The liberal project, born of the Renaissance and matured upon the blood of the Enlightenment always has had at its heart the desire to set free the individual from the situatedness of life in which people were conceived and birthed into. Liberalism taught its padawans that the greatest freedom was freedom from any identity that wasn’t freely chosen by the autonomous sovereign self. We can hear this theme in the cry of the sans-culottes; “No God, No King.” Self chosen identity, quite apart from any outside imposed or inherited identity would not be allowed.
With this flight from all situatedness institutional identity markers that had been held for centuries as the cornerstones of the Christian faith were attacked. The liberal vision attacked the natural bonds of family, community, and nation, setting the atomistic self free to rearrange these bonds in any order the new liberal man might see fit. With the flowering of the liberal vision came the end to the trustee family, the end of localism, and regionalism, and the end of the sense of belonging to the land and to the people. All of these were exchanged for the right of the sovereign self to choose his/her own identities. For the new liberal man the glue that would hold new social orders together would be abstractions like “liberty,” “equality,” and “fraternity,” and not a people, a place, and a present informed by God’s Word as it shaped the generations prior. For the new liberal man there would be “liberty leading a generic people” but there would be no fathers who would be heroes, no space which would be Holy, and no concern about leaving an inheritance behind for our children. The liberal demand for equality eliminated father heroes, Holy Space, and inheritance left for those who belong uniquely to us.
Liberalism rearranged reality in order to create a society where the new liberal man was not burdened by any previous situatedness. The new liberal man was a self creating God who could leave behind “belongingness” to pursue the happiness needs of the sovereign self. The new liberal man was a rights-bearing individual who conveniently was absent of any duty-bearing obligations to a prior received situatedness. With every success of the new liberal man came the necessity to push the boundaries even further in terms of how the new liberal man could create his/her own rights and reality.
However, snapback always comes. The pendulum can only go so far before it begins to swing back and it is that swing-back that we are seeing among some of the young men and women of the West who are crying out for an older view that goes behind liberalism. The Trad-West crowd are awakening to understand that reality and social organization predates their arrival and they long for the situatedness for which the new liberal man had such disgust. The young Trad-West crowd are reaching back for a stability that comes with faith, family, and place. Many of the Trad-West crowd don’t understand that only Christianity can give what they desire. They are properly put off with the “Christianity” that has been in service of the new liberal man’s vision of liberty, equality, fraternity and so have an animus towards Christianity. Part of the challenge for the Christian faith is to communicate that it is Christianity alone which teaches that human beings are not the sum of their autonomous choices. Only Christianity consistently forswears the liberal (and Pelagian) anthropology that insists that humans are defined through acts of individual choice and self-expression alone. Only Christianity teaches original sin, sin nature, and then tells how situatedness can be beautiful for the Redeemed community. Christianity teaches that all men were born into a set of beautiful “givens” and that man is responsible to honor and cultivate that situatedness ordained and bequeathed unto him by God Almighty. Christianity with its covenant theology provides a way to embrace kinship, and descent as norms without family, people, nation or race becoming idolized. Christianity teaches a particularity of people, place, and patrimony which ought to have placed an properly ordered affection that properly prioritizes our people, our place, and our patrimony. All of that is hated by the liberal vision that is constantly bleating about the dangers of “identity politics” or the dangers of “racism” or the dangers of “Kinism.”
The liberal order is ending, though it is kicking and screaming as it is being pushed off stage. Thankfully, we will never go back to some kind of caste system where we are locked into a place that we can never be rescued from because of our family line. However, just as clearly, we are moving away from the liberal vision where the atomistic sovereign self choose and creates his own destiny quite apart from obligations and responsibilities to the situatedness in which he was born. The absolutizing of freedom characteristic of the new liberal man has created a social order where people are isolated, lonely, and miserable. The absolutizing of freedom characteristic of the new liberal man has created a nostalgia for belongingness that is natural and not contrived. There exists now among many a desire to return to thick identities explained by the belongingness that is a consequence of family, place, patrimony, and most of all by the reality that it is God who places men in families.
Liberalism, with its insistence that it would not be satisfied until the last King was strangled with the entrails of the last Priest dealt itself its own death blow as it sought to tear up the very roots of human identity. Liberalism was the vision of rending every natural (and Biblical) source of human belonging into a thousand pieces in favor of unnatural and so disordered affections. Liberalism pitted freedom and order against one another and gave us a freedom that was the worst bondage of all — the bondage of that absence of natural belonging.
The modern Church in the West seems to miss much of this. There is, among the modern clergy, a knee-jerk reaction against all that would stand for ordered affections as being distinctly Christian. The contemporary Church in the West is a liberal Church at its core as seen by its disassociating itself with books like “Who Is My Neighbor,” which demonstrates that Christianity has never been in favor of the new liberal man. The modern church — even in its most conservative expression — cringes at the notion that men owe a special allegiance to their own people, place, and patrimony that they don’t owe to the stranger and the alien. And this even after it has been insisted that love for one’s own people does not mean hatred for those who are not one’s own people. The “situatedness” that we are advocating for is essential for what it means to be human. As such we are no longer making mea culpas for advocating a social order that God has ordained and we are no longer acting ashamed because we are no longer adherents to a Christianity that is more Rousseau than it is Jesus Christ.
Thanks so much!
That is some absolutely brilliant writing!
National Socialism was also a revolt against the new liberal man. I know I’m reigniting a fuse with you on this, but as ‘iron sharpens iron, I’d encourage you to read this old Faith & Heritage link, and pay particular attention in the comments section to a comment from one ‘Winston McCuen’.
https://faithandheritage.com/2014/05/the-theological-declaration-of-barmen/
ADOLF HITLER AND THE JEWISH PROBLEM: A CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE
For centuries, the claim has been made by critics of Jews — many of whom are Jews themselves — that there is a Jewish Problem. By this it is meant that Jews behave in ways that set them apart as undesirable and often unwelcome among non-Jews.
In asking whether there actually is a Jewish problem — a fundamental spiritual-behavioral problem with the Jews, or at least with non-Christian Jews — the Christian characteristically – as on all matters in life — turns to the Bible for ultimate guidance and definitive answer.
By faith through grace, the Christian, unlike the unbeliever, is able, if he is made circumspect by prayer, to ask the right questions and avoid the wrong conclusions. And there, in Scripture, he does indeed find a Jewish Problem discussed at length in both Testaments. He finds, as Augustine put it, how carnal or unbelieving, non-Christian Jews render themselves, by their peculiar and disagreeable behavior, a byword among the nations.
Digging deeper into the Word, we find that the core of the Jewish Problem – and the key to understanding carnal Jewish behavior — is a distinct, pronounced, and inveterate hostility within the Jew toward the Truth, which is God in the Person of the Son, Jesus the Christ.
This peculiarly Jewish hostility is aimed at both Christ and His followers, in all times and nations.
But if we want to understand the Jewish Problem further, we must ponder Romans
Ch. 11, then we must set it alongside Mein Kampf to correct as needed the understanding, the premises, the conclusions, and the excesses of its author, Adolf Hitler, the German Fuhrer, on the Jewish Question.
God in the Person of the Holy Spirit, speaking through the Apostle Paul, himself a Jew (but, of course, a true Christian believer) says that in our present era (between the first and second comings of Christ) the vast majority of Jews (but not all) will, by God’s plan, lack eyes that can see and ears that can hear the Truth, and will be therefore implacable enemies of Christ (the Truth) and of Christians.
And while all unbelievers are, by virtue of their unbelief, eo ipso, or by that very fact, in somewise alienated from Christ and hostile to Him, the alienation of the carnal Jew is in somewise different in kind and of greater magnitude and tragedy, since Christ, by an all-wise Providence, was incarnated as a Jew, and rejected by His own.
The heightened anti-Christ and alienated behavior of the carnal Jew goes a long way toward explaining and justifying (to some degree) the anti-Semitic reactions of other races and nations over the centuries.
We see also that the degree of anti-Semitism, in different times and nations, has been in rough and direct proportion to the number, power, influence, and orthodoxy of Christian believers among those nations. Hence the pervasive anti-Semitism of Christian medieval Europe as compared, for example, with modern, secular, liberal, Europe and America, where carnal Jews, being fundamentally and peculiarly alienated from Truth, tend to both dominate and destroy general society.
So, as God Himself tells us, there really is a Jewish Problem, and this fact has enormous and manifold moral and political implications for governmental policy in this earthly life for all the races of men, in every nation.
Understanding now the Jewish Problem far better than before, the fair-minded will see Adolf Hitler in a rather different light.
Now though, as a matter of course, Adolf Hitler was a fallible man, he was also, quite easily in fact, the greatest statesman of the 20th Century. Like an inverse Napoleon, who possessed first military and then political genius, in that order, Hitler was a brilliant political orator and organizer and leader, with a rare command of mass psychology, who also possessed military genius as well as a very considerable genius as a political theorist, as evinced in both Mein Kampf and in his second, untitled book on race and foreign policy.
From a humble background, Hitler the man was a fierce German patriot and highly decorated war veteran, wounded several times in battle. Unable to plumb his heart fully, one can see, on the surface of the man, a hard ruthlessness, and then deduce from his fruits, carefully weighed, dare I say it, a great nobility.
Hitler loved Germany and the Germans, and he wanted the best for his people; and he sacrificed himself to that end. He wanted to save European Western civilization, the greatest civilization humanity has produced, from atheistic Jewish Bolshevism. All the hatred spewed against him notwithstanding, Hitler was a true patriot, and probably Germany’s greatest, uber Bismarck and all the Fredericks including Barbarossa. (Even one of his enemies, Charles De Gaulle, visiting Stalingrad after the war would say of Hitler’s Germany: “A very great people, to have come so far.”
Hitler was rightly very skeptical and contemptuous of modern post-Enlightenment false, egalitarian “Christianity.” But Hitler was not a theologian, possessing the ample time and leisure needed to plumb the philosophical depths so as to methodize and correct modern corrupt Christianity. He was occupied instead with the practical and pressing political and military matters of trying to save what was best in Germany and in Europe and in the white Gentile race.
The poor martyred Bonhoeffer and his ilk, were, by contrast, shallow modernistic “Christian” ignoramuses. They were not real, solid, traditional Augustinian-Calvinistic (pre-modern) Christians. Is it any surprise then that these benighted and counterfeit “Christian” souls are now the idols of our perhaps hopelessly stupid goyim and “Zionist” fundamentalists?
As a son of the Southern Confederacy, I recognize that the victors write the histories. I recognize that the history books about Hitler and the Nazis are typically little more than Allied wartime propaganda rehashed and then served up with a big Jew-Holocaust industry twist on top. In WWII, Yankee-dominated egalitarian America sided with the bloodiest regime history had yet seen, Stalin’s Bolshevik state, against a more tradition and conservative, right-wing Europe, headed by Germany. Political centralization under National Socialism has been necessary, as a matter of conservative prudential politics, to combat her highly organized and centralized liberal and Marxist foes. So a people’s survival, in war time especially, must take precedence over its liberty.
Adolf Hitler is now the world’s most hated figure, his name being synonymous with evil. But, to judge him, as Christ commands, with greater fairness and accuracy, take a good, hard, and deep look at the world that has hated him, and then ask yourself: Who was more in the right, the Fuhrer or this modern, atheistic, egalitarian world?
But before we judge Hitler’s treatment of the Jews, for example, we should first be clear and accurate about what that treatment actually was. We should set aside loaded propaganda from all sides and sources – including and especially, most history books — and drill down to actual facts of the matter. In Hitler’s War, British historian David Irving, working from primary sources including interviews with individuals close to the man, has successfully challenged and refuted the prevailing Holocaust dogma at several critical points.
Before judging Hitler, we should consider too other weighty critics of Jews, including, for example, the great Reformer Martin Luther and his work, bluntly and tendentiously titled — to alert his readers to the import of the subject — On the Jews and Their Lies.
On Judgment Day or after we may be given to know the truth about Hitler and the Jews. And understanding how, in this fallen world, we see through a glass but darkly, we can therefore expect surprises on Judgment Day.
Winston McCuen is a metaphysician and political philosopher and Christian apologist. He is a Reformed believer, native South Carolinian, proud son of the Confederacy, and outspoken Southern patriot. He holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in philosophy from Emory University, is a John C. Calhoun scholar, and a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Furman University in history and philosophy. Formerly a welding instructor, philosophy instructor and Latin teacher, he holds multiple welding certifications and is a senior certified nuclear metallurgical welding engineer.