Christianity and capitalism

Of all the enemies that have combined to bring about the downfall of Christianity in the West none has been more deadly or more relentless than capitalism. The fact is that it is impossible to imagine two systems more completely incompatible than Christianity and capitalism.

Capitalism is the most thoroughly materialistic ideology that can be conceived of. Capitalism is interested only in things that can be objectively measured, and in the capitalist system there is only one standard of measurement – money. More money is good. Less money is bad. This standard applies to people as well as things. A person’s success in life is measured by how much money he has. Nothing else is relevant.

The incompatibility between Christianity and capitalism should have been obvious from the start. And it was obvious to some Christians. Unfortunately most Christians chose to shut their eyes to the contradictions. Even worse, many American Christians convinced themselves that capitalism was Christian. This is why American Christianity has failed so spectacularly. American Christians have embraced an ideology that was always inevitably going to destroy them.

There is no room for morality in capitalism. You can’t measure morality in monetary terms so therefore morality has no validity. More seriously, morality interferes with profits. Profits are good. Therefore morality is bad.

The big mistake Christians (especially in the US) made in the culture wars was to think that they could fight moral issues as individual battles. They focused on specific attacks on Christian morality, such as abortion and homosexuality. They were certainly correct in seeing abortion and homosexuality as evils, but they failed to see the big picture. They failed to see that they weren’t dealing with isolated attacks on Christian sexual morality. They were dealing with a system, capitalism, that was hostile to all Christian morality and all Christian values. And they were dealing with a system that was not going to compromise. This became (or should have become) clear with the emergence of globalist capitalism. The globalist capitalists intended to remove every obstacle in their path.

A major potential obstacle was Christianity. The idea that money is the measure of the good was obviously in pretty serious conflict with Christian teachings. The idea that the only motivations anyone should have were the accumulation and spending of money was not exactly in harmony with Christianity.

Global capitalists today are intensely hostile to Christianity but even without this overt hostility capitalism would still have the effect of undermining and eventually destroying Christianity. It’s simply in the nature of capitalism.

American Christians made another catastrophic mistake. Back in the 50s they convinced themselves that the real enemy was communism. They became obsessed with the communist threat. This led them to a tragically mistaken conclusion. Since communism was bad, capitalism must be good. Since communism was ungodly, capitalism must be godly.

Communism was a threat, but it was never anywhere near as serious a threat as capitalism.

Christianity can survive under communism. Communists might not approve of Christianity but they have no absolute need to destroy it. It’s not really particularly incompatible with communism. On the other hand Christianity cannot survive under capitalism.

Unfortunately Christians have made yet another strategic error, getting distracted by the social justice nonsense. Again they’re wasting their energies and failing to see the big picture. They’re putting themselves in a no-win situation. If they oppose the SJWs they’ll be painted by the media as nasty meanies. If they support the SJWs they’ll simply look weak and pathetic, and showing weakness to SJWs is a fatal mistake. Christians should focus on the real enemy, the globalist capitalists. Defeat them and the social justice nonsense will simply evaporate.

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who are the extremists?

What is political extremism? The answer to that question is very simple. Political extremism is any ideology that those currently in power disapprove of.

In most cases the accusation of extremism will make use of the left-right political axis. The left-right political axis no longer serves any useful descriptive purpose but it is still extremely useful as a propaganda tool. Those whose views are out of favour can be labelled as extreme right or extreme left. These days the extreme right label is the preferred method of disqualification. Because that’s exactly what this labeling amounts to – disqualifying and demonising the views of dissenters. If someone is “far right” then there is no need to examine his arguments or to present evidence to argue against him. The fact that he has been declared “far right” means he is a wicked extremist whose views can be simply disregarded.

Mainstream conservatives tend to do the same thing – they think they can disqualify an opinion by painting it as hard left. Even alt-righters and their ilk will do this.

Of course left and right are now entirely meaningless political concepts but the idea of a political spectrum is very very attractive to those who have set themselves up as the gatekeepers of acceptable thought. If there’s a spectrum then that means that anyone whose opinions fall on one end of the spectrum must therefore logically be an extremist (and therefore dangerous and evil). And anyone whose opinions fall somewhere in the centre of the spectrum must logically be a moderate (and therefore a good and reasonable person).

Naturally those who currently dominate the political scene, the liberals and the globalists, present themselves as being in the middle of the spectrum. They believe (or claim to believe) in liberal democracy and what could possibly be more moderate, more centrist and more reasonable than that? Wicked people who disagree with them are either communists (far left) or fascists (far right). Nobody bothers much about demonising communists any more. Communists only exist on American university campuses. It’s those right-wing fascists that need to be disqualified and demonised.

In fact if you think about it liberal democracy is itself a rather extreme political view. Two hundred years ago wise statesmen like Metternich quite rightly considered democracy to be dangerous extremist nonsense. The core principles of liberalism were regarded as being fairly outlandish and certainly unworkable in practice. Liberalism was the doctrine of cranks. Those prejudices have turned out to be quite correct – liberal democracy never has worked and never will work. But people who believe in liberal democracy are not considered to be either far left or far right and therefore by default they are considered, quite wrongly, to be moderates.

And a century ago globalism would have been dismissed as extremist claptrap. It is extremist claptrap. There is nothing remotely moderate about globalism as a political philosophy. It is as extreme as marxism was a hundred years ago.

If you want to find political fanatics today you’ll find them among the ranks of globalists and Social Justice Warriors. The views of the “far right” are by contrast remarkably moderate. Even the few remaining genuine old school hard leftists are moderates compared to the unbridled lunacy of globalists and SJWs.

It all comes down to who gets to apply the labels.

selling the nationalist brand

If we’re going to defeat globalism we need to take a look at the things that have made certain ideologies popular and successful. The popularity of an ideology has never had anything to do with the ideology itself. It’s the way the ideology is sold. It’s the marketing.

Look at marxism. Marxism became extremely popular among the young and fashionable in the 1930s. Why did this happen? It happened because if you were a marxist you could pose as a fashionable rebel. You were one of the cool kids. And you could portray yourself as being virtuous. You could claim the moral high ground.

Remarkably enough, even after the horrors unleashed by Stalin and Mao, Marxism was remarkably successful at maintaining the moral high ground. After all marxism sounds virtuous. It’s all about justice and fairness and equality isn’t it? What could be more virtuous than that?

Marxism is now all but dead but in the 90s another ideology took its place – the twinned ideology of globalism and social justice. Like marxism it sounds very virtuous in theory. It’s all about justice and fairness and equality isn’t it? What could be more virtuous than that? 

It was always difficult fighting against marxism, especially among the young, because the alternatives seemed a lot less cool and a lot less virtuous. And that’s the problem we have in fighting globalism/social justice. The alternatives won’t get you accepted by the cool kids. And you won’t get the same opportunities to virtue-signal (something that is incredibly important for women and young people). Being a nationalist will get you labelled as being Literally Hitler. Being a social conservative will get you labelled as a hateful bigot.

In an age of social media this becomes even more crucial. Everyone wants to be invited to join the cool kids and no-one wants to be Hitler or a hateful bigot.

Somehow we need to turn this around. We need to make nationalism cool and we need to capture the moral high ground.

One way of making nationalism more attractive would be to portray globalists as being on wrong side of history. Nobody wants to be on the wrong side of history.

Capturing the moral high ground should be easy. We have the advantage that globalism/social justice really is evil and unworkable. However that’s not enough. We need to be a lot  better at marketing. We need to emphasise that nationalism is a good thing for everyone. We need to make it clear that fighting for the well-being of one’s own race, one’s own ethnicity, one’s own nation, is good for everyone. White people should be proud of being white. Black people should be proud of being black. The French should be proud of their French cultural heritage. The Poles should be proud of their Polish cultural heritage. The Vietnamese should be proud of their Vietnamese cultural heritage. Bolivians should be proud of their Bolivian cultural heritage. Globalism is a threat to everybody’s culture.

Immigration should be opposed not because it’s bad for white people but because it’s bad for everyone. You can’t solve the problems of Somalia by resettling the entire Somalian population in Minnesota or Sweden. Syrians are better off in Syria and Syria is not going to be helped by having the best and the brightest Syrians moved to Germany. Refugee problems would be best solved if western nations stopped destroying other people’s countries. And it’s the globalists who promote the wars that cause the refugee problems.

We also need to point out that social conservatism is good for everybody. Feminism should be opposed because feminism is anti-woman. Sexual promiscuity is bad for women. We do homosexuals no favours by encouraging their unhealthy self-destructive lifestyles. We do confused unhappy people no favours by pretending that they can magically change their sex or choose from 57 different genders. Abortion is not only morally wrong it is psychologically damaging to the woman.

Sadly up to now the anti-globalists have made few efforts to take back the moral high ground. The alt-right has in some ways made things worse by indulging in childish shock tactics and by not distancing itself from its lunatic fringe. Every political movement has its lunatic fringe. The alt-right’s lunatic fringe is in truth more harmless than most (it’s a handful of nutters who live in their parents’ basements) but the trouble is they don’t sound harmless and they provide a very convenient stick with which SJWs can beat everybody who opposes their agenda.

Marxists enjoyed so much success because they were focused, they were disciplined and they were good at selling their ideology. We need to be prepared to learn from their success.