Against a merely Religious Right
Why the Intellectual Right could do without a specific form of Religion
To vitalist ears this title will seem to read as an attempt to revivify the spirit of Friedrich Nietzsche. What was once a Faustian crusade against against the afterglow of a dominating Christendom has turned into much bigger problems for anyone who cares about their civilization and their people.
It clear what is meant by "religious", especially when concerns of 'racialism' are mentioned. What is meant by "religious" is that strain of deracinating Christendom. The breaking of God’s covenant with his initially chosen people, opening it up to all humanity. That particular form of Christianity which can’t help but insist that the lions and the hyenas can get along. Anything liberal, “classical“ or otherwise, will use this initial doctrine in order to de-particularize any peoples it manages to grasp. Ironically, this goes against the apparent wishes of a God who once pulled down the Tower of Babbel to scatter the mixed populations of the earth. A God who normatively rebukes against the hubris of human interchangeability.
Moving away from the frame of religion and towards the fact-of-the-matter political issues (which should be the central concern for any discussion on the matter of rightism). We must realise that: politics is no godly thing.
Politics is a dirty, earthly game. All those harboring any shred of right-dissension should take note of this, as many of them have muddled their perceptions with godly thing. Politics concerns not the potential world hereafter, nor anything in regards to any principal of morality. Politics, and the place of the ‘right’ within it, only cares about power. The blood of geopolitics, the economic levarge of markets and the sexual fluids of eugenics.
The problem with "civil religion", a uniquely Protestant experiment, is that it is exactly the civility of rightist impulses which has lead to their inevitable containment. Classical Liberalism is only "coding right" by virtue of the fact everything has been made 'right'. This enframing, instituted following the French Revolution, must be cast aside in another revolution. Rightism, if it is to survive into the future must itself become revolutionary in that same manner.
The only way for the ‘right’ is to disengage the notions and concessions which got it into this situation. Actual rightism is never Liberal, and certainly not "capitalist" especially in the American sense of the word. Genuine rightism is paricularist, based on an ethnos of being. Not based on the muddy contemporary concept of "race", which increasingly has no basis in any cultural or genetic fact as we proceed further into meltdown. The liberally enframed discussion of ‘race’ has infact lent into all the superficial markers it claims to have usurped and befuddled the intuitions of all that is right.
The fear of a "secular or neo-pagan, Nietzschean, vitalist right" is a distraction on the order of a moral panic. Genuine rightism, by which I mean a particularist rightism, should have no problem with Christianity (or any other religion) as a binding agent to a particular peoples. Specifically where it is historically appropriate or serves the aims of the ‘right’. Occidental examples are the historic Church of England for the Anglo or the various Orthodox traditions where they appropriately segment the East. It is the universal and limp-wristed Christianity, the liberalism in disguise, which rightism should not allow itself to be dosed with. This type builds their churches in an unparticular style and wants to give entire planet the charm of an airport terminal.
A response to Toward a Religious Right by
Samuel, thanks for this response. I agree that Christianity need not strip itself or the cultures at which it arrives of their particularity. There is a discourse that disallows Christians, for example, from identifying themselves with their nation, especially with America. On the contrary, Christianity does take a particularly American form in the US, and perpetuating the particular traditions of Christianity that are indigenous to the US - depending on the tradition - can be a good thing.
I do think the Nietzschean secular right is worth being wary of; but I'm glad that you don't think America should go in a non-Christian, neo-Pagan (Viking?) direction. ;) More, I want to draw attention to the fact that a right without a religion reduces to the defense of particularity. The moral and universal drops out. So I guess I would encourage a not merely particularist right. The correct balance of universal and particular is what we need.