A number of statements by Tucker Carlson during his recent appearance on Red Scare highlighted the problems with Christianity as the guiding ideology of the Right, which I would like to elucidate here. I mentioned this to a friend, who said that Tucker is probably not a good example of the “Christian right,” because although he is religious, he’s not particularly dogmatic. He himself told the Red Scare girls that he grew up in a totally secular environment, despite being raised Episcopalian, and while he still considers himself a member of that congregation, he also says that it’s hardly even a real religion.

I think Tucker represents the religious disposition of many American men in much the same way that George Bailey did in It’s A Wonderful Life: “Dear Father in heaven, I’m not a praying man, but if you’re up there, show me the way.” (I note also both Tucker and Jimmy Stewart’s love of bowties.) In truth Tucker is more religious than George. I don’t know if he prays or not, but he believes in God, in contrast to George’s implicit agnosticism, and more generally, he believes in what he calls “the supernatural.” He tells Anna and Dasha, “There is a lot of stuff unseen, outside of the natural realm, we call it ‘supernatural’ it’s above nature, it’s 100% real, it’s as real as this table, and it expresses itself in very recognizable, familiar, repetitive ways.”

Nature and the Supernatural

Supernatural does indeed mean “above nature.” But there are two different ways of conceiving of this. Tucker gives the example of entities that are not visible to normal perception, which people in different times and cultures have nonetheless depicted in the same way. This would suggest things or beings which are not necessarily outside of and apart from the natural order, but are rather outside the range of limited human perception, except in cases of extra-normal or enhanced perception. (Users of psychedelic drugs often believe that they are given access to this kind of enhanced perception.) In other words, these things are still part of nature, part of the same spectrum of existence, it’s just a part of the spectrum that we humans can’t normally perceive. But Tucker also says that these things are “outside the natural realm,” which suggests the other way of conceiving of the supernatural: not as an extension of nature but as something radically different from and other than nature, an anti-nature.

The key difference between the Christian Right and the non-Christian right, whether pagan or secular, is their view of nature. Nature, as Jonathan Bowden said, is “that which is given.” Our concept of nature comes from the Greek phusis meaning “that which emerges,” that which exists. For pagans, there may be things or beings outside of human perception, including gods, but they would not be outside of nature; they would merely be aspects of nature that we cannot perceive. For Christians though, nature is one realm and heaven is another, and they are radically different. Nature is created and God is not. Further, and this is key, for Christians all of nature is fallen and corrupted because of Original Sin. Human beings aren’t supposed to die, but we do. The lion should lie down with the lamb, as we are told will happen in the end, but right now nature isn’t the way it “should be,” so the lion kills and eats the lamb instead. All because the first man and woman sinned. Genesis tells the story of how all creation changed because of Adam and Eve’s disobedience. Before that the lion presumably was herbivorous and had the digestive apparatus of a cow.

The Lord’s Prayer asks for God’s will to be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” Perennialists of the Guenonian persuasion will claim that this reflects the same metaphysical truth as the Hermetic maxim “As above, so below,” but it doesn’t. The Hermetic maxim reflects the pagan view that the macrocosm is like the microcosm and vice versa. Electrons orbit the nucleus of the atom the same way planets orbit the sun and the solar system orbits the center of the galaxy. The gods have good and bad qualities, like human beings. This is the way Homer portrayed them, and the Eddas also. But Plato didn’t like it—he complained that gods should be perfect. In his ideal Republic, there would be a new religion in which the gods were perfect and didn’t have any of these negative qualities, and then perhaps human beings wouldn’t have these negative qualities either. Plato essentially gave the same commandment that Jesus would give a few centuries later: Be perfect, as your father in heaven is perfect. Nietzsche noted that Christianity is basically Platonism for plebs, a religious mythology that corresponds to Plato’s philosophy. (More recently, Russell Gmirkin has argued that the Old Testament was actually written later than Plato and was modeled on his Laws.)

Whereas Homer begins with man and nature and extrapolates that heaven and the gods are like them, Plato and Christianity begin with their ideal heaven and their ideal God—known through revelation, whether by Scripture or the meditative practice of dialectic—and lament that man and nature are not like them. “On earth as it is in heaven” as stated in the Lord’s Prayer is a wish; it is not, like the Hermetic maxim, a statement of the way things are but a statement of how the supplicant wants them to be, how things “should be.” Earth should be like heaven, man should be like God. And how do we know what heaven and God are like? The priest tells us.

Total Depravity

For pagans and secularists, nature is either neutral or good—for example, Ayn Rand made “the benevolent universe” a premise of her atheistic system of Objectivism—whereas for Christians, nature is bad. Either it is good in essence but corrupted in some surface capacity, which tends to be the view of Catholics and Orthodox, or it is entirely corrupted and wicked to the core, as tends to be the view of Protestants, finding its most extreme expression in the Calvinist doctrine of Total Depravity, or Total Human Depravity. (Though developed by Protestants this doctrine goes back to Augustine in the 4th century.)

Tucker says that the religious gatherings he finds most powerful are AA meetings. He says that what is particularly meaningful is the requirement to first admit, before anything else, that you are “a piece of garbage” with no control over your life. This is the doctrine of Total Human Depravity filtered down through Christianized culture. You don’t have to be a Protestant or even a Christian to hold some version of it; the anti-natalist pessimism of Rust Cohle in True Detective is arguably a secular variant of Total Human Depravity. I have always found this doctrine to be very convenient because it provides an easy and concise answer to so many diverse questions. Why are governments corrupt? Answer: Total Human Depravity. Why did my neighbors want to put me in jail for not wearing a mask or getting an experimental injection? Total Human Depravity. Why did the cook mess up my order, why is the waitress being a bitch, and why do I have no bars when the phone company promised me nationwide coverage? Answer: Total Human Depravity.

But of course these kinds of pithy little formulas don’t actually explain anything. They are at best shortcuts to thinking, and in this case, it is a shortcut that leads to a dead end since it is utterly defeatist and hopeless. Not every problem is solvable, but some are. Not every person is good, but some are, sometimes. Wisdom is neither resignation to despair nor blind and foolish hopefulness, but discernment. I don’t doubt that for some people, sometimes, the message of total depravity is exactly what they need to hear. For others, of other dispositions in other situations, a good dose of grandiose narcissism would be far better medicine. In practice, the religious marketplace already reflects this diversity of needs, which is why you can choose between Calvinists like Mark Driscoll telling you you’re a piece of shit (but God loves you anyway even though you don’t deserve it) to New Age wannabe gurus telling you that you ARE God (but so is the guru, and some gods are more equal than others).

The total or partial depravity of man in Christian doctrine reflects that the corruption of nature includes human nature, as of course it should since it was the first humans who sinned (the real mystery is why this affects all the other animals too). Thus man cannot simply follow nature to live his life: not the nature of animals and other beings, and not his own nature, because both are fallen and corrupted and will lead him astray. Unlike animals and insects, he has no instinct or inborn knowledge (or so it is claimed) such that he simply knows what to do, the way a beaver knows how to build a dam or a spider knows how to spin a web without being taught. According to Martin Luther, even man’s reason is not a reliable guide because that too has been corrupted and distorted by the Fall.

“Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed,” said Francis Bacon. But if nature is fallen and is distinct from God, then nature must not be obeyed. Man must turn away from nature, from “the world,” and look only to God, obey only God. (In practice, as Nietzsche observed, this always means: obey the priest.) In human relations, the law of nature is lex talionis—an eye for an eye, says the Old Testament; blood spilled cries out for blood, says Aeschylus. But the law of God laid down by Jesus Christ is: if someone strikes you, turn the other cheek and let him strike you again. Resist not evil. Love your enemy.

Violence in nature is not limited to matters of justice. We inhabit a world in which, in order to live, it is necessary to kill other beings and eat them. Even if you are vegetarian or vegan, you must kill plants, not to mention the countless small animals and insects killed in the farming process. The predator-prey relationship is cardinal to existence. It is observable at both the microcosmic level among organisms too small to see with the naked eye, and at the macrocosmic level. We know now through astronomy that large galaxies grow bigger by absorbing—by eating—smaller galaxies.

Christianity regards the predatory nature of existence as sinful and unnatural. The rite of communion, in which the Christian symbolically (or actually, depending on your denomination) eats the flesh and drinks the blood of Christ, is meant as a purification of this process, its culmination and apotheosis. But of course it does not, in this life, free one from the necessity to eat, and therefore to kill. And so the Christian tries to live by the commandments—to be perfect, to not kill—but it’s hopeless, impossible. So he concludes that he is a piece of garbage. Christianity is not unique in its denunciation—always partial, always hypocritical—of the violence of nature. Other religions have gone much further. Most Christian sects have never acknowledged the value of animal life, whereas other faiths like Buddhism and Jainism have made abstention from harming animals a primary component of their practice. If Europe had taken the commandment to renounce violence and turn the other cheek more seriously, Europe wouldn’t be Europe, it would be India. The reality is that for most of the last two thousand years, Christianity has been but a thin veneer over the real spirit of European man, which believes, as Jonathan Bowden said, “if someone pushes you, you push them back,” and furthermore, “that conflict is natural and good, domination is natural and good, what you have to do in order to survive is natural and good.” I think Tucker believes this too. Later on in the podcast, in the context of discussing the biological roots of the male and female roles in marriage, he says “Nature cannot be defeated.”  Indeed. But if you also believe that nature is fallen and should not be obeyed, you are really in a jam.

Ned Flanders

There are different types of people who will be receptive to messages like “You are a piece of garbage.” There are those whom Nietzsche called “the botched” who are inferior in one way or another to their peers, for whom embracing “I am a piece of garbage” has the corollary “but by admitting that I am a piece of garbage, I cease to be one and I elevate myself over others who will not admit it. Because everyone is a piece of garbage, not just me.” That is how the ministry starts, by attracting those types. But then, when the teaching is established and begins to become dominant, the message starts to infect those who are not botched. Instead, it is the message itself which makes them botched, which stunts and handicaps them, by teaching them not to follow nature, not to follow their own nature.

Nietzsche believed that at one time Christianity was a beneficial, tempering force for European man, a check on his brutality. But over time, the virtue of temperance becomes the weakness of domestication. This process of taming seems to have accelerated with the invention of the printing press and consequent widespread distribution of the scriptures, and with the rise of Protestantism which elevated those scriptures to the sole authority of the religion. Before mass literacy and a Bible in every hotel dresser drawer, being a Christian meant going to church and confession and accepting the moral guidance of the priest. So Bernard of Clairvaux could make up rules for the Templar Knights and bless the Crusades and no one objected that such things have nothing to do with the Sermon on the Mount—the core of Christian moral teaching—because no one except priests and monks had ever read the Sermon on the Mount.

To this day, the fundamental contradiction between the praxis set forth by Jesus in the Gospels and the worldly practices of avowed Christians persists. Christianity teaches men that nonviolence is the highest good in a predatory world in which it is necessary to kill to eat, it is necessary to defend oneself from the violence of others, and perhaps sometimes even to initiate violence against others, to be the aggressor. Christianity teaches men that celibacy and chastity—as practiced by the one and only perfect man in history who, as far as is recorded, never so much as thought about a woman with lust and told his followers not to do so either—is the highest good, to which marriage takes a somewhat shameful second place, because “it is better to marry than to burn.” To follow nature and obey one’s youthful, lustful impulses is not only sinful but, according to many Christian denominations, uniquely sinful, if the inordinate preoccupation with premarital sex or which coital positions are Biblical is any indication.

If you are raised with these sorts of ideas and values, and you then encounter a world and a self that is not in conformity with them, you will either conclude that these ideas and values are wrong, or that you are wrong—you are a piece of garbage. And those who try to conclude the former and have done with these ideas have to contend with the mind virus implanted in Sunday School which tells them that God hears everything they think, and they will go to hell for disbelieving. If you’ve ever wondered why Ned Flanders types are so uptight, look no further than this. This is the tightrope between faith and reason, God and nature, heaven or hell that they walk every minute of every day. One wrong step could spell disaster, or damnation. The taming and domesticating effect of Christianity on the Ned Flanders contingent of American Right was masterfully analyzed by Scott Locklin in an article for Man’s World, to which I refer the reader. I don’t think Tucker is this type at all, and I suspect he agrees with that article in large part. But to the extent that he isn’t a Ned Flanders, it’s precisely because he’s secular and doesn’t take his professed religion that seriously. And in that way he is a microcosm of the West and its history.

In his excellent book The Church Impotent, Leon Podles chronicles how Christianity became predominantly a religion for women and children. His analysis is too detailed to summarize here and so I recommend the book to everyone. Throughout Europe and America, both Catholicism and the various Protestant denominations have failed to appeal to men, and particularly to strong, dominant men, for hundreds of years now. Tucker says in his family it’s his wife who is “the real Christian.” His reason for saying this are interesting: she’s a real Christian because she really believes that God is in control of everything, and therefore she is passive to what happens. As for men, Tucker says that a man’s job is to lead, to be active. If someone breaks into the house, to use the example he gave, the man’s job is to actively protect his family, not to do nothing and say “God is in control of everything.” In Tucker’s way of thinking, which I believe is representative, he has to choose between being a Christian and being a man.

C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man attempts to establish the universality of morality by citing examples from various religious and philosophical traditions from around the world. The earliest recorded example is from Egypt and gives an account of a man justifying his life on earth after he dies. He does so by giving a list of all the things he did not do while he was alive: I didn’t kill anyone, I didn’t steal, I didn’t cheat on my wife, I didn’t say any swear words except that time that guy cut me off on the freeway. But as La Rochefoucauld noted, there is a big difference between refraining from doing something which you are capable of doing, and claiming moral credit for not doing something which you could not have done anyway. Turning the other cheek to an attacker only has meaning if you are capable of fighting back in the first place. If you breed generation after generation of men to resist not evil, they will eventually lose the ability to resist. Use it or lose it, as the saying goes.

There is a great scene in The Patriot in which Mel Gibson is rescuing his son from the British soldiers who have taken him prisoner. Before he begins his assault on the British troops, he utters a prayer: “Lord, make me fast and accurate.” Does that sort of Christianity exist anywhere? Did it ever? The failure of Christianity—for hundreds of years if not for all of its history—is its failure to support men who would fight. And what has been the underlying problem with the American conservative movement since its inception? Men who will not fight. Men who stood by and did nothing but write their books and articles and give speeches to each other at academic circle jerk conferences while everything they claimed to want to conserve was eroded and attacked. Men who would not fight because they pharisaically claimed to love their “principles” more than winning. And for some of them, perhaps, men who would not fight because they can’t fight, and so they adhere to a religion which gives them a theological way to transmute weakness and cowardice into virtues.