The American, in other words, thinks that the sinner has no rights that any one is bound to respect, and he is prone to mistake an unsupported charge of sinning, provided it be made violently enough, for actual proof and confession.
H.L. Mencken, “Puritanism As a Literary Force”, A Book of Prefaces, 1917.
August 15, 2025
QotD: American Puritanism
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August 2, 2025
QotD: The path to salvation
The following is not a theological argument, it’s an observation about human nature: Both faith and works are necessary, because by their fruits ye shall know them. If one has faith, then the works will follow — naturally, as it were. But works without faith are mere mumbo-jumbo, no different than the crudest magic spell. The kind of guy who does what David French does — performs the works solely to be seen performing the works — is what Jesus called a “whited sepulcher”, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.
Again, you don’t have to be a Biblical scholar to observe that Jesus commanded what the parlance our times calls “tough love”. Just as you can’t save a sinner by taking away all his opportunities to sin — we are ALL guilty; we are ALL fallen; that alone is sufficient to damn us — so you can’t “save” a drunk, or an illegal alien, or a criminal, or whatever by enabling his lifestyle. The reason I’m not in church today is because the church is exactly like that gaggle of Karens in Starbucks — they talk a good game about renouncing the wiles of this world, but they bend over backwards to enable every possible social dysfunction.
No, Jesus did NOT command us to patch up the gutter addict every time he OD’s, so that he can go out and OD again. He did NOT command us to provide all kinds of food and shelter and medical care to every Squatemalan who broke the very first American law he had the opportunity to break by coming here. No, He did NOT command us to tolerate deviance — there are two clauses in “love the sinner, hate the sin”, and we must obey both.
The only route to salvation starts by admitting that everyone is fallen. You can take that in whatever sense you like, because it’s not theology, it’s just an obvious fact about human nature. Alas, it’s one you have to learn by age 12, or you’ll never learn it at all. That’s the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled.
Severian, “On Being Bad”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-12.
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July 27, 2025
I’m sure I would never have heard of Sean Feucht until they tried to silence him
It’s hard to believe how Canadian municipal and provincial authorities deal so gently with disruptive pro-Hamas protests that regularly threaten the lives and property of Canadian Jews compared with the positively authoritarian way they are reacting to “MAGA” Christian performer Sean Feucht‘s concerts:
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July 24, 2025
When tolerance becomes a fatal flaw
At The Crescent and the Guillotine, Paul Friesen explains why too much tolerance leads to the eventual collapse of social order and perhaps even the culture itself:
It is difficult to know what people are thinking when they endorse the importation of people who want to kill them for their lifestyle choices.
It was Karl Popper who warned that a tolerant society must be intolerant of intolerance, or it would cease to be tolerant at all.1 A delicious paradox, too often quoted and too rarely heeded. For we have taken the first half of the dictum — the imperative to tolerate — and chiseled it into law, into policy, into university mission statements and NGO pamphlets. But the second half — the requirement to draw a line, to say “no further” — has been treated like garlic in a vampire movie: an antique, anathema, unfashionable.
And so, the paradox has become pathology.
Our courts allow sharia arbitration councils to function in British cities, adjudicating matters of family and inheritance with standards that would make a 12th-century canon lawyer flinch. Our schools include faith-based curricula that require hijabs for seven-year-olds and teach that homosexuality is satanic filth. Our public broadcasters will air a documentary about the importance of free speech, followed immediately by a segment about why cartoons of Muhammad are “unhelpful”.
This is not multiculturalism. It is masochism. It is the belief that liberalism must be so open-minded that its own brains are spilled onto the prayer mat. It is the fetishization of identity at the expense of liberty. It is the ideological pacifism of a society too terrified to assert its own values, lest it be accused of “racism” by those who mistake ideology for ethnicity.
We have enshrined the rights of the theocrat while criminalizing the instincts of the secularist. The result is not harmony — it is humiliation.
[…]
The West’s greatest achievement is not democracy, nor capitalism, nor even the separation of powers. It is the separation of truth from tribalism — the idea that individuals are not to be judged by their creeds, but by their conduct. That women are not property. That speech is not violence. That blasphemy is a right, not a crime.
These are not Western values. They are universal values, discovered in the West by accident of history and preserved through blood, rebellion, and satire. They are the principles that allowed Jews, heretics, atheists, and apostates to live not just safely, but freely. And they are now under threat — from within.
The real problem is not Islam. It is the Western inability to demand anything of those who import their gods and their grievances into liberal society. We treat every imported superstition as sacrosanct and every local tradition as suspect. We require ex-Muslims to whisper their fears while we amplify the complaints of veiled Islamists who denounce our culture from our own podiums.
We are not being pluralistic. We are being duped.
And the cost of this self-deception is measured not just in freedoms surrendered, but in lives lost.
Lives like that of Yameen Rasheed, the secular Maldivian blogger who thought he could use satire to push back against theocracy — stabbed to death in his own hallway. Lives like that of Farkhunda Malikzada, beaten and burned in the streets of Kabul by a mob of men — because someone thought she burned a Qur’an. Lives like that of Samuel Paty, beheaded outside a French school by a refugee he welcomed — because he dared to show a cartoon in a civics class.
These are not random tragedies. They are the predictable outcomes of an ideological toxin given immunity in the bloodstream of liberal society.
What do all these victims have in common? They did not die at the hands of misunderstood minorities or “oppressed voices” who simply needed better integration programs. They died at the hands of men who were indoctrinated — sometimes abroad, often at home — with the idea that God’s honor is more valuable than human life, and that dissent is not to be debated but extinguished.
And more damning still: they died in environments that should have protected them. Environments that instead prioritized sensitivity over security, dialogue over clarity, understanding over justice. Environments where the ever-watchful eye of diversity officers and DEI consultants was trained, not on the assailants, but on the tone of the victims.
We have created a culture where courage is pathologized, clarity is punished, and moral equivalence is the new orthodoxy. When Islamist mobs swarm the streets chanting slogans that would make the Inquisition blush, we are told to “listen to their anger”. When feminists protest the veiling of children, they are told to “respect cultural differences”. When Jews complain about chants of “From the River to the Sea”, they are informed that they are “overreacting”, “weaponizing trauma”, or — most insultingly of all — “confusing Zionism with antisemitism”.
This is not inclusivity. It is assisted suicide.
1. I refer here to Karl Popper’s 1945 work The Open Society and Its Enemies, specifically in Volume 1: The Spell of Plato, Note 4 to Chapter 7. Here’s the relevant passage, paraphrased for clarity:
“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant … then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”
Popper argues that a tolerant society has the right — not to suppress opinions — but to defend itself against those who would destroy tolerance itself, especially if such groups refuse to engage in rational discourse and instead promote violence or coercion. It’s often called “the paradox of tolerance“.
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July 18, 2025
QotD: Christianity destroyed the ancient Graeco-Roman culture
Consider celibacy: Fustel de Coulanges examines several ancient legal codes and finds that in all of them the deliberate refusal to procreate was a crime that carried severe punishments. This makes total sense in light of all you’ve said — a man does not belong to himself, he belongs to his family, a diachronic (or transtemporal?) entity that lives in and through and above individuals. Deliberate celibacy would be like your hand or your kidney refusing to perform its assigned function and trying to murder you instead. Cancer, in other words. And the solution to cancer is to cut it out and destroy it.
Now imagine a religion praising cancer and vaunting the tumor as the highest form of biological life, and maybe we can feel a sliver of the horror that the ancients must have felt towards Christianity. And it wasn’t just celibacy either — in area after area Christianity emancipated individuals from the dense, ancient web of obligations, loyalties, and client-patron relationships. Loyalty to the city and loyalty to the family were both such incomparably important qualities for the ancients that Sophocles got several tragedies out of the collisions when they came into conflict, but Christianity in its most radical form says that both are ephemeral and contingent, and must be subordinated to a higher loyalty — fidelity to the Truth. To the ancients I bet this didn’t just seem like antisocial behavior, I bet it seemed like the apocalypse. No wonder there were so many martyrs. No wonder so many of them were martyred by their closest relations.
I’m almost tempted to say that that old snake Gibbon was right, it was Christianity that destroyed the Roman Empire, destroyed the entire ancient Mediterranean civilization that had lasted for a millennium or more, first bit-by-bit then all at once. But of course that isn’t quite right either. By the time Pentecost occurred, the dissolution was already well underway. Christianity massively accelerated a process that was inexorable by then, and changed the shape of what was to come after it, but the collapse was baked in.
Read any of the Roman authors from either shortly before or shortly after the Lord’s birth — Virgil, Cicero, Pliny, Suetonius — all of them, in one way or another, are obsessed with the unraveling of the matrix of tribal and familial relationships that Fustel de Coulanges describes. There were a lot of reasons for it, including but not limited to: mass migration to the cities, economic rationalization that replaced freehold farming with massive latifundia (plantations), and just the accumulated stresses from centuries of continuous warfare and expansion. The cumulative effect of all this was that a society formerly governed by ritual, familial and civic piety, tribe, and clan was transformed into an ocean of atomized and deracinated individuals engaging in mass politics.1
One of my favorite passages in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall2 is in the intro to the chapter on Alaric’s invasion of Italy. Gibbon contrasts this with Hannibal’s invasion 700 years earlier, and goes on this beautiful riff about how on paper, the Rome of the 5th century AD looks incomparably stronger than that of the 3rd century BC — it had a massively larger population, greater wealth, a greater technological edge over its opponents, etc. And yet when it came to a responsibility as basic as that of defense against a foreign invasion, all the GDP and technology in the world wasn’t able to make up for a lack of asabiyyah. When Hannibal annihilated the legions at the Battle of Cannae, something like 20% of the entire adult male population of Rome was killed, including most of her military and political leadership, to which the Romans simply gritted their teeth and raised a few more armies. The descendants of those heroes, despite having a vastly larger population to draw from, weren’t able to muster a single legion or a single capable commander, and surrendered their city to the Visigoths almost without a fight.
Rome was a rocket that soared into the sky and then came crashing back down, and it’s easiest to see it right at the apogee, the point midway between the first and the last great invasions of Italy. The first century glory days of Rome, the time that we moderns consider the height of her power, were actually a moment of deep institutional and social decay. Like an exothermic reaction — a bonfire or an explosion or a fireworks display — what we notice immediately is the ebullient, magnificent blaze. But it’s easier to miss all the fuel that’s being consumed: solidarity, economic resilience, social technology, all of it woven through with the tight bands of ancient law and custom that Fustel de Coulanges documents. Just as the Greek philosophy we love was an uncharacteristic flash in the pan, an evanescent moment that subverted and destroyed the culture that had given rise to it; so too the Roman imperial achievement was an engine fueled by a society and a citizen-soldiery that it quickly burned to cinders.
I wonder if every civilizational golden age would turn out to have this unsustainable character if you inspected it closely. If so it would explain a historical mystery, which is why these epochs are rare, and why they never last long. From this angle history looks a bit like a 2-stage cyclic phenomenon wherein the long “dark ages” are actually epochs of patient stewardship of economic, cultural, and demographic resources, whilst the short “golden ages” are a kind of manic civilizational fire sale of the accumulated inheritance. Maybe we need a new historiography founded on the idea that what we have heretofore considered dark ages are the true golden ages, and vice versa. This transvaluation of values would be like a temporal version of James Scott’s attempted reversal of civilization and barbarism.
Alas, while peasants could vote with their feet and migrate across the imperial frontier, our options for time travel are a bit more limited. Would we prefer to live in the cozy but constricting deep prehistory of a civilization, or in the wild glory of its last days? No doubt it would depend a lot on who we imagine being in each of these phases, but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter, because we don’t have a choice. May as well sit back and enjoy watching the blaze. It will be beautiful and exhilarating while it lasts.
Jane and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: The Ancient City, by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-02-20.
1. If this sounds familiar, it should. Whenever I read about first century Rome I always come away with a weirdly twentieth century vibe.
2. Yes, I’ve read the whole thing cover-to-cover. What? Why are you looking at me like that? There was a pandemic happening, okay?
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July 15, 2025
American (religious) exceptionalism
Christianity has been in retreat across the western world for decades, with the United States being the laggard in abandoning the faith. Canada is closer to the western European rate of secularization. On Substack, Fortissax explains why it has become uncommon to find a believing Christian outside the US in response to a query on X about people turning to various neopagan faiths:
First, I believe there are two factors at play. One is the divide between the United States and the rest of the Western world. The United States still has the highest percentage of weekly churchgoers in the West, at around 24 percent. In the U.S., Christianity remains a living tradition. Millions still attend church, or at least try to. Many people share a common faith, believe in God, and are familiar with Christian references in public life, politics, and law. In contrast, in countries like Canada and much of Europe, regular church attendance is closer to 5 percent. That number often includes recent immigrants who tend to be more socially conservative. Among native-born Canadians and Europeans, especially in urban areas, church attendance is even lower. Religion in these places is often kept alive only by older or rural populations. Among the youth, it has largely faded. Second, many Western countries have experienced secularization for much longer.
I believe this first one is not obvious to a majority of people. There are significant cultural differences and experiences within in the United States and outside of it. I believe it would be appropriate to say that the U.S. is still a Christian country, and not just nominally, regardless of whether or not it was established on Lockean principles and Greco-Romain inspiration (some would say revision), of the liberal enlightenment. Sure, the faith is not what it used to be, but probably the majority of Americans at least understand Christian references in common parlance.
I can share a personal anecdote that I believe is fairly typical.
I was born and raised in a region where Christianity had long disappeared from everyday life, following a slow process of state secularization. My great-grandfather was Catholic, but he changed denominations to marry my great-grandmother in the 1930s. It was a utilitarian choice. He believed in God but didn’t care for the petty tyrannies of ethnic and cultural association by denomination. His son, my grandfather, saw hypocrisy in both Catholic and Protestant institutions. As a boy, he was told he could not be friends with a Protestant by a the Catholic priest of his best friend, and he was kicked out of the house by his mother for attending Catholic mass with his girlfriend, even though his father had once been Catholic. My parents were irreligious agnostics. They were not hostile to Christianity, just indifferent, because they were not raised in it. As for me, I grew up in a post-liberal, post-Christian society. I believe in the divine and understand the importance of religion to civilization, but I have no living connection to what came before. In my country of Canada and among my people, Christianity is no longer part of the cultural fabric. I believe this to be the case in Western Europe as well.
There is a common joke that if someone likes paganism so much, they should try the most pagan tradition of all: converting to Christianity. But the unfortunate reality is that secular liberalism has exercised a longer and deeper influence in the modern West than many realize. In response, one could just as easily say that the most Christian tradition of all is converting to secular liberalism, which has formally shaped the cultural and institutional framework of the West for more than 275 years.
For people raised in multi-generational secularized liberal contexts, there is nothing to return to. Christianity is not a living tradition. They cannot come home to Jesus the way many Americans still can, and they cannot undo the liberal Enlightenment. They can only move forward through it. At best, something new might be reinterpreted or reformed from its remnants. But Christianity was never part of their lived experience. It was not seen, heard, or practiced. Churches were never attended. Christmas and Easter functioned as civic holidays focused on family rather than faith. Christianity resembled a historical artifact, something like a beautiful mantelpiece in an old house. It had aesthetic and historical value, but no emotional, cultural, or spiritual presence. This situation is common in much of the non-American West.
This is why many contemporary efforts at Christian revival often feel disconnected. They are built on the assumption that secular individuals are lapsed believers who simply need to be reminded of what they once knew. But these individuals are not returning exiles. They are cultural natives of a secular world. They did not lose the faith, it was never given to them. There were no prayers at the dinner table, no hymns embedded in childhood memory, no sacred calendar shaping the flow of life. Organized religion belonged to the past, replaced with secular civic cults they’re largely unaware of. It was something other people had, something no longer meant for them. This group is not necessarily hostile to Christianity. In many cases, they admire it. They recognize its role in shaping art, architecture, law, and moral tradition. When foreigners attack these, they defend them. They understand its civilizational significance. But the faith speaks a language they do not understand. Its metaphors do not resonate. Its moral claims appear without context. Its stories feel distant.
A useful comparison can be found in the Heliand, a ninth-century Old Saxon gospel poem that re-imagined the life of Christ using the language and imagination of Germanic warrior culture. In that version, Christ is not a wandering teacher from a distant land, but a noble chieftain surrounded by loyal retainers. His mission is framed in terms of honor, loyalty, kinship, fealty, and sacred duty. The gospel message is not altered in its substance, but it is reshaped so that it resonates with the values, social structures, and poetic traditions of a people for whom neither Scripture nor Roman religious order had any living relevance.
This work was part of a broader process of the Germanization of Christianity, a phenomenon that has been studied in detail by scholars like James C. Russell and Fr. G. Ronald Murphy, SJ. Russell, in The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, argues that the conversion of the Germanic peoples did not consist merely in the passive reception of Christian doctrine, but in a complex synthesis between Germanic folk-religious consciousness and Christian metaphysics. The resulting Christianities of the early medieval West were distinct, rooted in local mythic frameworks, and expressed through tribal loyalty, sacrificial kingship, and heroic virtue. Murphy, in works such as The Heliand: The Saxon Gospel, explores how the Heliand uses alliteration, formulaic verse, and martial imagery to make Christ intelligible to a newly converted warrior society. He shows how the gospel was not just translated into the Saxon tongue, but into the Saxon soul.
This is the historical precedent that today’s Church must study carefully. The peoples of early medieval Europe were not apostates. They were unbaptized, uncatechized, and culturally alien to Christianity. They were brought into the faith through through cultural immersion. Christianity did not ask them to surrender their world entirely. It entered their world, dignified their heroic values, and redirected them toward the divine. Only then did conversion become possible.
Even those outside the Church understand that this work is urgent. The crisis of meaning in secular liberal societies is visible. The desire for transcendence, rootedness, and spiritual structure has not disappeared. It has been redirected into political identity, consumer behavior, and digital escapism.
If Christianity is to succeed, the same kind of work is needed today. Christianity must once again become a missionary faith. This time, the mission field is not a remote foreign land, but the secularized cities and postmodern suburbs of the Western world. The people being addressed are cultural outsiders. Many were born into environments where the gospel was never lived, never spoken, never embodied. Christianity was not abandoned. It was never truly encountered.
A future for Christianity in the West will not be built on appeals to lost memory or civilizational guilt. It will not be recovered through progressive accommodation or through aesthetic traditionalism that treats churches, vestments, and relics as ornaments of cultural decline. It will only re-emerge through an act of deep cultural translation. That act must begin with an honest assessment of what has been lost, and a willingness to reframe the sacred in terms that can again be understood.
The alternative is a continued descent into spiritual confusion and civilizational forgetfulness. Christianity may continue to grow in the Global South. It may endure as a global religion. But in the West, it will only live again if it learns how to speak, once more, to those who were never taught how to listen.
Looking in from the outside, it seems to me that the majority of Christian priests and ministers have already made their peace with the inevitable extinction of their faith and far too many of them are actively working toward that end. Feminist and progressive currents move far more local Christian leaders than the message of the faith itself, hence any hopes of western Christianity reforging itself depend on a tiny minority of the clergy.
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July 14, 2025
Emperor Hadrian and Antinous the God
Reginald Godwyn reviews a new monograph from Dr. Sean Gabb:
Sean Gabb’s The Cult of Antinous is not a hagiography. It is something better: a quiet, erudite demolition of pious lies from both the ancient and modern world. The lecture-turned-book is a brisk, sardonic tour through the most decadent cult of the Roman world, and one of its most effective. The boy died, yes — but what followed was a miracle of political opportunism and spiritual success. Gabb does not flinch from the disturbing parts. Nor does he genuflect before the fashionably uncritical idolatry now surrounding Antinous as gay icon. This is not a work of celebration. It is a work of historical thought, dressed as a lecture and sharpened with scepticism.
It begins, as it must, with a photograph of Hadrian and Antinous — stone fragments now housed in the British Museum, staring out from beneath museum glass and centuries of self-serving speculation. “Hadrian is on the left”, Gabb says, “Antinous on the right”. But from then on, it is the boy — not the emperor — who takes centre stage. The story is simple enough. Antinous was a Bithynian youth, met Hadrian at around age twelve, became his lover, travelled with him, and died in the Nile under suspicious circumstances. Hadrian made him a god. Cities were built. Statues were raised. Coins were minted. Shrines were erected. And the worship spread quickly and widely—and in ways that make some modern historians uncomfortable.
Gabb’s treatment of all this is not exactly kind, but it is always fair. He reminds us that, when it comes to Antinous, we know almost nothing. The written sources are sparse: Dio Cassius gives a few lines; the Historia Augusta offers rumour. Most of what we “know” is based on “could have”, “may have”, “might have”. And yet on this we have built dissertations, operas, novels, and now neopagan blogs filled with inverted pentagrams and airbrushed torsos. Gabb is not impressed. His repeated refrain is “castle of supposition”. And rightly so. Royston Lambert, he notes, was especially fond of these castles.
But for all that, there is a real story here. Gabb walks us through the ancient views of sex, pausing only to make the necessary disclaimer for his mixed audience of Chinese undergraduates and English middle class language students:
Please be aware that other civilisations frequently have or had views of sexual propriety different from our own. This lecture will discuss, and sometimes show depictions of, sexual relationships between adults and persons somewhat below the present age of consent. Some of these relationships involve disparities of legal status. Though not recommended for imitation in modern England, such relationships are nowhere explicitly condemned. The lecture will also not avoid language that many may consider indelicate or obscene.
What follows is a lesson in ancient sexual economics. Among Greeks, boy-love was structured: older men pursued beautiful adolescent boys, usually between 12 and 17, who were supposed to receive but not enjoy. The Romans were less sentimental: they cared only who did the penetrating. “To use was fine. To be used was shameful.” Gabb’s phrasing here is withering, but accurate. There is no anachronistic moralising — just the dry, clinical reconstruction of a culture with different priorities.
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July 12, 2025
G.K. Chesterton on the dangers of cultural surrender
Andrew Doyle on Chesterton’s novel The Flying Inn (1914) which warned against the risks of unfettered immigration and what came to be known as “multiculturalism”:
The creed of multiculturalism has made it difficult to discuss the impact of unfettered immigration. The far right have always opposed it on the basis of racial prejudice and ethno-jingoism. Yet there are authentically liberal concerns to be raised about the problem of political Islam and how all discussions are stifled through accusations of “Islamophobia”. What happens when an essentially anti-democratic ideology is allowed to flourish within a society that otherwise depends upon democratic norms?
To help illuminate the troubles of our time, and in particular the perverted form of liberalism that ensures its own undoing, we might return to G. K. Chesterton’s The Flying Inn (1914), a whimsical novel about a future Islamic England. With today’s proliferation of sharia courts and the government’s determination to criminalise blasphemy against Islam by legislative stealth, one might call Chesterton’s novel prescient.
The key figure is Lord Ivywood, a politician who becomes enamoured of Misysra Ammon, an Islamic cleric who styles himself as the “Prophet of the Moon”. Ivywood is an exemplar of the zealotry of the progressive reformer, a prototype of the virtue-signaller, one who “did not care for dogs” but “cared for the Cause of Dogs”. He first introduces Ammon at a private event at the “Society of Simple Souls”, where he is able to preach his creed to the gullible bons vivants of the upper middle-class. The collective thrill of the crowd is pure orientalism, and they are easily mesmerised by Ivywood’s panegyrics.
Inevitably, Ivywood’s submission to Islam is framed in syncretic terms; not so much surrender as a beautiful fusion. “The East and the West are one”, Ivywood says. “The East is no longer East nor the West West; for a small isthmus has been broken, and the Atlantic and Pacific are a single sea.” Islam, he claims, is the “religion of progress”, a phrase that anticipates today’s oft-echoed slogan of Islam as the “religion of peace”.
This kind of doublespeak is ubiquitous among those activists who routinely strive to force the square peg of Islamic doctrine into the round hole of woke politics. This is exemplified by articles such as “Prophet Muhammed was an intersectional feminist” in Muslim Girl magazine, a piece that includes the inane claim that the founder of the religion “wanted to generate as much inclusivity as possible”. In similarly convoluted terms, Ammon in The Flying Inn argues that there is nothing more feminist than a harem. “What is the common objection our worthy enemies make against our polygamy?” he asks. “That it is disdainful of the womanhood. But how can this be so, my friends, when it allows the womanhood to be present in so large numbers?”
Today’s readers will recognise Chesterton’s depiction of the tendency of liberal politicians to kowtow to the demands of Islamic clerics in a bid to avoid causing offence. At one point, Ivywood explains that he has tabled the “Ballot Paper Amendment Act” in parliament to allow citizens to vote with a mark resembling a crescent rather than the traditional cross.
If we are to give Moslem Britain representative government, we must not make the mistake we made about the Hindoos and military organization — which led to the Mutiny. We must not ask them to make a cross on their ballot papers; for though it seems a small thing, it may offend them. So I brought in a little bill to make it optional between the old-fashioned cross and an upward curved mark that might stand for a crescent — and as it’s rather easier to make, I believe it will be generally adopted.
The main plot of The Flying Inn revolves around the innkeeper Humphrey Pump and the Irish sailor Captain Patrick Dalroy, who take it upon themselves to sell alcohol in spite of the new Islamic prohibitions in England. They find a loophole in the law that permits them to conduct their business so long as they first erect an official inn sign. And so we follow the pair as they dash from location to location, with their barrel of rum and a wheel of cheese on a donkey’s back, planting their portable sign wherever refreshment is needed.
June 29, 2025
QotD: People in the past believed their own religion
It is an old mistake – Polybius makes it of the Romans, writing in c. 150 BC. Polybius notes that Roman religion was “distinctly superior” for maintaining the cohesion of the Roman state, but that “they (= the ruling class) have adopted this course for the sake of the common people” (Plb. 6.56.6-8), by which he means for the sake of the “fickle multitude” which must be “held in invisible terrors and pageantry”. Polybius, I should note, immediately contradicts himself – one benefit of this religion, he says, is that Roman magistrates (read: elite Senators) do not steal from the public treasury even when they are not watched, which would seem to imply that even many very elite Romans believed their own religion (also, irony alert: those famously incorruptible Romans …). Poor men, after all, are not elected to watch the treasury.
Fortunately, Polybius is not our only source on Roman culture, so it is possible to say – and I want to be clear here – Polybius is wrong (on this point at least). Roman elites took their religion very seriously. There are exceptions, of course – Julius Caesar was an Epicurean philosophically, although this does not seem to have altogether disrupted his performance of the duties of Rome’s highest priesthood (he was Pontifex Maximus). Nevertheless, such philosophically minded men were generally regarded with scorn by even the Roman elites (Cicero heaps such scorn on Cato in the Pro Murena in what were clearly intended as friendly “ribbing” before a mostly elite audience), who nevertheless greatly valued religious character (in contrast, Cicero is quick to accuse his hated enemy Catiline of irreligion before the Senate). Roman leaders vowed temples and sacrifices in duress, and built and gave them in victory. Lavish dedications to the gods from all levels of Roman society confirm the overall picture: the Romans believed their religion. Yes, even the elite Romans (there is, I should note, some complicated in that elites tended to separate what they viewed as religion from common “superstition”, but that’s a topic for another day.) And, if anything, the evidence for elite “buy-in” to Medieval religion is far more voluminous.
Yet none of the main characters of Game of Thrones, apart from perhaps Catelyn Stark, is devoted to their region’s traditional religion in any private sense. I cannot recall at any point any character protesting an action on account of religion – no marches held up by high holy days (a regular occurrence in ancient and medieval literature), no groups, individuals or places religiously exempt from violence. The Faith has certain rules about sexuality, but they’re rules that are not only flouted privately by individuals in the show, but also quite publicly by the last ruling dynasty for centuries.
Moreover, none of the ruling characters seem to have any religious functions – or if they do, they simply ignore them most of the time. Keep in mind, these people believe that their gods – be it the Seven or the Old Gods – are powerful divine beings who are directly and immediately interested in the world and who act on that interest. Keeping such beings happy is vitally important – it is not an afterthought. No society, so far as I can tell, has ever believed there is enough gold or enough armies to save you if you have enraged the gods. There is simply no off-setting an angry divinity (and before the smart guy asks, “what about a favorable divinity?” the Greeks had an answer for that – go read Euripides’ Hippolytus. It ends badly for the mortals).
The lack of religious duties or functions for characters who are kings is particularly surprising. Kingship has three core roles in almost all human cultures where the institution appears: kings are 1) chief judge, 2) chief general, and 3) chief priest. That third role appears more or less prominently in almost all societies. In ancient Egypt and (at times) in Mesopotamia, kings were held to literally be either earthly incarnations of major gods or minor gods in their own right. Roman Emperors held the office of Pontifex Maximus, and took over as the chief priest of the state, before becoming gods on their deaths. The Chinese emperor was the “Son of Heaven” and was tasked with maintaining the right relationship with the divine (the “mandate of heaven”). The emperors of Japan are purported to be direct descendants of the goddess Amaterasu (and they have a family tree to back it up).
The relationship between medieval kings and the Church was more complicated, because of the existence of a clear religious head (the Pope) outside of secular authority, but medieval kingship retained a strong sense of religious purpose. Coronation rituals often involved the clergy and were essentially religious rituals, because kingly power was still thought to be bestowed by God. Kings, in turn, had a special role in keeping their kingdom in right relationship with the divine, both through just rule (which included protecting the Church) and through the performance of religious rituals. Those rituals, of course, worked both ways: both believed to be religious efficacious (as in they helped bring about God’s good favor), but also valuable tools of building royal legitimacy (hat tip to my colleague Elizabeth Hassler’s excellent dissertation on the topic of holy kingship). In some places (England and France most notably), kings were thought holy enough to be able to heal certain diseases miraculously by touch – a king who couldn’t was clearly insufficiently pious.
Bret Devereaux, “New Acquisitions: How It Wasn’t: Game of Thrones and the Middle Ages, Part II”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-06-04.
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June 25, 2025
It’s fine to refer to their bead-and-feather superstitious beliefs as a mythology, but not our holy revealed faith!
kulak responds to the “do you really believe this?” question:
One of the reoccurring critiques and challenges I get from Christians and others regarding Paganism is the accusation that I don’t “Really” believe in the Pagan Gods … that I believe or “believe” only as some calculated political/philosophical expedient or aesthetic choice and that really my professed “belief” is some sort of white or darker shade of lie or “LARP”, and that I must plainly KNOW that the Greek, Roman, Nordic, Celtic and other pantheons and only legends, mere mythologies, and cute stories …
I wish I could find it … but there was actually a twitter thread about a group of Christians and Jews responding with OUTRAGE when a group of academics, quite detachedly and seemingly meaning nothing by it, referred to Behemoth, Leviathan, the Flood, the Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, David’s defeat of Goliath, Adam and Eve, the Nephilim, the Plagues of Egypt, and Abraham and Issac as stories and figures of “Hebrew Mythology”.
“Mythology” to their mind was not a neutral term referring merely to cultural stories of a supernatural or historically unverifiable nature whose historicity, origin, and attachment to actual events cannot be verified to the standard of primary history — Stories of cultural import which may or may not be true or fictionalized to some extent we can’t differentiate (Imagine if Gone with the Wind was the last American book to survive and then arguing the Battle of Atlanta was fictional and never happened), the way Homer’s account of the sloped walls of Troy turned out to be shockingly accurate when Troy was found, whereas his accounts of Chariot warfare seemed to be confused by the subsequent 300 years without Greeks employing chariot archers. Rather “Mythology” to their minds denotes FALSE STORIES. SUPERSTITIONS with no attachment to reality, and thus to refer to even the most fantastical and supernatural of biblical stories as events or aspects of “Hebrew Mythology” was to state the Bible was false.
Troy, Gilgamesh, the Arthurian Legends, the Buddha, the conquests of Mohammed, the war of the Three Kingdoms, the Battle of Goths and Huns, the Hiawatha, the Wendigo, Quetzalcoatl (the God and the hypothesized historical ruler), the various unconfirmed Pharaoh stories, the Mormon Corpus … THESE ARE MYTHOLOGY. Even the stuff that’s been archeologically confirmed. Our collection of of texts and books though … you can’t call that mythology. It’s the truth!
Ironically many of these same people within nearly the same breath that they accuse me of being a “LARPER” will also accuse me of making pacts with “Demons” and claim that the beings I believe in are in fact vastly more real than I can possibly comprehend and that I am playing with the most dangerous of hellfire … so pressingly REAL and dangerous are the Ancient “Gods” who are actually Satanic Demons in barely concealed disguise.
Somehow I am simultaneously a cringe 90s mall goth playing at witchcraft and also a Later-Day Faustus dealing in a damnable deadly game with the Devil himself.
Amazing film BTW (Faust 1926)
“But do you actually believe in the Pagan Gods?”
Yes. Vastly more deeply and in more ways than the vast majority of Christian believe in their religion.
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June 5, 2025
QotD: Political institutions of the late western Roman Empire
Roman rule as effectively codified under the first emperor, Augustus (r. 31BC – 14AD) was relatively limited and indirect, not because the Romans believed in something called “limited government” but because the aims of the Roman state were very limited (secure territory, collect taxes) and the administrative apparatus for doing those things was also very limited. The whole of the central Roman bureaucracy in the first century probably consisted of just a few hundred senatorial and equestrian officials (supported, of course, by the army and also several thousand enslaved workers employed either by the state directly or in the households of those officials) – this for an empire of around 50 million people. Instead, day to day affairs in the provinces – public works, the administration of justice, the regulation of local markets, etc. – were handled by local governments, typically centered in cities (we’ll come back to them in a moment). Where there were no cities, the Romans tended to make new ones for this purpose. Roman officials could then interact with the city elites (they preferred oligarchic city governments because they were easier to control) and so avoid having to interact directly with the populace in a more granular way unless there was a crisis.
By contrast, the Roman governance system that emerges during the reigns of Diocletian (r. 284-305) and Constantine (r. 306-337) was centralized and direct. The process of centralizing governance had been going on for some time, really since the beginning of the empire, albeit slowly. The Constitutio Antoniniana (212), which extended Roman citizenship to all free persons in the empire, in turn had the effect of wiping out all of the local law codes and instead extending Roman law to cover everyone and so doubtless accelerated the process.
During the Crisis of the Third Century (235-284) this trend accelerates substantially; the sources for this period are relatively poor, making it hard to see this process clearly. Nevertheless, the chaotic security situation led Roman generals and usurpers to make much greater demands of whatever local communities were in their reach, while at the same time once in power, emperors sought to draw a clearer distinction between their power and that of their subordinates in an effort to “coup proof” their regimes. That new form of Roman rule was both completed and then codified by Diocletian (r. 284-305): the emperor was set visually apart, ruling from palaces in special regalia and wearing crowns, while at the same time the provinces were reorganized into smaller units that could be ruled much more directly.
Diocletian intervened in the daily life of the empire in a way that emperors before largely had not. When his plan to reform the Roman currency failed, sparking hyper-inflation (whoops!), Diocletian responded with his Edict on Maximum Prices, an effort to fix the prices of many goods empire wide. Now previous emperors were not averse to price fixing, mind you, but such efforts had almost always been restricted to staple goods (mostly wheat) in Rome itself or in Italy (typically in response to food shortages). Diocletian attempted to enforce religious unity by persecuting Christians; his successors by the end of the century would be attempting to enforce religious unity by persecuting non-Christians. Whereas before taxes had been assessed on communities, Diocletian planned a tax system based on assessments of individual landholders based on a regular census; when actually performing a regular census proved difficult, Constantine responded by mandating that coloni – the tenant farmers and sharecroppers of the empire – must stay on the land they had been farming so that their landlords would be able to pay the taxes, casually abrogating a traditional freedom of Roman citizens for millions of farmers out of administrative convenience. Of course all of this centralized direction demanded bureaucrats and the bureaucracy during this period swelled to probably around 35,000 officials (compared to the few hundred under Augustus!).
All of this matters here because it is this kind of government – centralized, bureaucratic, religiously framed and interventionist, which the new rulers of the fifth century break-away kingdoms will attempt to emulate. They will mostly fail, leading to a precipitous decline in state capacity. This process worked differently in different areas: in Britain, the Roman government largely withered away from neglect and was effectively gone before the arrival of the Saxons and Angles, a point made quite well by Robin Flemming in the first chapter of Britain after Rome (2010), while in Spain, Gaul, Italy and even to an extent North Africa, the new “barbarian” rulers attempted to maintain Roman systems of rule.
This is thus an odd point where the “change and continuity” and “decline and fall” camps can both be right at the same time. There is continuity here, as new kings mostly established regimes that used the visual language, court procedure and to a degree legal and bureaucratic frameworks of Late Roman imperial rule. On the other hand, those new kingdoms fairly clearly lacked the resources, even with respect to their smaller territories, to engage in the kind of state activity that the Late Roman state had, for instance, towards the end of the fourth century. Instead, central administration largely failed in the West, with the countryside gradually becoming subject to local rural magnates (who might then be attached to the king) rather than civic or central government.
The problem rulers faced was two-fold: first that the Late Roman system, in contrast to its earlier form, demanded a large, literate bureaucracy, but the economic decline of the fifth century (which we’ll get to next time) came with a marked decline in literacy, which in turn meant that the supply of literate elites to staff those positions was itself shrinking (while at the same time secular rulers found themselves competing with the institutional Church for those very same literate elites). Second – and we’ll deal with this in more depth in just a moment – Roman rule had worked through cities, but all over the Roman Empire (but most especially in the West), cities were in decline and the population was both shrinking and ruralizing.
That decline in state capacity is visible in a number of different contexts. Bryan Ward-Perkins (Rome and the End of Civilization (2005), 148ff) notes for instance a sharp decline in the size of Churches, which for Christian rulers (both the post-Constantine emperors and the new “barbarian” kings) were major state building projects meant to display either royal or local noble wealth and power; Church size really only reaches Late Roman equivalent in the west (an important caveat here, to be sure) in the ninth century. In this kind of context it is hard to say that Visigothic or Merovingian rulers are actually just doing a different form of rulership because they’re fairly clearly not – they just don’t have the resources to throw at expensive building projects, even when you adjust for their smaller realms.
Nor is it merely building projects. Under Constantine, the Romans had maintained a professional army of around 400,000 troops. Much of the success of the Roman Empire had been its ability to provide “public peace” within its borders (at least by the relatively low standards of the ancient world). While the third century had seen quite a lot of civil war and the in the fourth century the Roman frontiers were cracking, for much of the empire the legions continued to do their job: war remained something that happened far away. This was a substantial change from the pre-Roman norm where war was a regular occurrence basically everywhere.
The kingdoms that emerged from the collapse of Roman rule proved incapable of either maintaining a meaningful professional army or provisioning much of that public peace (though of course the Roman state in the west had also proved incapable of doing this during the fifth century). Instead those kingdoms increasingly relied on armies led by (frequently mounted) warrior-aristocrats, composed of a general levy of the landholding population. We’ve actually discussed some of the later forms of this system – the Anglo-Saxon fyrd and the Carolingian levy system – already; those systems are useful reference points because they’re quite a bit better attested in our evidence and reflect many of the general principles of how we suppose earlier armies to have been organized.
The shift to a militia army isn’t necessarily a step backwards – the army of the Middle Roman Republic had also been a landholder’s militia – except that in this case it also marked a substantial decrease in scale. Major Merovingian armies – like the one that fought at Tours in 732 – tended to be around 10,000-20,000 men (mostly amateurs), compared to Late Roman field armies frequently around 40,000 professional soldiers or the astounding mobilizations of the Roman Republic (putting around 225,000 – that is not a typo – citizen-soldiers in the field in 214BC, for instance). Compared to the armies of the Hellenistic Period (323-31BC) or the Roman Empire, the ability of the post-Roman kingdoms to mobilize force was surprisingly limited and the armies they fielded also declined noticeably in sophistication, especially when it came to siege warfare (which of course also required highly trained, often literate engineers and experts).
That said, it cannot be argued that the decline of “public peace” had merely begun in the fifth century. One useful barometer of the civilian sense of security is the construction of city walls well within the empire: for the first two centuries, many Roman cities were left unwalled. But fresh wall construction within the Empire in places like Northern Spain or Southern France begins in earnest in the third century (presumably in response to the Crisis) and then intensifies through the fifth century, suggesting that rather than a sudden collapse of security, there had been a steady but significant decline (though again this would thus place the nadir of security somewhere in the early Middle Ages), partially abated in the fourth century but then resumed with a vengeance in the fifth.
Consequently the political story in the West is one of an effort to maintain some of the institutions of Roman governance which largely fails, leading to the progressive fragmentation and localization of power. Precisely because the late Roman system was so top-heavy and centralized, the collapse of central Roman rule mortally wounded it and left the successor states of Rome with much more limited resources and administration to try to achieve their aims.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part II: Institutions”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-01-28.
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May 27, 2025
QotD: Refuting the “state of nature” argument in Leviathan
Alas, Hobbes’s method is so seductively useful, and his “state of nature” so seemingly correct (if you don’t think about it too hard, which is easy to do, as Hobbes’s prose is entrancing), that in their haste to reject his conclusions, later thinkers like Locke didn’t stop to question whether or not the premises behind the method are actually true. It helped, too, that Locke (born 1632) came of age as the civil wars were winding down (his father was briefly a Parliamentary cavalry commander); he made his philosophical bones with the Restoration (1660). […]
It’s easy to get too far into the weeds with this stuff, but I trust everyone takes my point: Because Hobbes presented such a seductive vision, and because he took such sustained criticism by such high-level guys as Locke even as they were adopting his premises and methods, we — later generations of thinkers, almost without exception — behave as if Hobbes really had done what he said he did, which was to naturalize political philosophy. Political science, he would’ve said, and unlike the pretentious dweebs who staff those departments in modern universities, he wasn’t kidding — he really thought the arguments in Leviathan were as unassailable and compelling as geometry proofs.
But they weren’t, and even he knew it. Hobbes is a fascinating personality, but he’s a hard man to like, not least because he’s so irascible. I sympathize, Tommy, I really do, I’m no mean curmudgeon myself, but dude, you were wrong. Recall the fundamental premise of the “state of nature” thought experiment: All men are functionally equal.
That’s not just wrong, it’s arrant nonsense. It’s hard to think of a statement this side of Karl Marx that’s so backasswards as that one. Far from naturalizing political philosophy, Hobbes made it totally artificial, completely mechanical. His social contract requires a bunch of armed-to-the-teeth free agents, of sound mind and body, all ready and willing to defend themselves to the hilt at all times. Women have no place in Hobbes’s world. Nor do children, or the weak, or the halt, the sick, the old …
In short, although Hobbes is a brilliant observer of human nature, full of acute insight into man and his works, the most famous passage of Leviathan, the one to which all modern political philosophy is mere footnotes, has nothing at all of Man in it. It’s baloney, and therefore, everything derived from it is also, on some deep philosophical level, horseshit.
Severian, “Range Finding III: Natural Law”, Founding Questions, 2021-11-23.
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May 24, 2025
History of Britain, II: Stonehenge; The Druids, Vates, and Celtic Religion
Thersites the Historian
Published 15 Jan 2025In this episode, I briefly examine the presence of prehistorical megaliths on the British Isles and talk about the religion of the Celts, which was ascendant at the time that Britain entered entered the historical record.
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May 23, 2025
Yasukuni-jinja, Japan’s most controversial historical site
Nigel Biggar on the Yasukuni-jinja in the Imperial Gardens in Toyko, where the Japanese shrine to their war dead also celebrates fourteen convicted WW2 war criminals:
The Yasukuni Shrine in the Imperial Gardens, Tokyo.
Photo by Pierre Hazan
If ever you find yourself in the centre of Tokyo, make your way to the north-west corner of the Imperial Gardens, and turn left. A few minutes will bring you to the Yasukuni-jinja, Japan’s most controversial site. This is the national shrine to the war-dead, whose two and half million resident “glorious souls” include fourteen Class A war criminals.
A hundred yards to the right of the main shrine stands a museum, the Yushukan. Upon entering it, a visitor finds himself immediately face to face with a locomotive.
Now, when an Anglo-Saxon puts together Japan, Second World War, and locomotive, he arrives at one thing only: the “Burma Railway”. This is the railway that was hacked through the Burmese jungle partly by Allied prisoners-of-war, who were treated as slave labour and perished in their thousands. Over 12,000 Westerners died — about one in five — alongside perhaps 90,000 Asians.
So our Anglo-Saxon visitor beholds the locomotive with a mixture of disbelief, rising horror, and curiosity. He approaches the machine, looking for an explanatory text. Finding it, he learns that this locomotive is one of ninety that ran along the Burma Railway. He also learns the name of the military unit responsible for the railway’s construction. But of the Allied prisoners, the slave-labour, and the number of their deaths he learns nothing at all.
The Burma Railway wasn’t Auschwitz, either in genocidal intent or in murderous scale. But it was similar in its cruel contempt for human life. So the experience of confronting this Tokyo locomotive is analogous to stepping into a museum in Berlin and being confronted by one of the trains that shipped Jews to Auschwitz, and then reading an explanation that omits any mention of its cargo or the nature of its destination. If there were such a museum in Berlin, I’d have found it.
When our Anglo-Saxon ventures deeper into the Yushukan, he eventually discovers the exhibition on the 1930s and World War Two in the Far East. And here he learns that Japan’s imperial expansion was in fact a war of liberation, waged on behalf of subjugated Asian peoples, against Western colonial domination. And he learns that, even though Japan lost the war militarily, she won it politically, since the example of her early victories over the French in Vietnam, the Americans at Pearl Harbor, and the British at Singapore helped to inspire anti-colonial movements worldwide and so succeeded in ridding the world of European empires.
He also learns that what is known outside Japan as “the Rape of Nanking” (1937-8) is referred to demurely in the museum as “the Chinese incident”. And that whereas the “Rape of Nanking” is reckoned to have involved the indiscriminate massacre by Japanese troops of about 300,000 Chinese civilians, “the Chinese incident” only involved the severe treatment of Chinese troops who had violated the laws of war by disguising themselves in civilian clothes.
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May 15, 2025
QotD: The Donatist heresy
But like all things theological in the Christian Centuries, Donatism had important socio-political implications. Again, I’m about the furthest thing from a medievalist, but as I understand it, Jan Hus — a proto-Luther if anyone was — advanced a kind of Donatist argument against the Holy Roman Emperor (and / or the King of Bohemia, I forget which, or even if they were separate guys at that point). He was also, IIRC, echoing the English heretic John Wyclif, whose arguments had a similar political import in a similarly anarchic time. They held (again IIRC, which I might not) that since kings derive their authority from God, any king that is obviously on the outs with the Lord has lost his right to rule. A heretic or schismatic king, in other words, is no king at all.
You could call this a Christian version of the old Chinese idea of “The Mandate of Heaven”, and if you want to do that I’m not going to argue with you, but it’s considerably easier to identify a heretic. A Christian king’s most basic responsibility is to his own spiritual health; closely followed by his obligation to his realm’s spiritual health. It’s pretty easy to tell when a king’s not doing that.
Severian, “The New Donatism?”, Founding Questions, 2021-11-20.
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