A new trend: Identitarian Religion

Below is an essay from Radix Journal, reprinted here with permission, about identitarian religion.  Although the concept of identitarian religion is relatively new in North America, it has gained some popularity in Europe.  One prefatory note I’d like to make is that identitarian religion can be pagan or Christian.  (Some critics seem to assume that all identitarian religion is pagan.)   For identitarianism (or archeofuturism) in general, some resources are: “Déclaration de guerre” (video in French with English subtitles), Identitär Idé (Sweden), “Remaking a People,” Markus Willinger’s Generation Identity,  Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age, and “The Rectification of Names: Guillaume Faye’s Why We Fight“.

 

What is Identitarian Religion?

A long-standing “Trad Catholic” I know told recently me that he had left the Church. He, in essence, said that his “conservative” priest had become obsessed with promoting mass Third World immigration, peddling interracial adoption, speaking incessantly about various forms of “social justice” such as opposition to non-White abortions, and, of course, denouncing evolution because it’s “racist”. Contemporary Western Christianity, even in its so-called “conservative” guises, has become indistinguishable from the central values of Cultural Marxism.

As other commentators have already noted, two things are happening to Christianity today:

First, outside the West, Christianity is rapidly becoming a non-Western religion (e.g. African Christianity in Africa, Mestizo Christianity in Latin America, etc.). As noted by many scholars, a new, non-Western form of Christianity is being born, unlike anything preceding it. It has been estimated that within 50 years, Christianity will overwhelmingly be a non-Western religion, both demographically and theologically.

Second, inside the West, Christianity is becoming more universalized than ever—often substantially no different from the major tenets of Cultural Marxism. You currently have mainstream Christian leaders (both Catholic and Protestant) supporting the Third World immigration invasion of the West and cajoling White couples into adopting unwanted African or Haitian babies instead of birthing White babies. Pathological altruism and ethnomasochism rule the roost; in short, Western Christian leaders today are a bunch of girly men. Such maladaptive trends cannot last indefinitely.

Evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson and science journalist Nicholas Wade have both argued that religion, by and large, is adaptive, in that religion increases one’s inclusive fitness. In short, religion provides group cohesion and, when overlapped with ethnicity or race, religion maintains strong group identity, which assists in group survival. A textbook example of the success of ethno-religion would be Ashkenazi Jews.

What is happening with Christianity in the West today, however, is arguably maladaptive. This extremely universalized girly-man form of Christianity (unlike the more manly earlier Germanic form) seems to be an unholy suicide pact. Not only does it lack any grounding in biological reality but it seems to be hostile toward it.

And what is grounding in biological reality? When religion overlaps with and reinforces racial identity, it is at its strongest. In fact, ethno-religion might be the strongest group identity known to man. Religious identity and racial identity can be strong by themselves, but combine the two and you are in a different league. It’s little wonder that throughout human history ethno-religion has been the norm. The more extreme, deracinated and universalized religion of the past century is the historical aberration.

And that is the gist of identitarian religion, as I understand it: it’s ethno-religion, a rejection of universalism, a return to human normalcy. So, identitarian religion is something “new” in that it’s juxtaposed to our current universalized suicide pact, but it’s also “old” as it’s a return to older norms.

What forms can identitarian religion take? Is it exclusive to a particular religion? Short answer: No.

While Christianity has become nearly synonymous with Cultural Marxism in the West, it must not necessarily be so. Identitarian Christianity is a possibility, and one certainly sees instances of it, ranging from Pro-Western Christianity to the Anglo paleoconservatives, to Kinist Protestantism, to forms of ethnonationalist Slavic Orthodox Christianity. But since Christianity has recently taken on an extremely universalist trajectory, any battle for Identitarian Christianity will be an uphill battle, but nonetheless perhaps a battle worth waging.

Another option one sees is a return to Paganism, ranging from Asatru in North America to other forms of Germanic Paganism, Celtic Paganism, Roman Paganism, Greek Paganism, and Slavic Paganism throughout Europe. Paganism properly understood, i.e. historically and accurately understood, is a blood-and-soil religion, an ancestral religion, an ethno-religion, the very antithesis to deracinated universalist religion.

And, of course, there are other forms of Non-Western identitarian religion that would be appropriate for Non-Westerners. But the question here is whether competing forms of Western identitarian religion can get along. Within the larger framework of Western identitarian religion, can, for example, Identitarian Christians and Pagans coexist?

I don’t see why not.

And what of identitarian atheists and agnostics? Can they co-exist with identitarian religion? Since identitarian religion is not at odds with nature, and thus not at odds with evolutionary science, it does not threaten secular knowledge but offers itself as an additional societal glue. And perhaps a necessary glue at that, as it is unclear that society can survive, long-term, without religion. While some individuals can function without religion, can society as a whole? Has it ever?

As Western Universalist Christianity wanes tepid, and as identitarian ideas continue to spread, now is a good time to outline a larger framework for identitarian religion as a guide for various Western religions. Hopefully this brief outline will help with this endeavor.