The Left would be all too happy to turn a right-wing victory into a pyrrhic one by depriving it of any real vigor. If they can separate the political Right from its Christian foundation, then that is precisely what they will have achieved.
It’s commonplace to see the Left attack Christianity. But, in dissident-right circles, it is also becoming increasingly common to see attacks on Christianity coming from fellow rightists.
Those doing the attacking tend to be either atheists or pagans who say they worship ancient European deities such as Zeus or Odin.
There are two chief arguments against Christianity used by these right-wing critics. The first is held by the pagans, who are usually strong identitarians.
In the view of these identitarian pagans, the pagan faiths are the true religions of their ancestors, and thus also the true faiths of the contemporary Western peoples. They feel they are being more true to their national identities by rejecting Christianity, which they decry as an eastern religion that was forced onto their ancestors.
Of course, their ancestors were not forced to adopt Christianity; the various tribes that eventually became the European nations largely adopted Christianity of their own accord, in many cases after the Western Roman Empire had fallen — eliminating the presence of the main political entity that would have had the power to impose it on them.
Why did the ancient Europeans forsake their pagan faiths in favor of Christianity? Clearly, it appealed to them in a way other forms of worship did not.
And, ultimately, truth is truth. When it comes to spiritual matters of divine truth, does the geographical point of origin matter? Do we reject other forms of truth simply because of where they were first discovered? Do we stop using paper and gunpowder because they were invented by the Chinese? Do we stop using algebra because it was devised in Muslim Persia?
The second argument against Christianity that is used by both atheist and pagan rightists is that Christianity is responsible for the fall of Western civilization.
That argument continues to gain traction, even though it’s obviously untrue, as evidenced by even a cursory study of history.
After all, when would even these rightists consider Western civilization to have been at its height? Probably beginning in the late Middle Ages, definitely by the Renaissance, and then through the 20th century. Generally, most rightists consider the “fall” of the West to be a relatively modern phenomenon that really kicked in with the collapse of the European empires and the start of the globalist world order that kicked in after World War II.
If we take the above-specified time period as being the age when the West was great, then clearly Christianity could not have been the cause of the West’s fall, as that period of greatness is precisely the time when Western civilization was Christian.
In fact, the decline of the West over the last half-century or so coincides perfectly with the rejection of Christianity in favor of materialism, secularism, and cultural Marxism.
And when did the European nations become great in the first place? The period in which they went from nomadic tribes into actual civilizations roughly coincided with their adoption of Christianity.
So if there’s any correlation between Christianity and the West’s rise and fall, it’s more accurate to say that the West rose when it adopted Christianity, and then fell when it rejected it.
Some rightist critics of Christianity use the same flawed argument as the Left in saying that Christianity plunged Europe into the “Dark Ages.”
As I have written previously, contrary to what many academics have led the general public to believe, the Middle Ages were not the “Dark Ages,” as they are so often called.
Palomo Pucci, an academic involved with the Bibliothèque nationale de France who has two master’s degrees in medieval manuscripts from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, writes:
The idea of a dark intermediary period between the Roman Empire and the Renaissance came from the mid-14th century Italian scholar, Petrarch, who divided history into two periods: the classical period in which Greeks and Romans brightened the world with their intellectual achievements, and a period of darkness and cultural stagnation (in which he himself felt to be living).
…During the Renaissance (the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity covering the 15th and 16th centuries), Petrarch’s idea of a dark and barbaric medieval past fed into humanists’ belief in their own present time as the rebirth of classical culture. This belief had been conditioned by the words of Giorgio Vasari, a 16th-century artist and art historian, who considered that Roman art had been the best and most divine of any other.
As Pucci notes, “the Middle Ages were an era of great inventiveness during which art, architecture, literature, international trade and culture flourished.”
In reality, the Middle Ages were only “dark” if you take a view of the world in which the Roman Empire is front and center. But the world did not fall into chaos and disorder with the Roman Empire’s fall.
For one thing, the eastern Roman Empire, also known as the Byzantine Empire, continued for another millennium after the fall of Rome.
In addition, Rome did not disappear from the face of the earth after the empire fell; on the contrary, it continued to be an important political, economic, and cultural center, particularly as the center of the Roman Catholic Church — one of the most important institutions in medieval Europe.
The atheist and pagan right-wing opponents of Christianity further argue, echoing philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, that Christianity fosters a “slave morality” that made Europeans weak, whereas Europeans were powerful warriors under paganism.
Again, that view simply doesn’t hold up to even a casual look at history. The great European empires — Britain, Austria-Hungary, France, Spain, Germany — all rose amid Christianity. And the existence of the Crusades easily dispels the belief that Christianity is inherently pacifist.
Such rightists mostly base the “weak Christianity” narrative on the fact that many Christian churches today support mass migration and LGBT.
While that certainly makes for an understandable critique of contemporary churches, the right-wing critics should understand that such positions are not expressive of true Christianity as it was practiced for two millennia. Rather, it is a very recent corruption of Christianity propagated by globalists who have infiltrated churches in order to destroy both Christianity and Western civilization.
In the end, right-wing opponents of Christianity should ask themselves: “If Christianity is destructive to the West, then why are the Left and the globalists doing all they can to eliminate it?”
