Category: Culture

Multiculturalism as the New Religion in Town

Religion — Any system of faith and worship. In this sense, religion comprehends the belief and worship of pagans and Mohammedans, as well as of Christians; any religion consisting in the belief of a superior power or powers governing the world, and in the worship of such power or powers. Thus we speak of the religion of the Turks, of the Hindoos, of the Indians, etc. as well as of the Christian religion We speak of false religion as well as of true religion.

1828 Webster’s Dictionary

“The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth. . . . We must, therefore, worship the State as the manifestation of the Divine on earth, and consider that if it is difficult to comprehend Nature, it is harder to grasp the Essence of the State. . . .[T]he State is the march of God through the world.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

It is my conviction that Religion is an inescapable category. All men organize their social order in subservience to, as Webster tells us, “belief of a superior power or powers governing the world.” Thus, all cultures are naught but the expression of the religion of the people who comprise that culture. Culture then is the religion of a people put into real life social order animation.

One thing we should immediately note is how ridiculous it is to make blanket condemnations as “all religion being bad.” Christians often do this by saying things like, “I don’t have a religion. I have a relationship.” Religion is an inescapable category and so while some religions are worse than others (and all are worse than Biblical Christianity) the reality is that all people and peoples are religious. This is true also of those (usually the atheist crowd) who say “I don’t have a religion.”  That this is true is explained by the fact that it is the religion of people who condemn religion that accounts for their condemnation of religion. The idea of something (in this case “religion”) being “bad” requires a moral foundation upon which to make such a pronouncement and that moral foundation is nothing else but an expression of a religion. In their statement, “I don’t have a religion,” or “Religion is wicked and accounts for all the evil of the world,” they are their own superior power that is governing the world (see Webster’s definition) and so their egoism is their religion. 

For most moderns the State is their god and so provides their religion as the Hegel quote indicates. For those non-Christians who haven’t taken the state as their god, the result usually is that they are their own gods, determining good and evil. As such their individual egos are their own religion. Religion is an inescapable category.

Given all that the above is true we might ask ourselves what is the religion of our culture. Below provides just a bit of a teasing out of the answer to that question.

I.) The Religion of Modernism

Multiculturalist Diversity

The irony here is lodged in the fact that the pursuit of multiculturalism finally arrives in the embrace of a monoculture as everybody is straitjacketed into the singular embrace of a uniform multicultural social order where the equality of all cultures create and reflect the monolithic religion behind multiculturalism.

II.) The Temple / Church of Modernism

US Government outlets (Civic bldgs., Schools, etc.)

All religions have a Temple or gathering place where the worshipers come to worship and be catechized. In the West, the Government facility has replaced the Temple as the Church of Modernism. In Church facilities, we educate our young into the state religion.  We send our tithes and offerings to the Church every year. We place our dead heroes in Temple like structures (think of the Lincoln Memorial). It is all really quite religious as in the State we live and move and have our being.

III.) Priest Class

Bureaucrats / Teachers / Ministers / Professional Class

All religions have a Preistcraft. Modernism as a religion is no different. The Priest class serves to guide the people in how to satisfy the god and how to practice the religion. The Priestcraft have a self-interest in perpetuating the religion since their lifestyle is dependent upon the religion being kept stoked. In the West, the God state is served by a Preistcraft that now includes almost the whole white collar professional class. Because of the totalitarian presence of the State nearly all the white collar professional class is beholden to the religion of multiculturalism and so supports it and inculcates it in all their doings. From Shrinks, to Shysters, to Ministers, to Teachers, to Businessmen, to Medial Doctors, to Academia, they all are tasked with serving multiculturalism as the religion and the State as God.

IV.)  Catechism Motifs

All religions have their catch phrases and pithy motifs that the Preistcraft must teach. In Christianity one might use as just one example, “the chief end of man is to glorify God and fully enjoy Him forever.” In the religion of multiculturalism, we get mindless pithy motifs that all are to embrace such as, “Diversity is our strength,” and, “White people are evil,” and “All people and all cultures are equal.” These and like simple-minded motifs constitute the lubricant that oils the thinking of the whole social order.

V.) Mission’s Agency

United Nations,  Evangelical Church Sending Agencies, US Military

Every religion has an agency whereby the religion is spread to others who are deprived of the great religion. In the social order of the West that Missions agency ranges from the United Nations publishing arm to the most Missionary agencies of most of the Denominations that constitute modern Christianity. Christianity has been reinterpreted through the grid of multiculturalism so that much of what is pushed as Christianity by missionaries (both home and abroad) is just another expression of multiculturalism. When nations are particularly resistant to being convinced of the truth of multiculturalism then we turn to the US Military to convert by the sword.

VI.) Criminal Code

Hate Crimes / homophobia / Sexist / Racist

Every religion develops a criminal code as to what is allowed and what is not allowed. Multiculturalism, as a religion, seeks to criminalize behavior that does not support the zeitgeist. As such multiculturalism creates hate crimes that punish with extra zeal those guilty of hating beyond the normal hate that comes with every crime. Further, homophobia, sexism, racism, while not yet criminal, are so deeply taboo that to violate them puts one outside the company of “civilized” people.

VII.) Propaganda Wing

Hollywood / Top 40 / Government schools / Media Outlets

Every religion has a propaganda wing. The propaganda wing of multiculturalism is Hollywood, Top 40 music of almost all genres, and Government schools, and newspapers, magazines, radio talk show, etc. All of these are not concerned with teaching people to think critically. All are concerned with teaching people what to think. All teach people the virtues of multiculturalism. We are bombarded with messaging that informs us that all relationships are equal. That all sexuality is equal. Christian white people are evil. Patriarchy is despicable. Heirarchy is bias.

VIII.) Main Goal

Overthrow Christianity

Samuel Francis, in his “Leviathan and Its Enemies,” captured this when he wrote,

“The persistence of traditional institutions and systems of belief constrains and impedes the continuing growth of mass organizations and their operations, and it is imperative for the emerging elites to challenge, discredit, and erode the moral, intellectual, and institutional fabric of traditional society that sustains the older elites and the systems of beliefs, or ideologies, on which their rule is based.”

The goal of multiculturalism is to completely destroy Christianity as the religion of the West. It has been largely successful to that end. The emerging multicultural elites are doing all in their powers to overthrow Christ and Christianity in favor of the cultural marxism that drives multiculturalism.

VIII.) Chief method to that end

The use of Critical theory to destroy White people

Critical theory was a means developed to viciously attack any aspect of thinking that had Christianity as its origin. It presupposed that Christian thinking was responsible for social orders that enslaved. It was leveraged as upon the foundation of Cultural Marxism and so all the criticism as run through the prism of Cultural Marxism in order to smash Christianity as evil. The reason that it especially is pointed on White people is that the Cultural Marxist understood that White people have been, historically speaking, the main carriers of Christianity and the builders of Christian civilizations. The Cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt school (the origin of movement multiculturalism) understood that if white people are destroyed the consequence is that Christianity will be destroyed.

This also explains the push for amnesty and the immigration crisis that the West is facing.

IX.) High Holy Days

Martin Luther King Day / 4th of July / Veterans day

Every religion has its own high holy days. Multiculturalism is no different. This explains why multiculturalism so intensely makes “war on Christmas.” Multiculturalism understands that Christmas is a high, holy day in competition with its own high holy days. The high holy days of multiculturalism celebrates egalitarianism and diversity, or the god-state and those who have died for it. (Why anybody can’t see the contradiction in praising, at the same time, both diversity and egalitarianism is quite beyond me.)

X.) Enemy of “The People”

a.) Epistemologically self-conscious Christians
b.) Trustee Family
c.) Property

Multiculturalism understands that it has enemies that it must snuff out. We noted above that Multiculturalism, as a religion, understands that its greatest threat is Christian white people. This category just refines that a wee bit further. Multiculturalism understands that the “enemy of the multiculturalist people” are especially those who are epistemologically self-conscious Christians. Epistemologically self-conscious Christians see through the three-card monte con of multiculturalism and so are understood as a threat and so must be professionally destroyed.

The Trustee family is such a distinct enemy of the adherents of multiculturalism because the Trustee family embraces hierarchy and patriarchy, and so eschews egalitarianism.

Property also is seen as an enemy of multiculturalism because property introduces a “mine, not yours” mentality which wages wars on everyone being and having the same.

So, this is a brief description of the new religion of the West. It is a description that seeks at the same time to reinforce that religion is an inescapable category that can’t be avoided. Either we will return to Christ and so have abundant life again or we will embrace some other religion of death.

Theology & The University

“War is the continuation of politics by other means.”

General Carl Von Clausewitz
German war theoretician 

As RJR notes in the quote below the same is true of Theology and all other disciplines. Every other discipline that can be named among the Humanities is just the continuation of theology by other means. This is why Theology was once understood to be the Queen of the Sciences. Our forbears understood that conclusions arrived at in the other humanities were only as good as the theology from which they were drawing.

Indeed, this understanding of Theology as the “Queen of the Sciences” is where we get our whole idea of “University.” The word “University” etymologically derives from the idea of “the whole,” or “the aggregate.” The idea was, in the midst of the various multifaceted disciplines offered and studied at a University there was a “Uni” that bound all the disciplines together. That “Uni” in “University” is Theology. Without theology as “Queen of the Sciences,” one no longer has a “University” but only a “Multiversity.”

The fact that we have given up Christian theology as “The Queen of the Sciences” goes a long way towards explaining the irrational age which we inhabit. Since we have no unifying glue to hold us together all that is left is the bizarre and the irrational.

Consider also, how modern Western man’s habit of compartmentalized thinking also is derivative of the refusal to have Christian theology be the “Queen of the Sciences.” Modern man is schizophrenic. He is a centripetal being. There is nothing that keeps him from the most strange and queer contradictions in his life. For example, modern man will, at one and the same time, espouse evolution and then turn around and attend church on Sunday. Modern man will complain about the Government and then keep on voting as if his vote will change what it has not changed for over a century. Modern man will see the modern woman for the feminist being she currently is and yet will still propose marriage. Modern man is a contradictory mess and that is largely accounted for, by the fact that he refuses to take Christian theology as the “Queen of the Sciences.”

What is interesting, though despite all the above being true, is that theology is an inescapable category, which means, that when man flushes Christian theology as the “Uni” in his “University” he doesn’t by doing so get rid of theology. Instead, he embraces something else has his theology. Marxists embrace Economics as their theology. Many moderns embrace “Science” as their theology, not realizing that that Science is only as good as the theology it is pinned upon. Cultural Marxists have, perhaps more insightfully than the rest, chosen culture as their theology. (More insightfully, I offer, because of the tight nexus that exists between culture and theology.) The point is that one never completely evacuates some kind of theology as the adhesive that is the sticking agency for something that passes as a pastiche of coherence for all the particulars.

As an aside all of this underscores again why R2K is such a stupid incoherent theology, arguing as it does, that there is no such thing as Christian law, or Christian Education, or Christian culture, etc. R2K strips Christianity of its fixative social order functioning and replaces it with the irrationality of a social order based on a “natural theology” that has only successfully existed when Christianity has dominated the culture.

Sociology, Literature, Psychology, Anthropology, Economics, Law, … all of it is just so much the continuation of theology by other means. If and when people ever come to grips with that truth, it will make conversation a good deal easier.

We end with the great Rushdoony making the same point.

“An abstract theology is only formally or technically systematic. Systematic theology must of necessity deny because God is sovereign, that there are any neutral facts or any areas of neutrality. All factuality is God-created and God-governed and interpreted. All facts are therefore theological facts, and every area of life, thought, study, and action is a theological concern.

Education, politics, science, the arts, the vocations, the family, and all things else, are theological concerns. A theology which does not involve itself in every area in terms of the sovereign God and His infallible law-word cannot be systematic: it is only abstract.”

 

Patriotism, Flag Waving & Allegiance

“We salute one flag and that is the American flag. And we’re going to make sure the American flag gets the respect it deserves, alright? … Patriotism will be celebrated in our cities and taught very, very strongly to our children.”

Donald Trump
Thank You, Tour
Hershey, Pennsylvania

“The territorialization of the patriotic sentiment has its modern roots in the political state that emerged in the Renaissance, but it was not brought to high intensity until the French Revolution. Then it was that the idea of France, ‘one and indivisible,’ became the mainspring, working through Jacobin decree and military successes in the field, of what think of as modern nationalism and patriotism.

Patriotism, as we have known it for nearly two centuries has been inseparable from war and revolution. Each of these forces, destroying or diminishing as they have the more ancient ties of race, locality, religion and kinship as effective allegiances….”

Robert Nisbet
Twilight of Authority — pg. 58

Many have been those who have opined that Trump ran upon a “civic nationalism.” But the question has to be asked, at least, what kind of Nationalism does Trump envision. Though I consider myself a Nationalist, I recognize that not all Nationalisms are created equal. The kind of Nationalism I envision is a grass roots nationalism that grows up out of allegiances that are more fundamental to an allegiance to the nation that is just the consequence of those former and prior allegiances.

There is a Nationalism that exists that is posited on the destruction of the allegiances I consider primary. Allegiance to religion, race, people group, locality, clan and kin are the bedrock allegiances that when existent create natural loyalty and allegiance to the nation. However, there is a patriotism that we might call “un-natural.” Un-natural because it reverses the process and is built top down. The demand is for the patriotism to the Fatherland without a prior patriotism to the former allegiances mentioned. This kind of nationalism absolutizes the nation-state and so seeks to destroy all other allegiances and patriotisms in favor of allegiance to the Father-land. This is the kind of nationalism that finds children being encouraged to report on their parents. This is the kind of nationalism that expects ministers to read their Bibles through the flag.

I don’t know which kind of patriotism Trump is touting but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that this kind of “patriotism” talk concerns me. Trump talks about local, local, local. I like that. But is he really going to give us a patriotism that devolves power from DC so that the local can be genuinely local again and so worthy of plights of fealty?

If he does so, I’ll be the first to congratulate Trump.

Nisbet and McAtee on “Professional men of Knowledge”

“Who, we are obliged to ask, looks with respect any longer to the professional man of knowledge: whether scientist or scholar?

Robert Nisbet
Twilight of Authority — pg. 110

Nisbet goes on to explain why this is so. This is so because the putative “wise men” for so many generations have disappointed and let us down. People have gotten wise to the con that the “Professional men of knowledge” pulled for so long. For a couple generations now these men have been all hat and no cattle.

In my environs, I see this most commonly among the clergy. The clergy was once accepted as the “professional men of knowledge” par excellent. This is rightfully no longer the case for those who are not simpletons or groupies.

The clergy has shown themselves too often to be vacuous hacks whose expertise is more akin to the kind of expertise one finds in those who have made a career of building McDonald franchises or in the skill one finds in Shamans among animistic peoples.

Clergy as “Professional men of knowledge?” That is almost as incongruent and ridiculous as the idea of Psychologists as being “Healthcare providers for the mind,” or “Friends of the Court” as being “Friends of the family.”

And so, we must each, on our own, go to the well of knowledge, and labor to be our own “Professional men of knowledge,” because it is unlikely (though not impossible) that we are going to find Professional men of knowledge in this culture.

__________

* = This is a post where I am speaking of general truths as opposed to universal truths. I acknowledge that there remain solid clergy out there. I just am convinced they are a minority.

Symbol Change

Judges 6:5 That night the Lord said to him, “Take your father’s bull, and the second bull seven years old, and pull down the altar of Baal that your father has, and cut down the Asherah that is beside it 26 and build an altar to the Lord your God on the top of the stronghold here, with stones laid in due order.

Studying the book of Judges right now and in Judges we see how unfaithful Israel had built altars to Baal as opposed to previous generations who had erected altars to “I AM” thus communicating who the people and the land were being given over to. I was struck with the importance of those altars as symbols and declarations of ownership.

When we tear down old symbols and replace them with new symbols we are, like the Israelites of old, giving ourselves, our children and our land over to different gods. The tearing down of a flag or a monument and the raising of a new flag or new monument is a significant happening. What you are witnessing is the gods being changed out.

In the last 100 years, we have seen quite a bit of this. When you do any reading on the fall of Czarist Russia and the rise of Communism you note that the Communist went whole hog on this very point. They not only tore down Churches. The Communists changed those Churches usage from houses of worship to places where pigs were housed. The Communists changed the Churches from places where the soul could find relief to latrines where a different kind of relief was found. The Communists after the revolution went on a rampage tearing down old symbols and erecting new ones. Out with the old God. In with the new gods.

When the Soviet Union fell the process was reversed. I clearly remember many scenes of statues of Stalin and Lenin being pulled down by cranes. When “Desert Storm” was finished one of the clearest images of victory was the pulling down of a statue of Saddam Hussein.  Out with the old god. In with the new gods.

Now in our country, we have been experiencing the very same thing. First, it was the Confederate flag desecrated and hidden away. Recently, I read a longish piece on how it is the Gadsen flag that has been determined as “racist” and no longer can be tolerated in the public square. Statuary of our ancestors is being removed in favor of the ancestors of an alien and strange people. Out with Christianity. In with the new gods.

Whenever you find this happening you are witnessing a religious attack on the people. Where this religious attack is successful you are witnessing a people being conquered. In the book of Judges, the people had been conquered by Baal as witnessed by all those new altars built to Baal. In Czarist Russia the Christian Russians had been conquered by the Jewish Bolsheviks as witnessed by removal of their Christian Churches. Today White Western Christians are being conquered by the enemies of Christ and the evidence of that is the removal of our symbols in favor of the symbols of our enemies.

The old West — The West of Christendom — is under siege and most Christians aren’t even aware that they and their undoubted catholic Christian faith is under attack.