Quotulatiousness

October 26, 2026

“Christofascism” seen as harmful

Filed under: History, Media, Politics, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I must not hang out in the progressive cool kids’ areas of the internet, as I’d only occasionally heard the term “Christofascism” and I’d never encountered even a vague definition of what the pejorative might mean. Copernican to the rescue with an extended discussion on that very thing (it’s a long piece, these excerpts just skim the surface):

Image from Seeking Always the Horizon

Long has the progressive movement decried “ChristoFascism”, representing it as the greatest threat to Western civilization. The alphabet-soup squad has mostly moved on. Like most words uttered by the progressive mind, the term is used entirely for the reaction it elicits, and has nothing to do with describing the real world. Christofascism was just another word in their toolbox, like “nazism” or “racist” or (now) the ever-popular “if you date a girl two years younger than you, you’re a pedophile”.

All these are words uttered merely to enforce the progressive’s bizarre form of destructive totalitarian thought-control.1

While the [CURRENT THING] horde has moved on from accusations of Christofascism, I have not. There’s something archaically elegant in that formulation of words and the compound thought-form they represent. Hiding in the spiteful accusation is a memetic complex that deserves further investigation. Christofascism was a mere combination of “bad things” that the Left hates … but that doesn’t mean it should be taken as mere braindead progressive gurgling.

It may well be far more than that. There’s a new cultural theology hidden in there.

[…]

ChristoFascism

Individuals like Kulak identify modern (what I’d call “liberal”) Christianity as a fundamental inhibitor to the people of the West.2 That analysis is not entirely wrong. Christianity in its modern incarnation developed alongside the fall of Rome, the High Medieval Period, and then through the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Christianity was a governance apparatus for regional tribal conflicts and the occasional crusade. It was the centerpiece of the Holy Roman Empire, but the theological framework has a great deal of trouble squaring with modernity.

Simultaneously, all of the alternatives, the materialist religions of the 20th century, have been absolute disasters ending in nihilism, hedonism, or cruelty. The human collective unconscious is not a static thing.3 It’s frothing with new ideas, particularly during times of great change and turmoil. The Hegelian dialectic.

Notably, the Hegelian dialectic ends in the creation of a new thesis. The original Thesis is the Universalist heritage of the West. That would be Christianity from 300 AD up until the 19th century. Then there is the antithesis, the materialist religions that seized the zeitgeist in the 20th.

[…]

A Christofascist cultural foundation must express:

  • The moral recognition of a higher power and that it is the duty of the state to nurture a heroic righteousness in its own people, granting Duties, and Guidance in addition to liberty.4
  • A masculine Will to Power in the development of its own practices, heritage, and promotion of its own cultural ideals to the exclusion of hostile, foreign, or corrosive ones.
  • That the State, and the individuals who make up the State, are responsible for adhering to higher moral standards. One cannot simply blame “the voters” for the evil actions of the state. The leadership of the state holds personal responsibility for imposed policies.
  • An intense sense of national exceptionalism, particularly in the eyes of God. As a spiritually exceptional state, the people of the nation uphold a higher scientific and spiritual ideal as individuals, families, and citizens.
  • A recognition of other similar nations as being siblings seeking the same ultimate goals through alternative means, rather than pawns in a game of Great Powers.
  • Paternalism with God as father to the nation’s people, and the nation’s people not beholden to the operational state but being the actuators of it. A father that expresses temperance in governance.
  1. I think that John Carter wrote the best analysis of this phenomenon in his work on “Homo Umbrans“. The product of man willingly handing over sapience in exchange for the reprieve from intellectual rigor. To very roughly summarize one of the best articles on Substack: if you feel like you’re under psychic attack when trying to communicate with a progressive, it’s because you are. The Leftist attempts to annul the meaning of words required for thought to render sapient cognition and abstract reasoning impossible.
  2. Here’s a direct link to some of the work that Kulak has done. This one is of particular interest to those in the proverbial Pagan camp. Here’s an article that was written by Millennial Woes on the same topic. A great article that I would recommend regarding this perpetual confrontation within the Spiritual Right.
  3. Here’s my own article on how best to conceptualize the collective unconscious.
  4. We will assume a Christian higher power, it’s in the name after all.

October 25, 2026

“This alliance between Islamist and left-wing forces is known in France as islamo-gauchisme“

Filed under: France, Media, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

After an earlier post of his went viral, Maarten Boudry revisits the same topic but this time with references and footnotes that he regretted not including in the original:

This was not a carefully argued analysis, but an impassioned cry from the heart, dashed off in the heat of the moment after watching the horrific scenes of wanton destruction in France. To my surprise, the post blew up: it received thousands of likes and reposts, was translated into multiple languages and was cited in several newspapers. I was flooded with interview requests, which I declined because I’m still working on my book.

As a sometime academic, however, I felt a bit embarrassed that my little rant contained no sources and little in the way of actual argumentation. A dereliction of duty! So, to make it up to you, I want to elaborate on one of its underlying ideas: that “useful idiots” on the left have been marching alongside Islamists, and that the Palestinian flag has become the joint symbol of hatred for Western civilization. This alliance between Islamist and left-wing forces is known in France as islamo-gauchisme (Islamo-leftism), and elsewhere as the Red-Green alliance. Does it really exist, and in what sense? Is it an orchestrated plot, or more of a rapprochement of convenience?1 And are the warm feelings mutual?

Come to think of it, I happen to have some academic expertise on the topic.

Photo from Maarten Boudry’s Substack

A conspiracy theory?

If we are to believe the vast majority of academics and journalists, Islamo-leftism is nothing but a “conspiracy theory” — a far-right fever dream in the same category as the Great Replacement or Judeo-Bolshevism. In 2021, more than 600 academics said as much in an open letter in Le Monde. As someone who has written several academic papers on conspiracy theories, I’m here to tell you: not only are these people clueless, they are part of the problem. They are abusing the valuable concept of “conspiracy theory” to shut down debate, much like the premature dismissal of the lab-leak hypothesis during the pandemic.

A conspiracy theory, in the pejorative sense, is an unproven and speculative hypothesis about a secret and sinister plot hatched by a relatively small group of people. Typically, the very lack of hard evidence for the conspiracy is taken as proof that the conspirators are fiendishly clever and have covered their tracks. In my academic work, I have dubbed such self-sealing theories the intellectual equivalent of a black hole: once you’ve dived in, it’s hard to claw your way back out.

The rapprochement between parts of the left and Islam is none of these things. It is hiding in plain sight and has been extensively documented. Granted, some of the leftist romance with Islam may stem from secret funding by Qatar and Iran — which would qualify as a genuine “conspiracy”2 — but by and large these factors are incidental. The Red-Green alliance does not rest on covert coordination behind the scenes, but on ideological kinship, a shared enemy (Western civilization, modernity and capitalism) and a hefty dose of naivety on one side.

  1. See Rob Henderson’s interview with Franziska Sittig, co-author of the 2025 book Intellectual Self-Destruction: How the West Gambles Away Its Future (the book is on my to-read pile)
  2. See this shocking piece by Ella Kenan about the secret plans of the Muslim Brotherhood and Qatar, which amount to an actual conspiracy.

October 23, 2026

Quebec is to Canada as Scotland is to the United Kingdom

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Fortissax explores the idea that Quebec’s relationship to the rest of the Demented Dominion closely resembles the sometimes awkward relationship between Scotland and the rest of the UK (but primarily England):

People have often compared the relationship between Anglo Canada and Quebec to that of England and Ireland, and while there are some similarities there particularly in the visceral emotions during the Cold War, I’d actually argue that Quebec is closer to Canada’s Scotland.

Scotland entered the British union in 1707 as an established kingdom with its own institutions and national consciousness. Québec entered Confederation in 1867 as the homeland of French Canadians, whose institutions and identity predated the Dominion.

Scotland and Quebec became elements of a larger political order while retaining separate identities. Both the English and Scottish can be British, both Anglo and French Canadians can be “Canadian”.

Scotland preserved its legal system and established church under the Union of 1707. Québec retained its civil law tradition, while the Quebec Act of 1774 protected Catholic religious practice and established important foundations for institutional continuity

Scottish identity has historically coexisted with British identity, just as French Canadian identity has coexisted with Canadian identity. In both cases, nationalists have disagreed over whether their distinctive peoplehood is best expressed through political independence or continued participation in a multinational union.

Scots were disproportionately involved in, and benefited enormously from, the British Empire, particularly through commerce, banking, industry, trade, colonial administration, and the military.

French Canadians likewise disproportionately participated in and benefited from the expansion of British North America and the Canadian economy, establishing banks, credit unions, grocery enterprises, factories, and steamship companies. They helped establish the Hudson’s Bay Company, the North West Company, explored vast swathes of the continent, contributed four Fathers of Confederation, and produced six prime ministers

Fast forward to 2026, certain Scottish and Québécois nationalists are suddenly smol wittle itty bitty decolonial Third World beans who dindu nuffin, possessed absolutely no historical agency, and were apparently dragged kicking and screaming into the imperial projects their ancestors helped build.

October 22, 2026

Street theatre with a niqab and a prayer mat

Filed under: Media, Politics, Religion, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On Substack Notes, Dan Burmawi discusses the recent phenomenon of Muslims choosing to performatively pray on the public streets:

Photo from Dan Burmawi’s note on Substack.

Tonight, as I was leaving a restaurant on 14th Street in New York around 10 p.m., this Muslim woman took a prayer rug and a niqab out of the trunk of her car, put the niqab on, laid the prayer rug down, and started praying on the street.

I grew up as a Muslim in the Islamic world, and let me tell you: this is absolutely part of an organized effort to flood the public square in the West with Islamic symbolism.

First of all, there is no Islamic prayer at 10 p.m. Even if she missed the Isha prayer, which takes place earlier in the evening, she has until dawn to make it up. So why choose to pray on the street at 10 p.m.?

Second, a Muslim woman who does not wear a niqab or hijab in her daily life would never normally have a niqab sitting in the trunk of her car.

She is clearly not strict enough to wear it every day, so why would she suddenly be so strict about missing a prayer that she carries a niqab in her trunk specifically for this purpose?

Third, in almost any Islamic country, you would never see a woman praying on the street at 10 p.m. This would be completely unacceptable.

If she were genuinely worried about praying, she could simply wait until she got home, especially since a missed Isha prayer can be made up before dawn.

I can tell you with full confidence that these scenes we keep seeing of Muslims praying in the streets of the West are intentional.

They serve to assert dominance, normalize Islam in the public square, seize ground, and demand exceptional treatment that immediately turns into claimed rights.

Bad-faith acts like this are signals of the same project that turned many cities in Europe into shitholes.

Exceptional threats demand exceptional measures.

Islam must be banned in the West because it is not a religion; it is a hostile political ideology.

Until that happens, the West will continue losing ground to this ideology every single day.

October 21, 2026

QotD: Religious institutions in the late western Roman Empire

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Government, History, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the decline of political and civic institutions did not mean the decline and destruction of every sort of institution and this is particularly obvious with the survival of the institutional Church. It is important here to stress at the beginning how Roman an institution the Church was by the start of the fifth century. After Constantine (with a brief hiatus under the emperor Julian) the “catholic” church (that is, the institutional Church which conformed to the “right” sort of Christianity) had been the continued recipient of imperial benefaction: emperors built churches and funded Church activity. This was itself very Roman, reflecting a continuation of the role that pagan emperors had played in previous centuries, demonstrating their piety by building temples and reviving old religious practices. The emperors had not “gotten religion” but merely changed religion and so changed their religious benefaction accordingly.

The emperors and the Roman state had also taken an active role beginning in the fourth century in defining exactly what the “right” sort of Christianity was. In response to a dispute over the ordination of bishops in North Africa (the “Donatist” schism), Constantine called a council of bishops to convene in Arles in 314 to resolve the matter (it didn’t work and Constantine began persecuting the remaining Donatists). But that council would hardly be the last – Constantine convoked the first ecumenical council (one that in theory reflected the entire Christian Church) in Nicaea in 325 in order to create a single universal Christian doctrine and resolve a number of internal disputes (having grown as a religion in secret and facing persecution, as you might imagine Christianity had a lot of significant local variations). The emperor Theodosius I (r. 379-395) convened the next major council at Constantinople in 381; after that it was the emperor Theodosius II (r. 402-450) who convened the next at Ephesus in 431 and then the emperor Marcian (r. 450-457) who convened the next at Chalcedon in 451. All of these councils served to define what the “right” Christianity was (“Chalcedonian” Christianity, named after the council), putting some belief systems outside of the doctrine of the Roman Church.

But whereas other Roman institutions didn’t survive the collapse of Roman political authority, the Church as an institution very much did. It was perhaps not obvious that it would – many of the “barbarians” had embraced a non-Chalcedonian Christianity, Arianism, and so might have been hostile to the Church as it existed in Rome. But in practice the need to consolidate the loyalty of their Roman Chalcedonian Christian subjects (on this, note Brown, op. cit. 2nd ed., 105-6, 133-8) and the prestige that the institutional Church held led the rulers of Rome’s successor states to convert to Chalcedonian Christianity; the last of the major Arian Christian kings was Garibald, King of the Lombards in 671.

Indeed, the institutional Church was in some ways a lifeboat in which other elements of the Late Roman world were carried through the storm of the fifth century into the Middle Ages. We’ve already talked about the Church’s role in preserving a fair chunk of the Latin literary tradition. Much of this was done through the spread and then perseverance of monasticism. The first communities of monks emerged in the Eastern Roman Empire in the fourth century and spread through the failing Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. The Western monastic tradition builds from this with the foundation of Monte Cassino in 529 by Benedict of Nursia and the promulgation of the Rule of Saint Benedict.

Meanwhile, the Church also emerged as one of the central institutions in the cities of the Roman world, with the bishop, the religious head of the Church in a given city, emerging as a key figure in civic governance. While the figure of the bishop rose to importance in both the east and the west, in the east, bishops largely did not move into becoming secular leaders alongside religious figures, in part presumably because the central Roman authority still existed to handle those functions. But in the west, the decline of both civic and centralized government left bishops in the breach. This in turn often preserved older Roman political geography as Liebeschuetz notes, with the civitas surviving as an administrative unit in the form of the diocese of a bishop, precisely because those bishoprics were originally established along Roman administrative lines and remained so even after Roman administration vanished. Bishops ended up taking up some of the tasks that in the past would have fallen to a Roman governor and since they had their seats in the embattled Roman cities, many of those cities survived the difficult fifth and sixth centuries precisely because they were the seat of a bishop.

And in order to run the institution of the Church, its bishoprics and their diocese, it needed both educated clergy who could read the Bible but also administrators who had learned the law – by which they meant Roman law. Secular learning had largely collapsed with the Roman Empire in the west – it had existed to provide training for wealthy men to become secular administrators for the central imperial government and so when the demand for that kind of training vanished, so too did the schools that trained the administrators and jurists. And so the Church had to train them itself, setting up episcopal and monastic schools which trained theology, but also law and administration (and of course provided the context for that survival of Latin literature as a teaching tool). As levels of education and literacy among the secular elite declined, it made sense for kings to employ bishops and other members of the clergy as members of their own administration, leading to this distinctly Roman religious institution having a key place within the secular “barbarian” kingdoms that followed.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part II: Institutions”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-01-28.

October 16, 2026

Worried you might commit an accidental Islamophobia? Britain’s Greens can help!

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The British Green Party has been getting a lot of media attention lately, but not for their former environmental concerns: now they’ve effectively converted themselves into the primary political vehicle for British Muslims, as Heydon Prowse explains:

You know you’re in People’s Front of Judea territory when the GEWs (Greens of England and Wales) decree that the majority of JEWs (Jews Everywhere in the World) are “racist“. Meanwhile, the party’s Muslim Greens grouping recently published a handy guide to what is and isn’t “Islamophobic”.

It turns out, pretty much everything is! Including, but not limited to, the following:

1) Criticising the Koran

The guidance warns against saying that the teachings of the Koran are backwards, because nothing says forward-thinking like a pre-Enlightenment ban on questioning religion.

2) Speaking up against Islam’s treatment of women

Koran 2:223 says wives are like farmland that husbands can cultivate as they please. Which, to be fair, is closer than the Green Party has come to discussing agriculture all year.

3) Saying that Islam isn’t a massive fan of the gays

Not a single Muslim country in the world permits or recognises same-sex marriage or lets gay couples adopt. But according to the Muslim Greens, this is all the fault of the Brits.

The guidance says: “Queerphobic legislation in many Muslim-majority countries is deeply tied to colonialism”. Apparently, the British Empire made them do it and has forced them to continue doing it enthusiastically ever since.

4) Going to the pub

Yes, apparently having too many Green Party meetings and social events in venues with alcohol present is racist. Given that Wetherspoons is the closest thing Britain has to a place of worship, I find this one deeply offensive.

Confused? You’re not alone. The Greens seem to have abandoned saving the planet in favour of a much more achievable pastime: making everything racist. It’s a bit like that game show, Is It Cake?, except instead of cutting open a handbag to reveal layers of sponge and jam, you dissect every political opinion to unveil a hidden hate crime.

Almost anything could be racist and you wouldn’t even know it. The guidance encourages Muslims to join the Greens because they “speak out on oppression everywhere”. But careful! It also says that if you assume a Muslim is oppressed, you might be being Islamophobic. Is it solidarity? Is it prejudice? Gotcha! It was cake all along! And now you’ve been referred to a disciplinary committee.

October 10, 2026

“The Catholic Church has always struggled with its relationship to nation-states”

Filed under: Europe, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In the New English Review, Bruce Gilley wonders when — or even whether — Pope Leo XIV will realize his pastoral duties extend to defending western civilization:

Pope Leo XIV in the library of the Vatican, 13 October, 2025.
Photo by Ricardo Stuckert via Wikimedia Commons.

    In the Middle Ages, they would have kicked a few cardinals in the ass, elected a new pope, and declared this one an anti-pope.

So says the French president in Jean Raspail’s apocalyptic 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, in which a fleet of 100 ships carrying 1 million illegal migrants from Calcutta disgorges its wretched cargo onto the beaches of the Côte d’Azur.

The outburst is occasioned by the insistence of the pope in the novel that Europe should open its borders to all Third-World migrants in the name of charity and solidarity, beginning with this Calcutta fleet. In the novel, His Holiness has sold off all the Vatican art and treasures to raise funds for the migrants, and he is badgering the French president to similarly raise funds to pay for needs of this influx.

“What else can you expect from a Brazilian pope?” the president asks an aide. “The cardinals wanted an innovator as pope, in the name of the universal church, and they certainly got one.”

This fictional scene has obvious parallels to real-life events we’re all experiencing under the current and previous pope, both drawn from service in Latin America, in weakening rather than strengthening the defenses of Europe against a migrant invasion and other anti-Western ills.

During a day trip to the Italian island of Lampedusa in July, Pope Leo took a page out of The Camp of the Saints in requesting European governments create a “a long-term strategic plan capable of receiving, protecting, supporting and integrating migrants”. He also praised the locals “for the solidarity that so many of you have shown”. The United States, he said, should likewise be “welcoming, protecting, and assisting immigrants” as “an act of charity”.

In 2025, before he was chosen as pope, then-Cardinal Prevost had taken up a similar cudgel by openly rejecting U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s invocation of St. Augustine’s concept of ordo amoris (the ordering of love) which allows that human limits mean we must prioritize those closest to us first and those afar second. To be frank, the hillbilly has a better grasp of Augustine than the man who became pope.

Leo’s predecessor Pope Francis was even more radical, calling for “open humanitarian corridors” for all and sundry who felt they had a right to waltz into the West. People should be “free to choose whether to migrate or stay” and national borders should be transformed into “privileged places of encounter”. Anyone who resisted, according to that logic, was a racist.

In 2023, the former editor of a Vatican newsletter insert, Lucetta Scaraffia, said that Francis “hates the values of the West” and was more interested in climate change than he was in condemning anti-Semitism or defending Christians from persecution around the globe. “He forgets that the West is the lone part of the world that’s tried, even in limited and insufficient ways, to realize the values of the Church”, she said.

The uncanny similarities between this outlook of Francis, an Argentinian, and that of Leo, whose career was spent in Peru, to the fictional Latin American pope in The Camp of the Saints is tragedy more than farce. Because if the Catholic Church cannot understand the problem that mass Third-World migration poses for Christendom, then the game — for Europe, at least — is surely up.

October 6, 2026

The insanity of the Kamloops Residential School allegations

Filed under: Cancon, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

For whatever reason, the Canadian government decided to not challenge the claims that 215 First Nations children had been buried in unmarked graves (media often changed that detail to a “mass grave”) at the former Kamloops Residential School in BC. On X, Tristin Hopper outlines the story as it was relayed to the public:

Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.

I still don’t think Canadians appreciate just how crazy the unmarked grave allegations at Kamloops were. So I tried to sum it up as best as I could …

The unmarked graves at Indian residential schools mentioned by the Truth and Reconciliation predominantly refer to students who died of disease, usually tuberculosis and usually before 1930. They were then buried in onsite cemeteries with wooden markers, with the result that the grave location was lost when the marker rotted away. When you hear about graves being excavated at IRS sites, it’s usually something like this.

The Kamloops 215, from the start, was an entirely different thing. It purported to provide evidence of an insane blood libel that the Catholic Church was secretly murdering Indigenous children en masse as late as the 1960s. The specific “knowing” was that staff were disappearing Kamloops Indian Residential School students and burying them in the school’s apple orchard in the middle of the night. This was despite the fact that nobody could actually name a specific student that had been disappeared in this fashion.

What Kamloops did was equivalent to claiming that we finally had physical evidence of the Satanic ritual abuse panic. So, think of it like a Canadian hospital publicly claiming that they’d found an onsite mass grave filled with babies murdered by Satanists in the 1980s.

Actual residential school deaths were employed as cover for an utterly bananas urban legend. And that’s why, in 2021, Canada was thrown into a profoundly destructive cultural revolution from which we may never recover.

September 29, 2026

QotD: Origins of modern Wicca

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the idea of witches cursing the moon has an ancient pedigree, dating all the way back to Greco-Roman antiquity and the literary trope of Thessalian witches who could pull the moon out of the heavens and down to earth. These ancient texts were part of the inspiration for Gerald Gardner’s mid-20th century creation of the “drawing down the moon” ritual, but where sources from the classical world implied that a witch could actually pluck the moon from the sky, in Gardner’s version a coven summons the divine personification of the moon to possess a priestess. Moreover, his creation of Wicca also drew extensively from freemasonry, the western ceremonial magic tradition, Crowleyian magic, Gardner’s own ethnographic observations in Southeast Asia — and, most important of all, the theories of James Frazer and Margaret Murray.

One thing that we can be confident that Wicca does not draw upon, however, is a goddess religion that survived the introduction of first the Indo-European *Dyḗus ph₂tḗr in the Bronze Age, and then the Semitic Jesus Christ in late antiquity, before being mostly suppressed in the “burning times” of the early modern era.1 Neo-pagans are not the (great-great-great …) granddaughters of the witches you didn’t burn in the 16th and 17th centuries; rather, they are the granddaughters of upper class romantics whose religious innovations in the early to mid-20th century are best characterized as “creative synthesis”.

Ronald Hutton’s Triumph of the Moon tells the story of the precursors, invention, and development of Wicca. Much of that history can be encapsulated in the mythic genealogy of “Black Annis”, an occasional pagan deity. There was a real medieval anchoress named Agnes Scott who served the church near Leicester and is buried at Swithland Church. She was venerated locally as a Christian saint, but following the Protestant Reformation was reconceptualized as an ogress. Then the 20th century crank archaeologist T.C. Lethbridge interpreted Black Annis as pagan survivalism of the “crone” aspect of the great mother goddess and a corruption of the Celtic goddess Anu. Finally, some modern neo-pagan communities were inspired by Lethbridge’s work to adopt veneration of Black Annis into their liturgy. As Hutton notes, “The gentle and pious Agnes seems therefore to have been turned first into a local saint, then into a local demon, next into a Celtic goddess, and finally into a witch goddess; and all the while her bones have rested in apparent peace at Swithland”.

The changing reputation of Agnes/Annis/Anu reflects a few processes that are common throughout much of the intellectual roots of neo-paganism. You start with the idiosyncratic cruftiness of medieval Catholicism, then Protestants derogate the cult of the saints, feast days, etc. as idolatrous — indeed, practically pagan. Fast forward to 1900, give or take a few decades, and an intellectual with dubious expertise projects pagan survivalism onto historical or ethnographic data. And then finally neo-pagans use the folklorist’s imagined version of the past as inspiration for a “revived” myth and liturgy.

Gabriel Rossman, “GUEST REVIEW: The Triumph of the Moon, by Ronald Hutton”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-12-01.

  1. The one aspect of this myth that might be true is a pre-Indo-European goddess religion. The idea that Stone Age female figurines like the Venus of Willendorf represent a goddess religion is plausible but unprovable, given that the figures predate writing by about 26,000 years and so we have no literary evidence to contextualize the archaeology. But even saying that the Neolithic goddess cult was possible but not settled fact, as archaeologist Peter Ucko did in the 1960s, was enough to upset Murray, who “sent Ucko a furious letter, informing him that he had no right to speak about the goddess, because he was, first, far too young, and, second, a man”. While there might have been widespread neolithic European goddess worship, all other aspects of the “Murray thesis” — the idea that witches executed circa the Protestant Reformation were practicing a pre-Christian goddess religion — are demonstrably false. Hutton notes the falsity of the Murray thesis incidentally in Triumph of the Moon and argues against it at length in his later book, The Witch.

September 28, 2026

“… if we provide no healthy path into adulthood, people will invent their own”

Filed under: Health, History, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison discusses the need for ceremonies or rites to signify the end of childhood and the entry into adult life … things that have almost completely disappeared in western culture over the last few decades:

I think modern society made a mistake when it assumed that getting rid of sacred rites would make people purely rational.

It didn’t.

Human beings still need thresholds, tests, stories, symbols and some clear sense that childhood has ended and adulthood has begun. We may no longer send young people into the wilderness for an initiation ordeal, but the psychological need to prove yourself, belong somewhere and become someone has not disappeared.

Traditional initiation rites were often harsh, sometimes brutally so, but they carried a clear message: your childhood identity is finished. You are now expected to accept duty, restraint, courage and responsibility.

Modern society is much less clear about that transition.

You can become legally adult at 18 while remaining psychologically dependent for years. There is often no agreed moment when society says: you are responsible now. Stop waiting to be rescued. Carry your own weight. Become useful to other people.

The danger is that the need for initiation does not disappear just because formal rituals disappear.

Young people invent substitutes.

Sometimes that becomes fraternity hazing, gangs, reckless behaviour, extreme risk-taking or ideological movements that offer belonging, enemies, heroes, rituals and moral certainty. Popular culture does something similar in a safer form. Star Wars, superhero stories, horror films and countless other myths repeat the ancient pattern: leave safety, enter chaos, face the monster, sacrifice something, return changed.

We keep telling these stories because they describe something real about human development.

The part I find most useful is that modern adulthood probably has to become more voluntary.

Nobody is going to drag most of us through a ceremonial rite and announce that childhood is over.

We have to do it ourselves.

Take responsibility before you feel completely ready. Accept obligations. Learn to tolerate discomfort. Become financially and emotionally useful. Care for somebody besides yourself. Face failure without retreating into nihilism. Test your beliefs against reality. Give up childish expectations that life should always be fair, comfortable or safe.

That is initiation stripped of superstition.

You enter difficulty voluntarily and come out carrying more responsibility than you carried before.

A mature society should probably find better ways of teaching that lesson, because if we provide no healthy path into adulthood, people will invent their own.

And some of those substitutes will be far worse than the rituals we thought we had outgrown.

September 19, 2026

QotD: Islam and the rise of Western hegemony

Filed under: History, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Governments across the Islamic world began to adopt constitutions that directly contradicted what Muslims had always believed was the perfect and eternal law given to them by God. Simultaneously, they began to sign up to international bodies that, despite their claims to neutrality, were shot through with the ideological assumptions of the West. The most significant of these was the United Nations, which in December 1948 issued a definitive statement of its guiding principles: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

This, which claimed in its preamble that acknowledgement of “the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”, was in reality not at all as “universal” as it affected to be. Standing recognisably in a line of descent from the proclamations of the French Revolution, it served as well as a repudiation of some of the more foundational assumptions of Islamic theodicy.

The concept of human rights was an alien one to Islam. Muslims, traditionally, had not believed in natural law. There were only laws authored by God. The insistence of United Nations agencies on “the antiquity and broad acceptance of the rights of man” derived, not from the great inheritance of the Sunnah, but from the philosophes of the 18th century. Tellingly, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had been signed — where else? — in Paris.

Western hegemony over the Islamic world, then, did not end with the collapse of direct rule over it by the European powers. Western values, Western assumptions, Western concepts of law, all of them packaged and marketed as “universal”, continued to exercise an overweening dominance in global affairs. If this was true for Muslims in lands that had sought to reconstitute themselves as nation states, then how much more so was it for Muslims who, in the decades that followed the Second World War, travelled to Europe, and settled there in growing numbers.

Tom Holland, “The age-old tension between Islam and France”, UnHerd, 2020-11-02.

September 16, 2026

Veterans of the GWOT “saw things with our own eyes that are hard for others to believe”

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Military, Politics, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Cynical Publius explains why some of the strongest opposition to Islamification comes from people who’ve seen Islamic culture up close in countries where it’s the majority religion:

Does this photo of Afghan men watching a young boy dance give you the creeps? It should.

Have you noticed that the community that is most vocal in warning about the Islamification of the USA is the GWOT veterans’ community?

That’s because we saw things with our own eyes that are hard for others to believe:

  1. The treatment of women as chattel property. Goats are treated better than daughters — no exaggeration.
  2. Widespread pedophilia and bestiality while at the same time people we call “LGBTQ+” in the West are subject to barbaric methods of execution.
  3. An absolute lack of freedom of religion.
  4. Wanton disregard for human life.
  5. Insanely paranoid antisemitism straight out of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
  6. Wholly corrupt governments; bribery as a uniform standard.
  7. Tribalism to an extreme: tribe trumps truth and justice, always.
  8. In the Gulf Arab countries, “Third Country Nationals” from poor Muslim countries engaged in menial labor and literally treated as slaves.
  9. Absolute confidence that Islam will violently conquer the rest of the world, and a belief that this is just and proper.
  10. Acceptance of the idea that lying can be and is necessary and proper.

These are not one-off observations; these are widespread norms that are easily observed and experienced in day-to-day life in any nation that accepts Sharia law. ALL OF THESE THINGS ARE COMMONPLACE. Having seen this stuff up close and personal across the entire Middle East, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa, American veterans have unwittingly become like the prophets of old, warning everyone else of the dangers we have seen that we never wish to see come ashore in America.

Yet somehow our voices are not being heard sufficiently, and we now see literal Communists wishing to import these evil practices to the USA en masse, as a path to their own power.

Guess what Commies? It’s the other way around, you are the ones being used and when the Green forces dispose of you Red forces, it’s not going to be pretty.

Wise up.

Update, 17 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

September 13, 2026

The Devils by Ken Russell

Filed under: Europe, France, History, Media, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

On her Substack, kulak explains why The Devils is the “greatest film of all time”:

What if the 1990s Berserk anime, Warhammer 40k, A Man for All Seasons, The Wickerman (1972), Cromwell, 1984, The Gulag Archipelago, the Rocky Horror Picture Show and the chronically underrated 2012 horror masterpiece Compliance … were all the same horrifying movie?

What if Mel Gibson made a film like Apocalypto, exploring the nightmarish depths of political/religious sacrifice rituals … But about Early-Modern Shakespeare-era Europe?

I’m constantly asked for my “Greatest Film of all Time” … A torturous question for someone who’s seen as many movies as me … And doubly torturous because maybe the best true answer is one its really hard to name:

Ken Russel’s The Devils might be it.

Certainly the best 30 Years War film ever made.
And the Greatest goth movie ever made.
And the Greatest witch hunt movie ever made.
And the Greatest “MeToo” movie ever made.
And the Greatest “insane asylum” movie ever made.
And CERTAINLY the Greatest Exorcist movie ever made.
Yes, I said that. And I mean it. Did I stutter?

And maybe the Greatest “Dark Fantasy” film ever made … Except for the fact that the whole thing is true.

And its being rereleased, the full remastered director’s cut in 4K, this October in Cinemas.

(The strobe effect is only in the trailer)

Ken Russel’s The Devil, adapted from Aldous Huxley’s book The Devils of Loudon and the play The Devils by Dan Whiting, is one of my top five films of all time. And certainly one of the biggest films of all time in it’s own weird way. It does things as impressive for the spiritual, psychological horrifying, and historical on film as Sergei Bonderchuk’s Waterloo does for warfare or Akira for Scifi and Animation.

Indeed I think I might be the only one who could give that answer, given I might be one of like 10 people who know 17th Century History/Literature and obscure extreme Horror Cinema well enough to INSIST on its OVERWHELMING historical accuracy.

Indeed I’d struggle to think of a film which captures the Insane deadly hypersexual kaleidoscopic character of the 17th century better.

I’ve been doing this a lot recently … But I feel I need to lay out my qualifications here to talk about this … My two areas of focus in university were 17th and 18th century English Literature (Shakespeare through to Jane Austin), and 17th and 18th century Political theory (specifically the works of Hobbes, Locke, Hugo Grotius and other natural law theorists … Yes, I took the BoomerCons seriously when they said natural law was the basis of our society, Like an idiot) … I’m by no means an expert, but the broad flavor of this era: Culturally, religiously, politically, historically, militarily, theoretically, theologically, poetically … Was what I immersed myself in during the years when I should have been drinking and partying more and repeating nonsense to people in power, and other things that actually advance your career.

I need to establish that off the bat because I feel as if a huge part of the reason this film is not regarded as a contender for “Greatest film ever made” is the simply the fact that audiences and critics do not believe it, and certainly do not GET it.

That it is SO Bizarre, and SO weird, and SO horrifyingly violent, and SO hypersexual, and SO saturated in its colors, and SO religiously discordant … That it has to be a bizarre psychedelic hellscape of Ken Russel’s perverse drug-addled imagination …

They especially had to think this because if they accepted that it was indeed historically accurate, and not a bizarre sexual/psychedelic story of the American 1960s and 70s reading themselves back into history … Suddenly they’d have to accept that the same thing done to Loudon in 1634 was what was being done to America in the middle of the 20th century, and has been done to the west more or less ever since …

That the yo-yo between state-enforced debauchery one the one hand, and moral panic witch-hunts on the other, is not a schizophrenic attribute of mass media or “Moral Progress” or American Culture … But a highly historically precedented and calculated attack meant to destroy and enslave a people without fighting them.

That “Free Love”, “Feminist Criticism”, “Queer Theory”, “No Fault Divorce”, and “Hostile Work Environment lawsuits” rock society between the extremes of sexual license and socio-sexual moral-panic for the same reason one might rapidly rock a boat between it’s port and starboard sides … To capsize it into the devouring abyss.

That we are indeed living through Loudon at scale.

August 30, 2026

The unspoken dividing line between “BCE” and “CE”

Filed under: History, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’m not a trained historian, so I don’t know if it’s a guild requirement for modern historians to ostentatiously avoid using traditional “BC” and “AD” to denote historical dates or if it’s just another sop to the easily offended like so many other things:

An Olmec head, By Marshall Astor (Life on the Edge), CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19349056

Although I work primarily as a computer programmer, my college degree is in History. Over the years, I have retained a high level of interest in history, both recent and ancient.

A few months ago I listened to a Great Courses presentation about the Olmecs — one of the lesser known Central American civilizations — given by Dr. Ed Barnhart. The course lived up to its name and taught much about the history and society, as well as the giant heads, of the Olmecs. However, one thing bothered me about Dr. Barnhart’s presentation.

Dr. Barnhart generally uses CE and BCE for dates. CE stands for “common era” and BCE stands for “before common era”. Other than that fact, CE perfectly coincides with the previous AD and BCE perfectly coincides with BC.

Perhaps Dr. Barnhart should not be singled out. He is not alone in the use of these terms. In fact, the majority of historical presentations these days employ CE and BCE. And it may be that using these terms is not a personal decision; rather, it may be that a department-wide or even university-wide convention.

However, in my view, using CE and BCE instead of AD and BC is not okay. As an (amateur) historian, I believe that it’s bad for history. And as a Christian, I find it a bit offensive. I will probably never have the opportunity to tell Dr. Barnhart why he should not use CE/BCE, but if I did, here’s what I would tell him:

1) The prime commitment of a historian should be to history. A historian should be careful that the information presented is the most accurate, the most complete, and most contextually grounded. CE/BCE fails to be most accurate because it takes an obviously true historical fact — that the currently used Julian/Gregorian calendar is based on the birth of Christ — and obscures that fact. It is not the most complete because there is no way on its own to understand that CE/BCE means to present the same system as AD/BC. To truly understand the system, the AD/BC system would need to be explained. The AD/BC system can stand on its own, but the CE/BCE can only be understood along with AD/BC.

And it lacks context because the terms “common era” and “before common era” give no indication as to what exactly is the demarcation between the two eras. Since CE/BCE gives no referent, a student could reasonably conclude that the dating system is entirely arbitrary. For these reasons, using CE/BCE leaves students or listeners knowing less than they should and perhaps even having a wrong understanding of the dating system. AD/BC preserves important historical information. CE/BCE does not. On the basis of that alone, CE/BCE should not be used by historians who want to be as accurate and complete as possible.

2) Using AD/BC does not require anyone to profess Christianity. Some might say that AD/BC unfairly burdens non-Christians, but the terms Anno Domini and Before Christ are clearly not confessional statements. There is no serious historical dispute that Jesus Christ existed in approximately the time and place given in the Scriptures, and AD/BC merely recognizes that this is the basis for the year numbering system. Anno Domini, or year of the Lord, doesn’t require the user to say “my Lord” or otherwise confess Christianity, just to recognize that the calendar was created by people who did confess Christianity. That is an important fact, not something to be hidden.

The fact is that every calendar starts dating from something, generally from an important event. Some examples are:

  • Roman dating: years counted from the traditional founding of Rome, Ab Urbe Condita, conventionally placed in 753 BC.
  • Hebrew calendar: years are traditionally counted from a calculated date for the creation of the world.
  • Islamic calendar: years are counted from the Hijra, Muhammad’s journey from Mecca to Medina in AD 622.
  • French Republican calendar: years were counted from the establishment of the French Republic in AD 1792.

To use a particular calendar says nothing about one’s religious beliefs.

August 21, 2026

QotD: The Amish

Filed under: Books, History, Quotations, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The Amish have their historical roots in the Swiss Anabaptists, a Radical Reformation movement who believed in adult baptism, pacifism, and total separation of church and state. (Unsurprisingly, the Anabaptists were bloodily persecuted by both Catholic and Protestant rulers for their refusal to accept conscription, swear oaths, or pay taxes.) And then in 1693 the Anabaptists had a schism, as Protestant sects are wont to do, over the question of how to deal with excommunicated members: one side of the argument, led by Jakob Ammann, advocated not just for exclusion from communion but for total shunning in everyday life. When he lost, he and his followers split off, and their branch was known after him as the Amish. Many of these early Amish joined the broader wave of German immigration to the United States, with five hundred settling in Pennsylvania in the 1700s and a larger group arriving in the early 1800s. Those who remained in Europe were eventually absorbed into other Anabaptist and Protestant denominations, but on the American frontier the Amish maintained their cultural identity: alone among the German immigrant groups, they still speak Pennsilfaanisch-Deitsch, or “Pennsylvania Dutch”, a dialect derived from Palatine German. (They mostly also speak English, and their church services are conducted in standard High German.)

The basic organizational unit of Amish society — after the extended family, which is vital and often includes three generations under one roof — is the “church district”, a community of twenty-five to forty families who live within a short buggy-ride of one another. The leaders of the district are chosen by lot from among the married men, and each is governed by an Ordnung, an unwritten set of rules laying down expectations for behavior. It’s this Ordnung that contains the restrictions on technology and lifestyle that we typically associate with the Amish, covering everything from what color you can paint your barn (one group insists on red because white would be too worldly) to whether you can use mechanical milking machines. The church revisits their Ordnung every six months or so to see if it needs updating — one group had originally approved walkie-talkies for communication while hunting, but then discovered boys were using them to flirt with girls and decided to ban them. Church districts with similar Ordnungs are “in fellowship”, and a cluster of districts in full fellowship with one another are an “affiliation”. (A “settlement”, like the Holmes County Settlement, is a cluster of geographically contiguous districts regardless of affiliation.)

Importantly, few of these restrictions are based on the idea that the banned technology or behavior is wrong in and of itself: for instance, every Ordnung forbids a baptized Amish adult to own a car, but boys from some Amish families have cars for a while in their teens and all but the most conservative affiliations will pay someone else to drive them if they need to go farther than their buggy can take them. Or to put it another way, nobody thinks the English are bad people for driving cars — they just think we’re not Amish.

So if an Ordnung mostly isn’t meant to keep you from doing intrinsically evil things, like murder and adultery and blasphemy, what is it for? How do you decide what to allow? What are you optimizing for when you design it?

Two things, mainly, though they’re not neatly separated. The first and most important role of the Ordnung is engendering the virtue the Amish call Gelassenheit. There’s not a perfect English translation for the German,1 but Hurst and McConnell describe it as a spirit of “selflessness, humility, or meekness”, a subordination of self to community. Amish scholar2 Donald Kraybill wrote that Gelassenheit is meant to develop a “yielded self” that “stands in contrast to the bold, aggressive individualism of modern [English] culture”. Thinking too highly of yourself, or trying to outdo others, are failures of Gelassenheit, but they’re hard to avoid when you have to market your personal #brand or compete in the marketplace. Unmechanized agriculture, on the other hand, was very good at nurturing Gelassenheit: a farmer is necessarily aware of his dependence on natural forces beyond his control, which keeps him humble. Nowadays the Amish worry that shifts way from their traditional lifestyle will “foster the notion that the worker controls his or her work and life”, which might “breed an attitude of self-sufficiency, even arrogance” that is antithetical to their values.

The concern for Gelassenheit shows up particularly in Amish approaches to childrearing. Where English society values self-expression, intellectual curiosity, and individual accomplishment, Amish parents rank obedience and self-control as the most desirable qualities in children. (More than half of the parents the authors surveyed put “being interested in how and why things happen” at the bottom of their list.) They also report that teachers at Amish schools tend to be “preoccupied (to our eyes) with minor aspects of misbehavior that signaled nonparticipation in the group or lack of obedience to authority”. All of this carries through into the workplace, too: the Amish generally think white collar workers are “out to make the big bucks” and that their jobs are be difficult or impossible to undertake with a “meek spirit”. So if you can’t farm (and increasingly you can’t), the Amish think your work should be something near home that uses your hands, allows your family to participate, and contributes directly to your community. No arguments here that building dashboards to give executives deeper insight into critical business functions leads to the more efficient allocation of global capital and lifts all boats; they want you to make food or furniture or something.

The Ordnung‘s second goal is to separate believers from the broader world. This is partly a legacy of the Anabaptist experience of persecution, partly a response to Biblical passages like Romans 12:2’s warning not to “be conformed to this world”, and partly a protective measure against a world that isn’t interested in Gelassenheit, but the dualism between Amish and “English” is a vital part of what it means to be Amish. Of course, it’s impossible to clearly differentiate between things that promote a particular mindset/virtue and things that mark you out as different: the distinctive Amish “plain dress“, for instance, both limits opportunities for vanity and marks out the wearer as, well, kind of a weirdo. (There’s sometimes also a sub-goal of separation from other Amish affiliations — one Amish man is quoted saying, “The only reason the Old Order doesn’t have rubber wheels [on their buggies] is because the New Order did it first”.)

Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: An Amish Paradox, by Charles E. Hurst and David L. McConnell”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-12-15.

  1. And they mean something different by it than Heidegger does!
  2. Okay, this one is a Mennonite scholar of the Amish.
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