Christianity as a Necessary Foundation for White Nationalism, Part 3: Design, Order, and Kinds
Originally published at FaithandHeritage.com under the same title
Part 1: Morality
Part 2: The Glory of God
Introduction
White nationalists ought to be commended for their courageous willingness to oppose the modern multicultural zeitgeist. Most people today, and especially much of the modern Christian church, have utterly fallen for the lies and deceit spewed forth with the influx of egalitarian propaganda. This has led many white nationalists to reject the Christian religion itself as untrue, specious, and crippling. While this diagnosis would be accurate if aimed toward the modern institutional church, the same cannot be said about the true religion. As I will argue, Christianity provides us with the necessary foundation to view the world as including various “kinds,” metaphysical categories which carry with themselves various normative obligations. Unbelief obliterates prescription and reduces these kinds to random concatenations of descriptive characteristics; it thereby gives us no reason to regard the white race as a unit we ought to acknowledge, benefit, or champion.
God-Created Categories
A view held antithetically to Christian physics and metaphysics is the materialistic doctrine of evolution. On this view, all life arose from a common ancestor (perhaps taking the principle of “one blood” to the extreme), and so all the biological distinctions we see today have arisen over an enormously prolonged and painstaking series of mutations differentiating one group from another. While the biblical view sees our Creator God as designing everything according to its kind (Gen. 1:11-12, 21, 24-25), from and within which all posterity is generated, the evolutionary theory posits no strict or intentional distinctions in the realm of biology. The Darwinist claims that the interminable biological past of the white race includes an unordered progression through many other inferior forms of life, positing a grand and inevitable interrelatedness for all of life.
Using “kinds” to refer broadly to any taxonomic classification at all, rather than to some particular level in the taxonomic hierarchy, the Christian need not posit that the kinds listed in Genesis 1 are the only kinds which exist, for God can still supernaturally intervene at any point in history, and could even bring about new kinds through natural causes (e.g. humans’ crossbreeding animals, or microevolution): what is important is that His intelligence is the ultimate driving force behind biological demarcation, stamping organisms’ creation with His authority, rather than their arising entirely by some purely natural and immanent engine of differentiation. The God-createdness of the various categories of organisms, as revealed in Genesis 1, gives us a different idea of their distinctiveness and taxonomy than does the evolutionary outlook, which denies any God back of the biological diversity we currently observe. The teleology provided by our divine Author turns out to be very important.
Egalitarianism and Stereotypes
Because unbelievers must take biological distinctions as lacking the imprint of the God who created them—or, one might say, as lacking the fixedness or determinacy which accompanies divine sanction—atheists must view different biological categories as, at most, a series of statistical generalities. The reader can understand this well by considering the egalitarian promotion of female pastors. Scripture expressly forbids that women are to teach or possess positions of authority (1 Tim. 2:12). Defenders of biblical patriarchy will sometimes support this principle1 by indicating that women are generally worse as pastors: they do not handle positions of authority as well, and they tend to embrace more sentimentalist ideas which compromise biblical doctrine. In other words, they would offer these statistical generalities as the ratio essendi for God’s prohibition of female pastors, the reason in the nature of things motivating His moral commandment on the subject. But the egalitarians would quickly respond that a general pattern does not justify this type of absolute rule. (Most egalitarians today would further say that any difference of skill between men and women is due to historical patriarchal oppression, but that is a separate point.) It could be that some women can handle positions of authority well, and it could be that some women would not compromise their theology with sentimentalism—those are bare possibilities, at the very least—so why is there a wholesale prohibition on all women? Why couldn’t there just be bona fide requirements for becoming a pastor, with no mention of gender? Perhaps, given these bona fide requirements, few (or no) women would eventually become pastors; but there is no reason to forbid a woman from the pastorate at the outset just because of her gender.
The Christian, believing in a God-ordained natural order of things, can answer this feminist contention by seeing gender as not merely the ground of a number of descriptive generalities (e.g., that men are more aggressive, and women more sentimental), but as a natural kind with intrinsically concomitant obligations. There is a certain purpose, function, or end (telos) for the different categories which God has created, including an environment for which God has designed His creatures and tasks which He has fitted them to perform. There is, in a word, an essence to the biological kinds God has created, including a certain design plan for which members of a kind ought to strive. Thus, against the egalitarian, the Christian could say, “Perhaps a woman can possibly wield authority ably, and perhaps a woman can avoid the sentimentalist temptation characteristic of many women—but nonetheless, she cannot be a pastor, as that would be unnatural and unbecoming of her gender; it would contradict the divine design of femaleness, and thus not serve to cultivate her femininity.” Another way of stating this is that a properly functioning female will not serve in a position of authority: that there is a way which females as females ought to behave, an end or purpose intrinsic to femininity as such, the fulfillment of which is a moral duty.2 Such an answer presupposes a divinely sanctioned basis for the category of gender, one which provides further obligations for us than whatever obligations arise from our empirical knowledge of how the sexes tend to behave. There is a certain nature and purpose to gender which is the ground of, but which nonetheless exceeds, the various statistical generalities that describe the characteristics, behaviors, and tendencies of males and females.
If one does not accept this line of argumentation in defending patriarchy, he inevitably falls prey to the egalitarian’s accusation of “stereotyping.”3 One of the actually legitimate (but rarely applicable) accusations of stereotyping is when the accused person acts as if everyone in a group possessed the average or typical characteristics of that group. It would be wrong and irrational to turn a generality into an unqualified absolutization, neglecting that averages often result from a degree of diversity in a population, rather than from strict uniformity. But if one defends the scriptural prohibition of female pastors merely on the grounds that women are generally inferior in fulfilling pastoral duties, then one would be turning a generalization (with respect to all those women unfit to be pastors) into an absolutization (with respect to all women entirely). The prohibition’s rationale, to be justified, must make some statement about femaleness or femininity, including the ideal for which women ought to strive—but such an essence, with ends intrinsic to femininity, could be situated only within a theistic worldview. Divinely ordained teleology is requisite unto the idea that females, to be female, ought to function a certain way. (And note, this applies not merely to a prohibition on female pastors, but also to any conception of femininity as a female ideal whatsoever.)
Not Positive Law, but Design
Do not mistake this explanation as a mere reliance upon positive law. (Recall the distinction between moral law and positive law, the former being grounded in the nature of things and the latter being grounded solely in an authority’s command.) It is not as if the metaphysical basis for the morality of gender roles is solely God’s command: as though the nature of the sexes themselves were insufficient to ground moral obligations, requiring an additional positive law to make them into truly universal duties. This would be the same mistake many Christians make when explaining the immorality of various sexual sins. If sexual sins like sodomy and fornication were wrong solely because God authoritatively forbade them, and not due to any immorality the actions possess by their nature, then God could simply rescind the commandments and make those actions completely morally permissible. But we recognize that they are wrong by nature—even “against nature” (Rom. 1:26)—because they contradict the design with which God has created us. Thus the commandments cannot be rescinded merely by God’s say-so, since their immorality is based upon our very constitution as humans. Such actions would not have been sinful had God constituted us vastly differently, but given the ends He has embedded within His design of human nature, they are indeed sinful, and their sinfulness, therefore, cannot be undone by a rescission of positive law. They are actions contrary to the moral law, not intrinsically permissible acts prohibited only by God’s sole authority. It is the same with gender roles, and as we will see, it is the same with our moral obligations to our “kinsmen according to the flesh.”
The basis for these sins’ immorality, though not dependent solely on God’s authoritative command, still is dependent upon Him, for they require His designas a coherent explanation. Women are morally forbidden from ecclesiastical positions of authority because such positions are contrary to the ends built into femininity. Femaleness has a teleology, a set of ends which women, as women, are designed to fulfill in the whole scope of domestic life and human society. God designed women to have particular tasks for their social existence, and He related this design to the rest of His design for human society, indeed for the whole universe. Because there is a teleology intrinsic to femininity as such, we can thus make moral claims about females as such (and the same for masculinity and males); we do not need to restrict our moral premises to the statistical differences between men and women. Yet this is the crux of the issue: teleology cannot be asserted where there is no universal design plan, and thus no universal Designer. The embedding of ends within human nature and the rest of the created order requires the intentions of an omnipotent, omniscient, all-wise God, our Creator. While divine positive laws are not a necessary (or sufficient) explanation for the morality of gender roles, the divine basis of a gendered teleology—of a design plan for the sexes and for all human society—is. Materialistic unbelief cannot possibly attribute purpose, order, and design to natural categories like gender, and neither can it do so for race.
Metaphysics Versus Pragmatism
Properly cognizing gender in this way aids us in our understanding of race. Race is more than the ground of several statistical generalities. While we can easily prove the reality of race through statistics—we can point to all the behavioral, moral, intellectual, physiological, and other differences among varying groups of mankind, as demonstrated by the scientific and statistical evidence—we understand that there is more to race than the bundling of those statistics. A real and important category subsists in order to ground or “bundle” those statistical generalities, and that category, race, is one which carries various intrinsic obligations with it, just like gender. Undoubtedly, the way in which gender carries intrinsic obligations is different from the way in which race carries intrinsic obligations. We do not pursue ideal whiteness or blackness in the same way that we pursue masculinity and femininity; the obligations accorded to race are not necessarily with respect to the type of people we ought to be, as if white and black virtues were different in the same way that masculine and feminine virtues are.4But there still are other obligations intrinsically connected to race, particularly as they bear on our social relations, duties, and commitments. A notable example of this, and an obvious one, is our obligation to love our race just because it is ours (Rom. 9:3)—not necessarily because it is statistically superior to other races in some merit-based category, but simply because it is our own. If we cherished our people merely because of their achievements and characteristics—i.e. if we apportioned our love for our people solely due to their meritorious deeds, not simply because they belonged to us and we to them—then we could equally value a multiracial utopia where the best characteristics, regardless of one’s particular race, are eugenically emphasized, distributed, and sustained. We could even reject humanity altogether: a society of artificially intelligent machines could as well accomplish this end. But we acknowledge that, just as with family, we have obligations to love and have pride in the race in which God has placed us. Moreover, we are designed to live among our people, to have our political and societal arrangements informed by our ethnic constitution. These are moral obligations concomitant with race and not reducible merely to the category’s statistical generalities. And they are moral because they are part of God’s design, which no unbelieving nationalist could ever claim.
Unless suppressing the truth in unrighteousness, we naturally recognize these metaphysical categories and their attendant duties, because God has constituted us to do so. When we study the world and notice the large differences between men and women, we not only identify statistical generalities, but garner conceptions of masculinity and femininity, which conceptions contain their own intrinsic obligations: either to be a man or to act like a lady. Or, perhaps as a more obvious example, we understand that gender is not merely statistical when we apprehend by conscience that any sex (or “marriage”) between two people of the same gender is sin, irrespective of whatever harms consequentially follow from the consensual act. Our recognition of the statistical generalities among men and women directs us to a metaphysical category back of those statistics, gender, with only insane egalitarians pretending that there is no natural (and thus moral) design to which male and female behavior ought to conform. Besides gender, another example of this metaphysical recognition, albeit abstract, is our knowledge of other people’s existence. In a purely empirical way, we cannot know if the other human-looking bipeds with whom we daily interact possess individual minds, since that is not empirically observable by its nature—yet we clearly know that we are interacting with other minds, and we apprehend moral duties from this as well. God has made us to recognize a certain metaphysical category, personality, upon our empirical interaction with humans. He likewise has constituted us to recognize other metaphysical categories upon the recognition of the statistical generalities marking them out: race and gender. It is these ever-important metaphysical categories, containing their own essence and intrinsic moral obligations, which only a theistic worldview can undergird.
Against this, unbelief has no intellectual arsenal to mark out these categories as having intrinsic obligations. To the evolutionist, these categories consist of generalities that arose merely by chance, and therefore can only provide packets of guidance in telling us how to further survive and propagate the species—that is, if we happen to desire to propagate: we have no teleological obligation to do so. The unbeliever, except he convert, cannot explain why it is intrinsically morally obligatory to honor one’s parents or ancestors, nor can he explain why sodomy is contrary to nature (Rom. 1:26); at most he can condemn those things only insofar as they result in harm, but not intrinsically. Gender and race (as a super-extended family) can have no intrinsic obligations for the atheist, because all they are is the merely physical concatenation of statistical generalities and characteristics. Such categories can give us pragmatic guidance in how to go about life, but they cannot bind us to any real courses of action. They cannot explain why we ought not try to transcend these lowly categories, obliterate boundaries, and become transhumanists. White nationalists intuitively understand that we ought to love our race by marrying among our own and seeking our nation’s benefit—they truly apprehend these objective moral obligations—but these obligations can be grounded only in a robust conception of race with metaphysical (theistic) support, not in the pragmatist foundations which unbelief lays.
After all, one of the great intellectual sins of our age, so characteristic of egalitarianism, is rebellion against and hatred of the metaphysical. Gender, race, and nationality are treated as man-made constructs, lacking any metaphysical or God-created character, and sinners consequently see no reason to obey the roles naturally associated with them. The upholding of race-related obligations is “racist,” just as the upholding of gender-related obligations is “sexist” and the upholding of sexual ethics is “homophobic.” Since these God-created categories have distinct natures, they have various statistical expressions in nature; but when people reduce these categories to their statistical expressions, viewing them merely as social constructs, not God-ordained essences, they then blind themselves from perceiving the divinely-sanctioned obligations we have back of those generalities. One of those vital tasks, so vivid to our ancestors and so well-expressed in Scripture, is our obligation to love and defend our own (1 Tim. 5:8).
Salvation as the Fulfillment of Our Design
The grace of God in salvation not only grants us full absolution from the penalty of our sins, but is designed to produce an inner holiness within the redeemed. This holiness, being essentially moral, comprehends all our moral dispositions and relations, and thus takes into account our divine design, improving our concordance with it. True, God created mankind to live in a state of glory that exceeds its natural happiness and aims, but this is to say that His grace restores and exalts nature; it does not negate it. Horribly false, then, is the modern mutilation of Galatians 3:28, which teaches that nature is itself destroyed by grace, as if God sought to redeem us from His own creation. The true interpretation is that no particular category of nature restricts the openness of salvation; a person of any gender, nationality, or social stratum may obey the gospel and attain life everlasting—at which point he is bound to become sanctified with God’s moral law, including as the law bears upon his racial identity and its station within God’s social design. The Christian view, then, wishes all men, as a consequence of this universally applicable redemption, to honor “the bounds of their habitation,” precisely as God designed the nations to reside.
Gregory Hood, in arguing for the inefficacy of Christianity, disagrees. When writing that the true faith “burns through ties of kinship and blood,” he cites Galatians 3:28 to show how this egalitarian monstrosity is “natural” from the text. He likewise criticizes Christianity’s “universalist message of salvation and overall moral and metaphysical outlook,” as well as its doctrine of justification sola fide:
For any who accept “justification by faith,” salvation or damnation is conferred by an abstract individual choice as to whether one accepts Jesus Christ as his savior. Such a creed renders family, kin, and nation irrelevant. . . . The most Bible-believing Christians, modern evangelical Protestants, are gradually transforming Christianity into its true form, a cult of egalitarian true believers, with the special “Chosen People” serving as the sole exception.
These contentions are evidently far from the truth. Justification by faith renders family, kin, and nation “irrelevant” only in the sense that one does not strictly need to belong to any particular family, kin group, or nation in order to be among the redeemed, not in the sense that no moral duties emanate from them. Fanatical Anabaptist “Protestants” who hate nature and see personal salvation as the sole moral objective within this world are the ones transforming Christianity into its false, Equality-worshiping form, for they atrociously misunderstand the role of our ethnic identity within God’s design (and thus His moral law), seeing nature as a barrier for redemption to overcome and vanquish. Why Mr. Hood agrees with their absurd interpretations is the question I would pose to him.
Mr. Hood expands upon his disdain for Christianity’s “overall moral and metaphysical outlook”:
As de Benoist describes, Christianity and monotheism generally paves the way for atheism by desacralizing the world. The result is plagued with a hatred for the world as it is, a world-denying impulse that naturally lends itself to messianic liberalism to make the fallen world fit with the divine order.
Christianity does not “desacralize” the world any more than pronouncing it to be created and non-divine. A denial of this distinction actually leads to a world that is itself divine which, by blurring the Creator-creature distinction, marches toward pantheism and then atheism. More importantly, Christianity alone recognizes that the way in which our fallen world must “fit with the divine order” is by restoring it to its Edenic condition, that is, fulfilling the original design which God intended. The moral renewal of our world and of all our relations is predicated upon a fundamental love for what God primordially pronounced as “very good,” including its holy and intricate design, rather than upon a demented, unbelieving view of the world where death is normal and natural, and where all can be fully reduced to physico-chemical processes. Contrary to Mr. Hood, then, Christian metaphysics, fully equipped with its robust teleology and the resultant ethical implications, supplies us with a powerful foundation for a healthy nationalism.
Conclusion
The white nationalist movement needs to acknowledge God in order to properly establish and conceptualize our intuitive obligations to save our people. Some white nationalists attempt to justify their view based ultimately on freedom of association: roughly, we ought to be allowed to choose our own company; we should not be deemed racist for preferring the company of our own people and teaching our children the same. While I would not dispute with this position, especially in its rhetorical and tactical utility, I contend that we should go further. We ought to love our own race and marry within it. We are sinning if we “prefer” to abandon our race and spurn our people, exercising our freedom of association against their well-being. If we allow freedom of association as our highest good, then we cannot decry the propaganda encouraging miscegenation, since we would have already abandoned normativity in race relations to the unimpeachable preferences of the individual. If we stand ultimately with freedom of association, then we, contrary to all sound moral intuition, can make no moral objections to deliberate and profligate race-mixers, those who open the floodgates of third-world immigration into our land. Without understanding the deepness of race, without seeing it as carrying intrinsic obligations, white nationalism becomes pragmatic and depends upon whites’ not abandoning their natural affections. It loses its moral dimension, so vital to our cause.
Therefore, in conclusion: Scripture teaches that God has created the various categories or “kinds” which we see today. Whether or not the scriptural usage of “kind” refers to a particular level in the taxonomic hierarchy of biology, it is crucial to acknowledge the God-createdness or divine sanctioning behind the world’s biological diversity. If we do not acknowledge it, the categories we clearly perceive, such as race and gender, are evacuated of normative significance and reduced to groupings of statistical generalities. Since white nationalism so heavily relies upon whites’ moral obligations to defend their own, it is cardinal that this normativity not be abandoned. The answer lies in Jesus Christ, the King of kings and Creator of all.
Footnotes:
1. I do not mean to insinuate that God’s Word needs any human support to be considered valid or worth following. We ought to believe that a verse such as 1 Tim. 2:12 is just and wise, simply because God commanded it. Nonetheless, while we do not need any other reason to know why we ought to obey that command, it still can be fruitful to understand the basis upon which God makes the commandment in the first place. God’s prohibition of female pastors is not arbitrary. ↩
2. The notion of proper function is one clear to us in many fields of science, both hard sciences like biology and soft sciences like psychology. For instance, we understand that there is a way a human heart ought to behave, and how our cognitive faculties ought to behave, if functioning properly. What is remarkable is that this rather common-sense notion completely presupposes an intelligent Designer in order to account for a “design plan” according to which such entities function properly. In fact, the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga shows how the notion of proper functionality is required for us to understand how humans have knowledge; see his Warrant and Proper Function. ↩
3. It is ridiculous, of course, that the modern usage of “stereotype” gives the word a negative meaning. Just as an archetype (or prototype) is a first instance or progenitor of a series or kind, so also a stereotype is a typical or average instance of that series or kind. But stereotyping today is viewed as some ill-defined sin involving the stereotyper’s generalizing about cherished minority groups. ↩
4. Here is a fantastic list of masculine and feminine virtues, including a solid theoretical understanding of how men and women ought to behave with respect to such virtues. ↩
christianity, ethno-nationalism, nationalism, orthodox christianity, white nationalism
Published by Nil Desperandum
Nil Desperandum is of European descent and resides in the States, eagerly awaiting the re-Christianization of the West. He enjoys studying theology and philosophy, especially epistemology and ethics. View all posts by Nil Desperandum
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