Blood and Faith: Christianity in White American Nationalism. By
Damon T. Berry. Syracuse University Press, 2017.
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Would that this were the most unsettling conclusion of this
chilling book. Berry takes us inside a dark world that most know more through
popular stereotypes than careful analysis. Our cavalier use of terms such as
“deplorables,” “little Nazis,” and “Christian right” may ameliorate our fears,
but we err badly if we think of them as merely weak-brained dupes and fools. Few
of us have heard of people such as Revilo Oliver, William Pierce, Ben Klassen, William
Pelley, James Madole, or Alain de Benoist, nor do we know much about Cosmotheism,
Creativity, racialized atheism, Odinism, Wotansvolk, Occult Fascism, or the
Left-Hand Path. And we haven’t considered the enormous impact of European New Right
movements upon American Alt-Right figures such as Stephen Bannon.
If there is any good news, it is that the forces of the hard
right are disputatious and divided. Berry delves into these often idiosyncratic
fractures, but most nationalist groups agree upon essential values. The first
is what Berry dubs “racial protectionism;” that is, white nationalists are
either blatantly racist or supporters of racial separatism. Like older hate
groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, they extend racial protectionism to voice
opposition to egalitarianism, multiculturalism, feminism, immigration, and
non-heterosexuality; unlike the KKK, most nationalists also oppose Christianity, a phenomenon often missed
in discussions of groups such as Christianity Identity. White nationalists
castigate Christianity for being effeminate, weak, and overly inclusive, but
mostly it clashes with their second shared value: virulent Antisemitism. They
are the heirs to views propagated in the infamous 1903 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which Henry Ford disseminated
in the 1920s, and of Francis Parker
Yockey (1916-60), whose Imperium is a
seminal work. Christianity is often called “Jewish Christianity,” and is therefore
both “alien” and corrupt. Those who adhere to it at all are careful to
differentiate “historical Christianity” from that “profaned” (181) by
modernism. Many are more likely to embrace neo-pagan views akin to the Nordic and
Indo-European mysticism found in German Nazism. (Berry is careful to differentiate
racialized paganism from positive spiritualism.) Still other nationalists are
agnostics, Satanists, or atheists who reject—in the words of Creativity’s White Man’s Bible—“Jewish spooks in the
sky.”
Another surprise is Berry’s discussion of the word "nationalism."
Extreme patriotic rhetoric notwithstanding, white nationalism is refracted
through bioracial and cultural lenses that are pan-Western European; they are
(in my terms) the white equivalent of negritude.
We should make no mistake; the nationalists are dangerous people, not dress-up
delusionals. Violence is part of their modus
operandi past—including the murder of Alan Berg and the 1995 Oklahoma City
bombing—and present-day attacks on African Americans, American Muslims, and LGBT individuals. White nationalists feel they are engaged in RaHoWa, their
shorthand for Racial Holy War. This also puts them at odds with mainstream
conservatives, of whom they are as contemptuous as they are of liberals. To
give you a sense of their fervor, many of its theorists quit the John Birch
Society because it was too soft. Consider also the fact that Bannon’s freelance
extremism was beyond even that which Donald Trump could forbear.
I have a few nits to pick with Berry’s book. First, he
correctly rejects the notion that modern white nationalism emerged in the
1980s, but makes too much of his own assertion that it actually crystallized in
the 1950s. He’s not wrong about those connections, but in his third chapter he takes
us through a cogent litany of even deeper roots: Manifest Destiny, the wars on
Native peoples, Social Darwinism, immigration restriction movements, eugenics,
and a welter of other things. As Gunnar Myrdal famously expressed it in 1944,
race has always been “an American dilemma.” For a book that pulls few punches,
Berry held back on this one. White nationalism isn’t a single breed of
poisonous snake; it’s a broad suborder of venomous vipers.
I also longed for a more thorough explanation of how white power
theorists decoupled nationalism from the volk-specific
associations of post Enlightenment romanticism (whose language they often
appropriate) to move it beyond national borders while simultaneously opposing
globalism. These may well be ideational contradictions within movements, but
they warrant closer analysis.
Berry’s attention to subtle distinctions, theoretical
structures, use of postmodernist terminology, and breadth probably make this a
book best suited for graduate students and specialists. But even if all you do
is sample, we should heed Berry’s evocation of Henri Bergson that these are
people “prepared for war" (14). They must be held accountable.
Robert E. Weir
University of
Massachusetts Amherst.
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