[BretLudwig]

Chapter Three

CHRISTIANITY TODAY



"If you desire to preserve our country and our civilization, you must
face two fundamental facts.

The first of these is that 90% of all the active support of pro-American
efforts has come from Christians.

Of that, there can be no doubt. Almost without exception, all of the
thousands of "conservative" and "anti-Communist" organizations that have
come and gone during the past fifty years have been specifically
Christian, proposing to defend Christianity and the Constitution
simultaneously. Many of the most active organizations today are
evangelical and try to revive Christian faith by holding meetings in which
the Gospel and patriotism are inseparably blended. Some organizations
specifically established to resist or promote certain legislation do not
explicitly raise religious issues, but they take Christianity for granted.
The only patriotic organizations that are explicitly non-Christian are a
small periodical, The Truth Seeker, which, having spoken disrespectfully
of Jews, is now being forced to the wall, and one small "activist" group
in California.

It is true that a very successful promotion was founded by a
master-salesman who began by admitting, with a show of candor, that he
rejected belief in a personal god as childish and preferred a vague
pantheism that recognized an "upward reach" in "all mankind" that was
similar to the upward reach of growing plants. But after testing the
market, he began to claim that he was purveying a doctrine that was a kind
of pep pill good for all religions and guaranteed to make the purchaser a
better Christian, better Pharisee, or better Moslem, as the case might be.
(There are no Buddhists, Parsees, Yezidis, Jains, Saivites, or Tantrists
with large bank rolls in the United States at the present time, nor are
they represented by oil-rich governments abroad.) The only point that need
concern us now is that the promoter accurately gauged his market. Of all
the members who passed through his organization in its heyday, at least
80% were Christians€”probably 90% of those who really worked and gave
money to the limit of their resources.

You have only to attend any "anti-Communist" meeting, including both the
most sincere efforts and the most fraudulent promotions, and talk to the
persons who attend and contribute to convince yourself that almost all of
them are Christians, and by that I mean persons who really believe in
Christ, as distinct, of course, from the many persons who attend
Sunday-morning clubs because they think it good for business, politically
expedient, or socially amusing. Whether you like it or not, you must
accept the fact that 90% of the active support for patriotic and
pseudo-patriotic efforts comes from men and women who have a sincere faith
in Christ.

During more than two decades, the active Defense of the West has rested
almost entirely on the shoulders of Christians in all Occidental nations.
And that has been true on all levels. I know that comparisons are
invidious, but to make my point I will say that if I had to pick one
periodical on our side as having the highest literary finish and
intellectual content, I should have to name Découvertes, the monthly
publication of a highly cultivated group of staunchly Christian Frenchmen
now in Lisbon.

That is not astonishing. For almost fifteen centuries Occidental
civilization was Christendom, and, as is shown by the data that we have
always examined, Christianity as we know it is, and always has been, an
Indo-European religion, incomprehensible to the rudimentary minds of the
primitive races and unacceptable to the subtle minds of the Orientals who
have civilizations of their own. If that seems to you negative proof,
consider the conversion of the Norse peoples during the early Middle Ages.
They were not subject to a Christian government that could coerce them and
they needed no Christian support against anyone; the Christians whom they
plundered on occasion were certainly not militarily superior, nor were the
institutions and culture of the Dark Ages anything that Vikings and
Varangians might have envied and wished to imitate. Their only reason for
abandoning the bleakly pessimistic religion of Thor and Odin must have
been that Christianity was more congenial to their minds.* Such
spontaneous conversions are rare phenomena in the history of the worlds
religions; the closest parallel is the adoption of decadent Buddhism by the
Chinese who found it congenial to their mentality.**

(* One historical factor often overlooked was Christianitys appeal to
the historical sense of our race. Norse theology was a collection of
inconsistent tales, admittedly mythical since the skalds could revise or
elaborate them at will, about the adventures of various gods in Niflheim,
Jotunheim, Asgard and other realms outside the known world and
inaccessible to men, at dates no more specific than "once upon a time."
Christianity offered a circumstantial and realistic narrative of events
that had taken place in remote but specific and well-known towns and
geographical areas at precisely stated times during the reigns of known
Roman Emperors; the historicity of the narrative was further guaranteed by
the generally consistent and apparently independent statements of four
eyewitnesses, whose veracity was further guaranteed by the official
reports of Roman governors who had themselves participated in the
climactic scene (i.e., the Acta Pilati, Epistula Lentuli, and other
forgeries that were accepted as genuine during the Dark Ages). It may be
relevant that the Epistula Lentuli certifies Christ as unmistakably
Nordic: tall, fair-skinned, with blonde hair and blue eyes.)

(** Note, however, the very important difference that although the Chinese
adaptation of the Buddhist religion eventually made a large number of
converts, it never supplanted Taoism and other native cults, to say
nothing of the widely-held doctrine of Confucius (which virtually ignores
the supernatural) and the more restricted philosophy of the Fa Chia (which
regards all religions as myths useful for governmental purposes). It would
never have been proper to speak of China as a Buddhist country.)

There is a second fact that you must also face. The Western world is no
longer Christendom. The religion that once united us has become the faith
of a minority.

That is obvious from what is happening here and in every country of Europe
except Spain and Portugal. The real question is how small a minority are
Christians in the United States.

In 1942, after a very careful study of the situation in England, Professor
A. N. Whitehead concluded that "in the whole country far less than
one-fifth of the population are in any sense Christians today." There is
very little difference in this respect between England and the United
States. And today?

Let us transcend all the doctrinal differences, important as they are,
that divide the Christian churches. The absolute minimum requirement of a
Christian is faith that Christ was literally the Son of God. Of course,
persons who do not have that faith may have the impudence to call
themselves Christians, just as they may call themselves elves, Martians,
or pterodactyls, but if they do, they are obviously intending some hoax or
fraud.

How many adult Americans today really believe that Christ was God
Incarnate? I have consulted discerning Christians of indubitable piety and
zeal who have had exceptional opportunities to observe in all parts of the
country. The lowest estimate was 9%. The figure that was best supported
was approximately 12%.

Of the 12% of adult Americans who truly believe in Christ, not all, by any
means, are active in efforts to defend our nation and civilization. Of true
believers, some also believe that the End of the World is at hand; others
believe that the destruction of the Western world has been ordained as
condign punishment for its sins, and that it would be impious to resist
the manifest Will of God; and others quite logically regard the events of
the brief life on earth as merely preparation for the salvation of their
souls. I should be astonished if more than half of the remaining
Christians are actively committed to the preservation of our country. And
yet this 6% has provided almost all of the support for anti-Communist
causes. That is something to think about.

We must specifically notice that the minority that still believes that
Christ was really the Son of God does not include the majority of the
persons who now talk from the pulpits of Sunday-morning clubs, including
the propaganda-chain operated by the National Council of Churches. The
majority of professional clergymen were trained in theological seminaries
in which they were taught that the Christian Bible is an agglomeration of
forgeries perpetrated by persons too ignorant to write coherently and
patched together by persons too stupid to make a consistent story out of
it. They were further taught that Christ, if he existed and was not merely
a myth created by awkward revision of the Essene story about the Teacher
Yeshu, was a crack-pot agitator to whom were attributed, long after his
death, some nice remarks about ethics and "social justice."*

(* Christians who have the courage to contemplate the present status and
the now inevitable future of all the large organized denominations must
read a recent book by a highly reputed "Biblical scholar" whose works have
been long been respected as authoritative in ecclesiastical seminaries: Dr.
Hugh J. Schonfields The Passover Plot (1965). Although his
reconstruction of the way in which a crack-brained Jewish agitator named
Jesus tried to stage a fake miracle is admittedly conjectural, his
interpretation of the character and motives of that man (assuming that he
ever existed) is now accepted in all of its essentials by virtually all
educated clergymen, although, understandably, they may prefer to envelop
it in clouds of misty verbiage when they harangue the persons who fill the
collection-plates each Sunday. That Jesus, although an ignorant blunderer,
is thought admirable because he was an early Bolshevik who tried to incite
a revolution to destroy our races Classical civilization and realize the
old Jewish dream of One World ruled, of course, by Gods Own People.)

Believing this but lacking the courage to seek honest employment, the poor
wretches are ordained and find themselves in a business in which their
income depends on their ability to keep congregrations awake or, at least,
in a donating mood each Sunday, while they must curry the favor of both
their atheistic superiors and of the Lords of the Press and Radio. It is
no wonder that they preach the "social gospel." Some of them, no doubt,
really believe it, for it is a fact that the loss of religious faith
merely leaves many minds morbidly susceptible to the contagion of the most
grotesque superstitions. Some see no reason why they shouldnt peddle the
brand of buncombe that pays the best. Some doubtless thirst for revolution
and chaos to avenge themselves on the society that makes them exert
themselves in pulpits, and, like the Vicar in Daphne du Mauriers
memorable novel, Jamaica Inn, picture themselves as clever wolves
preaching to congregations of uncomprehending mutton-heads. That is the
real explanation of what has happened to most of our churches, and there
is no need to imagine some fantastically large and cunning conspiracy of
Illuminati or other Supermen to account for the behavior of clergymen who
do not believe in Christianity.

The catastrophic decline of Christian faith is the most important, the
crucial event of our recent history. Even the dullest members of
Sunday-morning clubs know that it has happened, but they will try to deny
it by informing you that the Seventh Baptopistical Church has just moved
to a wonderful new edifice that cost half a million dollars and is
architecturally indistinguishable from a night club, and that St. Olafs
Presbutheran Church has just added a hundred-thousand-dollar gymnasium to
its sacred facilities. Believing Christians, on the other hand, know what
has happened and deplore it. When they try to account for the catastrophe,
however, they, if they recognize a natural cause at all, most commonly
blame the Jews. That, I think, is unfair and, what is much worse,
incorrect and therefore dangerous.

The most comprehensive and scholarly survey of Jewish pressures on, and
infiltration of, Christianity from the earliest times is the work of one
of the most learned ecclesiastical historians of our day and is now
available in a passable English translation: The Plot Against the Church
by Maurice Pinay. The virtual capture of the Catholic Church in recent
years, which has been celebrated in articles in Look and other
periodicals, is ably described by Vicomte Leon de Poncins in his Judaism
and the Vatican. No Protestant scholar, so far as I know, has made a
comparable study of Protestant denominations. It would be difficult to
take exception to the reporting of historical facts in the two books that
I have cited, and let us not question the authors conclusions. Do they
adequately explain the decline of Christianity?

I have no wish to defend the Jews, and I shall not ask whether it is
entirely reasonable to blame them for forwarding their own interests by
their own methods wherever they have planted colonies among populations
whom they regard as inferior, much as our ancestors regarded the
aborigines of North America. Let the Jews be as wicked and diabolical as
you wish, but let us consider the religious question objectively, lest
error delude us with fallacious hopes.

If we, from our vantage point in the present, look back over the history
of our religion dispassionately, we can discern, at a distance of a
thousand years and more, the origins of our plight today. I do not refer
to sectarianism and heresies: they are simply normal in all evangelical
religions. In Islam, for example, the multiplicity of sects is proverbial,
and by the time that Buddhism became a religion in the second century B.C.,
there were already eighteen major sects, each claiming, of course, to be
the sole repository of the true doctrine. Christianity is exceptional only
for its relative stability. Over a period of twelve centuries, from 325
A.D., when its doctrine had taken form in all essentials, to the
Protestant Reformation in the Sixteenth Century, the religion of the West
was an effective unity, not seriously disturbed by such sporadic heresies
as the Albigensians, and Waldenses, the Patarini, and the Hussites.*

(* We are not here concerned with the theological convulsions of the
Byzantine ("Orthodox") Church, which, as we observed earlier, was a
radically different kind of religion, imbued with Levantine elements
rejected by the West, and thereby appealing to a racially different
people. A discussion of the origin, incidence, and relative importance of
Jewish and other Levantine elements in the early Christian doctrines, the
progressive supersession of such elements in the West, and their
recrudescence in some heresies would necessarily be long, involved, and
somewhat abstruse. We cannot touch upon that topic here, where our concern
is with Christianity as it was generally understood and accepted by our
race. Debates about whether our distant ancestors understood it correctly
or should have accepted what they did would be, for our present purposes,
irrelevant and otiose.)

Christianity is, as we have said, an Indo-European religion and it was
therefore accepted and understood in terms of the mentality and
thought-processes peculiar to our race. Our minds, unlike those of other
races, demand that all the elements of a doctrine be logically consistent
with one another and in conformity with observed reality. The intellectual
efforts of the early Fathers of the Church, who labored to establish texts
and resolve contradictions, have some analogies in other religions, but
the Scholasticism of the Middle Ages is unique. This great philosophical
effort to understand the world about us has nothing to do with heresies or
even skepticism; it was, as one of the Scholastics defined it, fides
quaerens intellectum; it was carried on by churchmen, and, as we too often
forget, accompanied by mathematical investigations and empirical
observation of nature. There are many histories of Scholasticism, and a
good outline may be found in the second volume of Ueberwegs standard
History of Philosophy. There are some very stimulating observations on
late Scholasticism in the first volume of Egon Friedells Cultural
History of the Modern Age. The histories of science by Sarton and by
Thorndike cover the Mediaeval period fairly well. The reader, however,
will find the essentials most clearly presented in the brilliant work of
Lawrence R. Brown, The Might of the West, which not only brings together
facts that are artificially separated in other works, but identifies in
its Mediaeval origins the great tension of modern thought. Christianity
brought with it from Asia Minor alien elements that were generally ignored
but remained latent in its sacred books and dogmas, incompatible at the
limit with Western mans innate need to know and master the physical
world, and further complicated by historical accidents. That is what gave
us, as Mr. Brown observes, "a society whose inward convictions have been
at hopeless variance with the outward professions that the events of
history have forced it to make." We need only add that the conflict became
even more acute with the Renaissance and became one of the hidden causes of
the Reformation and Europes first Civil War.

From the Renaissance to the present, we of the West have had to observe an
ever increasing discrepancy between the tenets of our religion and the
observed phenomena of the world in which we live, and during the past
century the discrepancies became catastrophic.

One can enumerate sixteen intellectual factors that have contributed to
the decline of Christianity, but the four most important, all of which
took effect during the past hundred years, a

(1) The recovery by archaeological excavation of much of the history of
the Near East.

(2) Perception of the great physiological and anatomical similarity of
human beings to extinct sub-human species and to existing anthropoids, the
whole forming a neat evolutionary sequence.

(3) Determinations that the earth is at least a billion years older than
the Creation posited by Christian doctrine.

(4) Most important of all, perhaps, perception of the size of the
universe. It is one thing to call it infinite; it is another to know that
there are galaxies so remote that light from them, travelling at more than
eleven million miles a minute, has taken eight billion years to reach us.

Christian theologians, to be sure, have offered innumerable explanations
of these discrepancies. Some are forthright efforts to meet the issues
squarely, of which the best that I have seen is The Genesis Flood, by
Professor John C. Whitcomb, Jr., of Grace Theological Seminary, and
Professor Henry M. Morris, of the Virginia Polytechnical Institute. Some
are bizarre efforts to conjure a god from the Planck constant or squeeze
him out of the (hypothetical) Lorentz contractions. And some reach the
level of the books that Teilhard de Chardin must have written with tongue
in cheek. But we are not here concerned with the validity of any of these
Christian explanations. The important fact is that they convince no one
except Christians. Perhaps they should, but they do not.

That is the principal cause of the recession of Christian faith, and you
cannot blame the Jews for it. It is most unlikely that the Jews planted
every inscribed tablet found by excavators in Asia Minor, and it is quite
certain that they did not create quasars or even the great galaxy in
Virgo. The blame, if any, must fall entirely on our race€”on the
philosophical mentality and Faustian will that distinguish us from all
other races and that alone made possible the abstruse and complex
determinations of fact that undermined our faith. The four intellectual
factors that I listed above and eleven of the twelve that I did not have
space to enumerate all depend on data that no other race had either the
capacity or the wish to ascertain€”data, furthermore, that all other
races either cannot comprehend or regard as insignificant and irrelevant
to their racial mentality.

To repudiate the science of the West is simply to blow out our brains
figuratively, as our fetish-men, witch-doctors, and other "Liberal
intellectuals" would have us do. And if we of the West do it figuratively,
we may as well all do it literally, too, and so escape the ultimate misery
and degradation in store for us.

I began this cursory discussion by saying that it did not matter whether
we were Christians or atheists so long as we faced facts and reasoned
objectively about them. As rational men, all that we can do is measure the
consequences of the disastrous decline of faith€”for it is a disaster even
greater than most Christians suppose€”and ascertain by what means (if any)
we can hope to survive it."

http://home.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/oliver.html

--
Message posted using http://www.talkaboutaudio.com/group/rec.audio.opinion/
More information at http://www.talkaboutaudio.com/faq.html