In the September 2017 issue of First Things, literary editor Matthew Schmitz has written a jaw-dropping article entitled “Christianity Is For Cucks.” He enlists poor Evelyn Waugh and his short story, “Out of Depth,” and his trilogy of novels, Sword of Honour, in the effort to convince his gullible readers that cuckoldry is a pious virtue.
“Out of Depth” is about Rip Van Winkle awakening 500 years in the future to find England conquered by Africans, and the English reduced to savagery. Quite unlike what we read in the news, in Waugh’s imaginative story, Africans have not simmered in natural inequality until resentment and envy compel them to take what they did not build and destroy those who did build it, as has happened already in South Africa and Zimbabwe. No, in Waugh’s fiction, Africans have graciously decided to trade baubles with impoverished, barbaric Britons, rather than conquering them, and have established missions to preach to the indigenous white men the faith of their fathers.
Waugh intended the story to be a response to Hilaire Belloc’s famous statement, “The Faith is Europe and Europe is the Faith.” There is a phrase repeated by the villain in the story: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Love is the law, love under will.” This is Aleister Crowley’s occultist motto, in which the only “law” is that there is neither grace nor guilt of sin, and the only “ethic” is to pursue sexual gratification. For Waugh, it serves as a warning that to follow this course will mean the end of Europe, which only confirms Belloc’s aphorism. We Kinists appreciate the latter for its implicit recognition that faith is fundamental, but faith is not all that matters in life. Blood and soil matter too, because they are gifts from God and an inheritance to be passed to future generations. We honor God by being dutiful stewards of all that he has committed to our care. Faith is supreme, but family and the fatherland are to be defended at all costs. We will not relinquish what is ours without a fight. The Muslims who are now doing their best to overwhelm us share the same worldview but serve a different master.
Belloc agreed with Waugh, his fellow Romanist, in principle, for in his book, Europe and the Faith, Belloc argues that Christianity took what was left of the Roman Empire and created from it the Christendom of the Middle Ages, which became Europe and all the nations that sprang from it. He believed that Protestantism had gravely wounded European civilization, that the Reformation was a return to barbarism, and only Romanism could keep it from dying. We Protestants affirm the need to anathematize the idolatrous excesses of the popes and return to sound doctrine. We Kinists believe that though Europe and the Faith are not necessarily coextensive in scope or duration, there is no Europe without the Faith. There never has been, and there never will be. Nor do we have historical or current evidence that any other race of men will bear the standard of Christ, which the white race has carried from the beginning, but has now furled and hidden, to its own detriment. We agree with Waugh that the Church is “the normal state of man from which men have disastrously exiled themselves.” We agree with Belloc that Europe and her daughters will cease to exist if we break covenant with Christ, into whom our nations have been baptized. And we agree with Luke 19:40, that if we fall silent, the very stones will cry out.
This should have been the point to be received from “Out of Depth.”[1. The title is taken from Psalm 130:1: “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!”] The problem is that Schmitz, a cuck employed by cucks, is blind to the fact that the literary spectacle of white men degraded and black men compassionately nurturing them back to health without exploiting or annihilating them is the height of absurdity. It is contrary to all human history. He interprets it not as a cautionary tale for Europeans but as a heartwarming glimpse of future mixed marriages, churches, and neighborhoods. This is akin to suggesting that Beauty and the Beast is an allegory for bestiality.
Schmitz begins his article, by reveling in the “vision of Africans proclaiming the faith to whites,” which “is a literal description of many American and European parishes today.” Schmitz views racial mixture as a good thing, even a holy thing, because it reflects his false view of the Church in eternity, where we are gathered not to our fathers in the distinct nations that bring their glory and honor to the New Jerusalem; no, the white cuck’s vision for both our earthly and glorified states is to endure the chaos, conflict, and bloodshed that unfamiliarity breed until we’re forcibly amalgamated into a decidedly unbiblical uniformity, a new race, alienated from our own history, without borders, without trust, leaving isolated individuals defenseless against the gluttonous State.[2. Benjamin Constant, the Huguenot philosopher, wrote: “Variety is organization; uniformity is mechanism. Variety is life; uniformity is death.” Of the egalitarian revolutionaries in France, he wrote in 1814: “It is quite remarkable that uniformity never met with more favour than in a revolution raised in the name of the rights and the liberty of men. The systematic spirit at first went into an ecstasy of symmetry; the love of power soon discovered what immense advantage this symmetry gave it. Though patriotism exists only as a lively attachment to the interests, manners, and customs of a locality, our self-announced patriots declared war on all these things. They dried up this natural fount of patriotism, and wished to replace it by a fictitious passion for an abstract being, a general idea, deprived of all that strikes the imagination and speaks to the memory… The interests and memories which are born from local habits contain a germ of resistance which authority only reluctantly endures and hastens to uproot. It has an easier road with individuals: it rolls its enormous weight over them as easily as over sand.”]
The Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah, who is quoted fondly by Schmitz for his opposition to anti-family revolutionaries, spoke recently in Warsaw, and he said the ideology of liberal individualism promotes a “blending” that erases the natural borders of homelands and cultures, and this will lead to a ”post-national, one-dimensional world” in which “the only criteria are consumption and production.” Sarah affirmed that while every human life has dignity, people groups have the right to determine their own laws, in their own nations, and exclude whom they wish:
I say again that we must work together to rebuild the nations that have fallen victim to war, corruption and injustice, but this does not mean encouraging the uprooting of peoples and the destruction of nations. Some people exploit the Word of God to justify the promotion of multiculturalism and gaily take advantage of the excuse of hospitality to justify the admission of immigrants.
We are told in Deuteronomy 17:15 that only a kinsman is to rule over us.[3. The word “king” derives from the word “kin.”] He is to be a brother of the blood, not a foreigner, even if he is a foreigner of the same faith. Samuel Rutherford did more than anyone else to destroy the concept of the divine right of kings with the publication of Lex, Rex (“the law is king”), which was a response to the absolutist doctrine, “Rex, Lex” (“the king is law”). In this book, Rutherford makes numerous references to Deuteronomy 17. He writes:
The king is a relative… [The] primary law of nations is indeed the law of nature…[for] there is no government natural, but fatherly and marital…[and] it is better that my father govern over me than a stranger govern me.[4. Samuel Rutherford. Lex, Rex. (Q.XIII, pp. 51-52)]
Nor did Rutherford believe that Deut. 17:15 applied only to ancient Israel. He shows that even in the time of Saul and David, when kings were ordained by God, they had to be installed and accepted by the people. This gives us a pattern to follow for all time in our politics.
Sword of Honour is set in the context of the chaos and wastefulness of World War II. The protagonist, Guy Crouchback, seeks to become a war hero to reclaim the wife who has abandoned him, only to find her impregnated by her hairdresser, who becomes the war hero instead! Crouchback is a tragic figure who sets out to find honor as a crusader, and to save his country from being conquered by Hitler, but in the end realizes that he has only made things worse. Defeating Hitler has only enabled the Soviets, and the slutty ex-wife who cuckolded him, whom he hoped for years to reconcile to himself and even attempted to seduce while she was on her third marriage, has been killed by one of Hitler’s bombs. Still, he can do some good and find purpose, at last, amid disillusioned futility, by kindly and unselfishly raising his ex-wife’s bastard after her death. The orphan had no accountability in his circumstances of birth. Crouchback saves him from being aborted and gives him life.
The prophet Hosea lived under similar frightful circumstances. Hosea married a whore, at God’s command, and he named two of his children “Not Pitied” and “Not My People.” This was meant to illustrate what God himself had done for the adulterous nation of Israel. No one ever believed thereafter that marrying whores was acceptable, because it helps us to empathize with God’s own plight. No one gave children those names ever again. No one was ever so stupid as to think that the lesson of Hosea is that becoming a cuckold is the chivalrous duty of a true Christian and knight!
Then along came Matthew Schmitz. Commenting on Sword of Honour, Schmitz writes:
Virginia fears scandal and tries to abort the child before desperately asking Guy to acknowledge it as his own. He chivalrously agrees. He is a cuckold, a cuck. By embracing this role, he becomes true Christian and knight…
He sees that Christianity is not a matter of blood, or of race, or of victory in this world. It requires us to accept defeat in this life so we might enjoy triumph in the next. A Catholic cannot be certain that his line will continue or his country thrive. He only knows that the gates of hell will not prevail against Christ’s Church. This is why Waugh could happily entertain the idea that black men would bear forth a faith and culture abandoned by whites. Perhaps it will not happen, but no Christian would mind if it did.
It is true that we are saved by grace rather than race, but if blood and race are of no importance then neither is family. In Colossians 2:15, we’re told that by his death on the cross, Christ triumphed over rulers and authorities and put them to open shame. In 1 Corinthians 15:25, we’re told that he will reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. In Ephesians 6:12, we’re told that we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers and authorities over this present darkness. Waugh himself understood this, which is why he supported Franco’s Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, a war that successfully rescued Spain and its churches from Jewish Communists.
Schmitz is promoting pacifism and Gnosticism, which are incompatible with Christianity. In contrast to his defeatism, we have 1 Timothy 5:8, which tells us that if anyone does not provide for his relatives (his people), and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
There are cucks in the Protestant churches who are every bit as contemptible as Schmitz. Take John Piper,[5. What’s amazing is that this writer is an anomaly. He too wants to pretend that race doesn’t exist, but he at least recognizes that if the races were reversed, there would be outrage. As it is, everyone looks the other way, because the noble savage is saying something noble, and we must bow in reverence. Piper is living proof that interracial adoption turns white people into patronizing fools. They eagerly adapt to the gibsmedat agenda, so eager are they to belong to something. At the very least, they seek some kind of heritage to honor among those who barely know their own fathers.] for instance, who famously said that he would be unwilling to use lethal force to prevent his own wife or daughter from being raped or murdered, because it would hinder the opportunity of the attacker to receive salvation. Better to leave guns in the hands of the “government,” says Piper, where authority to wield the “sword” is found.
These white knights, some of whom sell plenty of books in the attempt to rescue women from the consequences of their own bad behavior by blaming it on men, love to talk about “chivalry” and becoming a true “knight,” but they are what the Bible calls them: worse than infidels. They are sons of the original cucks, the eleventh-century French poets who promoted what they called courtly love. C.S. Lewis wrote about them in his book, The Allegory of Love:
French poets, in the eleventh century, discovered or invented, or were the first to express, that romantic species of passion which English poets were still writing about in the nineteenth. They effected a change which has left no corner of our ethics, our imagination, or our daily life untouched, and they erected impassable barriers between us and the classical past or the Oriental present. Compared with this revolution the Renaissance is a mere ripple on the surface of literature…
The sentiment, of course, is love, but love of a highly specialized sort, whose characteristics may be enumerated as Humility, Courtesy, Adultery, and the Religion of Love. The lover is always abject. Obedience to his lady’s lightest wish, however whimsical, and silent acquiescence in her rebukes, however unjust, are the only virtues he dares to claim.
Chivalry in Victorian and Edwardian England inherited this courtly sentiment, portrayed by Lancelot literally worshiping Guinevere. In our own time, homes, churches, and schools tend to be led by women, usually indirectly, as husbands, pastors, and leaders abdicate their authority and pedestalize women. As Lewis wrote, no corner of our ethics has avoided infection by this cancer. It has turned the white man into an obsequious fool. Schmitz is simply another in a long line of philosophical cuckolds, subservient in sex, subservient in race, bereft of masculinity; a walking, talking death wish.
The history of chivalry is relevant to Waugh’s own work. Prior to the 1937 Matrimonial Causes Act, English courts of law required couples to abide biblical marriage, which was not to be terminated absent serious fault. There was no such thing as the now-commonplace practice of faultless divorce, allowed even if only one spouse is unhappy. The law used to require guilt. The proud, chivalrous cuckold believed that his wife would be dishonored, even if she were a harlot, if he were to accuse her of guilt. This would have been unthinkable! Thus, in A Handful of Dust, Tony Last – who names the bedrooms in his house “Guinevere” and “Lancelot” – hires a prostitute and two private detectives to fabricate evidence of his own adultery to support his wife’s petition for divorce. In Men at Arms, the first novel in the Sword of Honour trilogy, Guy Crouchback receives a “Dear John” letter from his adulterous wife, which ends: “And, please, there’s to be no chivalrous nonsense of your going to Brighton and playing ‘the guilty party.’ That would mean six months separation from Tommy, and I won’t trust him out of my sight for six days, the beast.”
It would be laughable to consider Guy Crouchback’s misguided chivalry in marriage or his misguided valor in war to be Christian virtues. Like Tony Last and Matthew Schmitz, he follows tradition without understanding what it means.
Waugh did not consider himself a satirist, because he said satire only works during a period when vice pays lip service to virtue, which was no longer the case in his time, and is even less true now. But his works truly were satirical. These stories are ironic and ridiculous, and the farce is unmistakable. Waugh’s work stands as a critique of modernism, but it might be easy for some readers to dig no deeper than the humor and miss the underlying substance. Satire regularly casts as natural that which is subtly under attack. It is not meant to be taken as doctrine or even as figurative advice for living. This is where Schmitz misses the point, so eager is he to divine a Gnostic message from the mind of a faithful genius.
Had Guy Crouchback and Tony Last played principled cucks, which Schmitz considers to be their Christian duty, they would have sanctioned adultery and theft. Likewise, if we men of the West decide that adulteration of our lineage and theft of our property is preferable to our duty to protect our families and homes, we are cowards and not worthy to be called men. How will we be able to salvage anything, much less advance the Kingdom of Christ, as our fathers once did? It is Christianity which has made Europe and the West. Without our Lord, we are sanctimonious addicts building monuments to ourselves. Waugh knew that without the faith, Western “civilization” is where adultery and theft are normalized, and men are expected to enable their own undoing, until a matriarchy takes shape.[6. Evelyn Waugh married a woman named Evelyn, often called “Shevelyn,” who deserted him for one of his friends. Waugh was not a warm man after this. He claimed to prefer his books to his children. Biographer Martin Stannard wrote: “His art was a theatre of cruelty; his temperament instinctively uncharitable.” A woman once asked: “Mr. Waugh, you say such horrible things to people, I cannot believe you are really religious. How can you behave as you do, and still remain a Christian?” He replied: “Madam, I may be all the things you say. But believe me, were it not for my religion, I would scarcely be a human being.” His personal experiences became useful for his art.] How could anyone living under such conditions claim that Europe is orderly and Africa is chaotic?
Waugh is often derided by inferior men as a “racist” and “anti-Semite.” See his novels Scoop and Black Mischief. The latter is about an Oxford-educated African (inspired by Haile Selassie, whom Rastafarians worship as the messiah, and whose coronation Waugh covered) who returns to his home of Azania to sell juju (condoms) at his Pageant of Birth Control. Would it have surprised Waugh that 70 years later (only 15 years ago), Kenya’s Public Health Minister would invite Kool & the Gang and someone named “Mighty King Kong” to host a rock concert to denounce “the social stigma associated with HIV/AIDS”? The cost of admission was an unused condom. Now, in California, a sodomite Jew by the name of Weiner has purged possessors of child porn from the sex offender registry and has reduced from a felony to a misdemeanor the crime of knowingly exposing others to HIV without disclosing the infection.
Waugh’s biographer, David Wykes, comically claimed that his “racism” was “an illogical extension of his views on the naturalness and rightness of hierarchy as the (main) principle of social organization.” Right, because those of us who love hierarchy and particularity, and loathe equality and uniformity, are never called racists! And those of us who believe that the province of women is the home, where their God-given gifts are best applied, are never called sexists! Waugh undoubtedly would have had a good laugh over the absurdity that in our own time, a “racist” has been reduced to one who merely insists on enforcing laws, at the border and elsewhere. The news of the Current Year would have been fertile ground for his genius.
Think of Schmitz’s comments on “Out of Depth” and the glee he derives from both the fantasy and the reality of his own people decimated and dispossessed, handing over their parishes to foreign invaders as they shuffle quietly from the stage of history. All Christians hope that all the world will be transformed by the gospel. If Africa is blessed by true defenders of the faith, we couldn’t be happier for Africa. This does not mean that we want our homes and churches inundated by Africans, nor do we want our country to turn into Nigeria. We unapologetically claim our right to live, to determine our own future, to form and secure our own government, and to bequeath an inheritance to our own children. Anyone who attempts to strip us of these rights is no Christian and no friend. He is an enemy who advocates our genocide. How can we recognize such a man as a Christian brother?
This is the essence of Kinist resistance to the popular tide of race-mixing, Alienist churchians united in thought and purpose with the rest of the anti-Christian world. Here we stand, contra mundum.
If we imagine cucks like Schmitz at one point of a triangle, and Kinists at another, let us consider the “Alt-Right,” at least its atheist contingent of nationalists, at another point.
Let us stipulate that, though we all love our families, those who lack natural affections on race will also lack natural affections on sex, and therefore will have an unhealthy view of the family. Let us also stipulate that Kinists defend an Empire as well – the Kingdom of Christ – which differs from the borderless, nationless empire of the cucks and the pagan imperium of the Nietzschean abstractionists who seem to dominate the Alt-Right.
Schmitz writes:
When I mentioned Waugh’s story on Twitter recently, I was inundated with messages from members of the alt-right, who told me that Christianity is for “cucks”—short for cuckold, a slur they hurl against whites who don’t subscribe to their racial theories… As it happens, I think those alt-right accusations had some truth to them. Christianity really is for cucks, and no one knew it as well as Waugh.
The backstory on this is that last year, during the presidential campaign, Schmitz wrote an article on Donald Trump which contains this paragraph:
Christianity is a religion of losers. To the weak and humble, it offers a stripped and humiliated Lord. To those without reason for optimism, it holds up the cross as a sign of hope. To anyone who does not win at life, it promises that whoever loses his life for Christ’s sake shall find it. At its center stands a truth that we are prone to forget. There are people who cannot be made into winners, no matter how positive their thinking. They need something more paradoxical and cruciform.
Schmitz refers to Matthew 16:25 and 10:39: “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Saving one’s life, in this context, implies that the choice is to deny Christ and live or confess Christ and die. No Christian would count his own life as more valuable than obedience to God. Nor did Christ himself, who taught us that the greatest love is shown by laying down one’s life for friends. In addition to our own lives, we affirm that we do not deserve to retain property, posterity, or possessions, if we, the men of the West, renounce our Redeemer.
On July 7, 2016, Richard Spencer, a prominent figure in the Alt-Right, tweeted a link to Schmitz’s article with the approving comment:
Christianity is a religion of losers. Trump’s contempt for the weak comes from a different kind of faith.
He elaborated on this in a recent podcast.
As someone who is critical of Christianity, I would, in a way, agree with this caricature [that Christianity is for cucks]. But it’s very sad that this is what Christianity is.
It’s not steely resolve in the face of adversity. That is not what he is saying… [Schmitz is instead saying that] your blood must cease to flow…
There’s a certain arrogance, or you could even say hidden white supremacy, in the sense that Africans are not going to succeed as Africans, but as parodies or simulations of Europeans. It’s a desperate hope that you don’t have to save your own people, because your enemies will save you.
You can see that when Schmitz is correct about the good Shepherd seeking his lost sheep, it is not just that he, a representative cuck, is called weak by Nietzscheans. Christianity itself is viewed as a religion of losers by Nietzscheans. When right-is-might is replaced by might-is-right, it is regression to Crowley, who taught that “Love is the law, love under will.” In other words, sin can’t be allowed to exist, because it hinders the will. And without sin, no grace is needed, because grace would only be of benefit to the weak.
But we certainly agree with Spencer on the implicit white supremacy of casting the rest of the world in the cuck’s own image, even as he rolls into a fetal position, hoping that strangers will serve as his horcrux and will nurture him, to relieve him of the burden of nurturing them.
There is an Armenian character in a couple of Waugh’s stories called Mr. Youkoumian. Notice how well he fits the mold to which Spencer refers:
The little Armenian was already well known and, on the whole, well liked by the English community; it did them good to find a foreigner who so completely fulfilled their ideal of all that a foreigner should be.
The moral of the cuck seems to be: If your enemy takes over the Church, the Church still wins!1 Waugh’s tragicomic male characters believed the same of their wives: If other men take them over, Chivalry still wins!
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