This week marked the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, by far America’s single largest Protestant denomination. At the meeting, the SBC passed Resolution 7 condemning the display of the Confederate Battle Flag beyond basically that of a gravemarker and once again accusing their forefathers of imaginary sins. This predictably caused outraged among those people, particularly white Southerners like me, who view the Confederate flag as part of our ethnic identity.
There are many points that could be made at length in response to this resolution: the irony of the SBC retaining their name after this, the case that the U.S. flag is far more evil than the Confederate flag by the standards of the resolution, the injustice of making it harder to minister to whites in order to make it easier to minister to blacks, the SBC’s plainly stating in that very resolution that they aren’t having trouble ministering to minorities, the application of this standard to any political symbol because it will always be offensive to someone, the transgression which this resolution makes against the fifth and ninth commandments, and so on. But frankly I’m a bit tired of making those points over and over again every time something like this comes up. Someone always pipes up asking what the big deal is, “it’s just a flag” or whatever. And you know what, taken in isolation in the grand scheme of things, they’re not entirely wrong. But these things never happen in isolation.
Over the past couple of years, white Southerners have faced a widespread and determined assault on our heritage, symbols, monuments, graves, and identity by secular and governmental forces. At the exact time we needed the church to come up beside us and defend the right of every people to their heritage and symbols, they chose to twist the knife instead. This combined with Resolution 12 calling for the third-world floodgates to be opened via the mass immigration of refugees and their defense of using SBC funds to build mosques in America forms a rather sinister overall picture.
Together these three form a three-pronged weaponization of Christianity against white people, particularly white Southerners.
- The wholesale ethnic replacement of white Americans in their own homeland
- The forcing of white Americans to fund their own dispossession
- The forbidding of white Americans from displaying political symbols used as rallying points against this dispossession
The fact that this program traces a path which is neither Christian, just, nor wise should be obvious, but, instead of endeavoring a point-by-point rebuttal of the resolutions, I think taking a step back and asking ourselves, “What lies at the end of this path upon which the modern American church has set us?” would prove to be more enlightening.
The Austro-Hungarian Correlation with Modern America
Austria started off as merely the southeasternmost German regional state amongst a myriad of other German regional states in the Middle Ages. Austrians are no less German than Bavarians, Prussians, Swabians, Saxons, or Hanoverians. But while the other German states’ territorial expansion was largely limited to other German areas, the Habsburg dynasty of Austria expanded eastward into non-Germanic lands inheriting Bohemia (now Czech Republic) in 1526 and Hungary in 1556 as personal unions under the Habsburg crown. Territorial expansion into Slavic lands continued into the nineteenth century at the expense of Poland and the Ottoman Empire until, by the turn of the twentieth century, the core ethnic German group accounted for only a quarter of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s population. The empire was administered from German Vienna, Germans were the backbone of the empire from the army to the bureaucracy, the Habsburgs were a German dynasty, and German was the lingua franca. But as the German proportion of the overall population dropped, the usual pressures of conflicting ethnic interests began to build. When the Revolutions of 1848 swept across Europe, it hit the multiethnic Austrian Empire particularly hard. A series of nationalist, liberal, and socialist uprisings and counter-uprisings rocked the conservative ruling establishment. Eventually compromises were reached in the form of the Dual Monarchy in 1867 which gave the second-largest ethnic group, Hungarians, a large degree of autonomy at the expense of Germans and officially transformed the Austrian Empire into the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But even this concession still left the Slavs, accounting for a little over half the empire’s overall population, without special representation and clamoring for autonomy.
Increasingly, the Austrian political elite was viewed as placing the interests of Slavs and Hungarians over that of Germans. This left a very bitter taste in the mouths of a growing number of Austrian Germans who for centuries had born the brunt of the cost in blood, sweat, and gold for the empire’s wars, administration, and public works, but now found themselves being pushed into the backseat and their interests ignored. This led to a rising tide of anti-Habsburg, pan-German nationalism, especially after the establishment of the Prussian-dominated German Empire in 1871. A bitter Austrian German outlined these sentiments in 1925 in the third chapter of his book, Mein Kampf:
The fate of the Germans in the Austrian state was dependent on their position in the Reichsrat [parliament]. Up to the introduction of universal and secret suffrage, the Germans had had a majority, though an insignificant one, in parliament. Even this condition was precarious, for the Social Democrats, with their unreliable attitude in national questions, always turned against German interests in critical matters affecting the Germans – in order not to alienate the members of the various foreign nationalities. Even in those days the Social Democracy could not be regarded as a German party. And with the introduction of universal suffrage the German superiority ceased even in a purely numerical sense. There was no longer any obstacle in the path of the further de-Germanization of the state.
For this reason my instinct of national self-preservation caused me even in those days to have little love for a representative body in which the Germans were always misrepresented rather than represented. . . .
The parliamentary regime shared the chief blame for the weakness, constantly increasing in the past few years, of the Habsburg state. The more its activities broke the predominance of the Germans, the more the country succumbed to a system of playing off the nationalities against one another. In the Reichsrat itself this was always done at the expense of the Germans and thereby, in the last analysis, at the expense of the Empire; for by the turn of the century it must have been apparent even to the simplest that the monarchy’s force of attraction would no longer be able to withstand the separatist tendencies of the provinces.
On the contrary. The more pathetic became the means which the state had to employ for its preservation, the more the general contempt for it increased. Not only in Hungary, but also in the separate Slavic provinces, people began to identify themselves so little with the common monarchy that they did not regard its weakness as their own disgrace. On the contrary, they rejoiced at such symptoms of old age; for they hoped more for the Empire’s death than for its recovery.
In parliament, for the moment, total collapse was averted by undignified submissiveness and acquiescence at every extortion, for which the German had to pay in the end; and in the country, by most skillfully playing off the different peoples against each other. But the general line of development was nevertheless directed against the Germans. Especially since Archduke Francis Ferdinand became heir apparent and began to enjoy a certain influence, there began to be some plan and order in the policy of Czechization from above. With all possible means, this future ruler of the dual monarchy tried to encourage a policy of de-Germanization, to advance it himself or at least to sanction it. Purely German towns, indirectly through government officialdom, were slowly but steadily pushed into the mixed-language danger zones. Even in Lower Austria this process began to make increasingly rapid progress, and many Czechs considered Vienna their largest city.
The central idea of this new Habsburg, whose family had ceased to speak anything but Czech (the Archduke’s wife, a former Czech countess, had been morganatically married to the Prince – she came from circles whose anti-German attitude was traditional), was gradually to establish a Slavic state in Central Europe which for defense against Orthodox Russia should be placed on a strictly Catholic basis. Thus, as the Habsburgs had so often done before, religion was once again put into the service of a purely political idea, and what was worse – at least from the German viewpoint – of a catastrophic idea.
The result was more than dismal in many respects. Neither the House of Habsburg nor the Catholic Church received the expected reward. Habsburg lost the throne, Rome a great state.
For by employing religious forces in the service of its political considerations, the crown aroused a spirit which at the outset it had not considered possible. In answer to the attempt to exterminate the Germans in the old monarchy by every possible means, there arose the Pan-German movement in Austria.
That last part is particularly relevant to the topic at hand. The summary of the above is that, having lost their numerical majority followed by losing their political majority, the Austrian Germans were facing cultural extermination and ethnic cleansing. The political elite had decided to entirely transform the basic core concept of the Austrian state from an extension of German civilization into a pan-Slavic state. Further, they weaponized Catholicism against Germans, Austrian Germans being almost entirely Catholic, as one of the means to accomplish this goal. This unfortunately led to quite a few Pan-German Nationalist leaders rejecting the church, and sometimes Christianity entirely, as fundamentally anti-German and adopting very anti-clerical political positions. Thoughtful readers should already be seeing the correlations between the political situation in Austria-Hungary over a century ago and America today.
The Weaponization of Christianity
The process by which Christianity was weaponized against Austrian Germans is gone into in greater detail later on in chapter three of Mein Kampf:
The hard struggle which the Pan-Germans fought with the Catholic Church can be accounted for only by their insufficient understanding of the spiritual nature of the people. The causes for the new party’s violent attack on Rome were as follows:
As soon as the House of Habsburg had definitely made up its mind to reshape Austria into a Slavic state, it seized upon every means which seemed in any way suited to this tendency. Even religious institutions were, without the slightest qualms, harnessed to the service of the new ‘state idea’ by this unscrupulous ruling house.
The use of Czech pastorates and their spiritual shepherds was but one of the many means of attaining this goal, a general Slavization of Austria. The process took approximately the following form: Czech pastors were appointed to German communities; slowly but surely they began to set the interests of the Czech people above the interests of the churches, becoming germ-cells of the de-Germanization process.
The German clergy did practically nothing to counter these methods. Not only were they completely useless for carrying on this struggle in a positive German sense; they were even unable to oppose the necessary resistance to the attacks of the adversary. Indirectly, by the misuse of religion on the one hand, and owing to insufficient defense on the other, Germanism was slowly but steadily forced back.
If in small matters the situation was as described, in big things, unfortunately, it was not far different. Here, too, the anti-German efforts of the Habsburgs did not encounter the resistance they should have, especially on the part of the high clergy, while the defense of German interests sank completely into the background.
The general impression could only be that the Catholic clergy as such was grossly infringing on German rights. Thus the Church did not seem to feel with the German people, but to side unjustly with the enemy. The root of the whole evil lay, particularly in [leading Pan-German nationalist] Schonerer’s opinion, in the fact that the directing body of the Catholic Church was not in Germany, and that for this very reason alone it was hostile to the interests of our nationality.
The so-called cultural problems, in this as in virtually every other connection in Austria at that time, were relegated almost entirely to the background. The attitude of the Pan-German movement toward the Catholic Church was determined far less by its position on science, etc., than by its inadequacy in the championing of German rights and, conversely, its continued aid and comfort to Slavic arrogance and greed.
Georg Schonerer was not the man to do things by halves. He took up the struggle toward the Church in the conviction that by it alone he could save the German people. The ‘Away from Rome’ movement seemed the most powerful, though, to be sure, the most difficult, mode of attack, which would inevitably shatter the hostile citadel. If it was successful, the tragic church schism in Germany would be healed, and it was possible that the inner strength of the Empire and the German nation would gain enormously by such a victory. But neither the premise nor the inference of this struggle was correct.
Without doubt the national force of resistance of the Catholic clergy of German nationality, in all questions connected with Germanism, was less than that of their non-German, particularly Czech, brethren. Likewise only an ignoramus could fail to see that an offensive in favor of German interests was something that practically never occurred to the German clergyman.
And anyone who was not blind was forced equally to admit that this was due primarily to a circumstance under which all of us Germans have to suffer severely: that is, the objectivity of our attitude toward our nationality as well as everything else. While the Czech clergyman was subjective in his attitude toward his people and objective only toward the Church, the German pastor was subjectively devoted to the Church and remained objective toward the nation. A phenomenon which, to our misfortune, we can observe equally well in thousands of other cases.
This is by no means a special legacy of Catholicism, but with us it quickly corrodes almost every institution, whether it be governmental or ideal.
That quote is worth re-reading to fully digest its contents.
Creating Another Hitler
This same historical process is now playing itself out in modern America. A few “find and replaces” of white for German, minority for Czech, and America for Austria and that passage could be a description of the American churches’ current assault on white people. The radical change in the core concept of the American state from an extension of European Christendom into a pluralistic, propositional, multiracial, multireligious empire, the intentional marginalization of the core white racial group on the backs of which the country was built and maintained, and the genocidal weaponization of Christianity against white interests to aid in the first two goals. White churches are viewed as problems to be fixed, pulpits are given to minorities who immediately subordinate white interests to those of their own racial group which are then taught as gospel, whites forced to view their race objectively while everyone else is allowed to view theirs subjectively, and everywhere the white leadership of the church seems utterly incapable of recognizing what is happening, much less opposing it, even when they are not actively collaborating in our dispossession.
History didn’t allow us to see what the final end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire would have been without World War I, but based on what happened to Yugoslavia in the 1990s and the fact that Austria’s own multiethnic instability was the very reason that World War I started in the first place, it’s not hard to imagine what it would have been, and it’s not pretty. Unfortunately I think that the United States has already passed the demographic point at which it realistically can be salvaged as a political unit, with or without a Trump victory this fall. The very same ethnic tensions which would have eventually torn the Austro-Hungarian Empire apart are currently working their way through modern America, and this will only accelerate as the overall percentage of the core racial group declines towards minority status.
Identity politics are the inevitable consequence of an ethnically diverse political unit. Their being largely absent in White America outside of the South over the past century was due solely to the unthreatened overwhelming majority status of those areas. The same forces that gave rise to the pan-German nationalist movement in nineteenth-century Austria are currently birthing Generic White American as a concrete identity group in modern America. Church leaders who think that they can forestall this by pontificating on the righteousness of whites’ slitting their own collective throats should take note that 30% to 40% of Evangelical Christians ignored Russell Moore’s Soros-funded, estrogen-laced pleas in the pages of the New York Times and voted for Trump anyway in the Republican primaries. A large portion of white Americans are not going to simply roll over and die because their pastorate finds it most convenient that way for their own virtue signaling, bank accounts, and respectability.
The question then arises, who are the leaders of this forming identity group going to be? This too is following the model of Austria-Hungary’s pan-Germanism. If the church had thrown their weight behind someone like Pat Buchanan and supported legitimate white interests in the 1990s, then without a question it would be people who not only held the church in high regard and viewed Christianity as absolutely essential, but were themselves devout Christians. In the 2010s, after another twenty years of the church’s knife in white people’s back, a good number of nationalists now view the church with apathy if not outright contempt and, while still viewing Christianity as an important cultural institution and Christian moral standards as largely needing to be maintained, lack personal faith in it themselves – men like Trump. If the American church is successful in helping to defeat Trump or even just continues to openly oppose his just championing of white interests, then the next generation of white leaders may very well be openly antagonistic not only to the church, but to Christianity as a concept. People like our bitter Austrian German author, who vividly remember the great spiritual betrayal of their nationality by the church and thus have no intention of being bound by Christian morality in righting the wrongs that church actively helped to perpetuate.
We at Faith and Heritage will continue to fight for the position that Christianity is not inherently anti-white and that nationalism is not inherently anti-Christian, but this is no easy task when the institutional American church takes every opportunity to try to prove us wrong. I don’t think it is too much to ask for an American church denomination that talks about White America’s national interests as being legitimate in the same manner that the SBC talks about Israeli Jews’ national interests as being legitimate in Resolution 5.
I do not want another Hitler, and if the organized church in America doesn’t either, then they should stop weaponizing Christianity against white people.
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