I want to address different issues raised by readers.
White-Only Town in Arkansas
Someone referred me to this documentary about a “White Only” town in rural Arkansas, spearheaded by Eric Orwoll and his Return to the Land movement. Before explaining why their project is evil, I want to acknowledge that this group is animated by some good impulses. Orwoll and people like him are correct to point out the double standard that when blacks or Jews form intentional communities or take pride in their identity it is received differently than when whites do the same thing. And the group that is forming around Orwoll is also correct in recognizing that whites should be able to take pride in their heritage, just like other groups can, without being labelled racist. And they are also correct that whites have been attacked because of skin color – something I’ve experienced when being informed that it isn’t enough for me not simply not be racist, because I must engage in self-shaming activities to expunge myself from inherited guilt from my slave-owning ancestors (which doesn’t make sense anyway because my ancestors were Quaker abolitionists).
BUT, after watching the entire documentary, I can confidently say that Eric Orwoll and his “Whites Only” community is racist and evil.
Consider, when ideological or utopian movements go bad, it is usually because they are based on something good (often tightening in-group boundaries based on real oppression and genuine grievances) mixed up with principles that are slightly off. The things that are slightly off increase over time to become evil, rather like lines that look parallel but when extended veer in opposite directions. And something is very off with Orwoll and his “White Only” town in Arkansas. It will turn into a disaster, and the more successful it initially is, the greater the disaster will be.
You don’t have to dig very deep to see what is off. Notice how Orwoll defends Nazism and WWII revisionism. (“I think a lot of the kind of fantastical fears of what the Nazis would have done if we didn’t intervene are unfounded.” No, actually, what the Nazis did BEFORE we intervened is fearful enough.) And notice also how they share with leftism the tendency to view culture through the victim-oppressor framework – a standard feature of left-wing wokeism, and now made popular in “conservative” circles through the right-wing wokeism of the Trump-Vance machine.
Another concern is that Orwoll and his cult followers are using whiteness as an organizing principle both for the European culture they wish to celebrate and for the down-home traditional values they want to preserve. Regarding the former, this reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of European history and of the ethnic plurality that has always characterized the European experience. To imply, as Orwoll does in this interview, that white people share a common cultural background, or to treat whiteness, even rhetorically, as an ethnicity, is to reveal a profound ignorance of the relationship between race and culture. Would he consider the Sámi people of Northern Scandinavia to belong to the same “ethnicity” as people in rural Arkansas simply because both might be classified as white? The very question exposes the absurdity of treating whiteness as a meaningful cultural inheritance.
And regarding the down-home traditional values that Eric Orwoll wants to preserve, it is worth pointing out that these values do not map over to ethnicity in the way they claim. Indeed, if Orwoll was serious about the traditional values he espouses (as opposed to merely leveraging those values for race-based hatred) then he and his followers would have to recognize that they likely have more in common with a typical catholic Mexican family than whites from urban coastal cities. Also, if whiteness is the organizing principle to mark out the values they wish to preserve, then what would happens if, centuries down the road, whites become more associated with cultural nihilism but the majority of brown people (which, again is not co-expensive with a single ethnicity) are associated traditional values (a real possibility given current trends in the global south). In such a scenario, would white people wishing to still be traditional need to repudiate race as an organizing principle of their values?
Alexander Dugin is a Myth
A couple readers asked me about Alexander Dugin. Here’s more or less how I’ve been replying.
Dugin’s political-historical thoeries hinge on the assumption that liberalism has won after defeating its competitors. According to the narrative told by Dugin, the twentieth century saw liberal secularism defeat its contenders, namely Fascism and Communism. This led to a unipolar world where critics of the reigning orthodoxy invariably become associated with either fascist or communist ideals, since these are the only alternative paradigms that we are familiar with for attacking liberalism. What we need, Dugin claims, is an ideology to replace liberalism, one that is neither fascist nor communist. For Dugin, the solution is “fourth political theory,” one that integrates and supersedes all three predecessor ideologies. This successor ideology must recognize ethnos-based civilizational blocks over the nation state (this is where it connects with the type of Russian imperialism I have discussed elsewhere), combining the vitalism of Heidegger with Plato’s yearning for philosopher kings. It seeks to dismantle all western philosophy as distortion and alienation in order to inaugurate a more primitive ground for being rooted in new gods. One of these new gods is ethnos, described by Dugin as “the greatest value of the Fourth Political Theory.”
Dugin’s Fourth Political Theory is seen by its advocates as providing a skeleton key for understanding all of modern history. This has resulted in Dugin becoming something of a guru of the radical right. His followers talk about Dugin in reverential terms. Michael Millerman, who helped translate Dugin’s 2009 book The Fourth Political Theory into English, doesn’t understand “why certain people, when confronted with the concept of the Fourth Political Theory, do not immediately rush to open a bottle of champagne, and do not start dancing and rejoicing, celebrating the discovery of new possibilities.”
But this narrative is skewed on so many levels. Consider the claim that we live in a unipolar world where critics of the reigning orthodoxy invariably become associated with either fascist or communist ideals since these are the only alternative paradigms that we are familiar with for attacking liberalism. This is just wrong because there has always been another option for opposing liberal secularism besides the Fascism and Communism, and this other way has NOT been swallowed up by a unipolar world of secular liberalism. St. Augustine recognized this other way when coming to grips with the fall of Rome; Edmund Burke recognized it when responding to the French Revolution; Henri De Lubac recognized this other way in his lectures on the collapse of the Third Republic. This other way is simply a Christ-centered conservatism, the only true solution to our political idolatries. This tradition has never disappeared, and has been advocated by a cast of sophisticated thinkers that include Sir John Fortescue, Richard Hooker, Sir Edward Coke, John Selden, Sir Matthew Hale, Sir William Temple, Jonathan Swift, Josiah Tucker, Edmund Burke, and John Dickinson. The American thinker, Russell Kirk (1918–1994) recognized tradition in his monumental book The Conservative Mind. All these thinkers have offered a “fourth way” beyond the echo chamber of Liberalism, Fascism and Communism. This tradition, which I have summarized here and here and here, has offered a coherent and consistent body of thought for attacking liberalism.
The philosophical movement represented by thinkers like Dugin and his North American populizers like Michael Millerman neglect this rich tradition and then can make the astonishing claim (see around the 6:57 minute mark in Milerman’s interview with Reno) that we have no reflex left for opposing liberalism anymore. This false problem, rooted in amnesia of the rich tradition of conservative philosophy, offers a false answer to a false problem, paving the way for a vitalism of a pre-civilized past that looks to Heidegger (read through the lens of Dugin) as our new starting point. But this is not viable. As Rusty Reno himself pointed out years before his interview with Millerman, Dugin’s vision is deeply anti-teleological, appropriating Heidegger’s Dasein without Heidegger’s teleology. Moreover, as I pointed out in my article “America and the Collapse of Politics,” while Dugin and the larger radical right lament the way liberalism has robbed us from the transcendent, they would replace the liberal order with a Nietzschean vitalism that merely repackages and rearranges the very paradigms they reject. But this is a dead-end, for when the old mythos passed away at the incarnation, everything was transformed, so that a resuscitation of pre-Christian religion, metaphysics, or even politics, is more than merely anachronistic; it is nihilistic.
But if Dugin’s sagacity is overrated, so is his actual relevance in geopolitics. Rusty Reno’s conversation with Millerman, author of Inside “Putin’s Brain”: The Political Philosophy of Alexander Dugin, gives a good sense of how many Americans think about Dugin. Both gentlemen perpetuate America’s central myth about Dugin, that he has somehow been providing an intellectual architecture for Putin. Few people, if any, within Russia would concur with the characterization of Dugin as Putin’s version of Rasputin, let alone the philosopher whose ideas offer insight into Putin’s brain. The role that Dugin is thought to play is entirely a fiction of the American radical right, with their deep need for a philosopher who is thought to be both sophisticated and somehow pulling significant geopolitical strings.
If you talk to people within Russia itself, they will tell you that Putin and Dugin are not working in close collaboration, and neither is Dugin working independently to provide intellectual justifications for Putin’s policies. In fact, Dugin is a marginal figure within Russian political discourse. He has his fans and supporters, but none of the sizeable political factions sees him as a leader, or even an important ideologue. He’s known to anyone who’s serious about Russian politics, especially people on the right, but few within Russia actually take him seriously.
Here’s how one Russian person explained it to me. “If you walked into the apartment of a notable Russian right-wing blogger, it wouldn’t be surprising if he had a couple of Dugin’s books. But if you asked him about Dugin, he’d probably scoff and say he’s right on some things but otherwise outdated, irrelevant and wrong. That’s about the extent of his influence. Suppose you go into a real bookstore? Once in St. Petersburg, I went to a big bookstore and decided to check, ‘Hey, do they have Dugin?’ They were well stocked with a variety of political texts. Nothing by Dugin. Which didn’t surprise me.”
Dugin’s heyday was in 2014. In that year, he was head of the sociology department at Moscow State University. However, he lost that position because of his controversial views. Then in 2015 he was associated with Tsargrad, a social conservative cable channel. Since then, he’s mostly relied on his own social media and other platforms. He has a bunch of fans, but they are mostly international because, again, he simply isn’t that big in Russia. If someone made a list of the top 100 political commentators in Russia, he might well be on that list. Possibly (but not probably) in the top 50. Certainly not in the top 20. It is true that the assassination of Dugin’s daughter briefly elevated his profile, but only briefly.
The fact is, Dugin has way more influence among anti-globalists outside of Russia than within the nation. If you look at a typical high school civics textbook, you’ll find Ivan Ilyin, but not Dugin.
But if Dugin was doing Putin’s ideological work, offering intellectual justification for the war in the Ukraine, then why doesn’t Putin support him? After all, Dugin could easily ask a media oligarch to give him a TV show, or just have him on as a more frequent guest. He could ask a university rector to give him another academic position. Putin could do lots of things. But he doesn’t. And he can’t for the simple reason that there is considerable disparity between Dugin’s views and those of Putin.
Dugin is an apocalypticist. He frames geopolitics in terms of the end times. He sees the world stage as dominated by a Manichean conflict between “oceanic” and “telluric” forces. He conflates metaphysics and geopolitics, uses lots of vague occultish and pseudo-mystical jargon. All of this completely contradicts Putin’s approach. People in Russia see Putin as far closer to Solzhenitsyn than to Dugin. Moreover, Dugin is far more extreme than Putin has ever been. For example, according to George Barros, Dugin once advocated the breaking up of China. That’s wholly contrary to Putin’s policies. In fact, this is why Dugin lost his MSU position. He has also advocated other positions incompatible with the approach taken by Putin’s government.
Since Dugin was ousted from his teaching position, he has gradually become one of Putin’s critics on the right. The mainstream media doesn’t report this much, but hardcore Russian ultra-nationalists have big problems with Putin. Dugin has been one of them. If you talk to well informed people in Russia, they all confirm this. George Barros at the Institute for the Study of War will tell you the same thing. And he also cites studies by RAND and the Kennan Institute, who reports similarly.
The Answer to Christian Nationalism is More Mixing of Christianity and Politics, Not Less
One reader, shocked by the direction that, so called, “Christian Nationalism” has been taking, wrote to me that “I think the REAL solution to this political mess is to completely abandon ANY and ALL political advocacy as Christians, since Christian Nationalism is an obvious and glistening heresy. I am sickened and appalled that I had any role to play on any level of this national disaster. I have prayed and confessed about it, and have humbled myself before God and repented. I see no other option both for you and _____. ” In my response below, I suggested the problem isn’t actually mixing Christianity and politics, but not mixing them enough.
Thank you for sharing this. I understand you to be saying that the real solution to this political mess is to completely abandon any and all political advocacy as Christians, to stop mixing theology and politics. I don’t agree. To say that Christian nationalism, political antisemitism, the Trump-Vance machine, etc., is bad is to make a political claim, and either those claims are informed by Jesus Christ or they are not. If they are, then you are mixing Christianity and politics right there, which renders your position self-referentially inconsistent. But if, on the other hand, those claims are not informed by Jesus Christ, then some other horizon of ultimate values must be informing your conception of good political order, since without such a conception, it is impossible to sustain the critiques you offer.
Does this make sense? Am I out on the skinny branches?
I’ll up the ante. Removing Christian values from politics is actually one of the conditions that created space for Nazism, and this happened, in part, through the adoption of an extreme version of Luther’s two-kingdoms theology. What we need now is MORE mixing of Christianity and politics, not less—but REAL Christianity. I mean a politics that advocates for the oppressed, that rejects a might-makes-right modus operandi, that refuses to treat human beings as merely economic units or political instruments, that recognizes the image of God in every person, that protects the weak from the powerful, that cares about the stranger and the immigrant, that restrains the wealthy and powerful when they exploit the vulnerable, that refuses to deify the nation-state, and that takes seriously the biblical commands concerning justice, mercy, and care for the poor. (Not that it’s the vocation of the state to directly facilitate each of these goals, but the state can make it more or less easy for these goals to be pursued privately. And some of these goals, such as restraining injustice, do come under the direct mandate of the state.)
In other words, I don’t think the answer to the corruption of Christian political engagement is to retreat from political engagement. Rather, the solution is to recover a genuinely Christian account of political life, such as the one I advocated in chapter 10 of Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation. Christianity has something substantive to say about how power is exercised, how the vulnerable are treated, what human beings are for, what constitutes justice, and what obligations we have toward our neighbors. Those convictions inevitably have political implications. The question, therefore, isn’t whether Christians will bring ultimate theological commitments into politics; it is which theological commitments they will bring, and whether those commitments will actually be governed by the teaching and example of Christ.
I would also argue that the attempt to separate Christianity from politics doesn’t actually produce a neutral political space. It simply leaves the political realm to be shaped by other visions of the good—nationalism, economic utilitarianism, racial ideology, individual autonomy, technological progress, or the interests of whoever happens to possess the greatest political power. In that sense, the choice isn’t really between “Christianity in politics” and “Christianity out of politics,” but between different competing accounts of Christianity, which lead to radically different visions for what human beings are, what justice requires, and what political authority is for.
So I agree that there is something deeply wrong with the way Christianity and politics are currently being mixed. I just don’t think the problem is that they are being mixed. Rather, I’d argue that the problem is that Christianity is so often being distorted in the mixing. The remedy for bad Christian politics is not less Christianity in politics, but genuine Christianity.
Further Reading