We’re continuing to explore the Victorian-to-Modern transition in America which as we have seen began in the 1910s and accelerated in the 1920s.
In previous articles, I have explained at length how at the end of Victorian era there was a consensus in America on national identity, morality, culture and the meaning of progress, which has steadily eroded over the last century. The Victorian generations believed in traditional morality. They were optimists who celebrated scientific, technological, material and moral progress. Protestantism was at the center of American life and dominated the culture. WASPs ruled America. The Victorian home was a school where children were taught the moral virtues which made up their character. Collectively, the Victorian family, church and school were the trinity of institutions that forged the prized “character” of young people, taught them their history and transmitted to them their identity and values.
From Henry F. May’s The End of American Innocence, 1912-1917:
“The dinner was really a testimonial to the unity, excellence, and continuity of American nineteenth-century civilization. Most of the speeches and press comments pledged the country’s allegiance to the three central doctrines of that civilization. These were first, the certainty and universality of moral values; second, the inevitability, particularly in America, of progress; and third, the importance of traditional literary culture. The last, especially, was sometimes praised in a slightly defensive tone. Many of the diners assembled at Sherry’s knew that some Americans valued one of these doctrines more than the rest, and even that a few misguided young people, usually through the effect of European corruption, defiantly rejected all three. This was all the more reason for honoring Howells, since these three major American commitments were almost perfectly summed up in his long career. …
When we encounter this bland vision in the year of the beginning cultural upheaval, when we remember that every article of the standard creed was being sharply attacked, when we remember that young men had long been reading Marx and Nietzsche, that Veblen and Shaw and Mencken had loosed their arrows, we have a sense of double vision …
In 1912, the champions of moralism, progress, and culture still retained a hold on nearly all the strategic centers of cultural war, on the universities, the publishing houses, the weightier magazines, and most of the other centers of serious opinion. This led to something like a Maginot line psychology; those centers were to prove less solid than they looked. To understand their strengths and weaknesses, we must look closely at a few of them, with their garrisons intact and their flags still flying.”
In the 21st century, we live in a secular country where Christianity is a subculture and a lifestyle preference. White identity is proscribed as “racism” and “white supremacy” while all other identities are publicly celebrated in the name of “progress.” Morality has become the laundry list of -isms and -phobias derived from Freudian psychoanalysis, critical theory and postmodernism. Things which previous generations would have understood and universally condemned as sin, vice and criminality are publicly celebrated while virtue and obeying the law is forgotten or no longer celebrated. The Hunter Biden scandal no longer shocks the conscience of the nation because we expect the political class to be moral degenerates.
It is difficult to exaggerate the cultural distance we have traveled over the course of the past century from a culture that revered its Founders to one that despises them. The culture has steadily become more coarse, modernist and libertarian since the 1920s and the flaccid Center Right and its philosophy of conservative liberalism has been all but useless to those who have wanted to resist these changes. If anything is true, it is been an obstacle to change and a handmaiden to the status quo.
Today, we are looking at how one of the key institutions that controlled Victorian morals and character broke down in the early 20th century: the Protestant church. In 2020, we’re about a century out from the Victorian family, church and the school losing their control over American culture.
The following excerpt comes from the chapter “The Children of Our Discontent” in Paula S. Fass’s book The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth In The 1920s:
“Progressives and traditionalists disagreed sharply about the significance of youth’s behavior, but both insisted that contemporary youth were unlike previous generations, and neither would have challenged the truth of James Truslow Adams’ observation that amidst all the hysteria about the younger generation no one was fool enough to believe “that the babies born between 1900 and 1910 all received a hypodermic injection of new original sin.” No, the source of youth’s problems lay not in their nature but in their nurture, and whatever their orientation – to the traditional past or the reformed future – contemporaries directed their attention to American social institutions …”
In the 1920s, traditionalists and progressives both agreed that the culture of the younger generation, which is to say, the Losters and the youngest cohort of GIs (those born between 1882 to 1910) was a major break with the values of their elders. They were the first Moderns.
“If the family was in trouble, the church was in ruins, and the more the churches adjusted, the less they seemed to matter. In the stable world, the traditionalist remembered, the church had been the second pillar of social order and social morality. But the young had simply “thrown religion overboard.” “We are not looking at this question from the religious viewpoint, from that of saving souls,” the Chicago Tribune admitted, “but simply from the viewpoint of social behavior.” And from that perspective, “skepticism in religion,” as William Phelps observed, “is, in nine cases out of ten, followed by skepticism in morals.” The progressives were generally less interested in the churches than the traditionalists, partly because they were less concerned with the maintenance of old-fashioned authority, partly because it was precisely the progressive-liberal reform of the churches which had apparently undermined religion.”
If you want to understand the split between progressive liberals and fundamentalists within American Protestantism that occurred in the early 20th century during the Progressive Era and has widened down to our times, watch these two videos. By the 1920s, the Protestant establishment had embraced liberalism, modernism and cosmopolitanism and shed its 19th century attachment to White Anglo-Saxon Protestant identity. This is why the Protestant establishment opposed the Klan in the 1920s.
“Americans had spent the latter part of the nineteenth century wrestling with the consequences of Darwinian evolution and devising a makeshift alliance between religion and science. But, as S.K. Ratcliffe observed in Century Magazine, this “liberal” religion meant nothing to the young. “There is no more momentous social fact that the cool and decisive turning away of the young people from those forms of religious association which to the liberals of the last age seemed to be the natural and satisfying embodiment of an emancipated faith.” Predicated on the inevitability of progress and the evolving perfection of the human race, the religious compromise had been wrecked by the war which betrayed what a flimsy patchwork of naive idealism it really was. “We have seen hideous peculation, greed, anger, hatred, malice and all uncharitableness, unmasked, rampant and unashamed,” one of the “Wild Young People” informed the readers of the Atlantic.”
Everything fell into disrepute in the eyes of the young because of Woodrow Wilson’s foolish decision to plunge America into World War I: religion, culture, morality, patriotism, etc. Then in the 1920s, Modernism poured into the minds of alienated American youth, specifically, the children of urban and suburban, college educated, middle class professionals who went on to become America’s elite. Modern values have passed down from generation to generation to the point where it has saturated “mainstream” culture. No one remembers where the “mainstream” came from or how it originated.
“According to Katherine Gerould, a contributor to the Atlantic, Americans would have done well to heave to the orthodox line. Only firm dogmas and doctrines, not liberal idealism, could provide the young with the stable moral leadership which alone would make for socially responsible behavior.”
This insight applies in many areas.
Conservative liberals, for example, fight the Left by accepting its moral and cultural frame. The Left dominates conservatives by hitting them with -isms and -phobias and accusations of “white supremacy.” These milquetoast losers have conserved nothing, not even marriage or two genders.
“But her own generation had replaced authoritative control with humanitarianism and freely accepted ethical principles. They had done away with God and heaven and hell and thus deprived religion and the churches of the power of eternal sanction. They kept only the commandments, Gerould asserted, without the religious tenets upon which they were based. But these could not in turn be passed on to the young, who lacked the ingrained fear of transgression. Morals without religious absolutes could not keep youth in control. “This conduct is wrong,” had been replaced by “this conduct is unsocial.” But in the end, who was to say with authority that the standard morality was any more humane or beneficial than a deviant morality? “There is no reason why the young should not do anything they please, so long as it is not inexpedient. Society, escaped from its leash of authority, will soon see to it that anything it pleases to do shall be expedient.” The churches, “afraid of being too narrow, afraid of offending their hearers,” had erased the fundamental definitions and doctrines, which had been the basis of their authority, in the illusion of humanitarian ecumenicalism. And, in another, effort to please its communicants, Avis Carlson noted, churches now offered social service and entertainment instead of religious dogma, converting their buildings into “social centers with gymnasiums, club-rooms and billiard halls.”
This was known a century ago and Christians still don’t want to hear it.
Previously, God had been the center of life in the community as it remains to this day in Islamic countries, but progressive liberals felt the need to update Christianity to modern times. This meant putting the Self and its choices up on a modernist pedestal and dissolving religious and moral authority. Why does the Self which has become God need religion or culture or ethnicity or morality or anything external?
“By their liberals and misguided compromises, Americans had undermined the efficacy of the church as a moral guardian. The progressives had, of course, asked that religion be broad and humane, and writers in a liberal religious journal like the Outlook continued to believe that the young wanted “the windows of the Church … thrown wide open to reason,” that they were seeking “for truth and will accept no compromises.” A progressive like George Coe went further. Applying a Deweyite commitment to change and elasticity, Coe condemned the churches for remaining traditional, rigid, insufficiently given to questioning the ethical, social, and Christian foundations of the society which they served. Christianity, Coe insisted, must return to its humane and human roots of brotherhood and justice. For Coe, the churches were still narrow and bigoted, beholden to the interests of government and business whose practices they needed to examine and cleanse. Even when they could attract them, Coe asserted, the churches continued to tie the young to the leading strings of mindless authority, instead of liberating their creative Christian imaginations. But Coe’s philosophy was lodged in just that open humanism that traditionalists attacked. Coe was intent on changing the world by changing religious instruction and was eager to have the churches serve human needs in a new social environment.”
In hindsight, liberalism and modernism destroyed mainline Protestantism. The autopsy will show this was the cause of death. People like Russell Moore are now finishing off the Southern Baptists.
“The traditionalists looked to church authority to stop the world from changing, and to control, not express, human needs. Not event he religious aspirations of the young themselves could reassure the traditionalists. “I feel that the definition of religion has changed,” “Last Year’s Debutante” declared in the Atlantic. “The ‘wild young people’ don’t believe that faith can be confined to a dogma or reduced to a creed. We think of religious as the spiritual stream in which we are floating or swimming, or struggling or sinking, and how can we deny the existence of the very element in which we live?” In the end, however, it seemed highly unlikely that authority would ride the flux or that morality could be floated on a “spiritual stream.”
This is pluralist and relativist Jamesian stream of consciousness language. See William James’s book The Varieties of Religious Experience.
“While the traditionalists may well have overestimated the modernity of the churches, their perception of the erosion of church discipline in the lives of the young were certainly correct. Even the progressives agreed that the churches were not attracting the young. By the twenties the young had transferred their allegiance from the churches, broad or narrow, to a different sort of God, as they invested a kind of religious devotion to their leisure pursuits, to sports, dating, and son. And they engaged in these in the communion of peers. This means not that there was no religion among the young, but that even the most religiously inspired college youth, those who joined YMCA’s and missionary societies, and even theology students, often found the churches ill-suited to their needs. These students often turned to social reform and politics just as their less spiritual brothers turned to football and jazz. Coe understood that the traditional religious institutions were not responding to the new social conditions. But even Coe was too much of a traditionalist to see how religious energies had been rechanneled. Some contemporaries, especially those connected with colleges and universities, sensed that religious energies had been redirected, and certainly Ben Lindsey and Floyd Dell understood how important peer conventions had become. But few realized how thoroughly the shift in allegiance and authority had been effected.”
The Victorian family, church and school lost their grip over the young.
In retrospect, we can attribute the demise of Victorian culture to World War I which undermined the authority of elder generations who failed to pass on their values largely because of that event. The war was certainly the primary cause and the best bookmark of the end of 19th century culture.
There were other key developments going on though. Something like 2 million American soldiers had been sent overseas and exposed to French culture. The automobile and car culture was making young people more mobile and liberating them from distance. More young people than ever before were attending high school and college which exposed them to ideas from outside of their communities. Hollywood movies, which were the carriers of coarser values, were now playing at the local theater. The radio and phonograph brought new music like jazz into the home. The “smart magazines” were making modernism fashionable. Finally, the “mainstream media” as we know it was beginning to take shape as modernists seized control of formerly Genteel institutions like the Nation or the Atlantic or created their own like The New Republic and mass circulation news magazines like Time and Life came into existence.
The Victorian Protestant church splintered over liberal theology as the divide opened up between mainline Protestants and Fundamentalists. The Protestants who joined the Second Klan tried to uphold Victorian values, beliefs and norms, but were opposed by business-minded mainline Protestant elites. The Protestants who joined the Klan overwhelmingly came from the ranks of the middle class and were not typically Fundamentalists. They supported Prohibition and immigration restriction and were not known for violence against blacks. Internally divided and without elite support, Victorian traditionalists lost the culture war and the young were set loose from traditional sources of authority.
Who were the new authority figures who replaced fathers, ministers and teachers? Young Americans began to look up to Hollywood celebrities and athletes in the 1920s. They began to look up to “journalists” like H.L. Mencken or Randolph Bourne who told them the “truth” about “puritanism.”
The old WASPs, especially the educational class, tried mightily to evolve a modern Protestant Christianity. But it proved unworkable. Stripped of the superstitions of the bronze age and pastoral societies, all that was left of Christianity was Nietzsche’s slave morality and a tepid “social gospel” constantly fighting against the natural differences between races and ethnicities. Perhaps René Girard’s “scapegoating mechanism” sociology was the very last attempt at intellectual Christianity.
The last gasp of American Protestantism was the religious right of the post-1960’s Jesus People, and they were simply “sex regulation societies.” Liars, the greedy, thieves, the proud – all were welcome to openly sin, as long as they didn’t commit sexual sin. Even this fell apart as young women’s sexual sins were ignored and there was really no incentive to not go ahead an live the secular life, then join a church at the last minute to do the family thing, then divorce and join another church later.
Now American Christianity only barely retains the sexual ethic of pagan Roman Stoicism and has essentially zero to say to the culture on any other issue.
Frankly at this point those attempting to resurrect Christianity are just digging up the grave and defiling the corpse of a beloved and respected ancestor who died a long time ago.
Christianity has gone through worse times of irreligion before, it has been on the ropes numerous times in the past 2,000 years. Each time it was down for the count; and yet……
Even though I tend to agree with what BannedHipster said in his comment’s closing sentence, Toh, I don’t know that your comment in reply is inaccurate. In recent years, I was struck, in the course of more-or-less incidental reading, that both Saint Augustine (of Hippo, not Canterbury) and Thomas Aquinas were praised, IN THEIR TIMES—by Catholic higher-ups, maybe even the Pope—for restoring Christianity. This, of course, was ~AD 400 and in the latter 1200s, respectively.
@Toh
Nope, you’re wrong. Christianity has been the establishment religion in Europe since the time of Constantine, pretty easily defeated various pagan holdouts, and never suffered any serious competition until the Industrial Era, when the pastoral bronze age mythology of Christianity no longer resonated with people.
@BannedHipster
It has been challenged, and submerged numerous times. Don’t forget it has been around 2,000 years (almost). Constantine stopped the murder of Christians, but it was Theodosios that made it official.
@BannedHipster
Also, are you the former “Hipsterracist” commenter I’d mentioned before?
This is completely false.
In broad strokes:
Christianity was a minor cult movement up to the mid-2nd century, at which point it became far more popular, though it didn’t become the default choice until after the 3rd century. By the time the Western Empire fell, even the invading barbarians were Christian.
Paganism remained in Scandinavia and Lithuania until about 1000 AD; other than that, all of continental Europe was Christian, and most of it was Catholic. The myths and folk tales and popular entertainment were all strongly Christian-derived, or reformulated to fit into Christian belief. The everyday customs of ordinary people were totally structured around Christian concepts and calendars. It was common throughout the medieval period for failure to attend church on Sunday to be a crime punishable by death. I am not making this up; in France, it wasn’t until the 1600s that “progressives” in France started arguing that such a punishment was maybe a little too extreme. The basic pattern of life for the commoners did not change meaningfully from about 800 AD to the 1600s, and reliigous belief – and action predicated on that belief – was a constant.
At no point was there widespread irreligiosity. The Papacy went through periods of blatant corruption but that was the leadership; the broader society stuck to the straight and narrow. The Crusades were motivated as much by religious fervor as strategic concerns. The Protestant Reformation itself was a product of religiosity. Exploration and settlement of the Americas included religion as a major motive – Columbus was hailed by the Church for opening the way to bring the Word of God to all the benighted heathens.
The only historical parallel for the present-day collapse of Christian religious belief is the collapse in belief in the old “interpretatio romana”, the pagan system throughout the empire in which all gods were honored and different people’s gods were often considered different aspects of the same basic figures. Part of why Christianity became popular was that the Roman empire’s citizenry simply stopped taking the old gods seriously, and the field was wide open for a new religion to spring up.
The same thing is happening now. Christianity has NEVER experienced ANYTHING like this, which is a big part of why Christians are in total denial about it.
Maybe one (comparatively-minor) adjustment, Rollory: The Christianization of Lithuania didn’t really take place until ~AD 1400; and pagan customs prevailed among the common people there for quite some time—maybe more than two centuries—thereafter.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianization_of_Lithuania#Christianization_by_Jogaila_and_Vytautas
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianization_of_Lithuania#Aftermath
The (Roman Catholic) Diocese of Samogitia, Lithuania’s last ethnic region to be Christianized, wasn’t established until October 1417, more than two years after the ashes of Czech proto-Protestant Jan Hus, burned at the stake for heresy, had been thrown into the Rhine. I mention this only to point out that the Catholic Church’s grip on its territory was slipping even before the expansion of that territory was complete.
That, of course, doesn’t mean Christianity itself was slipping, since, as you point out, the so-called Reformation was Christian. I mention it only because the ongoing dissolution of the Catholic Church in particular seems to me really to point up what you say, namely, that “Christianity has NEVER experienced ANYTHING like this,” my comment re Augustine and Aquinas, earlier in this thread, notwithstanding. A few years ago, I remarked to an acquaintance that, in all history, there is no institution like the Catholic Church and that to be standing in the stream of time as something of that magnitude is being washed away is, I don’t know, stunning. Of course, history hasn’t been all that long—five or six millennia—so this will all just be a blip someday.
Circa 1960, the Shrine of St. Elizabeth Seton was constructed in Emmitsburg, Maryland, where Seton established her Sisters of Charity in 1809. Photographs of the construction—with modern steel girders—can be found on the internet. If you’d asked me in the early 1960s, when a grandaunt of mine was one of those Sisters of Charity, how long would last the Catholic Church, which, in the mind of juvenile Catholic me, went back to like the time of Pontius Pilate, I’d have said, “Oh—like forever?” Back in 2009, when I took my mother to visit that shrine and her aunt’s gravesite there, for the order’s two-hundredth anniversary, I learned from a young sister we encountered that the order was, I don’t know, maybe closing down its main house there and would be keeping only the shrine itself going—for visitors, effectively. I don’t quite have the details, but it was something like that.
Jeepers—all those steel girders, which the hippies vibrated to meaninglessness with a few twangs from electric guitars. Well, Mr. Wallace, our host, will get to that part of the Modernism story in time.
The status-seeking of today’s mainstream Protestant ministers is disgusting. They’re highly-educated professionals wanting the suburban house, SUV, big salary, and all the materialist trimmings. They seek to be part of the world, and revel in it. Not that I expect the desire for martyrdom of the early Christians, who would actually pull the lions towards themselves in Roman times, but at least these worldly types could stop chasing acceptance by the left that controls the seminaries. Serve God, not your vanity, preacher. There are few (if any) Ravenhills left among the current crowd of ministers wearing pretty suits.
“it was precisely the progressive-liberal reform of the churches which had apparently undermined religion.”
This gets the cause and effect reversed.
Why do churches have steeples? Various reasons, but when lighting struck, the pastors said it was God’s wrath for some sin or the other. By the 1700’s men like Ben Franklin were learning about electricity. The famous “kite” experiment was mostly a folk tale about early electrical engineering.
By the late 1800’s they were having truly impressive “Electricity Demonstrations” at various World Fairs and State Fairs. Science is meaningless to the masses – it is Technology that gives Science its credibility.
By 1900, Scientists and Engineers created marvels that Pastors and Preachers could not. Clearly, the new Clerical Class of Scientists had far more powerful magic than the old Christian Clerics.
And that, my friends, is all she wrote.
The Progressive-Liberal reforms were the last-ditch attempt by the Church to remain relevant. Every year, to this day, various denominations will hold “revivals” where they use extremely ambiguous language about “getting back to basics” and “old time religion” – and all it does is recycle the same tiny minority of fundamentalist holdouts – all of them either a) born into fundamentalist Christianity or b) those with severe emotional traumas due to personal tragedies.
Let the dead bury the dead.
Let the Atheists die irrelevant is my take BannedHipster.
People who are extremely critical or hateful of Christianity are perhaps the most useless of nationalists and don’t deserve a voice at all. I’ve been following Hunter’s Apollonian argument as well and the only solutions non-Christians have is stoic atheism which basically is an excuse for them to bang sluts without being judged.
Christianity is the only thing that allowed for Whites to unlock our true potential, there are other factors that work alongside it, such as having a elite that upholds the values it preaches so the masses will follow it, but atheism, cosmotheism or some LARP paganism is just going to lead to situations like Canada or Sweden. Populations of people who do not think of anything but consuming for themselves.
At least Christianity, as tepid as it may be, offers an alternative narrative to the mainstream. Even if one is only casually aware of it. No other faith in our cultural experience has that.
@Outlander
“don’t deserve a voice at all. ”
It shows that you don’t really believe in Christianity at all. Like a SJW, or a Jew, you can’t even stand to hear another opinion and are desperately crying “hate!” And now demand that no one else even “deserves a voice at all.”
Of course, you use the typical midwit smears: “atheist” and this one is my favorite:
“an excuse for them to bang sluts without being judged. ”
I don’t even want to get into why this reflects so poorly on you, but try to figure it out.
“At least Christianity, as tepid as it may be, offers an alternative narrative to the mainstream.”
Yep – and there we go. You don’t actually believe in the supernatural claims of Christianity at all – all you are doing is demanding no one tell the truth and not scare the horses – if anyone deviates, it’s “hate” – just like a Jew from the ADL.
You just say “at least” it’s an “alternative narrative” – and you also prove my point that Christianity has nothing to say about anything except for sex. (Which, again, has the exact same ethic as pre-Christian Stoicism, so it’s not unique to Christianity.)
I wish Christianity were still a factor in society – I fit quite well into Christian society. I still attend church and suggest Southern Nationalists do to.
But you people have ZERO to say. You have nothing – no philosophy, no ideals, no solutions.
Face it – you people’s big hope was Donald Trump – the least Christian president ever. So, clearly, you don’t even believe your own bullshit. Yet you still expect other people to pretend that you do.
You’re more of an atheist than I am.
Ah Hipster Racist, you’re reminding me why I hated you in the comments section of altright.com years ago, your smug arrogance mixed with your lack of nuance and misrepresentation makes for an annoying adversary. Like some youtube commenter seeking ownage points instead of giving a substantial response. I guess time doesn’t change people all too much.
I don’t think people have time for dumb opinions anymore, especially dumb opinions that have been proven not to work such as atheism or some form of LARP paganism. My statement on Christianity isn’t on the faith as a whole, that’s your projection, it’s on the individual person’s experience with some form of it, even weird heretical offshoots like Episcopalians. It’s an alternative to the cultural soup the normie marinates in and is something they will be exposed to that is better even tangentially so to the mainstream.
Your point is equally invalid, what other hedonist thing do you want me to say? I mentioned Mark Brahmin and his simp quest to bang a literal slut and try to justify it. Do you want me to say atheism and LARPaganism is an excuse to do copious amounts of drugs? An excuse to steal? An excuse to think of ones self like a idol that should be worshipped and cherished a la styx? If your head wasn’t so far up your own ass you wouldn’t be so immediate in your declaration of victory.
“But you people have ZERO to say. You have nothing – no philosophy, no ideals, no solutions”
Have you become blackpilled over the years? Or did you realize that you offer absolutely nothing and no one bothered to chill with you and your buddy holly themed website? There are more ideas in the far right than there is out there in the other spheres. For example, what sort of ideas are you bringing to the table? What sort of solutions?
If anything, the last four years have proven that the most annoying people are the people who endlessly critique, such as faggots like Beardson. Your idea of “let’s just leave Christianity to die.” is stupid as we can scientifically see the results of the types of people that do that or have that attitude.
My hope in 2016, and indeed the general mileu was that Trump as President would be a step in the right direction and anyone analyzing the cultural mood at the time accurately said as such. However, after the election win, Trump made every mis-step and stab in the back he could have possibly taken and by April 2017, a good chunk of people were already off the Trump train. Indeed the stagnation since at least 2018 was a battle over the alt-light and the alt-right over Trump and the optics of Charlottesville and a refocus in 2019 and 2020 of creating parallel institutions. A large part of the problem was caused by Nick Fuentes and his Amnats hell bent and on a mission to attack everyone to the right of them in defense of Trump and many in the far-right standing back and re-assessing the situation, or dealing with legal fees.
You probably have zero understanding of what I’m talking about or even some of the names I’m mentioning because people like yourself hop on to give an idiotic take before going back to whatever is you’re doing. So go back into thinking that I’m a Trump shill with no ideas except marching around in a brown shirt or whatever you retards believe and don’t comment again.
@Outlander
I see you’ve been obsessed with me for years. You, on the other hand, I don’t know anything about and after reading two comments, I’m still not interested.
“You probably have zero understanding of what I’m talking about or even some of the names I’m mentioning ”
Perhaps you are a celebrity among the “Alt Right” but I have no idea who you are, nor do I care.
You just got triggered by my truthful statements and went into an irrelevant tirade, then proved yourself to be a hypocrite and a midwit, and obsessed with my sex life.
But I certainly believe you are a “big deal” in the comment boxes of fringe right-wing sites. That I can believe.
@Outlander
I thought it was him. I vaguely recall him posting here and there and even having a blog. All in all, Hipster had some interesting things to say 90% of the time. It is true, however, that he was clearly trying to get a rise out of the other. I recall him once claiming to be an elite because he got laid and what-not. Pretty funny stuff.
@Outlander
Learn to not comment and read @bannedhipster. You clearly do not believe in the absurd truth claims e.g. virgin birth and bodily resurrection of Christianity. Do not support forcing atheists who are nationalists to worship a Jew. Keep your thoughts to yourself.
Steeples were meant to ‘reach for the heavens.’ Are you that guy who used to post under “hipsterracist” back in the day on kievsky?
“Let the dead bury the dead.” What manner of blasphemous DOG is this, HW? How DARE you presume to quote the Lord Jesus’ Christs words, as if you have even one iota of the power that they possess!
“While the Bible maintains that the Christian apologist is prohibited from adopting the starting point of unbelieving thought, he is encouraged to show the unbeliever the end result of his foolish philosophical principles if they are consistently followed. As defenders of the only true faith, we are to “answer a fool as his folly deserves, lest he be wise in his own eyes” (Prov. 26:5). That is, we are to put the unbeliever’s worldview to the test, showing how absurd it is when followed consistently. “- https://americanvision.org/24207/no-apologies-please/
You talk about science, your god? Here’s your fecking science!!!
“14 billion years ago there was nothing, and it exploded into all we see. After a bunch of stuff happened, (none of which we have math for yet) planets and galaxies coalesced in their infinite (but also expanding) vacuum – then our lucky planet formed in the perfect Goldilocks position while furiously spinning on a tilted axis at 1000 mph around a giant blazing ball of gas billions of years old itself, flying at 67,000 mph through our galaxy- that’s going 500,000,000 mph into nothingness, itself.
Earth was just chilling and spinning there for a while before suddenly out of nowhere, (with math we don’t have yet) inert matter turned into single-celled organisms which for no apparent reason just divided, re-organized, and self–replicated, becoming complex multicellular life that then morphed slowly into fish and end fast forward well our nuclear furnace son seems perfectly stable heating us just right from 93,000,000 miles away – big simple dinosaurs appear, then apes, who then turned into tiny smart people.
All by accident, on a random spinning rock moving in multiple directions at once and at incredible speeds. And all this we believe as we sit here, perfectly still. That‘s science!”
UTTER BULLSHIT.
@Fr. John+
BEGONE, foul heretic! ANATHEMA SIT! ANATHEMA SIT! ANATHEMA SIT!
How DARE you speak such vain words – in the mouth of FOOLS, yeah, the emissions of horses, the stink of thine flesh is a abomination in My nostrils!
Good post, Brad. Most evangelical protestant churches that I have visited have services that are essentially the bastard children of pop/rock concerts and self help/ guru lectures. The queer worship leader acts like the lead vocalist of a garage band, and the hip pastor bloviates like a self-help guru while vainly attempting to apply biblical stories to everyday life. Evangelical youth groups that I have attended play music with lewd sexual themes and ignore the sins of the youth. Generally, the messages revolve around feeling good about oneself and loving Jesus which is often portrayed in romantic/sexual terms for the largely female audience. This bride of Christ aspect to the songs and speeches really turn off normal heterosexual men including yours truly. American evangelicalism revolves around the revival which cannot exist apart from engagement with the broader culture. When our culture has become degenerate, the churches have decided to take in the degeneracy to attract seekers. They dilute their message and become lukewarm, offering nothing that milquetoast youtube lectures and cliche songs on spotify cannot. The only hope for protestant Christianity in this country is to outbreed the competition. The quiverfull movement offers hope for the true believers. However, most protestants including all my family members have chosen to have small families and to use birth control. They are all obsessed with materialistic success, and our women dislike the idea of staying at home. Most of the evangelicals that I know believe that female empowerment, Jewish racial supremacy, and interracial sex are apart of God’s plan. No one who is fully immersed in today’s rationalistic and secular culture will take the absurd truth claims of Christianity on faith. The evangelicals will die out like the mainlines, and a remnant of countercultural quiverfull-like protestants will continue in rural areas much like the Amish. Rather than lamenting the decline of evangelicalism, southern nationalists should embrace it and push newly secular young men who are looking for meaning in life into our camp. All men need an ultimate concern. Why can’t it be the well-being of their own kinship group?
@AW
“Evangelical youth groups that I have attended”
Relax, you’re there to meet girls – you think it’s bad, at least they don’t have tattoos. Don’t take it so seriously. It’s a social game, not an ideological argument.
@BannedHipster
The women who were there at such gathering regularly engaged in premarital sex, listened to negro music, and flaunted their tattoos and sexuality.
“revival which cannot exist apart from engagement with the broader culture”:
Then look at the history of Welsh Revival, that changed Wales culturally (and to a lesser extent England) for most of a century and had influence around the world, although it did not bring socialism and ethnonational independence to Wales.
Brad, do you seriously propose that all southerners become bible-believing Christians again and join the southern baptist or Lutheran church nearest to them? What would this accomplish other than lining the coffers of evangelical cucks like Al Mohler, Jerry Falwell Jr., and Russell Moore or woke female Lutheran bishops like Elizabeth Eaton in the ELCA? You have demonstrated yourself to be above this obvious strategic failure.
If Soros want then yes. Antifa will be rapidly transformed into Baptists, they will promoted to high rank position. Like BLM jumped out from nowhere.
Very soon Normie understand than now is new fashion around, will be scared to called Christophobic
and obey everything what is served him under the name of Jesus Christ to avoid called witch and burned at the stake.
This is and will be the eternal problem with isms and institutions. Mad liberal whites infiltrate, take over and turn into absurd. We currently have even Antifa pope right now and more than half Vatican are commies.
@AW
“do you seriously propose that all southerners become bible-believing Christians again and join the southern baptist or Lutheran church nearest to them?
No to the first part, yes to the second part.
If you don’t understand why, you are not a Southerner.
@bannedhipster
My people arrived in the South in the 1600s, and I have no proximate ancestors who were not southern states settlers. Retract your words.
Many southerners were deists, atheists, free thinkers, skeptics, and non-Christians when they settled the back-country. Why would you support people joining a protestant church if they do not believe the confession of that church which most likely includes biblical inerrancy?
@AW
“Many southerners were deists, atheists, free thinkers, skeptics, and non-Christians when they settled the back-country. Why would you support people joining a protestant church if they do not believe the confession of that church which most likely includes biblical inerrancy?”
Throughout the entire history of the South, deists, atheists, and free thinkers were still members of the Church. The Christian ideology is irrelevant – especially now. But the institution of the Church is far more important than the ideology.
So, yes, Southern deists, atheists, and free thinkers should still attend their community church.
For more info, see Musonius Rufus of the Identity Dixie Rebel Yell podcast, who has this spelled out in great detail.
I don’t “believe” in Santa Claus, but I still celebrate Christmas and think that Santa Claus is not just good for the children – but even good for the adults.
If russell moore can finish off our southern baptist brethren, then they were pretty weak to begin with. Their is no power created that will come between us and our king ,we love, cherish and adore him for ever .r.moore is a gnat, we must pray for him.
The southern baptist denomination put him in , now they can man up and replace him.
From “the Denver Nightingale,” Billy Murray (born 1877, Philadelphia, to Irish immigrants), 1919 …
So true, I had thought of posting that one myself.
The Great War gave hundreds of thousands of soil-rooted American farm boys their start in killing people and fornicating (“hometown heroes” henceforth) and wanderlust and rootless urban cosmopolitanism.
The Great War. I remember the first time I saw that wording, as opposed to “World War I,” on a memorial plaque—an old plaque, that is. “Oh,” I said to myself, “that was before anyone realized world wars would have to be numbered.”
“In retrospect, we can attribute the demise of Victorian culture to World War I which undermined the authority of elder generations who failed to pass on their values largely because of that event. The war was certainly the primary cause and the best bookmark of the end of 19th century culture.”
World War 1, and to a lesser extent, the Japanese-Russian war, disproved many spiritual and physical assumptions made by Victorian Culture prior. There was no glory or test of wills fighting in industrial warfare, just mass slaughter for those who didn’t rebel and agreed to go over the top.
Not to say Modernism is a fitting answer, but we need to find a solution to Modernism going forward.
“In previous articles, I have explained at length how at the end of Victorian era there was a consensus in America on national identity, morality, culture and the meaning of progress, which has steadily eroded over the last century.”
I’m not really sure what is the point of these articles besides living in the past. We are never going to return to the Victorian era.
I wouldn’t be so pessimistic. Rural and suburban White America for the most part (with notable exceptions) have good values. They call it the heartland of America not because it is the most populated but because they hold onto old American values.
I honestly don’t buy this argument that society has been totally degenerate since the Victorian era. There was nothing wrong with the 1950’s. Good incomes, safe neighborhoods, White communities. We had it good. Today’s rural and suburban White America remind me of the 1950’s with the notable exception of the drug infested communities.
1.) I’m just plugging away at my research and working on my book.
2.) I think returning to the Victorian era is impossible and absurd, but so is assuming the Modern era will last forever or even through the rest of our lifetimes.
3.) At least 82% of Americans have expressivist values. Modernism is “traditional.”
4.) I never said that society has been totally degenerate since the Victoria era. Right now, I am only researching the intellectual origins and the earliest stages of the process when rising elites became infected with it. It took a century for these values to trickle down from elites to the masses.
(((Moore))) As is typical. Virtually all churches of any consequence have been taken over – you have only to look a closer at the names. They may say they are Christians, but even where they are not conscious infiltrators, their genetics are determinative. They cannot help themselves. They feel compelled by their nature to undermine the host population.
They are aided in their task by ignorant Christians who promote the heresy that Christ was Jewish when the New Testament says the exact opposite. Who is going to worship a god born of a neurotic, ugly, parasitic race, and how could you oppose Jews if you believed your god was of them?
“Virtually all churches of any consequence have been taken over”:
Some churches are even buying Israeli-made facial recognition surveillance systems that “make it easy to keep track of members’ attendance, and help with insurance and liability protection” !
“the heresy that Christ was Jewish”:
Judaism/Pharisaism/Talmudism and the church are entirely distinct in the Johannine scriptures.
Another reason, that you did not list, for the alienation of youth from the culture besides the war, movies, automobiles, higher education and fashion magazines was the thorough destruction of traditional agriculture. Capitalist farming-for-profit became even more competitive as railroad transportation and other long-distance food distribution methods improved and increasingly financialized as very expensive tractor, truck and manufactured equipment loans replaced crooked horse trading, driving millions of soil-rooted agrarian Americans off the land into “other lines of work” – to become bread “winners” in the dog-eat-dog “culture” of urban rootless cosmopolitanism.
I did not mean to imply that agriculture in the U.S. had ever been mostly traditional, not capitalist. It was always mostly capitalist by intent, but due to circumstances of very poor transportation, primitive technology, sparse population, lack of slave labor (in some places) and little finance, it was mostly subsistence-like, resembling or amounting to traditional family- and community-based agriculture, but the private profit motive was always there.
This is all addressed in The Golden Bough.
In fact, it is PREDICTED – along with devastating wars and further social trends – in The Golden Bough, which was written a quarter century earlier.
Frazer absolutely put his finger on something important.