Frenchmen waged war against working-class Krauts in trenches lining the Western Front. The rise of a middle class that comprised millions of strongly unionized working men also stifled the appeal of class warfare.
That failure led the Marxists to refocus on culture and a “March Through The Institutions.” By capturing the organs of cultural dissemination — the arts, media, entertainment, and educational institutions, most notably universities — Neo-Marxists rearranged the cultural furniture by propagandizing the masses, which shaped their consumer, cultural, and even religious preferences. The Neo-Marxists also attacked the heart of a people by retelling their histories, for example the war on Confederate monuments.
Cultural Marxism is an attack on Christians and their churches, although the attack has been, until recently with the rise of the powerful “LGBT” Lobby, mostly a covert attempt to undermine racial, ethnic, national, and familial attachments. Part of this subterfuge involves the destruction of European Christian culture via the propagation of multiculturalism and public secularism.
An important prong of multiculturalism is the ethnic, racial, and religious transformation of historically European and Christian peoples via mass immigration and coercive secularism. Of course, the Cultural Marxists’ ultimate object was unseating Christ and the Faith as the center of Western society and the primary loyalty of Western man.
Schlebusch also shows that today’s crisis in the West arises from the Babylonian captivity of the Church. “The institutional church,” says Schlebusch, “has been greatly corrupted and is certainly not living up to the calling and royal status of the bride of Christ: the contemporary church is weak, impotent, and passive. Innumerable heretics and cowards man her pulpits. Historic Christendom already has been largely destroyed.”
Its pulpits are given over to a new “gospel” that revives the old Gnostic heresy, but smeared in a veneer of “Christianity.” Neo-Gnosticism shares with its ancient forebears a “denial of the authority of divine revelation and an aversion towards reality as a creation of God.” Leftist theology’s rejection of doctrines regarding Creation, the Virgin Birth, and the physical resurrection of Christ are based on that rejection. Even “conservative” churches have embraced an antinomianism that spurns not only earthly authority and government as sub-spiritual, but divine and natural law as a means to create a just social order.
Neo-Gnosticism abetted the materialism of Cultural Marxism with an irrational dualism — an outgrowth of all forms of Gnosticism such as Manichaeism — that has infected the church:
In an infusion of two antithetical ideologies, mainstream theologians have come to justify their agreement with Cultural Marxist egalitarianism based on a Neo-Gnostic premise, namely the supremacy of spiritual over physical realities. They then proceed to argue for the leveling of all social distinctions and social hierarchies as the inevitable result of this premise.
But the historic Christian religion assumes a moral and cultural order in which men are born into families and nations. Our duties, traditionally defined as justice, are hierarchical and flow outward in a series of concentric circles. The Christian duty to love is arranged according to proximity and responsibility. A pious life requires the recognition of these realities and favors the near over the far, the concrete over the abstract.
Modern Christians, however, have redefined traditionally understood justice as “social justice,” which is based on radical egalitarianism, which replaces personal and particular affections with a universalized “neighbor love” and its attendant fantasies of global uplift. St. Paul, for instance, says that among those baptized into Christ “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female.” In the hands of leftist modern clergy, that passage sanctions dogmatic “anti-racism,” feminism, homosexualism, and even transgenderism. But this misreads Scripture and denies church history.
Schlebusch closes with a plan for the faithful Remnant. The true Church must be an armory, not merely a sanctuary, that attacks and conquers. That requires faithfulness in small things in a small world, i.e., the world closest to us: our families and communities:
Schlebusch has written an excellent book on the relationship of Christ and culture. He is warning European Christians that universalist dogma has more in common with the Tower of Babel that God destroyed — precisely because the city and tower united all people in one language — than it does with Christ and his teachings.
And so, Christians must fight against those who are inviting — in the name of Christ, but wrongly so — a Third World invasion that will be the death of the civilization that Christians and their ancestors created.
Kevin Sullivan writes from the Wolverine State.
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