A Right to Fie: Rex Stout's White Guilt

Rex Stout (1886-1975) was a master of detective fiction, but a racial imbecile.

Even at its most erudite, escape fiction must keep political harangues firmly out of the narrative, or must in any event strive to permit such materials only in a way that is incidental to the enjoyment of the story itself. Otherwise the story languishes and the reader is left with unintentionally comedic results. One thinks of Arthur Conan Doyle’s bizarre and rambling (though very astute) fugue against Mormonism in his very first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet. Although the ax which Doyle is grinding there against the Smith/Young cult is entirely reasonable in fact, the didactic tone of his attack has no connection to the main narrative of that novel, nor is the interruption all that entertaining as an interpolated tale. But if you thought that A Study in Scarlet was badly damaged by extraneous moralizing, just wait till you see what Rex Stout has done while trying to use a murder-mystery as a vehicle for hyping the Civl Rights hoax. At least Doyle’s anti-cult position was sympathetic, if distracting; Stout’s is both distracting and false.

In A Right to Die, a decent story about the murder of a civil rights crusader, Rex Stout has botched his ordinarily masterful management of the Manhattan Brownstone by allowing Nero Wolfe and his muscular amanuensis Archie Goodwin to stray into the minefield of liberal white guilt. The fact that the two are treading unfamiliar and dangerous ground is obvious as soon as they begin the journey. Nearly every line spoken either by or about black people in this book is uniformly scripted by what were already (in 1963) well-entrenched codes of political correctness centering upon the default nobility of blacks and the indubitable guilt of whites.

I don’t know what got into Stout in the early ‘60’s, but having read this book, and also its successor The Doorbell Rang, it’s obvious that some precursor strain of the Great Society had afflicted his mind in the throes of Camelot. Of course, many of Rex Stout’s fellow white intellectuals were at that time joining the revolution to overthrow everything normal in Western society, but one can at least be excused for cherishing the hope that a genius and all-around good guy like Stout would not participate in the orgy. The fact that he felt compelled to genuflect to the monstrous lie of the civil rights farce shows that even the most brilliant thinkers are not necessarily safe from the tide of revolution.

Because of Stout’s clumsy grandstanding, this book is a decidedly mixed bag. In The Doorbell Rang, an entertaining adventure wherein Wolfe takes on the FBI and attracts the meddling attention of J. Edgar Hoover, we are also subject to a poorly integrated diatribe against government intrusions upon civil liberties. I’m as opposed to such activities as the next man, but the lecturing element was neither needed nor enjoyable in a mystery novel. Wolfe is simply unconvincing as a political crusader; indeed his most enduring quality is as a man who defies all forms of progress, even such minute forms as the movement from one chair to another.

At least in Doorbell, Stout kept my attention well fastened to the wit and action of my favorite pair of Manhattan crime-fighters. But in the book under review, Stout’s politics are far too evident upon his sleeve, and they do not belong in the mouth of Nero Wolfe. It would be bad enough if the novel were merely moralizing; what is far worse is that it is also inexcusably false in its presentation of black/white relations, of its own era or of any other.

One of the quintessential pieces of interracial lunacy foisted upon America in the '60's was "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner". This movie appeared just after Poitier had abandoned his first wife and four children so as to miscegenate more freely in Hollywood.

I will give just a couple of examples of Stout’s sad failure to pull off the job of making Wolfe and Archie into MLK-style racial utopians, though I could supply twenty. In Chapter One, we meet the client of the novel, a black man whose name is Whipple. After revealing the fact that his son is engaged to marry a white girl named Susan Brooke, and that both young people are members of a civil rights outfit, Whipple makes his request: he wants Wolfe to find some dirt on the fiancée so as to prevent Whipple Junior from saddling himself with the difficulties of an interracial family. So far, so sound. But Wolfe begs to differ with Whipple’s quibble, and tells him so. Wolfe’s objection shows that he has taken leave of his senses in agreeing to pursue such a weird case:

“[My] comment is about marriage. It’s possible that Miss Brooke is more realistic than you are. She may be intelligent enough to know that no matter whom she marries there will be the devil to pay. The difficulties, snags, embarrassments, and complications…are in any case inevitable. If she marries a man of her own color and class, the grounds for them will be paltry, ignoble, degrading and tiresome. If she marries a Negro the grounds will be weighty, worthy, consequential and diverting.”

How painfully dishonest all of this is. And how unintentionally racist! A white liberal is never more racist than at those moments when he is striving to establish his bona fides as a post-racial guru. It is one thing to be subjected to this sort of nonsense from Keith Olbermann or John McCain in 2013; but it’s simply unbearable from the world’s smartest obese detective in 1963. Let me underline the unintentional racism of Wolfe’s remark. While issuing a blanket condemnation of all forms of marriage (a funny enough angle for the likes of the happy bachelor Wolfe), he proceeds to say that if a woman must expose herself to the infamies of marriage, she might at least score political points while doing so. And what could be more progressive in the marriage game than to marry a Negro!? The good thing about this speech is that it perfectly typifies the mentality of white liberals who embrace faddish intermarriage; the problem with it is its unspeakable hypocrisy and the patronizing view it presents of blacks, as if whites marrying blacks were a way of elevating the latter while improving the whole society.

Archie appearing in his usual pristine white.

One of the stupidest and least persuasive parts of the book is the tedious discussion we get from Archie about his lust for one of the black murder suspects, Beth Tiger. Although Stout devotes several long passages to Beth’s beauty in the book, it would be too embarrassing for both you and me to go over all of them here. Instead I will give you the dumbest, funniest, and most accidentally racist part (and thus most reflective of fake white pomposity), where Archie first catches sight of the Black Venus at one of Wolfe’s grilling sessions:

“Tiger was one of those specimens who cannot be properly introduced by details. I’ll mention that her skin was about the color of an old solid-gold bowl Wolfe has in his room which he won’t allow Fritz to clean, that if she had been Cleopatra instead of what’s-her-name I wouldn’t have missed that movie, and that I had a problem with my eyes all evening, since with a group there I am supposed to watch expressions.”

Translation: Tiger was so beautiful that she has caused Archie to compromise his investigative objectivity and to forsake his crush on Elizabeth Taylor, considered the most beautiful woman in the world at that time, but who evidently couldn’t hold a candle to this golden specimen. Fans of the Wolfe stories know Archie better than this. Archie certainly does appreciate female beauty and he does not spare us the details when making these reports. But his admiration is never slavish or obsequious, and none of the white girls he takes a shine to would ever be able to distract him from his work. What makes Beth Tiger an exception to Archie’s policy of steadfastly dividing dames from detective work? Answer: she’s a black beauty. Clearly, Archie is no racist.

The civil rights element in this book does no service, and much harm, to our enjoyment of the plot. I have now read a handful of the Wolfe and Archie books, and I am a confirmed fan. When restricting himself to the world of orchids, gourmet cookery, and deductive reasoning, Stout does well. Indeed, no fictional hero can make me feel so welcome in his domicile as can Nero Wolfe in his brownstone on 35th Street. It is that milieu that Wolfe fans recall long after the names and criminal details of the stories have faded, and for my money it is often more fun to enter the brownstone than to visit 221b Baker Street. Stout had a powerful imagination and a magnificent gift for storytelling. But in A Right to Die, he allowed the charming bubble of his ordinarily ideology-free world to be punctured by the stupid and rotten zeitgeist of the ‘60’s civil rights movement, a horribly chosen maneuver which Stout usually avoided wisely and happily.

Archie's usual type would have been far more tasteful.

This Island of Ours

Herman Cyril McNeile (1888-1937) was a British veteran of the Great War who turned his time in combat into fiction under the pseudonym Sapper. And it was by that name that he became a household word in England while publishing his phenomenally successful novels about the exploits of Captain Bulldog Drummond.

Sapper's theme in these books is one of the most important of the 20th century: the collusion between money-hungry capitalists and bloody-minded bolsheviks. Sapper gave the world Bulldog Drummond a full ten years before Leon Trotsky had fabricated the word "racist", and hence he was able to write the novel well outside the chilling influence of that ruinous neologism. Never hesitating to call an Englishman an Englishman, or a jew a jew, Sapper still retained the essential knowledge of racial reality which is indispensable for both the health of nations and for their peaceful coexistence. But preserving nations and fostering peace have never been high on the list of Marxist priorities, so the erosion of healthy racial consciousness has always been their modus operandi. That the Drummond books are now forgotten, and would be universally condemned today if appearing for the first time, tells us everything we need to know about who won the war.

This, the first of the Bulldog Drummond stories, appeared in 1920 and became a national sensation in England. Reading it some ninety years later allows one to feel the steep decline in literacy that has taken place since Sapper's heyday. Although Sapper's thrillers were regarded at the time as penny dreadfuls, it's obvious that their value has endured. "Bulldog Drummond" is not only thrilling entertainment, it is also an insightful record of what an average Englishman thought of the political scene just after the Great War.

Untouched by the diseased campaign to deaden all racial sensibilities which would soon envelop the West, Sapper wrote from the heart, and for the common man. Like all true Englishmen, Sapper and his hero Hugh Drummond are anti-Utopian. They resist foreign innovation for the sake of hearth and home, and they fight their enemy to the hilt. Sapper was in the trenches in France, and he put Drummond there, too. Though the story is set in the immediate aftermath of the war, the specter of political upheaval which drove that bloody affair hangs over every chapter.

Consider the fact that Sapper was something of a Stephen King of the early 20th century, both in popularity and production. He was a prolific best-seller, and his books were frequently filmed. Yet what a contrast we find between what passes for popular literature today and what Every Man was reading back then. Drummond is self-consciously not an intellectual, and in fact some of his funniest lines are directed against the eggheads with guns who he is up against. And yet it would be wrong to call Drummond anti-intellectual either. He's a dashing but quixotic figure, shrewd yet refreshingly naive to the ways of the world. Trench combat has blessed him with a cool-blooded demeanor, without in any way removing his joie de vivre. He is both ugly and virile, and he possesses the wisdom of the folk. He is Falstaff on the streets of modern London.

"Demobilised officer, finding peace incredibly tedious would welcome diversion. Legitimate if possible; but crime, of a comparatively humorous description, no objection. Excitement essential." Thus runs Captain Hugh Drummond's peacetime advertisement in the London Times in the summer of 1919. Having been flooded with responses from interested seekers, Drummond wisely settles on a damsel in distress.

As the story opens, the lovely Phyllis Benton has been drawn into a murky web of criminal intrigue through one of her father's business relations. Carl Peterson is a newcomer to the Bentons' neighborhood in Surrey, but he is a master of disguise whose putative English pedigree Phyllis immediately distrusts. Peterson has taken to meeting and dining frequently with Phyllis' father. Having seen or overheard several angry exchanges between the men, and heard even worse of Peterson's cohort, Phyllis decides to seek a meeting with the anonymous demobilised officer. Instantly intrigued by the girl's story, and taken by her large eyes, Drummond commits on the spot.

The book is loaded with humor and violent action, a kind of heady blend of Wodehouse and Ian Fleming. Perfectly paced, each chapter sweeps us deeper into Peterson's world. As the full depths of his international conspiracy to undermine England are revealed, we gladly join Drummond in his relentless pursuit of the Peterson gang, from London, to Surrey, to Paris, and back for the exciting climax at the Elms. Drummond's final address to the Peterson gang is worth quoting in full:

"Listen to me." Hugh Drummond's voice took on a deep, commanding ring, and against their will the four men looked at the broad, powerful soldier, whose sincerity shone clear in his face. "Not by revolutions and direct action will you make this island of ours right--though I am fully aware that that is the last thing you would wish to see happen. But with your brains, and for your own unscrupulous ends, you gull the working-man into believing it. And he, because you can talk with your tongues in your cheeks, is led away. He believes you will give him Utopia; whereas, in reality, you are leading him to hell. And you know it."

The Faith is Europe, and Europe is the Faith!

by Edward Waverley

"The faith is Europe, and Europe is the faith!" ~ Hilaire Belloc

I have a friend who for several years has been living abroad in Europe. He went there to study theology, and in theory this was an excellent plan. After all, where else but in Europe can one discover all the great eternal truths of the Christian faith as handed down to us by the church fathers? And all of the church fathers were European, so it's logical to assume, as my friend has done, that one's best chance to grasp the faith is to live and work in Europe.

Alas, Europe is no longer herself. It is no longer possible to join Hilaire Belloc in declaring that the historic Christian faith is identical with the historic nations of Europe. The relentless onslaught of wars, both physical and spiritual, which have been waged against Christendom over the last century have reduced the Old World to a propositional shell of her formerly vibrant self. The elimination of blood-and-soil consciousness in Europe and her satellites has been a deliberate goal of anti-Christs throughout the existence of the church. But it wasn't until the Church succumbed to the propositional view of nations, as propounded by JJ Rousseau and his entourage, that the faith began to recede.

But to return to my friend abroad. He is now making a living teaching in Europe, and I get an occasional letter from him. I was surprised recently to find that far from sharing my antique vision of Christian nations and their vital importance to the life of the church, he has fully embraced the vision of Rousseau. My friend has declared that racial consciousness, rather than being birthed and nourished in Christianity, is on the contrary vanquished by the faith. I was deeply saddened by his report, and could only feel that it was probably a very accurate reflection of the dominant opinion of European youth today. Nevertheless, I decided to respond to his letter. I wanted to remind him how much nations have meant to Christians throughout history, and to urge him to begin thinking like the many great fathers who have been granted to the church throughout her history. My reply is here:

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My dear friend,

I must beg to differ with your analysis quite emphatically. As you are surely aware, the English word nation in Acts 17, translated from the Greek ethnos (ethne plural), is taken from the Latin “nationem.” The New Oxford Dictionary (2nd ed, 1989) states that nationem means “breed, stock, race, nation.” This, in turn, derives from the Latin “nasci,” which means “to be born.” So there is a substantial genetic component to the historic idea of nations, including when the Biblical writers use the word. Otherwise, how do we explain the painstaking effort to give such long and detailed genealogies all through the biblical text?

We can see this concept of the meaning of birth, and its connection to national status, at work vividly in the so-called Anchor Baby laws in the USA, through which legislators have managed to foist more and more foreign subjects onto the federal dole by claiming that by simply being born within the geographic boundaries of America, a newborn is (Abracadabra!) a full American citizen, with full rights and entitlements to all sorts of benefits. Never mind the fact that the same legislators deny that there is any such thing as an historic American nation defined according to the above definitions. The point is that, when it suits their agenda, the concept of birth suddenly becomes of enormous importance. But the double standard is set up always to strongly benefit non-Whites, and to punish Whites. And this is about as anti-Christian of a policy as I can imagine, for it is based entirely in a politics of envy and greed, and it is a mockery of the Tenth Commandment, "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's possessions." How in the world do the concepts of neighborhood, and coveting make any sense in that verse without a firm category of private property? And private property is simply a microcosm of the broader idea of national institutions and identity.

It's easier to see how destructive and counter-intuitive this is if we narrow the focus of the argument. Imagine if pregnant Mrs. Johnson happened to go into labor at the home of her friends the Robinsons, and for some medical reason could not leave that home until the baby was born. Would anyone try to argue that, because the baby had been born at the Robinson residence, that it was now a legal heir to the Robinson estate? The idea is ludicrous. No one can become a Robinson unless he is either born from Mrs. Robinson, or in the special case of the Robinsons voluntarily adopting. Yet the claim of borderless ideology is that America does not belong to any one race (and race is simply a very large extended family, easily established with DNA testing), but that America belongs to everyone, and that everyone must be absolutely free to live and work and enjoy the blessings of whatever nation they happen to be in at the moment.

Notice that this is never the case with third-world countries. There is no immigration problem with people streaming into Africa. On the contrary, people are leaving Africa in droves, doing everything that they can to exit. The claim of pseudo-Christian anti-borders ideology is that Christians, especially Western Christians, should be under a gospel obligation to distribute their wealth, open their nations, their local communities, and even their homes to as many foreign strangers as possible, because this supposedly breaks down primitive, anti-Christian barriers which have been supposedly abrogated by the Advent of Jesus Christ. When I encounter such thinking I always wonder, "Why did Jesus, then, feel the need to go and preach almost exclusively to the people of his own nation and race? Why did he carefully list the concentric steps in which the Great Commission was to be unfolded, in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth? Why did Paul, in Titus 1:12, approvingly quote a Cretan author who had declared that 'All Cretans are liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons'? Why did Paul go on to command his readers to rebuke Cretans accordingly?" Those are my thoughts when I hear about this new gospel command to forget about the mythology of nations. Evidently Paul and Jesus do not agree with this philosophy, nor did the Holy Spirit appear to subscribe to it when, inspiring John on Patmos, He stated that in the Eternal Consummation, all of the kings of the nations of the earth will bring their splendor into the city.

Peter Brimelow has defined the concept of nation to mean, "the interlacing of ethnicity and culture" usually speaking a single language. There are countless examples of such nations throughout history, many of which are indexed in the Bible. And when Paul refers to the settled times and boundaries of nations, he is making the point that such boundaries and times are set by God for the purpose of diffusing political power in such a way as to facilitate the gospel. The implication is that an unhealthy concentration of central authority is deleterious to the Bible. This is precisely the opposite of the popular idea that borders obstruct the gospel. According to the Bible, borders and boundaries are healthy outlines, laid down by God so that families can exercise dominion over the whole face of the earth in a milieu of familiarity and kinship. This has always been the predominant doctrine of nations in Christendom.

You say that multicultural empires are historically normal, and you are quite correct. Whether it's the Roman Empire, or the present American Empire, or any other you wish to name, the common denominator is the reckless attempt to meld together diverse people groups in the hope that they will be more loyal to The Imperial Proposition than they are to their own race or ethnicity. The question is, is there any difference between a nation and an empire? The term multiculturalism itself gives us the answer. Empires are never monocultural, but always multicultural. But the drift of empire is monocultural, in that the elite who rule in empires demand rigorous cultural conformity in their subjects. While claiming to embrace "diversity", our imperial rulers actually want people to become rootlessly similar, until all feelings of loyalty have been steadily transferred away from families and over to the all-powerful central state. To see the truth of this, witness the slavish outlook of all Americans, who expect to be told what to think and what to do in every area of life by the State that they gladly worship.

I can do no better than to quote RJ Rushdoony, as he comments upon sociologist Carle Zimmerman's theory of families. Zimmerman's analysis shows, to my mind at any rate, that the correct biblical view of nations is that they are God-ordained extensions of many related tribes, all hierarchically arranged so as to reflect the glory of God's majesty:

Carle C. Zimmerman has pointed out that there are three types of families in history: the trustee, the domestic, and the atomistic families. The trustee family has central authority in a society: it is the basic power and institution, and most government is in its hands. The trustee family sees its possessions and its work as an inheritance from the past to be transmitted to the future. The family wealth is thus not for private use but for the family's on-going life.

The domestic family is a weakening of the family's powers, with the state as gainer. It is a transition stage to the atomistic family, when the totalitarian state is the on-going life and power, the main heir and the controller of inheritance, and the source of direction for a society.

The family in Scripture is a trustee type of family, and Biblical law is geared to the family as trustee. This means that authority in the family, i.e., the authority of the husband and wife, is not personal but theological. This appears very clearly in Ephesians 5:21-33. The matter of family authority is theological. The husband's headship is established by God as a ministry through the family. His authority, while resting in his person, is not personal; it is religious and theological. His authority is valid thus only insofar as he is faithful to the word of God; when he departs from it, God will confound his authority. Women and children will then rule over men and be their oppressors (Isa. 3:4, 12).

All authority on the human scene, in the family, church, state, and school, as well as the vocations, is ministerial (Eph. 6:5-9) and theological rather than personal. The personal exercise of authority for the sake of power is the mark of the Gentiles, i.e., of unbelief (Matt. 20:25-29; Mark 10:35-45).

Since Biblical authority is a trusteeship from the Lord, it is basic to that authority that it must be exercised in the name of the Lord for His Kingdom. What we are and have belongs neither to us, to the family, the church, or the state, but to the Lord and His Kingdom. We must thus protect ourselves and our possessions from the attempts by an ungodly heir, or by the state, to gain possession over them as if the right of inheritance were a personal fact. Inheritance, however, is a theological principle, with an eschatological framework. It must serve the purposes of God and His Kingdom, and its goal is the new creation, and all the glory of the earth made an inheritance of God's Kingdom.

Nations are, by definition monocultural. A pastor friend of mine has put it quite beautifully: "Culture is religion poured over ethnicity." The 20th-century theologian Henry Van Til had an equally apt phrase: "Culture is nothing but the unfolding of a nation's religious convictions." And this is a perfectly biblical notion. Notice that this formula does not fail to obtain in the case of empires, but it doesn't obtain in a healthy way. Whereas in a historically Christian nation, such as France, the French people were allowed to discover their own national way of expressing their faith through the flourishing of the uniquely French culture, an empire disturbs such natural developments by insisting upon unswerving allegiance to the State. In 1789, when revolutionaries seized power in France and declared all of the old regime to be discarded, they explicitly claimed ownership over the children of France, as being the properly entitled authorities for recruiting and shaping them for the ends of the State. Again, this is a systematic expression of godless humanism, wherein a group of men claim God-like control over the destinies of the majority of men, for the supposed purpose of establishing a better world system.

The relentless push from the imperial leadership is for all the subjects to amalgamate their beliefs, their languages, their races, etc. The reason for this strategy is at once obvious and brilliant: if Rome, or America, is everywhere, and if everyone on earth is potentially an American (which is the explicit claim of our entire political leadership) then the very idea of nationalistic or racial loyalty is entirely emptied of its power. The only power left in which to take refuge is the empire. Whereas the Bible teaches that it is in God that we live, and move, and have our being, Imperial Statism teaches that it is in the State that we live, and move, and have our being. Statist thinking is simply the normal Christian formula for worship, with the State replacing God as the object of worship.

In One-World international ideology, or on a smaller scale in American-style imperial hegemony, the State does not fail to usurp as many of God's sovereign roles as it can. God is omnipotent, and so the federal government of the USA acts and speaks as if it is omnicompetent, able to address every human problem from a vantage point of perfect objectivity. God is omniscient, and so the government demands unfettered access to all information, however private, about its subjects. God is omnibenevolent, and of course our government frames all of its activities in pseudo-religious language about "The Great Society", "No Child Left Behind", "The Race to the Top", "The Patriot Act", "The Department of Homeland Security" etc. Such usurpations are plainly prophesied in Scripture, where the Psalmist queries: Why do the nations rage? And try to overthrow the Lord and his anointed one? They conspire together and claim that they can shed the bounds that God has placed upon them as nations.

You stated, "Most emperors seemed to be indifferent to the language, ethnicity, and cultural practices of a people with the singular exception of religion." First, Emperors are not typically indifferent to language, ethnicity, and cultural practices. On the contrary, emperors are mightily opposed to any religion other than Full-Orbed Statism. Secondly, are we supposed to admire emperors for being hostile or neutral toward the historic character of the peoples which they conquer or with whom they form slavish alliances? Far from admiring such hatred for God's distinctions, I despise such attitudes. The reason that Rome tolerated, for example, the Jewish religion in Palestine up to the time of Jesus' life wasn't that Rome was indifferent to the Jews' religious and political beliefs. No, they tolerated the Jews only to the extent that the Jews were cooperative taxpayers, and obedient subjects to Roman authority. If and when there were uprisings in Palestine, or elsewhere, those insurrections against the Empire were quickly and violently put down. As we know from the history of the First Century church, Rome quickly scented that the Christians did not and would not acknowledge Caesar as a god, for the Christians steadfastly refused to serve or worship any god but God Almighty. Hence the feverish persecution of the Roman Christians, their martyrdoms, and tribulations, and scatterings. Wherever the Crown Rights of King Christ are fully pressed, there you shall see swift and bloody retribution from the Powers that Be in Government. This helps us to understand why there is, in America, a shallow feeling of Ease in Zion. Many false professors of the faith have decided that going with the flow of international technocracy and statism is more pleasant than the task of the Christian life.

"That is to say living in the Islamic empire you can be of any nation, and even to a certain degree of any religion, but you can not openly criticize the Islamic faith." Two points here. 1) The Koran commands all good Muslims either to slay or convert all infidels. There is no quarter to be given to unbelievers from the Koran. Meanwhile the Koran also permits its adherents to engage, whenever necessary for preserving life, in the practice of taqqiya, or strategic lying. If necessary, Muslims are permitted to deny their faith verbally, if only to get along with infidels for a time. No such doctrine is permitted in the Bible, other than a time when the truth is being demanded of a Christian by an explicit enemy bent on murder, as was the case in the story of the Hebrew midwives lying to protect the infant boys in Egypt. 2) Even if Islamic rulers were indifferent to the religious convictions of their conquered subjects, which I doubt, it would not follow that this is a healthy tendency. If anything, permitting any form of religion which contradicts the dominant faith in a nation will badly undermine the faith of the people, which is obvious both in the ostensibly Christian empire of America, and in the pagan empire of Rome. In each case, the original dominant religion was eventually subsumed in a flood of interreligious chaos. In the case of Rome, it was a very good thing, contrary to what Augustine wrote in "The City of God." The death of that empire was good for Christianity, just as the death of the American empire will be very good for a return to real, biblical Christianity.

"but is it not more accurate to say that it is the Church (the body of Christ) struggling against the invisible powers?" I don't agree that the Church is only ever struggling against invisible powers. This was the position of the Gnostics, who denied the goodness and validity of the material world, while badly over-spiritualizing the nature of the Kingdom. When Jesus said that his kingdom was not of this world, he was not saying that his kingdom is immaterial. Indeed, how could he say that in light of the central importance of the Incarnation, the putting on of flesh so as to identify fully with mankind? No, what Jesus meant was that his power was not derived from, nor in any way contingent upon, the world system of power as it is devised by anti-Christ men. Now it's very true that we struggle not against flesh and blood, but in context Paul is saying that the nature of the Christian struggle is not limited merely to a contest of physical strength, but that it encompasses angelic spheres, that demons and spirits are also at work, on behalf of Satan. This does nothing to remove the importance of working, physically, to resist evil in the world.

"It may just be semantics, but nations rise and fall, and the modern nations (at least in their modern nation-state identity) were almost all formed within the last 100 yrs." I agree that the central state government identities are very new, but this is only to reinforce my own point that one-world/no-borders ideology is contrary to most of human history, and that the dominant model has been one of diffused power, through many smaller political entities. Wherever you encounter a violent attempt to expand an empire, such as occurred in Ancient Rome, or with the British Empire during the 18th and 19th centuries, or in America throughout her history, you will inevitably find that the efforts to build were very bloody, and that historic people groups were usually striving to secede back into their own historic spheres of geography and sovereignty. Witness the dissolution of the USSR, the attempted withdrawal of the American South in 1860-1865, the attempt of Quebec to secede from Canada, and on and on. In each case, a group of people far smaller than the size of the empire saw themselves as having more in common, and a better shot at liberty, with each other than with the melange of peoples who were held together only by flimsy documents or political slogans. Blood and soil consciousness is ineradicable in such people, and no amount of bullets will ever destroy what God has ordained.

You wrote: "Their were era's in which temporal authority, and more or less absolute dominion, was given to kings and emperor's who were Christians, true Christians (Stephen Milutin of Serbia for example)." It's interesting to note that the etymology of the word "king" is "kinning", as in, "Being kin, or related to in blood." God plainly excoriated the people of Israel when they demanded a human king, but God granted their evil request, even as he imposed many conditions for who could occupy the throne. He must be a blood relation, for it is an abomination to be ruled by foreigners. He must have his own hand-written copy of God's word that he has written out himself. And many similar demands. To the extent that European nations followed these outlines, they enjoyed some modest success politically through monarchy. There was an old phrase of the Europeans, "I serve the King, and the King serves Christ!" Oh for such a slogan to be true! But what if the king is anti-Christ? Then a Christian is no longer permitted to say, "I serve the king!" He must declare that he opposes the king who opposes God.

" If there is a hierarchy found here on earth that mirrors, let us say the celestial hierarchy, it will not be found in the rulers of this world, but in the Church itself." Rulers are appointed by God, and are under just as much obligation to obey and seek God as the Church is. Today the Church has abrogated her duty disastrously, and has failed to discipline the increasingly ungodly civil government. The Church has been seduced by an insane idea that she has no authority to instruct or counsel the State, an argument invented by JJ Rousseau, JS Mill, John Locke, and other anti-Christ humanists. The Church's assignment is to disciple nations, teaching those nations everything she has learned from Christ, and baptizing those nations in His name.

"What forms one's personhood in the likeness of God has much more to do with love, mercy, compassion, and humility than language, ethnicity, state, or cultural practices. " As you can guess, I reject this formulation. I don't think love, mercy, or compassion are possible outside the context of culture and ethnicity. My obligations in Christ are concentric, and begin with my immediate family, followed by my extended family, my local community, etc. According to the politics of guilt and pity, we are expected to feel more compassion for our fellow Christians in Africa than we do for our unbelieving mother of father. Such teaching is not found in the Bible, but rather is found in Marx and Trotsky. Why else does Paul say that he who fails to provide for his own has forsaken the faith and is worse than an unbeliever?

A Dialogue in Hell

by Edward Waverley

With apologies to Goethe

The following interview was recorded by the author at the brink of hell, a domain guarded not by Cerberus, but by one of its harridans-in-chief, Susanna Margaretha Brandt. The woman who was the model for Goethe’s Gretchen in Faust granted the interview on the condition that we publish it unexpurgated, without the usual tricks of editors everywhere, who she described as, “incorrigible traffickers in sensation and controversy.” In the spirit of that agreement, we present to you here our uncensored exchange with that odious creature who even now shows no remorse for her infanticide of 1771, for which she was executed the following year.

Interviewer: It says here that you support a woman’s right to kill babies, is that right?

Susanna: Yes, I think that a woman must be free to move on from an unwanted pregnancy, whether it resulted like mine did from a rape, or whether it arose from consensual sex.

Interviewer: But if a woman isn’t willing to give birth to a child, wouldn’t it make more sense for her to refrain from sex altogether?

Susanna: Well in my case, your objection is irrelevant. I was drugged and raped by a drifter, so I don’t accept any responsibility for what happened.

Interviewer: You mean when you killed your baby it was simply inevitable?

Susanna: No, what I mean is that I reject your suggestion that what I did involved a baby. A natural biological process was unfolding that promised to bring me some very unpleasant consequences and so I intervened to stop that process in its tracks.

Interviewer: Well it would be ludicrous for me to argue with a demon about the imago dei, so I’ll concede the point in order to return to something you said a minute ago, about consensual sex. Is it your contention, then, that people should be free to divide their sexuality from its God-given ends?

Susanna: What are these ends of which you speak?

Interviewer: God has revealed that the chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. Within that framework, the utmost joy of matrimonial felicity is the mutual pleasure that arises when a man and a woman are united in their desire to bear and rear children, whose appearance serves as a literal and blessed reminder to the family of its eternal bond with Heaven.

Susanna: But you seem to be forgetting all that we know about family life. Having kids doesn’t heighten sexual pleasure. On the contrary, kids damage sex irreparably in several ways. Pregnancy fattens women, a process that only worsens as she cranks out more ruffians, and if the babies are allowed out of the womb, they intrude more and more upon the leisure time of their parents, canceling out most sexual opportunities for years.

Interviewer: Aha! So we have discovered where Hollywood gets all of its ideas about love, marriage, and heterosexual monogamy! Evidently you are the direct pipeline to hell, and have been instructing the liberals about exactly which myths to concoct and spread for the maximum impact on a wicked and perverse generation. Allow me to congratulate you: the Satanic plan is working to a tee. What you have described is precisely what is preached and believed by all modern liberals and increasingly by deluded Christians. Everyone watches these movies, accepts their presentation of sex as unshakable truth, and steadfastly refuse to get married, let alone have children. Even those who marry insist that they must be free to delay having children interminably, or to put it off until it is financially prudent. Evidently, your master’s theory that man must live by bread alone has really made inroads on earth.

Susanna: Thanks, we try very hard down here. The boss says that abortion is more popular than ever in your world, and it’s easy to believe. But you make a good, and related point; sometimes what’s even better than encouraging and inspiring abortion is to kill the dreams of heaven right when they’re hatching in young minds, long before young people are even thinking consciously about marriage and family. The hellish picture of families that we broadcast, and that are of course taken directly out of our own existence here in hell, are usually more than enough to frighten even the pluckiest kids out of wanting to get married. The results are very pleasing: the vast majority of people enter adulthood with a very cynical view of marriage; both men and women expect to have plenty of casual sex before getting hitched, either with or without any serious thought about marrying their partners; even weirdo outliers who refuse to put out before marrying will usually delay marriage until they have established a career; and then, even when people do get married, there are usually so many exciting memories of the glory days of youth (I believe you people call it sin?), that the husbands and wives resent each other. As a result there are many, many barriers to your picture of heavenly matrimonial childrearing. And we like it that way. A lot.

Interviewer: But haven’t falling fertility rates worldwide lessened the abortion rates?

Susanna: As a matter of fact, you’re right, they have, and for us that is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, watching a woman self-destruct in the wake of an abortion is one of the most glorious sights in hell. We revel in the daily pain a woman must walk with when she begins to experience doubt about whether her blob was really a blob. Now of course we demons know that it was always a blob, because the blobs never arrive here. But the fact that blobs are blobs does not in any way prevent us, as demons, from tormenting the post-abortion women. Because so many of them experience doubts, we can often talk with them and tell them that they are guilty as hell, and that they belong with us and to us. One of my favorite delights is how often such visitations result in suicide in addition to blobicide. I’ve met some of these gals in person.

Interviewer: retches violently

Susanna: You okay?

Interviewer: I think so, yes…let me go back to something you said about the dead babies.

Susanna: You mean the blobs.

Interviewer: No, I mean the slain children. You say they never come here. And you claim that proves their blobhood. I’m happy to inform you that they are all with their Father in Heaven. And you also admitted that you don’t always meet the mothers. That’s because many of them have been rescued by the grace of God from your demonic clutches. When you whisper to them about their bloody guilt, you tell a bloody and diabolical half-truth. You are right to mention their guilt, but you have neither the right nor the power to convict them of the sin you mock. You prey upon spurious guilt, even among the redeemed who have already repented of their sin, but there are already many murderers in Abraham’s bosom today, and there shall be many more in eternity.

Susanna: Your lectures are as tedious as your religion is sad. You seem to think that our enemy can actually help you, and for that I am beginning to hate every inch of your being. Is this interview nearly through?

Interviewer: No, not quite. I have another question for you. Why did you say earlier that the falling rates of abortion are a mixed blessing for hell?

Susanna: Well, as I said, the drawback to fewer abortions is that we miss out on one of the most exquisite forms of torture known to humankind, the undying nightmare of a woman who has slain her blob. But there is an advantage for us as well. The less people conceive babies at all, the less people there are who exist to join the enemy. As long as humanity continues on earth, the enemy has wide-open access to the human world, and he continues to claim more of their souls as time goes by. Seeing even one soul leave our orbit and enter his is, for us, the equivalent of a miscarriage. And we would never, ever, willingly yield one of our own to that sickening man who never stops talking of…AARARGHGH!! (She spits out some blood and gore, vomits hugely.) You smote me!! You stupid Christer, what have you to do with Mephisto?? How did you injure me?!

Interviewer: I smote you with the True Cross. I will not listen idly to your blasphemies, hellish minx! Dare you to insult my Lord, and my God? No power of hell, and no scheme of man can ever pluck me from his hand. Get behind me, and go your way. As for me, I march to Zion!

Siding With the Past

 by Edward Waverley 

Racist is a very curious and troublesome word. We know what liberals mean when they call someone racist. Liberals use 'racist' to mean that the person they are debating believes that there are deep, obvious, and unchangeable differences between the races; liberals also mean that such beliefs are demonstrably false; and liberals also mean that to think such things is absolutely evil.

The first part of this accusation applies to me with complete accuracy; if assenting to the idea that there are deep, obvious, and unchangeable differences between the races makes a person a racist, then I am a racist. But if 'racist' is defined, a priori, to include the judgment that all such beliefs are evil and primitive, then I am absolutely not a racist, because I reject the idea that such beliefs are immoral. On the contrary, I think such beliefs are wise, true, and realistic. The liberal tries to shut down debate on many topics by smuggling in an absolute moral condemnation of all reference to the idea that the races are different, and he also imputes to his opponent the idea that simply by noticing such differences, his opponent is also implying that there is a moral hierarchy of races. But I need not believe that whites are morally superior to other races in order to believe that whites are very different from other races. I do believe that whites are very different from blacks; I deny that whites are in any important sense morally superior to blacks. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, but not all of the races have built an enduring Christian civilization where charity reigneth. In fact, only one race has done as much, and that is the European race.

Recognizing the obvious and undeniable historical and spiritual differences between the European race and all other races has nothing to do with pride. The differences are obvious to anyone who has eyes, ears, heart, and brain. It is a difference of burden. All of the heavy lifting of building and elevating Christian civilization has been done (yes, by God) through the European people. And what was it that enabled the European race to turn away from paganism and toward the light? What allowed the Europeans to produce unparalleled achievements in art, music, science, medicine, architecture, literature, and poetry? Obviously it was made possible because the Europeans had hearts on fire for Jesus Christ. Why haven't there been any similar achievements among Africans? Among Mexicans? Among Asians? Is it because the gospel has gone unpreached to those people? Obviously not, because the church has been reaching out to those groups for centuries. Then why do black people commit an inordinately disproportionate number of violent crimes in America compared to all other races? And why do white people commit almost none of them, in spite of having so much larger a share of the population? How does that work? Is it because black Americans have not been told about Jesus Christ? That's absurd. Africans have inhabited North America for as long as Europeans have; both races arrived at the same time, and have been coexisting in this nation throughout its history. Blacks have always had, at best, a very tenuous grasp of Christian truth; the more that blacks are worshiped and given everything that they demand from white society, the worse and worse grows their behavior. Please don't try to tell me that black behavior has been improving over time since the civil rights revolution. We know that the opposite is true.

I can hear the objection already: but haven't the morals of the whites in America gone just as much into the sewer as those of the blacks? To an extent I grant that, but that's because a small number of anti-Christian liberals co-opted the true gospel and turned it into the hyper-liberal social gospel of social justice, race-mixing, and related multicultural utopian nonsense, and the American churches swallowed it, hook, line, and sinker. So in a country where only 100 years ago perfectly decent American Christians would never have blushed to tell you that they considered blacks to be a more primitive and backward race, and that they had no desire to share space or business with them, now we live in a country where even to mention such an idea is an invitation to have your head cut off.

Let me ask a question: if wanting to live in a majority white country, and being opposed to integration and interracial marriage, and wishing to live separately with people who are a natural and spiritual extension of my own blood is such an evil, anti-Christian attitude, then why is it that this was exactly what was believed by the vast majority of Christians for 1300 years prior to the 20th century? How do you explain that? Is it that all those older Christians, like Rudyard Kipling, and Walter Scott, and Shakespeare, and RL Dabney, and John Taylor of Caroline, and Thomas Hughes, and Charles Dickens, and Andrew Jackson, and John Calhoun and millions more, were they not really Christians? According to the new racial gospel, those old jerks were confused racists, who misunderstood the Bible and didn't understand reality. Well I am choosing to side with the old jerks.

But I will never accept the new and postmodern idea that such beliefs are evil. Such beliefs are neither evil nor especially virtuous; they simply reflect reality. All Europeans prior to the 20th century believed that firm barriers existed between the races, and that such barriers were necessary for the maintenance of civilization. This definitely includes Christians. It's not as if I believe that black people are unable to enjoy the blessings of salvation; I don't believe that at all. Race is no barrier to God, but there is no other civilization besides the European one that has actually followed through with the biblical mandate to center itself upon the person and work of Jesus Christ.

Abide With Us

by Edward Waverley

And they said one to another, Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures?

Today our spotlight falls upon one of the forgotten knights of Christian chivalry and the immortal hero he created. The novelist’s name is Jack Schaefer (1907-1991) and in his debut novel, he introduced the man who rode, “out of the heart of the great glowing West and when his work was done rode back whence he had come and he was Shane.”

As the blogger CWNY has said, “The best works of Western civilization are the ones in which the author tells a simple story well.” I believe that Shane belongs on the same shelf of great European folklore with Don Quixote, the Grimms’ fairy tales, and the novels of Scott and Dickens, for it is a simple story told very well. The novel is narrated by young Bob, a boy basking in his family’s affections, and struck with love at first sight for the magnificent stranger he spies from afar.

“He rode into our valley in the summer of ’89. I was a kid then, barely topping the backboard of father’s old chuck-wagon. I was on the upper rail of our small corral, soaking in the late afternoon sun, when I saw him far down the road where it swung into the valley from the open plain beyond…He was clean-shaven and his face was lean and hard and burned from high forehead to firm, tapering chin. His eyes seemed hooded in the shadow of the hat’s brim. He came closer, and I could see that this was because the brows were drawn in a frown of fixed and habitual alertness. Beneath them the eyes were endlessly searching from side to side and forward, checking off every item in view, missing nothing. As I noticed this, a sudden chill, I could not have told why, struck through me there in the warm and open sun. He rode easily, relaxed in the saddle, leaning his weight lazily into the stirrups. Yet even in this easiness was a suggestion of tension. It was the easiness of a coiled spring, of a trap set.” (Shane, 1949)

Like all of the princes and squires who sit at the round table of European literature, Shane is in many ways a type of Christ. And like the Man of Sorrows, Shane is also an easy rider whose supernatural personality encompasses many moods, from the tenderest exchanges of friendship to the dispensing of rough justice.

Shane rides abruptly and irresistibly into the lives of the youngster Bob Starrett and his parents, homesteaders in the old Wyoming Territory who are deeply committed to living out their simple faith while working their family farm. When Shane stops to ask for a drink of water for himself and his horse, Joe Starrett does what the good peasant always does in a fairy tale: he insists that Shane stay the night.

“He stopped the horse and looked down at us. He was refreshed and I would have sworn the tiny wrinkles around his eyes were what with him would be a smile… ‘Thank you,’ he said in his gentle voice and was turning into the road, back to us, before father spoke in his slow, deliberate way. ‘Don’t be in such a hurry, stranger.’”

This is a representation of the encounter between the risen Christ and two of his disciples on the road to Emmaus. The Gospel of Luke says that after they had spoken for a while with Jesus without recognizing Him, “he made as though he would have gone further. But they constrained him, saying, Abide with us: for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent. And he went in to tarry with them.”

Once Shane has complied with Starrett’s entreaty of hospitality, bad weather necessitates a longer stay, and by the third day under Starrett’s roof, there is an unspoken bond between the stranger and the family. In the same way that Christ entered human history on a quest to make peace between God and man, Shane quickly begins to clear the ground of Starrett’s homestead in order to plant the family deeply and firmly into their promised land.

Shane does not come to give the Starretts peace as the world gives peace. The peace that he offers is the kind that can come only from manly adherence to His heart. His pistol is an object of fascination and awe for Bob, who has a natural curiosity about this man who never wears a gun but who has an otherworldly mastery of his weapon.

“His right hand closed around the grip and you knew at once it was doing what it had been created for. He hefted the old gun, letting it lie loosely in the hand. Then the fingers tightened and the thumb toyed with the hammer, testing the play of it. While I gaped at him, he tossed it swiftly in the air and caught it in his left hand and in the instant of catching, it nestled snugly into his hand too. He tossed it again, high this time and spinning end over end, and as it came down, his right hand flicked forward and took it. The forefinger slipped through the trigger guard and the gun spun, coming up into firing position in the one unbroken motion.”

The best part of the story is of course Shane’s confrontation with incarnate evil in the person of the meddling rancher Luke Fletcher and his hired gun, Stark Wilson. Wilson and Fletcher have declared that the whole valley belongs to them and their gang, and they have the government contract to back up that claim. They are trying to cut in on the homesteaders, and they naturally sneer at any consideration of the aspiring farmers or their families. But Shane is neither a farmer, in spite of his adoption into the Starrett family, nor is he a hired gun. He is a man of the old code, an antique European clinging to the permanent things, who sees what must be done and does it very well. Here is the prelude to the showdown at Grafton’s saloon:

“Shane stopped about three quarters of the way forward, about five yards from Wilson. He cocked his head for one quick sidewise glance again at the balcony and then he was looking only at Wilson. He did not like the setup. Wilson had the front wall and he was left in the open of the room. He understood the fact, assessed it, accepted it.”

Those of us who are still fighting the good fight under the old code are in the same position that Shane faced in the saloon. We do not like the setup of open combat with one enemy before us, and his legion behind us. But we need to acknowledge the reality of the situation, assess it with courage, and press on into the fray. It is either Shane’s code or the weary way of the world; it is either Christ or the abyss.