Contra Kulak
The Based Pagans, yet again
[The following will probably sound harsh. I don’t mean it to be, and I’m not really attacking anyone personally, not even Kulak, but there’s simply no way to convey what I know to be true in terms any more polite than on offer here. I’m a teacher and I owe the world honesty, not niceness.]
Just when I think I’m out, they pull me back in.
Per a comment on a note I recently posted on Substack, someone challenged me to address the argument put forth by
in one of his recent posts. The central point of his polemic seems to be that online Christians are exhorting Kulak and others to worship a “based Jesus” that only exists in meme form, while in the real world pretty much all Christians pray to a “common Jesus” who is an ultra-leftist communist Jew whom all right-thinking young men should abhor. Since both of these conceptualizations are essentially tendentious strawmen, based almost entirely on the mostly online experiences of a single young man, one could be forgiven for doubting that either paints an especially accurate portrait of the lived reality of Christianity for most Americans and people of the West more generally. He begins:I'm Often Asked:
"Why do you pick on Christianity!? This isn't Helping, we need to work together."
And my response is:
When you looked up at them in Middle-School or High-School in the midst of new atheism and saw your priests were losers who were happy being losers, and who wanted you to be a loser...
You were right.
It pretty much always comes back to middle school with this crowd. Their understanding of Christianity begins and ends with half-remembered lessons and emotional impressions gleaned from unpleasant experiences in VBS when they’d have preferred mom leave them alone to while away their summers playing Call of Duty.
But for almost every member of the young right, they had the experience of seeing gay, weak, castrated, lesbian, or boomercon preists [sic] GLADLY sell out their heritage, their people, and their families. And try to coach young people to be willing to sell out their children in turn.
I wasn’t raised in the Church myself, but since converting I’ve yet to experience a lesbian priest encouraging me to sell out my daughters. Nor has anyone at Church asked or intimated that I should cease to speak my language, renounce my customs, or denounce my ancestors. Perhaps they only cover that in youth group. But that’s all basically peripheral. The core of Kulak’s argument, such as it is, is what follows:
There are 2 Jesus's [sic] in America.
there is the common Jesus we all know:
Self-Sacrifice Slave Morality, Ultra-Leftist Jesus. The Communist, Jewish Palestinian, proto-John Lennon, hippy pacifist friend of prostitutes, lepers, minorities, and losers, who instructed his followers to pay their taxes, not resist evil, go the extra-mile for people who enslaved them, obey their masters, be the Lamb not the Lion, turn the other cheek, and forgive those who'd kill and rape you and your children... even as they do it. "Forgive them father they know not what they do"
Strawman #1 I’d call a hyperbolic caricature except, given the tone, I’m pretty sure it’s what Kulak actually thinks- perhaps what I would think if the last time I’d encountered the faith was by way of anthropomorphic vegetables. Kulak claims that this Jesus is worshiped by hundreds of millions of Americans and billions of foreigners. The notion that even NormieCon Big Eva promotes a communist, John-Lennon-Jesus is simply absurd. Granted, opportunities abound, especially in the Protestant sphere, to 30-pieces-of-silver your way into polite society, but shilling is a hardy human universal. The space within normative, traditional Christianity where one encounters such twaddle in earnest is limited to dying mainline lolcow sects, secularism’s waiting room.
The based pagan critic of Christianity typically half-remembers a few Sunday School worksheets from which he reconstructs an entire theology of personal projection. The tell is that it’s always the same few core Bible verses and concepts, the ones they really hate because they demand difficult things or sound counterintuitive. Christ befriended the lowly because, as One who needs nothing, His love is infinite and the hierarchy of which He is the apex is spiritual rather than worldly. While Christ did counsel His followers- wisely- to avoid political violence (note what happened to the Jews who didn’t listen to him), He did so in the context of their immediate situation and for the greater purpose of His mission, which was to prepare the world for the advent of its true king. He forgave the people who murdered Him on the quite logical and charitable grounds that if they realized they were killing the Savior of the world they would hesitate to do so. Forgiveness is the sole prerogative of the powerful.
A Jesus who is more opposed to health, nature, virtue, loyalty, truth, beauty, family, ethnicity, country, honor and prosperity than any depiction of Satan in all of human literature...
Jesus is opposed to health? It seems to me that he had a pretty healthy lifestyle- fasting, walking, lots of time in the sun socializing- but perhaps I’m missing something. I suppose by “nature” Kulak means not trees and such but what Nietzsche imagined nature was- the pitiless expression of domination by higher types. He’s not especially clear in his terms. But to illustrate a point Jesus withered a fig tree to demonstrate His expectation of productive action on the part of His followers, so there’s that. Virtue, loyalty, and truth- Christ is the sinless God-man who died demonstrating the truth of His Being as an act of loyalty to a humanity that had turned on Him. I could go through the rest of the list but it’s all the same thing, emotional projections born of petty indignations from youth, wholly uninterrogated.
And then there is a mysterious other Jesus. Based Jesus. Right wing Jesus. The Alleged Jesus of the Crusaders and Conquistadors. The Jesus of Oliver Cromwell, The Bourbons, the Romanovs and Kaiser Wilhelm... The jesus [sic] of the crossguard sword... who allegedly said and believed the exact opposite of everything the popular jesus [sic] said if only you'd learn Latin, Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew, dive through 100 year old books of theology... and see through the lies of hundreds of years of mistranslation....
OMG those books are like 100 years old thats like older than like gta 3 !!! Yes, if you’re going to critique Christianity and expect people to listen to you, you have to put in the work and actually read something. Do you know who else understood that- every serious critic of Christianity who ever lived, to include Nietzsche. There’s 2,000 years of Christian theology, history, apologetics, law, and criticism out there for you to use to judge whether the ultra-left or based Jesus strawman is closer to reality as understood by the great body of believers from the beginning to the present. Kulak’s research begins and ends with social media and his ‘extensive travels.’
A based right wing Jesus Who was totally worshipped by all these based people who, no, weren't priests or religious leaders themselves and never really wrote about their religious convictions, and we can't really access what Hernan Cortez's, [sic] or Horatio Nelson's or Baldwin IV's personal Theology [sic] was... But that is clearly the real Jesus.
It took me all of 42 seconds to find a brief but decent source on the religious beliefs of Horatio Nelson referencing his personal correspondence. Hernan Cortes’ described his own ideas about religion in numerous letters and they are recounted in turn by his great biographer Bernal Diaz. Baldwin IV . . . what even needs to be said? Plenty of other examples are extant. Constantine the Great’s religious outlook is fairly well-documented by his contemporaries, including close companions like Lactantius, but the emperor also expounded on theology in his own words. Ignatius of Loyola wrote of his own spiritual journey in great detail. The personal conceptions of faith of other great Christian kings and warriors of history, not so personally reflective, are recorded by their peers and have been the subject of innumerable secondary sources, none of which Kulak has bothered with in his analysis. Again, put in the work.
And none of them will Acknowledge [sic] this dichotomy. That if who they say Jesus was is the real Jesus, then hundreds of millions of devout Christians are worshiping Satan in a crude mask of the man.
Apart from the fact that for 2,000 years Christians have understood that people calling themselves Christians are not necessarily such, no one addresses this dichotomy because it only exists in the imagination of the ‘based pagan’ right. Actual Christians believe nothing like either extreme, but of the two strawmen, the scarecrow that most resembles the Faith of the Fathers is the based one, if for no other reason than, as with all good caricatures, it is based ultimately on an exaggeration of some reality. If Christianity was what Kulak imagined it to be historically it is supremely difficult to explain how it was so successful, why it spread among some of the most barbaric and warlike peoples of the ancient world, why the pagan cardinal virtues were adopted alongside the Christian theological virtues, why only under the the Faith did the West halt barbarian invasions, turn outward, and become the dominant culture on the planet. While Christianity should never be viewed reductively as a political program, when the pews were full, the West was based. That’s just a fact.
But the basic flaw in all of this is that very instrumentalist view of the Faith on the part of Kulak and his fellow critics. They have some end in mind, something generally along the lines of a society with fewer foreigners and greater social and economic cohesion such that they would have an easier time establishing personal financial security and a household. I choose not to be cynical and really do believe they actually want those things. The problem is that they evaluate Christianity in terms of its utility to that end rather than in terms of its specific metaphysical, ethical, and historical claims. Because, as noted, their grasp of all three tends to be limited (as a teacher, I assume the partial L on that one) they can’t really analyze it in terms of true and false, but rather only as based or cringe. They show up at their local Baptist potluck (again, I’m assuming good faith) only to discover it’s not a den of white nationalists, and conclude that the whole thing is basically gay. It’s a bit like visiting a Planet Fitness, wandering around the machines for a while, leaving, and deciding that exercise simply doesn’t work.
But this is why I'm telling you, begging you [don’t beg people; it’s demeaning] ... don't just go back and accept the authority of the people you saw through as losers in the 8th grade.
Middle school again . . . Yes, don’t ever rethink any of your idées fixes from when you were 13.
And certainly don't accept that these people, People [sic; FFS GET AN EDITOR] who've managed the loss and surrender of western civilization for almost 100 years, are somehow authorities over the young dissident right who've achieved vastly more against globohomo in 10 years than they achieved in the entire 20th century . . .
I actually, as the young people say, lmfao reading that. What- at all- has the “young dissident right” (presumably the anti-Christian variant) achieved against Globohomo? What have they achieved in their own communities? What have they achieved in their own lives? The main ‘achievements’ of the based anti-Christian right-wing youth, as far as I can tell, are internet screeds lamenting how they can’t accomplish anything because of X, the variable being boomers, women, Jews, HR, Christians, etc. They can’t buy houses; they can’t get married; everyone’s being mean telling them to have kids- on and on. They work tech jobs for Globohomo, play its narcotic video games, watch its porn, whore with its daughters (far less than they’d like), and train their H1B replacements. Pace Nietzsche, their measure of success is material gain in the merchants’ game; they stack jobs like Achilles stacked bodies! And of course, deep down, they hate it all. Pervasive, seething doomer resentment isn’t an achievement.
I don’t mean to harp on the late German philosopher- Kulak really doesn’t- but since he’s the best the anti-Christian right has, his legacy bears scrutiny once more. Nietzsche blew Christianity out of the water, taught everyone how to be an übermensch, went crazy, and died over a century ago. Since then, who is the great success story of that philosophy? I don’t mean someone who wrote about it, I mean some great genius who actually, through a supreme act of will, created his own values, impressed them onto society, and lived in opposition to the slave morality of bourgeois Cuckianity. Who do you got? If you need a suggestion, I might offer Foucault, the prolific and profoundly influential scholar who was also a homosexual pedophile who fought the cops when he wasn’t dying of AIDS. Do you have a better suggestion?
This is the real appeal [of; I’ll help] Neo-Paganism, or Hellenism, or Wotan, or "The Cult of Kek", or Russian Orthodoxy, or Neo-Shintoism.
I’m not sure how Russian Orthodoxy counts as an alternative to Christianity, but perhaps I once again missed something.
And if "Based Christians" manage to get it together and form institutions and present a vision that isn't just globohomo, white surrender, praising the "Good intentions" of Communists, welcoming "Refugees" and sending all your money to Africa at a slower pace...
The Christians I know write about raising families, educating the future, creating intentional communities, coming together in fellowship- I regularly correspond alike with Christian professors at major colleges and Christian farmers raising their broods off-grid. More to the point, they do those things in the real world. They advance novel legal theories, novel educational strategies, novel farming techniques, etc. - by novel of course I mean in the relative sense, new to the world but timeless in their principles. They champion traditionalism and value the legacies of both Rome and Jerusalem, each in its measure. They learn the languages and read the books the based right-wing youth are too busy on Discord to bother with, and thus become the rightful custodians of the Classical legacy the anti-Christians traded for their bowl of soup from Neoliberalism. Quod ceteris negatum est, cum mortuis loquemur . . .
Then they can try to coalition with the post-Christian right or convert us... But I'm not going to try to build my life on sand. You might insist this is a good foundation, you might want to build your life on it, but I don't see it, and I'd sooner dig down to the bedrock of my ancestral racial religion and try to rediscover Wotan or the Hellenic Gods than risk it on this collapsed edifice.
Your ancestral racial religion, such as it is, is Christianity. Your ancestors abandoned their prior beliefs for it, much as, along the way, they abandoned cannibalism, child sacrifice, and defecating in the streets (not so much in the tech industry, but you get my point). But really, the idea of an ancestral racial religion is silly to begin with. The religion of the Greeks of St. Paul’s day little resembled that of their Homeric forebears, which in turn had few holdovers in common with the Indo-European cults that had preceded it, and who knows from where their religion came?
What you seek in your rejection of common American religion is a reconstructed faith based on your personal interpretation of religious material from thousands of years ago, filtered through your own expectations and cultural conditioning. At best, you’ll come together with a few like-minded fellows, publish your thoughts, gain a following, and then face schism and infighting as everyone’s take on the source material reaches the point of mutual incompatibility with the others. The end result- again at best- will be a pragmatic creed centered on assuaging spiritual doubts by way of evidence of worldly success. In short, your quest for a pagan replacement for Christianity will result in your becoming an American Protestant. Good luck.
European is a pretty nebulous concept. There is a place called Europe where people broadly sharing genetic patterns live. It’s a useful construct for understanding things in some contexts, not so much in others. No Roman would have thought of the Germans, for example, as anything like them in terms of race, culture, etc. Caesar felt free to conduct a campaign of genocide against the Gauls because he viewed them much like colonial powers viewed the Indians. “European” is an identity that emerged over centuries and is impossibly to disaggregate from “Christendom.”
There is not “a continuous tradition” of European paganism. Continuous implies ongoing. It’s long gone and has been long gone since the Middle Age at the latest. At best, one could argue that it could be resurrected, but here you arrive at the point I was making. Will Isis worship be a part of your European pagan revival? How about Cybele, the Neolithic Magna Mater? Do we edit all the material from the Enuma Elish from the Theogony? This isn’t a theoretical consideration; neopagans have to argue these exact points because of their similar misconceived essentialism. There is exactly one European religion with a continuous tradition still practiced there, and it’s not Odinism. If you say, “but Christianity came from Asia,” well, so did the Aryans.
To your second point, no one in Roman antiquity would have attached any significance to the fact that, of the three continents they knew of, the Germanic tribes shared Europe with them. They were as hostile and predatory as any boat people today, and just as alien. Fortunately, Christian missionaries were able to smooth away the rough edges and build upon their positive traits, such that Europe was reconstructed with those barbarians playing a major role. The Roman Empire was revived in the West, eventually, under Christian rulers, controlling far more of Europe, and the world, than the old pagan Empire did.
Regarding your third point, yes, the Church could certainly do more. Clement of Alexandria thought the Church was neglecting everything education; no one would listen to him, so he started his own school as part of a program of catechesis. Francis of Assisi thought the Church was neglecting the poor, so he went out and lived among them, and started an order dedicated to that purpose. The mistake so many young men make is to think of the Church as a service provider like Door Dash and lament that it’s neglecting an untapped market. The Church isn’t the buildings and the priests, it’s the whole body of believers. If no one in the Church is doing what you think it ought to be doing, that may, perhaps, be a sign that you are the one meant to do it.
People keep making the same basic errors in interpretation because of the Dunning Kruger effect. They’re good at statistics or computer science but, knowing nothing about the Bible, imagine it must be an order of magnitude simpler. Then when their superficial and reductive readings are challenged, they blame the text for being obscure. It isn’t. It was written in a particular time and place, meaning that some parts will be more challenging to interpret, but was meant for all times and people. The key to unraveling that paradox is to realize that scripture can only really be understood within a living holy tradition. Scripture in that sense is as intellectually demanding as the mind inquiring into it can bear, and its exegesis is in no way intended for a mass audience. Neoliberalism is largely based on the notion that the exact sciences can serve as an organizing basis for society. Missionaries are men with a special charisma for communicating the truths of the faith in terms comprehensible to a particular people. The based young right are wide open for one so gifted.
So many of these arguments posed by the anti-Christian camp remind me of a class I took in college on Political Theory in Antiquity, which ended up being one of the most formative classes I ever took. Not just because it was the place I was introduced to the great works of philosophy by Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine (which was his favorite), Thomas Aquinas, so on and so forth, but the Professor himself was remarkable. He was from Quebec and a lapsed Catholic who told me, during a private discussion, "The saddest thing on earth is a man who lost his faith and desperately wants to find it again." Obviously, he was fighting his own demons, but for being a self-professed lapsed Catholic and agnostic, he was always defending Christianity on basic, logical arguments that helped spark a renewed interest in religion myself. Every time anyone has a question about Christianity, he had an answer that was simply irrefutable because he was so well read on the topic.
I remember distinctly this one kid tried to "epically own" him on the question of the Trinity, and he just sat down, put his hands in his head, and said something to the effect of, "There are more books written on that topic than you could ever read in a life time. Every question you have has been answered by men smarter than me. If you want to argue about this, please read some of them, and then we can have this discussion." So much of Christianity's most vociferous critics fail to grasp even the basic concepts of it, so much so that debate with them is often pointless because they don't know what they don't know. Pretty much any question they might have has already been discussed extensively since the foundation of the religion and written about by men much more intelligent than any of us. And I'm not claiming to be a great Christian scholar or theologian, but his words always struck me as profound. You can't really argue against Christianity if you only have a surface level understanding of it, no more than you can argue or debate against anything without at least a working knowledge of it.
I hope that man found the peace he seemed to be longing for.