The Constantine Option

The New Pagans

I promised a few weeks ago that we'd be doing a deep dive on paganism, and today I'm making good on that promise.

If you're not familiar with the Shiloh Hendrix case, it's easily summarized: Hendrix, pictured above, allegedly called a Somali child the n-word at a playground, and then said it again on camera in a video taken by a Somali man at the scene. This happened at about the same time as Austin Metcalf's murder and the subsequent fundraising by the murderer's family, which is relevant insofar as Shiloh Hendrix also opened a fundraising campaign for her pending cancellation that did very well.

There's a lot to unpack here about race relations, free speech, immigration policy, and so on... but I'm more interested in something else. What's... what's that necklace she's wearing?

My Ongoing Vindication

Not that anyone said I was wrong, but I called it. A couple short weeks ago I wrote you all saying: "I fear that increasingly, young men find paganism [attractive]," and here we are, seeing the alt-right's latest darling is wearing a Mjolnir necklace.

I've seen this and other pagan iconography more and more recently, and now that you know what it looks like, I wonder if you won't also. It's no longer confined to the liberal women, as it has been. I've come to call their brand of aimless pagan displays and rituals "glitter occultism," because it's essentially just a repulsive blend of girl power and tarot cards, palm readings, and tattoos of symbols they only barely understand. What I'm describing is different, at least insofar as it's right-wing.

The Identity Crisis

In order to understand what's going on here we have to pan way out, because something very traumatic has to happen to drive someone to revive a long since dead religion. This does not begin with a spiritual problem, however, it begins with the temporal problem of the West's present identity crisis.

There is virtually no normative identity a Westerner can proudly attach to himself without inviting scorn. His national identity is racist, his religious identity is insensitive, he's even subjected to the humiliation ritual of clarifying his gender identity and sexual orientation. Virtually every Western government has subjected its people to hoards of third-worlders from across the world, and made them citizens. What national identity can possibly survive such a blow?

It is from this identity crisis that paganism finds its resurgence. Christianity, they argue, is a foreign religion. It was founded in Galilee, it's Apostles were Jews, and this alone is sufficient reason to them to dismiss it outright. Moreover, they consider Christianity to have done nothing to spare the West of its present crisis. The new pagans, it seems, have invented a kind of race-worship as a response to the invasion of their nations. They are uninterested in anything which does not originate from their own people.

The Christian Response

This attempt to supplant Christianity as the foundational religion of the West must not be allowed to succeed. It places the natural above the supernatural, reinterprets Western history as not owing its glory to Christ (which it does), and cannot hope to accomplish anything other than the compounding of our present troubles. I hope this much is obvious, although evidently the solution is not.

I have not seen the Western church make any attempt to address the legitimate concerns which underlie this movement, which as we have established are primarily concerned with national identity. Of course, returning to false gods invented by Westerners is no solution, but if we say that we must then say what the solution is. Broadly speaking, Christendom has been silent.

It appears quite plain to me. We have in Genesis 11:1-8 a record of how and why God created the nations from one people, as a response to the Tower of Babel: "from that place the LORD scattered them over the face of all the earth." It is not some accident of evolution, it was the deliberate design of God that mankind be divided into nations.

In light of this, the Christian response to our present dilemma is obvious. God did not create the nations, scattering mankind over the face of the earth and confusing their language, just for us to blend the nations back together into one people. This is the spirit of Babel. Christians ought to express this clearly, not only as a matter of personal conviction but as a matter of policy. Christian Tradition teaches us this also, there is a consistent rhythm in the writings of the saints affirming the virtue of national loyalty (where it does not injure loyalty to God).

Perhaps the church has been hesitant to concern itself with matters which are "too political" in general, but we'll have to address this error at another time. Suffice it for now to say: Rome would not have become Christian if Constantine had the same disposition.

God bless you,

The Constantine Option