Islam, Christianity, Paganism... Which Ring Will Rule Them All?

As the West stumbles into materialist decadence and spiritual nihilism, traditionalists often point to three religious movements that can revive us, yet which is most likely to triumph?

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In this piece, I explore the three religious movements that are oft-touted in traditionalist circles as solutions to the ongoing corrosion of Western Culture. I discuss the plusses and minuses of each and what we’re most likely to see occur in the near—to medium-term future.

As regular viewers and readers will know, I hold to (mystic) Christian beliefs and deeply value the Christian tradition and its influence on the West. However, I will try to be as objective as possible in answering the above question. Do let me know in the comments if I miss any key points.

Firstly, a quick note on why I didn’t include other religions and movements such as the Eastern religions and atheism.

Regarding Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism and Buddhism, I see these as uniquely ‘Asian’ religions that are deeply embedded in the cultural fabric of the Eastern world. So much so it’s hard to consider the West adopting such religious movements. Another key factor here is that the aforementioned religions are not proselytizing in the way Christianity and Islam are, this means they tend to remain insular.

Further, the only Westerners who seriously adopt Eastern religions are a handful of sincere spiritual seekers, or materialist moderns seeking refuge from a life of habitual drug use and sexual excess. However, as I explored in a recent video (see below), many Westerners are happy to take the ‘pathways to bliss’ they acquire from a Mooji or an Eckhart Tolle but aren’t too keen on following this through into a sustained, disciplined and self-denying practice that forms the basis of an actual culture and tradition.

It is, in essence, just another form of enlightenment-flavoured Western escapism, in my view:

Secondly, regarding atheism, while moderns see it as the triumph of rationality and sense over the superstitions and paranoia of the ‘Dark Ages’, atheism is a modernist phenomenon. It comes on the back of technology, of man’s newfound ability to tame nature and find authority in the modern scientific state rather than God, tradition and ethnos.

Secularism is materialism, after all. It sees man as purely biological. It sees the human mind as the ultimate authority. This seems like wisdom to a modern, but as the spiritual godfather of traditionalism Rene Guenon points out, this plays to man’s lower, rather than higher, nature:

‘Humanism was the first form of what has subsequently become contemporary secularism; and, owing to its desire to reduce eveyrthing to the measure of man as an end in himself, modern civilisation has sunk stage by stage until it has reached the level of the lowest elements in man and aims at little more than satisfying the needs inherent in the material side of his nature, an aim that is quite illusory since it constantly creates more artificial needs than it can satisfy.’ (1)

I would argue, and perhaps this is a topic for another time, that the dawn of atheism hasn't led to an era of rationality, sense and order, but chaos, disunity and all manner of rogue ideologies that have kidnapped Western minds, especially those of the youth. As Chesterton once stated, “When men stop believing in God they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything.” (1)

One could argue this isn’t the case with a hyper-intellectual rationalist in the mold of Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens, but it’s certainly true of society at large, as we’ve seen by the carnage of radical feminism, hyper-liberalism and wokeism.

Finally, atheism, that is materialism, cannot form the basis of a tradition—every civilisation has its founding mythos, its prophetic figures, its moral universe, its ‘divine’ hierarchy—it speaks to the material and the metaphysical in the man. The mind and the soul. While the mind may become more prominent as a tradition matures, it always begins with a spiritual explosion that informs the norms and values of a given culture or civilisation. Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed are all obvious examples of this.

With this addressed, let’s begin with Islam’s claims to be the tradition to rule them all.

An Islamic West?

The idea of an Islamic West is the bane of many right-leaning figures online, and while it’s easy to parody such people or call them bigoted as the liberal side of the divide tends to do, it’s not as if they’re without substance in their concerns.

Islam is, after all, like Christianity, a proselytizing religion. Adherents want others to become Muslim, no matter their cultural or ethnic background. It’s only the blind naivety of the modernist utopian liberal that overlooks this, assuming, via the prideful materialism of Western secularism, that once Muslims spend a bit of time in Hamburg they’ll ditch Allah for Richard Dawkins and Pride marches.

As those of us who’ve been paying attention have noted, this process is not happening. At all. Islam is not only the fastest-growing religion in the world but also in Europe. One could say this is due to immigration, which is largely true, yet we’re also seeing Westerners convert to Islam. The converts we’re seeing tend to be young men looking for meaning, structure, community and masculine guidance in an era of nihilistic materialist modernity and a weak, feminine and liberalised version of Christianity.

Yet it’s not just lost, young men who see value in Islam, the aforementioned father of traditionalism Rene Guenon adopted Islam himself, seeing it as the only valid structure left that Western man could adopt given the Western tradition had been destroyed by modernism. Islam, in his words, was still valid because it ‘distinguishes the two complementary parts [of tradition], which can be labelled exoterism and esoterism’. (3)

So let’s break down what’s in Islam’s favour.

Plusses

The main advantage Islam has is its loyalty to Allah and the ummah (the brotherhood of Muslims) rather than modernity, with its attendant individualism. This makes combating the atomised modernist individual easy work and why we see such cultural dominance from Islam in the UK when compared to other religions and philosophies.

This huge advantage is only enhanced by the idiocy of Western liberals themselves. Such liberals, desperate in their bleeding-heart modernism to be ‘tolerant’ of non-Western peoples that have supposedly been ‘oppressed’, demand all manner of government and corporate policies to ‘include’ Islam. Of course, they fail to see that Islam not only has the power to supplant Christianity, which they wouldn’t care about anyway, but liberalism itself too in time. This they would care about.

To return to Guenon, Islam has maintained its ‘exo’ and ‘esoteric’ traditionalist nature, whereas the Christian church has been all but hollowed out. This means that for those looking for deeper meaning and structure than Western modernism can offer, only Islam fits the bill of having a contemplative dimension alongside practical guidance for daily life.

As stated previously, this is very popular with men seeking meaning and guidance, specifically when it comes to dealing with females. The modern West is extremely sexualised and extremely degenerate. Worse still, radical feminism means Western women can be hyper-individualistic, hyper-materialistic and competitive with men. The result of this is the massively declining birth rates in the UK amongst Indigenous Brits, while we see the opposite happening with Muslims.

Finally, Islam has admirers whom you may well not expect. Nietzsche was famously more sympathetic to Islam than Christianity due to Islam’s ‘masculine’ and ‘warrior’ nature, the late, great orator of the radical right Jonathan Bowden also ‘admired’ Islam as it was ‘very right-wing’ by nature. (4)

All this points to Islam having spiritual, cultural and, eventually, numerical dominance in only a few decades, yet Islam does face quite significant challenges as per below.

Minuses

Starting with the aforementioned Bowden, while he admired the masculine, communitarian and religious qualities of Islam, he also stated that Islam was ‘not our way’, believing the core of Western Culture lay in the Greco-Roman tradition, stating:

‘Our civilisation is based upon… a reverse principle of open-mindedness and reflexiveness… We begin with the view that there are certain absolutes and certain truths, but we are slightly less certain of what they are, and we wish to test them through life, struggle, evidence and so forth.’ (5)

Bowden touches on something visceral here that’s all too easily dismissed in liberal modernity—that is that we Westerners are, despite our amnesia, part of a spiritual, ethnic, cultural and intellectual tradition. While the Tony Blair’s of this world seemingly believe that this can be washed away with the wind, it still lays dormant in even the most committed liberal materialist. In fact, one could argue the obsession with social justice and self-flagellation we see in the modern West is a unique sickness in Westerners and our attendant culture. After all, we don’t see Asians, Turks, Africans and other groups engaging in this sort of civilisational suicide.

Anyhow, I digress, the core point here is that Islam will likely struggle to get a true foothold into the Western consciousness as it doesn’t correspond to who we are—it is a warrior, desert religion at its core, one grounded in the scorching heat of Arabia. That doesn't tend to fit well with the temperate ambience of a lush English garden.

Some may counter here that Christianity is a Middle Eastern desert religion too, but as I’ve explored in the piece below, Christianity has been solidly ‘Europeanised’ over thousands of years:

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Is Christianity an Eastern Religion?

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Another major shortcoming of Islam is its public image and its abhorrent behaviour in the West. While liberals are fighting tooth and claw to keep a lid on the realities of grooming gangs and Islamic terror, anyone outside of the liberal paradigm can see there are major problems here—in the past couple of decades, 90% of terror convictions have been due to Islamic extremism. Given the response of mainstream Muslims tends to be to ignore such problems and accuse critics of ‘Islamophobia’, the religion looks brutal and wicked to many average Europeans.

Another major issue for Islam is the exact reverse of what so many Westerners fear—yes, Islam could conquer the West, but what if the West conquers Islam?

The above image is symbolic of Islam at a cultural crossroads in the West. We have the adherent Muslim woman wearing the hijab (the headdress) which is worn for reasons of modesty—that is to play down the sexual dimension of life—while she affixes lip-gloss. Lip-gloss is a Western creation made to enhance the appeal of the lips so they mimic sexual arousal (6) and render women more attractive to men. We can see a similar dynamic with the woman’s mascara.

All of this points towards the creeping Westernisation of Islam and Muslims. It may seem that Islam is bulletproof against Western sexualisation, with women kept in line via brutal means, yet we once thought this way about Christianity, about conservatism. Things fall apart. In this same vein, feminism is making its mark on Islam, which by its very nature will alter the traditional dynamic.

Two more deeply damaging impacts of modernity on Islam are materialism, something we see at its most decadent peak in ‘Islamic’ Dubai, and its ironically very feminine desire to play the victim in the Western world via the charge of Islamophobia. Islamophobia is part of intersectionality, the leftist notion that all ‘oppressed groups’—homosexuals, trans-people, blacks, Muslims, and so on—all share the same battle against the Western white power structure.

While this may result in cultural and economic gains for Islam, at what cost are they coming? Would Nietzsche, Guenon and Bowden respect this Islam? Would they still see the mystic warrior spirit in modern Muslims ringing Tell Mama to complain about how some drunk European football casual called them a “goat f***er” on the bus?

While Islam is ostensibly in the strongest position as a tradition, on closer inspection we can see that the jury is very much out, and Islam faces the same problems that destroyed Christianity, with almost zero awareness that it’s making the same mistakes.

Christianity

Negatives

I’ve made a great deal of content on the YouTube channel about the fall of the Christian tradition, so I don’t have to dive into too much detail here, for those that would like more clarification of my views, do watch the below:

• Is Christianity Just Too Weak & Feminine?

• How the Church is Failing the West

In short, it’s clear our tradition has lost its ‘exo’ and ‘esoteric’ nature, and thereby been split into liberal leftist secularism on one side, and an outdated Biblical literalism on the other. This means it’s been easy prey for a particularly aggressive brand of New Atheism, which convinced a generation to do away with their cultural inheritance.

This has left a shell of a faith that seems weak and hopeless, yet not all is lost.

Plusses

A phenomenon we’re increasingly seeing in the West is once atheist hardliners who had no time for Christianity soften their line. Even Richard Dawkins recently said he was a ‘cultural Christian’ and was sad to see the traditional culture dying. While most still can’t find it in them to ‘believe’, most Europeans do have a warm familiarity with the Church. It could be the stories and parables of Jesus, it may be the distant church bells ringing on a warm Sunday morning marking a wedding as you walk through the countryside, or it may be singing carols at Christmas in an ancient church by candlelight.

These things hold deep, instinctive cultural meaning for many people, it feels as though we’d be a poorer place without such things.

Yet as we move into an uncertain future, a future that’s culturally chaotic, dangerously violent, atomised, soulless, and potentially Islamic, people do tend to reach for their roots all the more. This may explain why we’re witnessing a rise in church attendance in the UK year-on-year. We’re also seeing a surge of young men scuppering Islam for conservative, ‘masculine’ and hardline orders in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions.

Further, while we’re witnessing modest growth in church attendance and an increasing warmth towards the tradition coming from right-leaning atheists, Christianity does have a couple of, as yet unrecognised, aces up its sleeve, too.

I spoke with the ex-film director and now Christian mystic Scott Mannion recently, a very important person to speak with as he’s at the forefront of a reawakening of the Christian mystic tradition of initiation (the esoteric nature of Christianity). While this may not appeal to the masses, such practices and understandings are vital. I must say again, vital, for cultural and civilisation renewal. Regular viewers and readers will know that I advise Westerners not to fear the decline as it’s necessary to inspire a rebirth of the West, and as part of any rebirth, we will need the flowing waters of revelation and spiritual realisation to engender us with new vigour in a lost and damaged world. Such a force has the power to unify the Western mind and collective spirit once more.

Not only is this energy building, but many are finding a treasure trove of wisdom in our forgotten tradition to guide us. To name but a few; Meister Eckhart, St John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, and even the literary figures of Blake, Milton and Chesterton offer us ‘new wine’ to sustain us.

The other ace is the tradition itself. The Christian tradition may be in tatters now, yet it has a rich history, and with new understanding can be reawakened to guide new generations of men. Of course, this has the added advantage of connecting us with our forebears, who were deeply intertwined with the very same tradition, as well as being the tradition Europeans are already intrinsically familiar with.

Paganism

Paganism has taken on renewed vigour on the European right in recent years, chiefly due to its uniqueness to given peoples in the Western world. To quote Bowden once more, who was himself a (Nietzschean) pagan:

‘I prefer people to have a religious viewpoint, even if its the most tepid sort of thing, because at least there is a structure… But, personally, I prefer tribally based religions. I prefer religions that are about blood and genetics and honour and identity…’ (7)

This tells us something vital about why paganism, which is often seen as a movement of liberal hippies opposing the Daily Mail-reading Christian conservatism of their parents, is gaining popularity in right-wing circles. Paganism is rooted in ethnic exclusivity; that is blood, ethnos and, as a pagan would see it, the harsh and true realities of nature. For many pagans, including Bowden, Islam is more admirable than Christianity because Christianity is ‘left-wing’ by nature. Bowden again:

‘Christianity has provided the ethical and aesthetic superstructures throughout which most Western people think. [But] reality is pagan… Nature is pagan. Pagans have reacted against Christianity which is deep down a left-wing religion of humanism, love and tolerance.’ (8)

Let’s explore the plusses paganism offers:

Plusses

As we can see from the above, paganism offers Europeans an ancient, nature-based practice that by its very nature challenges every aspect of modernity. It takes back ethnic and cultural identity in an era when Westerners are effectively outlawed from having such things. It speaks to a connection with land and bloodline that frees the modern from the liberalist universalism of ‘equality and diversity’. It’s an affront to the Guardian-reading vicar who tells Western man to be softer, more feminine, more inclusive, more tolerant, more self-hating.

Another bonus paganism offers is, ironically, that it’s new. I don’t mean this in a historical context, of course, but in a cultural context. Most modern Europeans have had no interaction with paganism beyond The Wicker Man, so discovering something ancient can be enthralling and adopting it may well feel as though a great circle has been conjoined, like you’re at a new epoch of European history.

The other major advantage of paganism is that it’s not weighed down by the bad public image, alien nature and increasing decadence of Islam, nor the massive feminine bureaucracy of present-day institutionalised, liberal Christianity. Free from such constraints, it has free reign to speak to a new generation in a new way, while being supported by several intelligent and ambitious figures on the right wing of European politics.

Minuses

Paganism, while dynamic and exciting, is still very fringe in the grand scheme of European culture. Further, as aforementioned, those who do know anything about paganism tend to think negatively of it because of The Wicker Man or they know Daisy-Juniper, the privileged daughter of the rich folks up on the hill who grew out her armpit hair, no longer showers, and changed her name to Moonbeam. While this may be an unfair characterisation, it still exists in the cultural consciousness.

Another major issue is that Islam, and especially Christianity, are deep, rich and profound traditions. This isn’t just true spiritually and culturally, but politically and intellectually too. The achievements of European Christendom are massive. A pagan may say that such achievements were made despite Christianity, yet this is still a claim, and the rich framework of Christian moral belief and its attendant intellectual tradition is not easy to wash away.

Perhaps the key minus is the focus on the ethnos, the blood, and the natural world—while such things have an appeal, it does beg the question of transcendence. Both Islam and Christianity have rich mystic traditions rooted in the melting of the individual will into the Divine Will—the Oneness of (the tripartite) God. This leads to notions of ‘universal love’ which, as we saw from Bowden, are often mistranslated into left-wing ideals.

I’m not saying this process hasn’t happened with liberal Christianity, I am saying that, at least in my view, this is a misreading of the traditional Christian teaching which does indeed demand spiritual equality between men, but not equality on the physical plane (as liberalism and leftism does). This is a vital distinction to make as what pagans tend to be arguing against is liberal, rather than traditional Christianity.

It’s no surprise that Nietzsche, who Bowden followed and admired, made the same criticisms.

As a final note, it’s up for debate whether paganism can be a true spirituality and offer a true transcendence given its identity holds such an anchor in the material (ethnos, blood, peoples, et cetera). While these dimensions are indeed important, they are of secondary importance in Christianity and Islam (the first being the transcendent Godhead), and one wonders if the very nature of paganism really is as Bowden put it ‘barbaric’, and thereby cannot hold a civilisation, or a world, together.

In Closing

While I don’t wish to do a compare and contrast of which is the ‘best’, and the answer to that would be quite obvious given my Christian loyalties, I do hope this piece offered some insight into this most important issue of our time.

On that note, I intend to reawaken some of the initiatory practices mentioned previously on this Substack soon, most likely through group work. I’ll have more information about that shortly.

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References

1: Guenon, Rene., Crisis of the Modern World. Sophia Perenis (2004)

2: Cammaerts, Emile., ‘The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything’, Chesterton: The Laughing Prophet (1937)

3: Guenon, Rene., Haqiqa and Sharia in Islam. See here.

4: Bowden, Jonathan., Why I’m Not a Liberal. Imperium Press (2020).

5: IBID

6: Pubmed. Lip colour affects perceived sex typicality and attractiveness of human faces. See here

7: See 4

8: See 4