by Guillaume Faye

Arktos Journal

Apr 21, 2024

Guillaume Faye examines the influence of Christian universalism on the erosion of national identities, highlighting its push towards an abstract ideal of mankind that negates cultural particularities and drives a global shift towards a homogenised society.

This is the fifth part of Guillaume Faye’s essay ‘The New Ideological Challenges’, published in 1988. Also read parts one, two, three, four, and five.

Among the dogmas of Judeo-Christian universalism, which particularly threaten the identity of nations, is the dogma of the unity of mankind, understood as a metaphysical substance. This concept of a unique mankind (an aggregation of individuals and children of the same God the Father) that should reject abnormal and merely temporary affiliations originates from the biblical view of mankind — an evidently ethnocidal and totalitarian view. The biblical argument imposes a worldview in which the Absolute is decisive over particular notions, where the focus shifts from the general to the particular — without any interaction — resulting in the particular always being in a devalued position. This line of reasoning, utterly opposed to the worldview of European paganism, ‘derives what we can know about the particular from what we are supposed to know about the Absolute’1 — yet it is now contradicted by the entire fields of biology, anthropology, and physics. Both this ethnocidal myth of the unity of mankind and the archetype of a universal man (a monogenetic being from the same stock) are rooted in Genesis and the teachings of the Church Fathers; this model leads to the devaluation of identities.

Racism, a characteristic attitude of egalitarian and uprooted societies, is based, among other things, on this biblical and Christian notion of the unity of mankind. Indeed, even when the particularities of individual human groups are diminished in favour of a ‘neutral’ and ‘universal’ model (mankind, divine filiation, the Adamic myth, etc.), this model — still considered superior and to which all are summoned to conform — remains the model of a revealed truth, originally belonging only to a minority: the Law of Yahweh, the teaching of the Church, and today, consequently, the civilisation of the Judeo-Christianised West.

To affirm the ‘right’ of all people to Christian baptism and subsequently to ‘civilisation’ (under the ideology of human rights) implies an acknowledgement that their own ethnic and cultural models are inferior. This suggests that they need to adopt the minority model presented by the Bible, followed by that of the Western world. If Judeo-Christian universalism is indeed the breeding ground for racism (both assimilation and superiority), Europeans today must recognise that such racism, which once operated to their advantage and at the expense of colonised peoples, now, through an ironic reversal, works against European identity, which in turn is supposed to disappear in favour of a multi-racial (i.e. raceless) society and the cultural melting pot of a globally extended West. Even if Blandine Barret-Kriegel rightly claimed that ‘the notion of man is biblical’2, we must immediately add that this notion is racist and responsible for the genocides and ethnocide committed in its name and that this notion is not based on any fact. The species concept of ‘man’ is not human; it is zoological. In contrast, the entire pagan thought (confirmed here by ethology and anthropology) emphasises that peoples and humans, the main reality of human appearance, represent a biocultural and no longer zoological reality, that cultures and individuals build themselves by escaping the purely animal reality of a ‘mankind’. Geneticists increasingly view the latter as polygenetic; that is, it goes back to several genetic sources differentiated before the Homo sapiens stage and is destined, like other living species, to differentiate and branch out.3

Robert Jaulin, Edmund Leach, and many others have highlighted that modern totalitarians, ethnocentrism, and alterophobia (denial of the identity of the Other by assimilation to oneself) originate from biblical universalism and its progressivist conception of history (eschatology aimed at abolishing differences) and that today’s Europe paradoxically falls victim to the ideologies it revered and used to subjugate others. Biblism, which denied the Other (the pagan or the Muslim) their religion; Jacobinism, which denied the legitimacy of ethnic particularisms; progressive Westernism, which in the name of human rights (the secular version of Christian charity) intended to ‘liberate’ Native Americans from their Indian identity and Africans from their tribalism — all are now turning their ethnocidal logic against the Europeans themselves; today, the same ideology denies Europeans the right to affirm their cultural identity, the right to preserve their ethnicity, and even their political sovereignty.

The West is thus ethnocidal because it is conversion-obsessed, and this proselytising links the tragic connection of the former expansive dynamism of Europeans with Judeo-Christian universalism. Western civilisation — which sees itself as a moral teaching and pastoral theology — began by deculturating Europe through Christianisation. It is therefore not surprising that this Westernised Europe — as the site of the so-called inaugural ethnocide — and its extension (USSR-USA) inflict the same ethnocide on others that it itself suffers from.

Now, as the globally extending West turns against its birthplace, Europe, Europeans are experiencing their second ethnocide, so to speak. The first was the work of Christianisation (introduction of a mentality foreign to local paganism); the second was the work of Westernisation, the current globalisation, with its dual logic of identity destruction: a multi-racial society and Americanisation. The first ethnocide, corresponding to the naturalisation of Christianity, was not completely destructive because the religious era of Christianity, especially Catholicism, was a syncretism of European and pagan values. Christian Europe remained, albeit restrictedly, Europe. The second, however, is synonymous with radical identity loss as we endure Judeo-Christianity in its completion, i.e. the very essence of Biblism: the construction of the World Church in the form of the uprooted World Society.

Regarding the second ethnocide, Pierre Berard writes: ‘The repudiation of the Other represents the most obvious manifestation of alterophobia. However, ethnocentrism expresses itself in a more subtle way, as it appears less polemical; it involves the negation of the Other by assimilation to oneself. This negating action presents the Other as non-distant, as identical, thus eliminating the possibility of discussing the issue of difference and the identity and originality of another culture. This hallucination, as far as one mirrors oneself in otherness, sees oneself in the ‘Other’ and involves ‘external autoscopy’. Ideologically, it is induced by a noumenal, a merely conceived notion of humanity.’ Pierre Berard believes that the Christian grafting onto the pagan European culture had a deculturating effect and produced a ‘syncretic’, unstable culture from which we must now emerge. He writes: ‘The remnants of pagan culture flowed back into the “subconscious” of the societal body, while a Christian “super-ego” formed in layers, injecting its egalitarian, universalist values into Western civilisation in increasingly potent doses. Today, the collective super-ego becomes more compelling as it rediscovers the Parousian4 demands of its early times.’5

Thus, Western Biblism and the ideology of human rights present Indian and European identities as obstacles to the dignity of the Indian or European individual. Only when he sheds his ethnic and cultural identities will he achieve human dignity. More precisely: only when he adopts the Western-Judeo-Christian model and venerates biblical universalism will he no longer be impure; he will truly become a human.

Humans are urged to give up their ties to their homeland, their fatherland, and their ethnicity so that they can be recognised and judged as humans at all. ‘Jewish universalism’, writes Robert Jaulin, ‘as well as its cultural progeny (including Christianity), differs fundamentally from other civilisations in that God, as lord of his cosmology, does not inscribe himself in the earthly world, in the organisation of states, of places.’6 Alain de Benoist shares this view: ‘For Yahweh, the differences between people and nations are temporarily insignificant and altogether superficial.’7 As Gerard Hervé and Pierre Berard show, the biblical prophets (‘All nations before him are as nothing; they are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness’, Isaiah 40-17; and Paul: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek’, Galatians 3-28) trace ethnic and cultural differences among people to a divine punishment and desire ‘a world without unevenness’; and thus, they justify the deep-seated biblical and Judeo-Christian hatred of empires (imperia) and the legitimacy of ethnocides, even genocides…

The process of identity loss and ethnocide is not based solely on uprooting and deculturation. It also relies on a philosophy of history and a particular conception of time.

In the linear perception of time, advocated by the prevailing ideology in the West, the core concept of identity is endangered. This view of time has contributed to accelerating the deculturation, uprooting, and amnesia of the peoples to whom it has been applied. The progressive view of historical time (a Judeo-Christian notion) presents the past as something definitively concluded, something which must be forgotten. Tradition thus becomes a meaningless concept, as tradition is nothing more than a living past that operates within the present and is crystallised by it. Oriented exclusively towards theological or secular eschatologies, Europeans have always been encouraged to forget their past and hence their identity. For example, if one seeks to convince others today of the inevitability of a cosmopolitan and Americanised society, the European past is undermined in favour of what is purportedly the only concern: the messianic anticipation of a ‘communal’, racially mixed, and multinational world. In this linear view, the character of nations — measured solely by their past — is deemed outdated and insignificant; only the future ‘goal’ from the starting point, the ‘neutral present’ representing today, matters.

(translated by Constantin von Hoffmeister)