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June 22, 2017 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
01:09:45
The Satanic Verses

Richard Spencer (raised Episcopalian), Hunter Wallace (raised Methodist), and James Edwards (raised Southern Baptist) discuss the Southern Baptist Convention's denunciation of the Alt-Right, as well as Christianity's relationship toward nation, race, and culture. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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Gentlemen, welcome back to the Bad Out of Hell Death Cast.
I am your host, Beezlebub.
Just kidding.
This is Counter Signal with Richard Spencer.
I don't know if I've ever been called a satanic before.
I've been called a lot of names.
You know, the whole gamut.
From the historical lexicon, you know, Hitler being the most useful for our enemies.
But I've never been called the devil, and I kind of like it.
I think it's a good look.
It makes us dangerous.
I might grow a goatee and start wearing black and red or something like that.
But it's kind of fun.
But anyway, welcome.
Welcome to both of you, my friends, James Edwards and Hunter Wallace.
This is a very Southern podcast.
Hey, y 'all.
How are you?
This is the most Southern podcast I've had, with the exception of when I hosted Dr. Michael Hill alone.
But welcome.
And we're going to talk about the Southern Baptist Convention.
First off, before we talk about wider implications, and I do want to also talk about the history of Southern Baptist, the meaning of that denomination, why don't we just talk about what happened this week?
So I was following it, though in a rather cursory fashion, but I had heard about a proposed amendment for the Southern Baptist Convention that was put forward by an African-American preacher.
That, you know, quoted lots of scripture and then basically after all this justification from the Bible, he reached utterly PC conclusions where we must denounce the alt-right, but also we must denounce any ethno-nationalism.
I think that's maybe even more important than denouncing a particular movement in 2017.
So this was a very, very bold claim.
It has actually wide-ranging implications.
It was put forward, and then I was, again, I was following this situation on Twitter, though in a rather cursory way, and I did hear that it was not passed, it was rejected, that it was...
You know, did not have the votes to reach the floor.
And then all hell broke loose.
And then, lo and behold, after much prayer and soul-seeking, we were all denounced.
So what did I get?
Why don't, Hunter, why don't you just start out?
What did I miss here?
Give us a little taste of all the politicking and, you know, chicanery going on with the situation.
Well, it's pretty much as you said there.
This was all caused by the...
Well, from what I read, the guy who spearheaded it was this black preacher, I think in Texas, and Russell Moore to denounce white supremacy and alt-right, and then they didn't really want to do it.
I think they shelved it.
And then the media criticized them, and they're like, oh my god, we'll look like a bunch of racists and a bunch of white supremacists if we don't do a ritual virtue signaling.
I think last year it was the Confederate flag where they denounced anyone who used the Confederate flag.
And this year's resolution was denouncing the alt-right.
And it's hilarious.
I was reading it this morning, or some coverage of it, and it was like a fact based on the alt-right.
And they're like, well, the alt-right are not just white supremacists.
They're white nationalists, and they believe in white identity, but white identity is satanic.
I was just sitting here thinking to myself, aren't all these blacks, don't they have their own black churches?
I mean, most of the black Baptists and the black Methodists, I know it's like the African Methodist Episcopal Church or something, or the national, you know, Martin Luther King Jr.
And all the reverends, you know, Jackson, the Reverend Sharpton, and so forth.
They're all members of this, you know, their own black denominations.
So you got literally, you got racially, I mean, it's like the black version of Christian identity.
Sure.
And these groups announced us and like, oh God, these guys over here are terrible racists.
White identity is satanic.
Let me go back to my...
My black denomination and my historically black college and university denounce these evil racists who want to segregate America.
It's laughable.
They're denouncing white people.
They're not denouncing anyone else.
It's white identity, which is satanic.
It's not black identity, Hispanic identity, Asian identity.
In fact, like when they have their first black president a few years ago, that was a source of pride just because he was black.
So it's a farce.
I can add a little more layer to even what Hunter presented, because I follow this with a fervent zeal, I guess you could say, having grown up Southern Baptist.
And the person who wrote this...
...resolution, which read as if it had been written by an entry-level intern for Hillary Clinton's campaign, is a black pastor, as Brad mentioned, from Arlington, Texas.
His name is Dwight McKissick.
He's also the same man who wrote last year's anti-Confederate flag resolution, two resolutions condemning the alt-right and condemning the Confederate flag, written by the same black pastor.
Out of Texas.
So, it was presented to the resolutions committee before the convention, and the resolutions committee is the body that decides which resolutions will reach the messengers, which is what they call their delegates, and be presented to the floor for a vote.
It failed to come out of the committee.
Now, of course, this black pastor was not going to be content with that, so he decided to present it.
On the floor, you can do that, but if it doesn't come out of committee to present it on the floor, in order for it to have a hearing, it has to receive two-thirds majority vote.
It failed again.
That's the second time it failed.
It failed to receive the two-thirds vote when he presented it on the floor.
At that point, as Hunter mentioned, that's when all hell broke loose, and you had Soros' agents like Russell Moore, and you had the black identity pastor stirring up hell.
this pastor who presented the resolution actually started holding court with the press.
And so now you had the press started ginning up these the Southern Baptist refused to reject white supremacy stories.
Everybody starts getting scared.
So and we've got to understand that these people aren't going to be the people that lead you into battle.
If you look at these messengers, they really are very weak, very soft, spiritually and physically.
And so, even though this is in violation of their own rules, They started rounding up their delegates, or messengers, if you will, in the middle of the night.
They brought them in there very late at night, near midnight, for a third vote.
The third vote also failed.
This is what I think even you and I didn't cover, Richard.
A third attempt to pass this resolution failed.
At that point, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, who is a pastor at a church in Memphis where I'm from, said, we're not going to leave until we get this right.
So they voted on it a fourth time the next afternoon.
And God only knows what happened after the third vote and the fourth vote.
God only knows how they got the near-unanimous consent.
But after the fourth vote, it passed.
Out of 5,000 votes that were cast, one man voted no on the fourth time.
I would love to meet that one guy and take him out to dinner.
But what's interesting is...
And then, of course, you know the rest of the story.
They denounce Satanism.
White nationalism is Satanism.
White supremacy is Satanism.
All of these things, which, of course, have we ever declared ourselves to be white supremacists or anti-Semitic or any of these other things?
I mean, certainly that's not how we would identify our very heartfelt and reasonable messages.
But what makes this interesting is, not only was it presented by a black pastor, as you might expect, this is a guy who publicly stated in October of last year...
That he was voting for Hillary Clinton because the killing of unarmed black men by white police officers was the greatest pro-life issue of our generation.
And of course he pastors an all-black church.
And in addition to that, the Southern Baptist Convention had officially sanctioned groups such as the African American Baptist, the Korean Baptist, the Chinese Baptist, the Filipino Baptist.
And so, of course, it's not racial identity that they oppose.
It's white racial identity.
Even in this convention, a black man was elected to chair the Pastors Conference.
And as Hunter mentioned, there was, in fact, in 2012, Fred Luter.
Well, apparently there had never been a president of the Southern Baptist Pastors Conference before that was black until this year.
When that happened, of course, all of the whites and blacks alike said, it's so great to have an African American chair this committee.
So, of course, racial identity exists for us if there's some sort of guilt attached or some inherited syntax.
So that really is the chain of events and the chronological timeline of what happened.
And then, of course, the spin from there has just been grotesque, embarrassing, and pitiful.
Right.
And, of course, the Southern Baptists got no credit for this.
They were, like, denounced by the Washington Post.
I, you know, of, like, oh, they're still racist.
Don't believe it.
But let me, I am a little bit curious about what to make of this, because I, a couple months ago, I actually read a book.
That I would recommend, and it's by Robert Jones, and it's either called The Death of White America or The End of White America.
And it's actually very useful.
It's a very cucked book in its overall message and tone, but it's actually very useful in looking at the decline of mainline Protestantism as a kind of national religion.
And one thing he said about the Southern Baptist Convention is that it is, if you look at it from a bird's eye view, it is actually a very diverse congregation faith.
But if you go down to a ground level view, it's actually a checkerboard in the sense that the denominations are racially segregated.
You know, basically in fact, if not in motivation or in law.
And the other thing about it is that I would say Southern Baptists are the kind of part of what people would call evangelical America, of a Republican voting, generally pro-life, family values, most often rural and suburban, or overwhelmingly rural and suburban, white people.
The core of the Republican vote.
The core of what you could just say is, you know, normal, middle America or Southern America.
And so I am curious exactly what to make of all this, because do you think it was failing?
You know, I think it's a bit much to say that because those votes failed, that means that the Southern Baptists are alt-right or...
They're listening to this podcast.
I don't think that's the case, sadly.
I have a theory, and it's simply, probably they didn't really know what they were voting on, and probably most of them were not that familiar with the alt-right.
But in addition to that, membership in the Southern Baptist Church has declined for 10 consecutive years, which means, of course, for 10 consecutive years, they're...
members than the year before.
Right.
After they passed the Confederate flag resolution last year, membership immediately dropped another 7 percent, 7 percent in the last year alone.
They were probably a little bit hesitant.
Now, certainly, if you go and you talk to the average member of a Southern Baptist church, particularly one that's a little older, and they're comfortable with you, They will probably agree with us on most racial issues.
On the Jewish question, certainly not at all.
But I think that they were probably hesitant to tackle another controversial issue.
But then once it became a point of contention and you had the pressure from the head table coming down, if we don't denounce white supremacy...
And this Satanism, the church is going to fold.
You've got to understand that most of the people in this, you know, obviously these messengers, if you look at any of the pictures on Twitter, these are herd-like people.
And if they're getting the tough sell from Russell Moore, who is there as, I believe, a paid agent and some of these other head cucks, they're going to fall in the line.
And that's what happened.
Yeah.
And they do sense it in their hearts or in their bones.
They sense that this, they might agree with the surface of the, The proclamation that, oh yes, we don't like white supremacy, we're all God's children, or what have you.
But they sense it in their bones that this is anti-them.
And they're right, of course.
It is completely anti-them.
It's not like the Southern Baptists were about to attend the MPI conference or start voting Richard Spencer to replace Russell Moore as their leader.
That's not going to happen.
So it was just a moral signal, basically.
But I think a lot of the people probably sensed it in their heart.
It was anti-them.
It was demoralizing them.
And it was moralizing not only non-white Baptists, but it was actually moralizing the liberal media.
It was moralizing people who hate their guts.
And they are absolutely right.
Well, I want to hear Hunter's take on this.
Especially these older people in their 60s and 70s.
You don't want an obese, black, radical, racial agitator coming up and proposing this kind of stuff year after year.
And you're right, Richard.
I mean, most of the Christians or people who claim to be Christians or identify as a Christian either culturally or even if they're true believers, most of them are from the South.
And, of course, the South has a cultural rudder and a very interesting history that would make the Southerners more fertile soil.
For our more muscular positions.
And surely, just as there are decent people in the rank and file of the GOP, and the head table is completely fraudulent and corrupt, that's basically the same thing you have in Southern Baptist churches.
Most of the rank and file who would never go to a convention, who have no idea what even gets voted on at these conventions.
Most of the Southern Baptists have no idea what happened this week.
They are fundamentally good people.
And they are fundamentally people, I should even qualify that as saying by good, I mean fundamentally with us on some of our platform.
Yeah.
Let me jump in here.
I've got a lot to say.
Well, as you've been following this, I'm sure, Russell Moore almost lost his head recently.
Twice, I think, in fact.
There was a big effort to get rid of the...
He's the most controversial individual in the Southern Baptist Commission.
by far.
There was a huge amount of resistance to him and wanted to get rid of him.
There was a lot of resentment about how he was so opposed to Trump during the election.
He was one of the leading...
Cucks out there.
He was leading the charge of cucks against Trump.
And the evangelicals completely rejected Russell Moore and all his arguments and all these leaders of these cucked churches.
The lay people completely rejected them and voted for Trump in overwhelming numbers.
I mean, they saw this stuff about race, but it was...
Trump's racial positions, which was resonating, especially in the Deep South.
That's where Trump's base was.
He won every southern state, I think.
Well, also, despite being a thrice-married person, I actually don't think Donald Trump is the worst philanderer out there.
But there's also, he clearly has a history of cheating, of being outlandish.
He's bombastic and having a hot bottle on his arm.
Despite all of that, and being vulgar and so on, despite all of that, evangelicals really came out in force.
He would not be president without the evangelicals, no doubt.
Go ahead.
Especially in Alabama.
In Mississippi, where he got one of the highest percentages in the primary.
I know he won every single county.
In Alabama, you've got to think, look what Trump had going against him.
He had his whole lifestyle, which goes completely against the grain of everything that Baptists believe.
Flamboyant, owns casinos, gambling, married three times, a womanizer.
What resonated here was his rhetoric on race and immigration and issues like that.
That's why he had these huge rallies here.
That's just interesting.
There's this big conflict between Russell Moore.
Russell Moore and a lot of these leaders don't exactly represent their base.
All these people were diehard Rubio supporters, if I'm not mistaken.
There's certain factions.
Because of cucked evangelicals like Eric Erickson is very representative.
And those people were all in for Rubio and Cruz.
And they lost tremendously.
But that gets right to the heart of the issue.
And this is the funny thing about the Southern Baptists.
When they're condemning racism and they're condemning slavery and they're condemning segregationists, And white supremacists, they're condemning themselves.
I mean, who were the slave owners?
Who were the white supremacists?
Who were the segregationists?
It was them.
In fact, they were significantly further to the right than the alt-right is today.
I mean, these were people who said that blacks were inferior because God had cursed him to be a servant.
The servant of servants, right?
And there was even a time when Southern Baptists in the Antebellum era didn't even think that blacks were human.
They were a different species.
This was polygenesis.
This was popular back in the day.
And so their views on race were significantly harder than yours or mine or James'.
I mean, it's just amazing how they forget all this history.
I mean, why is there a Southern Baptist Convention?
And it's because...
Yeah, I was about to urge you to say that.
I know the answer, but why is there such a thing as Southern Baptist?
And it's because the Northern Baptists didn't want to have slave owners as missionaries and to enter in communion with the slave owners.
So it wasn't just the Baptists that broke away.
It was also, for a time, the Methodists and, I believe, the Presbyterians.
And they all broke over slavery.
They believed that slavery was a positive good.
That slavery was this great thing and that Africans had been uplifted by their humane Christian masters.
And servitude was this great institution that was going to sweep the world.
And free labor was bad.
And in terms of their racial views, it was extremely...
More hardcore than anything.
I mean, how hardcore do you have to be to, like, be a slave owner?
You know, to actually physically own an African and think they're inferior.
These people were the Southern Baptists.
And these are the people who are now, like, condemning white identity.
It's the most ridiculous thing in the world their ancestors would be, are, rolling in their graves.
Pretty much they're condemning everything that they were about.
James, talk a little bit about this.
What was it like when you were a kid growing up in the church?
I assume you had a lot of the feelings that you have now when you were younger too.
Give us a personal flavor of being a Southern Baptist growing up in the mid to late 80s and 90s.
So you're a little bit younger than I am.
My experience growing up in the Southern Baptist Church was absolutely wonderful.
I think that you, certainly different people, can arrive at the same destination politically taking drastically different routes.
I am, to this day, still a Christian.
And I know some people in the alt-right are not.
But we have reached the same political positions.
And for me...
I got there in part by my spiritual upbringing.
Growing up at the Southern Baptist Church in the 1980s, I was born in 1980, so in the 80s and early 90s was a wonderful experience.
Now, granted, I didn't go into church and hear a speech from someone like Sam Dixon.
It wasn't a political speech, but I do believe it was rooted in the traditional Word of God.
What we didn't get was obviously these basic Marxist screeds that you get out of the church now.
But we had a small congregation.
It was a very conservative congregation in the best sense of the word.
It fostered a sense of community.
And I certainly marinated in that in my formative years.
And if anything, it reinforced the ultimate positions that I take today in a very public way.
But growing up, I went so far as to even teach vacation Bible school in the church for a few years.
So all of these things...
Really helped shape me.
And my grandfather was a deacon in the church.
I met my wife at church.
So in addition to all of these other things, on a very personal level, the church changed my life, and I don't regret that at all.
But you've certainly come a long way from the days in which...
You would sing Dixie at church to the days of Russell Moore.
So let's talk a little bit more about Russell Moore.
This is a guy who wrote in the Antichrist, the New York Times and Washington Post.
I say Antichrist because they're certainly not pro-Christian.
Trump voters may be going to hell.
He referred to Jesus as an illegal immigrant, advised people to attend homosexual weddings.
He said Trump voters might be going to hell?
The Black Lives Matter chaos in Ferguson.
He questioned if they were actual Christians, if they were voting for Trump.
And he did that in the pages of the New York Times last year.
Very well known.
During the Black Lives Matter chaos in Ferguson, he took the side of Michael Brown instead of the police officer who shot him in self-defense.
Same for Eric Gardner.
He has diverted Southern Baptist money to help build a mosque in New Jersey.
He called me a white supremacist in the press last year, so that's a little bit personal.
But in addition to that, now this is where it really...
It gets absurd.
Say what you will about Martin Luther King, that he was a degenerate, that he was a plagiarist, that he was all of these things that he absolutely was, a communist.
But even if you can overlook all of that, and some great men were horrible people.
Obviously, Martin Luther King was not a great man.
He was a horrible person.
But there have been great historical figures that were flawed personally.
But even if you discount all of that about King, He publicly denounced the divinity of Jesus Christ.
So in order to be a Christian, certainly on some levels, unless you just appreciate the cultural ramifications that Christianity has played in our people's evolution over the last 2,000 years, You would have to say you have to believe in the virgin birth, you have to believe in the resurrection, in order to be a fundamentalist Bible-believing Christian, which the Southern Baptists claim to be.
So why then are they honoring a man in Memphis, Tennessee next year on the 50th anniversary of his assassination and holding him up as the exemplar of what Southern Baptists should be?
And that's what they're planning next year.
So according to them, the great Christians of the past in the South, Robert E. Lee, R.L. Dabney, Stonewall Jackson, they're all in hell, whereas Martin Luther King...
Sets at the right hand of Jesus Christ.
So this is what you're getting out of the church now.
No, we didn't get any of that back then.
We didn't get any of that.
But I'll tell you, there was a theologian by the name of A.W. Tozer who had a great line.
And this certainly applies to today's Southern Baptist Convention, but really all Protestant denominations in the West.
Religion today is not transforming people, he wrote.
Rather, it is being transformed by the people.
It is not raising the moral level of society.
It is descending to society's own level and congratulating itself that it has scored a victory because society is smilingly accepting its surrender.
If that didn't really sum up the church of the current year, I don't know what does.
But no, the Southern Baptist tradition, even of course prior to my experience in the church, was certainly very good.
Even as late as, you know, we all know why the religion or the denomination came to be, why they said the 1840s from the mainline Baptists.
But even as late as, of course, the 1960s, you had the prominent theologians of the Southern Baptist Convention using Scripture to back up their positions on segregation.
Now, that was within the lifetime of many Southern Baptists who were still alive.
And so I would say it does make, Christianity and the Church does make for a very convenient...
Whooping boy for many of us in the alt-right.
I come from this from a unique perspective, being an alt-right person who was raised a Christian and Southern Baptist.
But I think the problem is certainly in our society, because what is the church, if not a collection of individuals from the local communities that the church is located?
And so if our people are infected with this pathological altruism, this disease that seems to only afflict white people, well, certainly when they cross the threshold of a church
Yeah, I mean, look, for someone like me who is critical of Christianity itself, and its origins, I could talk a long time about
I would say that you're absolutely correct in the sense that the Southern Baptist Convention is just one more institution that has gone the way of PC madness and current-year ideology.
I remember, certainly, Getting into all this stuff 15 years ago when I was first, you know, becoming an adult and reading and subscribing to magazines and things like that.
And most conservatives, paleocons and so on, would always point to the church as, well, you know, society is infected, but at least we have these, you know, bastions of light out there.
But the fact is, the way I see it in 2017 is that all of these institutions...
Maybe there are a couple of exceptions here and there, but all of the institutions are taking parallel paths down this road towards the current year, and they just have a different way of doing it.
So, I mean, as I was joking with Hunter before we turned on the recorder, he said, oh, were you raised a Southern Baptist?
And I could detect a little bit of sarcasm in that question.
No, I was raised an Episcopalian.
But I'm a confirmed Episcopalian, actually.
But yes, effectively, the church that is my mother's church has reached the same conclusions.
It's just gone about it differently.
The Episcopalian church has female lesbian pastors sending people on African missions and all sorts of nonsense.
We just do it in a more kind of snobby, Whole Foods-type way.
That is our way of reaching the same thing.
And really, all institutions are doing this.
There are very, very few exceptions, all universities, whether it's a big state college with a big football team or so on, or whether it's Yale or a small liberal arts college out in Pennsylvania, they are all, they have the exact same, effectively, freshman orientation session.
They have the exact same ideology animating the, you know, arts and sciences and much of the physical sciences, actually.
So all of these institutions, the government itself is like this.
It is very, very difficult to find an institution that actually is not cucked or paused or whatever word you want to use.
I would say maybe the only institution that isn't fully cucked is the internet.
I mean, you know, but in terms of all, you know, wider society.
All of the institutions that were basically the institutions of the ruling class, something like the New York Times, the Washington Post, Harvard University, the Episcopalian Church, your local Rotary Club, the U.S. military, I could go on.
All of these basic WASP institutions of the ruling class have all reached the same destination.
They just have different flourishes and different aesthetics about it.
And so, no, I absolutely do not blame The Southern Baptists, but the only thing I will say is I totally agree that there are a lot of very decent, good people involved in these religious orders, but as institutions, they have not been able to put up any resistance.
The fact that they just ultimately folded, it just expresses it all.
None of these institutions at this point...
We are going to have to see it to the end.
We are going to have to pass through this era of...
Of ideological transformation, and it probably will have to get worse, because the idea that we can point to something out there that is like, well, at least that's not cucked.
At least the churches aren't cucked.
No, they are.
They are arguably more cucked.
Some of the stuff Russell Moore has said, and the absolute moralization and valuing of interracial marriage...
Some of the things that religious people have said are actually worse than stuff you would hear at Harvard, because there is a kind of religious quality to it.
Go ahead.
I think, again, we have to differentiate between the leadership of any institution, including the church, and the laity or the members of any other institution.
But certainly the leadership of the church, you couldn't get any more cucked than what you're seeing out of Russell Moore.
I think Russell Moore, unlike most of the people in the Southern Baptist Church, who are, again, just like...
Most people anywhere else in society, they will take the passively resistance.
There are very few people in the world who actually have any semblance of leadership quality.
There are very few people that have any core beliefs.
You're listening to three of them right now, of course.
But for the most part, that's the issue.
I think Russell Moore very much is a paid change agent in the church.
But it is interesting, and I would ask, why was it the Southern Baptist Church?
You haven't seen all of the other denominations passing.
Only the Southern Baptists have done that.
And I think, of course, the reason is twofold.
Number one, the history of the Southern Baptist Church being so demonstrably of segregation into existence over the issue of slavery.
Their history plays into it.
But I think the leadership knows that on a fundamental level there are a lot of people in these pews that, to go back to something I said earlier, are in agreement.
I think there's certainly some natural overlap there, but the church is dying because they alienate men who are the natural leaders of families, whether it be spiritual or otherwise.
The church today, as is written at Faith and Heritage, a website that I like, with its...
Tucking on race and feminism and immigration demands that the grace of Christ comes attached at the hip with this suicide cult manifested by feminized leaders like Russell Moore.
So any reasonable person is going to reject this ridiculous practice of religion out of hand, which means, of course, the very best people would be alienated from Christianity.
So I understand fully why nonbelievers in the alt-right, who didn't have my experiences with Christianity growing up, cannot but look at the church and gag.
And to them, I would say, just as the political establishment must be destroyed by an outsider that we thought could have been Trump, probably not now, but so too must the Christian religious establishment be destroyed by a charismatic and forceful advocate of the traditional faith of our fathers.
He's going to have to drive these cucks out of the pulpits.
And Richard, you say this, you said this quite right.
First the culture changes, then politics changes.
Well, there's another cliche that goes...
You tell me what the world is saying today, and I'll tell you what the church will be saying in seven years.
And so I think if we recapture the culture for anybody who is interested in restoring the church, that it can be restored.
But as it stands now, it's as bad, if not worse, as you mentioned, than anyone else.
And again, some people listening to this may be Christian.
The majority might not be.
But even William Pierce said, two people.
A Marxist and a Christian can take the same scripture and interpret it in a way to defend their position, so I'm not going to do that.
But there is something beautiful about it, I think, that is worth preserving, and we need to retake everything.
But as far as it exists now, it needs to be destroyed before it can be rebuilt.
You lose a fortress, you fire on your own fortress, you recapture it.
And then you restore it.
But it's a mess, and believe me, again, I say this as someone who grew up and had wonderful experiences in that church, but it's embarrassing.
Hunter, what about you?
Have you struggled with your faith, Hunter?
I don't mean to get too personal, but...
Oh, yeah.
Well, you know, I grew up in the Methodist Church.
The Church of Hillary Clinton.
Yeah, the Church of Hillary Clinton.
In the deep south is, you know, the Methodists and the Baptists there.
Predominant here.
And then, you know, as I got older, you know, I started to realize that they believed all these cucked things about race, all these, you know, terrible things about social issues.
And that just, you know, alienated me from it.
It's just like, you know, I don't want anything to do with this.
And it took me for the longest time, you know, to do, you know, in my mind for a long time, Christianity, I associated Christianity with types like Russell Moore.
But then again, like I said, my sense of history allowed me to see this in perspective, and this is what I was going to go into.
Well, look at the SCV, right?
If someone looked at the SCV, speaking of cucked institutions, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, You would think that the war between the states was between legions of black confederates who were fighting on behalf of the multiracial, anti-racist South.
States' rights.
Yeah, for states' rights and to oppose high tariffs against Abraham Lincoln, who was a racist monster.
So millions of black confederates fought to liberate the South.
We could have multiculturalism and anti-racism.
Okay, so that's just one example of a completely cucked institution.
But you read history and you're like, okay, wait a minute.
And then you, like something else, Russell Moore wrote one of his big essays.
One of the first things that drew my attention to this guy was he wrote an article called The Cross and the Confederate Flag Absolutely Can't Coexist, right?
And I'm like, wait a minute.
They coexisted just fine.
It was absolutely...
All the churches split over slavery and over race.
After the war, the whole lost cause ideology was Southern theologians who said the Confederates had been baptized in blood and were God's chosen people.
Race was right there in the middle of it.
They've completely tossed aside their own history.
And they seem to believe that we are right now.
I mean, we are correct right now, not to be too ambiguous there, in the sense that all these other Christians, basically the whole history of Christianity was effectively wrong.
Because clearly, identitarianism or nationalism or whatever you want to call it, racialism, certainly in the United States, He clearly coexisted with Christianity.
And so it is a very bold claim to make.
I mean, Russell Moore is basically saying, I am correct on this.
And all of my forefathers were wrong.
Yes.
And I don't know if he's ever...
I'll sometimes talk to Christians and they don't...
They're not willing to say this.
I've talked to these really cucked Catholics, like John Smurak, and they seem to believe that the Catholic Church was always about multiracialism or denying race and all this kind of stuff.
And that's just totally delusional.
I would almost rather they, as opposed to calling upon this theological wisdom that they've just pulled out of their ass, that they just openly admit what they are doing.
Which is that we are right, and everyone who preceded us is wrong, because that is the only thing you can say.
Even churches now, I mean, particularly in Eastern Europe, another irony of history, there are many ironies of history, is that many of the people, many of the nations that suffered under communism did not suffer under something worse, and that is cultural Marxism.
And so they actually have very strong, intense senses of nation.
If you told a Polish Catholic that the true meaning of his religion was about globalism and multiculturalism, they would look at you like you're speaking to them in Arabic.
No, actually, our Catholicism is about us.
I don't know what to say.
It is amazing.
At the same time, I would put this forward, is that Christianity does have, any kind of monotheism, at least does have something, it does have an inherent universality that is something it can call upon to make this point.
And that it is interesting, and that, you know, I agree with you, I absolutely agree that...
Most of the whites who are Southern Baptists are decent, that even if they're flawed, like we all are, they want to be family men, leaders of families.
Hard-working people, I absolutely agree with that.
But the fact that they don't have an ability to oppose Russell Moore, and they clearly didn't.
Like, when Russell Moore browbeat them or twisted arms or shamed them, wagged a finger, they ultimately went in line.
They didn't have anything to call upon to say, no, actually, the Confederate flag is something we should be proud of.
No.
I don't even know what the alt-right is, is what they probably should have said.
But, like, who are these people?
We have no earthly idea.
However, we, yeah, nationalism and ethno-nationalism, how are we really going to denounce this?
I mean, you know, this is just insane.
They don't have the words.
Or the ability to oppose their leaders.
And I think that is a very tragic thing.
One thing I was going to pick up here.
It's amazing, like you said, that they don't have the ability to reply to Russell Moore.
Now, they actually wanted to make all the correct biblical arguments for white identity.
Racial differences for slavery, for white supremacy, for segregation.
That's what Southern Baptists, you know, had.
They made all those arguments against everything they believe today for well over a century, right?
Over a century.
And you look at the timeline here, and we were talking about how institutions, you know, go on parallel paths, and that's the interesting thing about the Southern Baptist Convention, in that of all the institutions in our society, It was the last one to, I would say, it was the slowest one.
And that the Southern Baptists discovered that racism and slavery was this horrible thing in 1995.
Yeah, they announced in 1995 that, you know, racism is a sin after all.
Like 30-something years after the Civil Rights Movement.
Hundreds, over 100 years after slavery.
They make these arguments.
And we have to ask, why is this going on?
Why isn't it not just, why is it the Southern Baptists?
Why is it Presbyterians?
Or, you know, even atheists or agnostics or Catholics.
You know, at the end of the day, they all believe the same thing.
Whether it's, you know, the universities or the churches.
They're all screaming, bleeding the same message about race.
And that really gets to the heart of it and what changed.
And that's in the 20th century.
Before the 20th century, you didn't have really mass media.
Culture was organic.
Culture was centered in...
Most people didn't go to universities.
In the South, public schooling was kind of a joke.
Educated people had private tutors.
We didn't have mass circulation, newspapers, radio, Hollywood, television.
So what happened in the 20th century is that you got this kind of culture that was coming and being beamed down from above, like whether it was radio, television, everything.
And even then, look at the 60s, right?
Southerners overwhelmingly voted against the Civil Rights Act of 64. They filibustered it, I want to say.
Massive resistance in the South.
So the timeline here is that there's this rotten culture that comes down from the very top.
And the culture, like the churches, you know, are kind of like a subculture.
And they're conforming to the dominant mainstream culture that's on top of it.
Like, you know, all the television.
Like we were saying, the cause of all this, the ultimate cause of all this.
Is that, you know, the natural organic culture of, say, the South or the natural organic culture of Ireland or Germany or France, it's all, like, been subordinated to this globalist, well, this global mass culture that comes down through television, through radio, through newspapers and stuff like that, through elite universities.
And that's what they're conforming to.
It's my sense.
They want to be mainstream, they want to be respectable, so they give ground to the dominant culture.
And that's what they become, more like over time.
That's what all institutions become more like over time.
They become like the dominant group in society.
Yeah, and this has actually been challenged by the internet and social media.
And I think there are a lot of bad things about the internet and social media.
I read less books now, fewer books now, because I'm...
I'm on Twitter too much or I'm reading stuff on the web and so on.
It's just kind of a bad thing.
At the same time, this is the dynamic that I totally agree with what Hunter is saying.
There is a kind of monopoly.
There's a definite monopoly on culture by the big three television stations, by Hollywood and so on.
And this is actually being challenged for the first time through the internet.
Where society is fragmenting.
And that these new views are actually coming in.
And they're being challenged.
I mean, the alt-right's collective budget isn't even approaching.
Like, the budget for the...
B.C. conference or convention, not to mention the combined budget of all these individual churches, yet they feel the need to denounce us as some terrible threat.
I don't know.
One doesn't just throw Satanism around.
That's reserved for really serious threats.
And obviously Moore and the Baptist leadership views us as a threat because we are challenging their narrative.
So it's an interesting historical dynamic, and we're caught in between it.
Go ahead, James.
Well, it's a little ironic, I think, that the guy who, in some capacity, and this is not conspiratorial, Russell Moore sits, On the board of an organization whose sole purpose is to push amnesty to their flocks.
And in part, that organization is funded by George Soros.
So a man who, at one degree of separation, accepts money from a very nice atheist Jewish individual, is claiming that the members of his own congregation are Satanists if they disagree with him.
But, again, a lot of this is societal, gentlemen.
They do want to be accepted.
But as it was said, I guess halfway in jest, just as every German girl in the 1930s wanted to be with an SS officer, when the culture changes, the church will change once again.
So as bad as it is, I guess that can give us some hope.
But these people are also very spiritually illiterate.
And if you want to hear about something else that's ironic...
We've all seen the Mark Dice videos, the Man on the Street interviews, where people can't answer first or second grade questions about civics or history.
They can't name the belligerents in World War II or any of these things.
Well, certainly that too can be found in the Church.
As they passed this resolution damning the alt-right as satanic, as anti-Semitic, as white supremacist, and on and on, they also passed a resolution, quite rightly, celebrating the 500th anniversary of the...
Protestant Reformation, which began by many accounts in, well, what year is this?
1517, I believe.
And so, of course, in celebration of that, they had many books on Martin Luther at this convention.
I saw one bookseller with a nice Martin Luther collection.
Well, I thought they ever even read anything that Martin Luther said about Jews.
And so, all of this stuff will work itself out.
And what we see today is not sustainable.
We all know that.
And when it flips again, everything else will flip, including the religious institutions.
So we can take hope in that.
But we do know, as I said earlier, and I'm not sure if I said it on this call because I've had some trouble with the connection.
I know I said earlier before the call, the alt-right is the only organized force fighting degeneracy in the West.
So for any conservative Christians out there, if they want to join a battle that their ministry Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And we welcome them, I would say this.
Speaking as a Nietzschean, I welcome Southern Baptists.
I mean that absolutely sincerely, even though I did say that with a twinkle in my eye.
I mean that absolutely sincerely.
The Southern Baptist, one of the interesting things, you've got to think, well, you know, they completely accommodated the South's racial culture, the South's, you know, belief in white identity, the South's slavery culture.
Completely accommodated.
And you've got to think, what if, you know, what if the Third Reich had won the Second World War and had conquered America?
You know, they would probably be conforming to whatever...
You know, National Socialist America would be preaching today because, you know, they want to be—the key thing about these people is they want to be accepted.
They want to be respectable, and they'll accommodate, you know, whoever bestows respectability, whether it was the slave owners in the antebellum South or the media moguls who control the television channels today and who are the big donors.
And it'll be something else.
It'll be something else, you know, 20, 30 years from now, I think.
I absolutely agree.
And I would say this.
A lot of Americans really love this notion of the separation of church and state, which can be traced back to a letter written by Jefferson.
And it does have, obviously, some historical basis.
I think there were...
Many people in the founding of America feared the notion of a national church because America was multi-confessional and a Baptist or a Catholic didn't want an Anglican forcing his religion down their throat.
But I do think this notion of the separation of church and state is actually wildly naive and wildly ahistorical.
And that is governing bodies and communities.
They congeal through religion.
And it's actually the religion that grants legitimacy to the state and vice versa, actually.
And religion is almost inherently tribal.
Even in a universalistic faith like Christianity or Islam or something like that, there is this tribal element.
To religion.
And the tribe reinforces the religion, and the religion reinforces the tribe.
And we really can't ever get away from that.
And we have to understand the degree to which, yes, what you were saying, Hunter, is true.
If there is a change of regime, we will, within about 10 years, because Southerners, they're a little slow.
It might take them 10, 15. They'll be quoting scripture, justifying the new regime.
And we can look at that cynically, but we can also look at that as a sign of hope.
And we can also look at that from a standpoint where that I am not, whatever I'm, however I might feel about religion itself or my faith or life.
I don't believe there can ever be a society without a religious sensibility and without a religious institution.
I don't think those things can exist.
And there is going to have to be, for any kind of new society that we want to found, there is going to have to be a binding force that is supernatural, that isn't the police, that isn't the constitution, that is something that is...
That is theological and that is in our hearts and in our minds and in the air, you could say.
Well, and this may have been their overzealous attempt to stave off something that they feel is happening in the Church.
I think there is a lot of pressure building up in the Church.
We saw it with Trump.
I mean, on the political scene, all was calm and serene until Trump happened.
Now, certainly he's underperformed based upon our expectations, but what he did, that campaign was really one of the most enjoyable years of my life, watching the people.
And I believe that some of these churches may be feeling that as well.
And it can happen in the church.
Certainly, I can tell you from being on the inside of this thing, Not with the Southern Baptist Convention currently, but having grown up in the church, and I still take my kids to church.
I can tell you that the average person in the pew of a church in the South does not want to go and hear Marxist bilge coming from the pulpit, as they are inundated incessantly with all other forms of media, except for the ones, of course, that we control, bombarding them.
With this worldview, they don't want to go to church on Sunday morning, hear a sermon that reflects the Obama MSNBC worldview.
I think that something could break in the church.
And if you look back, not just on the South, obviously, and this has been talked about, this is not a new idea, and this isn't something that hasn't been said a hundred times before, but if you look back, our people do owe a lot to the Christian sect in terms of, to varying degrees, certainly the great white kings of Europe, Charlemagne, Sobieski, Martel, it was the banner of the cross that united a lot of those tribes.
So I don't know if that's the role Christianity can play going forward, but I think it's certainly nearsighted or short-sighted to blame Christianity for the plight of the world as it stands today.
And so I do agree with you, Richard, that we will need something going forward that fills that void on a spiritual plane that things in the physical realm can't.
Amen.
Do either of you happen to read Rod Dreher?
You know who that is?
Oh, he's my favorite.
Yeah, he's my favorite commentator.
Oh, yeah.
But the only thing I would...
The only thing I would say about Rod Dreher, he is a bit too extreme, and I feel that I will have to distance myself from some of his white supremacist and eliminationist viewpoints.
However, as a lover of free speech, I am willing to tolerate the radical anti-Semite and neo-Nazi Rod Dreher.
Okay, so commenting on Rod, I do read Rod.
And I think, you know, from reading Rod's blog...
I couldn't do it.
If I read him every day, I would just be in a bad mood.
I would just be like, oh!
I keep tabs on Rod to see what, you know, Christian conservatives and these types are thinking.
And you've got to think, maybe the reason they're condemning the alt-right is the same reason the Southern Baptists were condemning integration relentlessly back in the 50s, 60s.
You know, they were denouncing integration with resolutions because the alt-right is gaining ground, and they see the alt-right as a threat.
And I've seen many blog posts by Rod Rear when he talks about how all these Christian principles and...
Christian school teachers and all these people who do Christian homeschooling are complaining that their kids are on their smartphones talking about the alt-right and Pepe and all this stuff.
And it's kind of like denouncing pornography.
They're losing.
And that's because our discourse is so available.
It's so out there.
Even though we have such a small...
Budget, you know, our voice is everywhere on the internet, on Twitter, on YouTube, some places, if you count Paul Jusuf.
But yeah, I mean, we're getting our ideas out there, and they feel threatened by us, and that's probably one of the reasons you had this big denunciation.
What do you think of that?
No doubt.
Well, and Richard, you even mentioned what the alt-right's been able to do on this budget that wouldn't even be a drop in the bucket.
Single churches in the Southern Baptist Convention, single churches that bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars in time every week, and they are completely weak, effeminate, emasculated, and the future is not there.
I'm not saying as a Christian that the future can't be, that that faith can't be part of our future as a people, but the future is not in the Christianity that you're getting at the denominational head table right now.
Oh, I think it's absolutely true, and I'll just add to the Rod Dreher discussion.
Rod Dreher is kind of like an expression of the older, worrying...
A hand-wringing Christian who doesn't want to see this going.
Rod Dreher has expressed a kind of, well, not a kind of, he's expressed a cultural pessimism.
I mean, he has thrown out this idea, the Benedict Option, a romantic retreat from the world.
We need to basically retreat from the culture war and set up camp somewhere and then maybe come back after it's burned itself out or something.
That is the Benedict Option.
To the degree that I understand it.
But it is interesting that people like Dreher will say things.
He'll even say things that I might agree with on a lot of issues, things affecting our society.
You mentioned pornography.
Has the wide availability of pornography made us better people?
To ask that question is to answer it.
Obviously, no.
And family breakdown.
Loss of trust in society, etc.
I agree with all that.
But all of these things do seem to be fundamentally symptoms of a greater loss, and that is that loss of our sense of ourselves as a people.
And also, all of these things have a racial element to them.
Somewhere, whether you like it or not, that is what they are about.
At some basic level, this is the level on which whites or Americans are being attacked.
It's on the racial level most prominently.
And to just think that we shouldn't fight that battle or, oh, let's not fight that battle because as Christians we don't see race, but let's try to fight all these other battles, it just seems hopelessly naive.
And even if Dreyer might be, and I'm speaking seriously, I was joking about Dreyer being a neo-Nazi, of course, that was sarcasm, but I'm speaking quite seriously now.
You know, even if we agree with Dreyer on some important points, if you're not going to enter the field of battle, where the battle is taking place, you might as well go play tiddlywinks.
You know, it's like the left, the enemies of everything Rod Dreher likes, they have amassed an army on the race battlefield.
And yet Rod Dreher is like, no, to the sea!
No, let's go over to this other country where we might be able to win this tiny little skirmish.
No, at some point you have to face down your enemies.
And if you don't, you're cut.
I don't care what your opinions are on abortion or pornography or the decline of the family or civil discourse or profanity or whatever the hell you want to talk about.
If you're not fighting the battle that matters, you might...
Might as well go take up tiddlywinks.
Because that is just as useless as what you're doing right now.
And Rod Dreher is funny.
He is a funny guy in terms of locating where cuffed Christians are at the moment.
But that's all he's useful for.
He's utterly useless for anything else besides that.
He is not going to fight.
And if someone's not going to fight, you kick them out of the army.
He's a barometer, I would say.
That's why I read him.
He's kind of a barometer or temperature gauge of where these people are at.
And I read National Review every day, and another one who's like that is David French.
And his response to everything, just like Rod's response to everything, is a stern moral lecture.
That's so awful that you're rioting, you know, in our schools and you're kicking our professors out.
How dare you?
How dare you?
And it's always the response to everything is a stern moral lecture and a complaint about double standards.
The usual hand-wringing and never doing anything but denouncing us because, you know, we're the only ones who are going to get out there and do anything about it.
They'll call us, you know, when we go out there to oppose the antiphots who are beating people up in the streets.
They're like, oh, well, there's just two sides of the same coin, is what they'll say.
And they're weirdly right, because we're, both of us, both of these sides are actually fighting.
You know what I mean?
Fighting, yeah.
Yeah, it's like, that's basically what they're saying.
You're just social justice warriors.
I've heard this so many times.
It's such a stupid argument.
But at some level, it's like, well...
Okay, let me actually accept that.
Like, yes, like the social justice warriors and like Antifa, we actually want to change society.
We're not just going to wring hands and complain and wag fingers.
That's ultimately meaningless.
So it's like, yeah.
Of course the battle is racial, and I'll give you two examples.
One is how the phrase white male has become...
A derogatory term.
Like, you know, you used to call somebody a racist.
Now you call them a white male or a white conservative.
You attack them.
You specifically attack them on the grounds of their race and demographic.
It doesn't get any more clear-cut than that.
And the second is, you know, with the Southern Baptist Convention, you know, they condemned in their little resolution.
They said that white identity was satanic, right?
Now, they didn't condemn...
They didn't say that black identity was satanic.
All these black Baptists who have their black congregations or these black Methodists who have their race-based congregations, they didn't say that they were satanic.
It's just whites.
And even they understand that.
And even Rod understands that.
He'll just, you know, handwritten about it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, gentlemen, let us put a bookmark.
In this conversation, there's obviously a lot more to say, but I think we have spoken our piece about this matter.
But thank you, Hunter.
Thank you, James.
Do you guys want to plug away before we go?
Yeah, I would say this very quickly, Richard.
I am channeling you the week that Hillary Clinton condemned the alt-right.
I believe you were in Japan that week.
I happen to be out of town myself to why my connection has been so poor.
And I think I even dropped off the call a few minutes ago for a moment.
And so to your audience, I would apologize for my lack of accessibility here.
But I would leave you with two thoughts.
Number one, what you're seeing here is nothing more than the modern-day witch hunt to identify and punish and persecute so-called racists.
But unlike those days when the people perpetrating it had some semblance of power...
The future will not be written by people like Russell Moore, who publicly admitted to crying uncontrollably when the Southern Baptist Convention denounced the Confederate flag.
History is not going to be written by people who cry tears of joy when the Christian cross of his fathers is denounced by his own church.
That's not going to be who writes history.
The people who write history are the people who are listening to this podcast and the people who support the institutions that represent this podcast.
And so I'm happy to be part of you.
Thank you for supporting altright.com.
And if you want more about me, I've been on the radio for 13 years fighting this battle on the AM radio, the political cesspool.
Thank you, Richard.
Thank you, Hunter.
Yeah, thanks, James.
Awesome.
And you can visit me at occidentaldessent.com and, of course, also check out...
AltRight.com where I'm sure this will be posted and I hope all our friends in the media and the Southern Baptists can listen to what we had to say about them this evening.
Thanks Richard for having me and thanks James.
It's always great to talk to y 'all.
I'll talk to y 'all later.
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