American Dissident Voices broadcast of March 3, 2018

by Kevin Alfred Strom

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL COHESION of the nation is one of the primary functions of religion, a function which Christianity completely fails to fulfill today anywhere in the West. It is also a function which Christianity, and all other religions, are in fact forbidden to fulfill in the profoundly unhealthy society of the United States of America.

Today we continue with part 7 of our series, “A New Religion for Us,” as we study religion’s necessary ability to bind what would otherwise be nothing more than an unstable, loose association of families and tribes into a nation. I give you the words of classicist and scholar Revilo P. Oliver, from his book The Origins of Christianity, read by Miss Vanessa Neubauer. Listen:

* * *

The Triple Function:
Cohesion

by Revilo P. Oliver

AS ALL readers of Robert Ardrey’s brilliant expositions of biological facts, The Territorial Imperative and The Social Contract, well know, all animals that hunt in packs must have an instinctive sense of a common purpose and a rudimentary social organization that regulates the relations between individuals and produces, at least temporarily, a cohesion between them by subordinating the individual to the group and its common purpose. Obedience to the law of the pack must be automatic among wolves . . . and all species that depend for survival on cooperation between individuals.

We may be certain that that instinctive sense was present in our remote biological antecedents of two or more million years ago, the Australopitheci, who hunted in small packs and even learned to use as simple weapons stones and the bones of animals they had killed and devoured. . . .

The success of the [much later] Cro-Magnon people in hunting such formidable game as mammoths is sufficient proof that they must have lived together in groups large enough to be called a tribe, and that they had a language that was in some way inflected to form tenses and thus indicate temporal relationships, thereby making possible conscious planning and specific reference to past experiences. This, in turn, permitted the generalizations that are a kind of rough classification and a conscious awareness of tribal unity, which could be communicated to the young by spoken precept and rule, however crude and elementary, thus forming what anthropologists call a culture. . . .

The earliest religions of which we have knowledge are tribal, and their ceremonies are rituals in which the whole tribe (except children) participates or all of the part of the tribe that is concerned (e.g., all men of military age or all married women) or a group that has been selected to perform a dance or a sacrifice on behalf of the tribe as a whole. And when a number of tribes coalesce to form a small state, the demonstration of their effective unity and common purpose by religious unanimity becomes even more necessary, and it is affirmed by festivals in which every citizen is expected to participate, at least by abstaining from other activity and being present as a spectator, and in which aliens, whether visitors or metecs, are not permitted to participate and from which they may be so excluded that they are forbidden to witness any part of the proceedings. The number of citizens is now so large that active participation of all in a religious ritual is no longer feasible, and comparatively small groups must be selected to act on behalf of the whole state or the whole of a class in it. Alcman’s Partheneion, for example, was written for a choir of virgins who performed a ceremony on behalf of all the virgin daughters of Spartan citizens to conciliate for them the favor of Artemis. The Panathenaea, which celebrated the political unification of Attica, was a series of varied ceremonies (one of which was a reading of the poems of Homer) in honor of the goddess who was the city’s patroness, and although a fairly large number of individuals took part in the chariot-races, musical contests, choral performances, cult dances, and other ceremonies, only a small fraction of the citizen body could take an active part in the festival that was held for the benefit of the whole state, and on the last day, traditionally Athena’s birthday, metecs were even permitted to join the grand procession as attendants on citizens. At Rome, the twenty-four Salii solicited for the entire nation the favor of Mars and Quirinus by performing their archaic dance accompanied by a litany in Latin so archaic that its meaning was only vaguely known. . . .

This function of religion is to affirm political cohesion. And it has retained that function almost to our own time. When the unity of Christendom was shattered by the Reformation and it became clear that it would not be easy for either the Catholics or the Protestants to exterminate the other party, an early compromise was the doctrine of cuius regio, eius religio [the King’s religion is the people’s religion]. By agreeing that the ruler’s religion was to be that of all of his subjects (except of course, the Jews, who were always given special privileges), men hoped to maintain the effective unity of each state, and that was a political purpose that atheists could and did recognize as expedient. . . . If [such a pragmatic ruler] knew of Cardinal Dubois’ famous dictum that God is a bogeyman who must be brandished to scare the populace into some approximation of honesty, he may or may not have thought that the good cardinal was running a risk of post-mortem woe, but he recognized that Dubois’ opinions did not detract from his political efficiency in maintaining social stability.

In the United States, Benjamin Franklin certainly did not believe in any form of Christian doctrine, but that did not prevent him from approving, if he did not inspire, a state constitution which, by requiring an oath of belief in the Trinity, effectively excluded from political influence many of the Jews and such dissidents as the Quakers, who, for example, refused to defend with arms a society whose privileges they wanted to enjoy, and were, at least passively, disturbers of the political cohesion of the state of Pennsylvania. . . .

The principle of the separation of church and state, which was one of the bases of the Federal Constitution, has been nullified by the various states and, hypocritically, by the Federal government itself by exempting nominally religious organizations from taxation, and is nullified in practice by the strenuous political activity of virtually all the Christian and other religious sects, which, of course, is laudable when they agitate and intrigue for political ends of which you and I approve, and damnable when they use their power to oppose them, as any theologian can prove in five minutes by reciting selected passages of Holy Writ and tacitly lying by pretending that contradictory passages do not exist. The separation of church and state has proved impossible in practice in the United States, and for all practical purposes the ostensibly religious organizations have become privileged political organizations, most of which are actively engaged in subverting what little cohesion the nation once had and are furthermore avowed enemies of the race to which we and many of their members belong.

The use of religion as an expression of cultural unity and political consensus cannot long survive the first practice of toleration by which the nation’s Established Church, whatever it is, is tacitly disavowed by failure to suppress openly dissident sects. That function of religion, once the most important of all, has, in little more than a century, been so completely forgotten that some of our contemporaries are astonished when they hear of it.

* * *

You have been listening to the words of Professor Revilo Pendleton Oliver on the power of religion to bind a people together, as read by Vanessa Neubauer.

One could argue, and some have done so, that we White racial-nationalists should “take up the sword of Christ,” emphasize and reinterpret the Hebrew scriptures (and Saul of Tarsus’s revisions of them) that are (or can be made to seem) critical of our primary enemy, the Jewish power structure — and profess what we know is not true simply because the untrue doctrine still has the power to inspire and motivate many millions of our folk; and because those millions are in many cases the least corrupted by the degeneracy and self-hating “liberalism” promoted by our enemies.

But many of the most honorable Aryan men; the most self-respecting men; and the most intelligent, far-seeing men — and women — cannot engage in such hypocrisy and manipulation and still respect themselves. It is this kind of man that we in the National Alliance wish to attract and forge into our own power structure which will lead our people to a salvation both biological and spiritual. Only a creed which is in accord with the facts of Nature and evolution, as discovered by the best minds of our race, can command the respect and obedience of such men. Only a creed which makes our racial survival — and upward evolution — into the very purpose of our lives and our nations can inspire our best people, our leading minds, to do what needs to be done. And only such men as can see these truths are capable of holding out their hands to raise their brothers and sisters to the next highest level on our path.

There is a place, I believe, for those who can harmonize yesterday’s creeds with our Cosmic truth — who can make simpler folk see the light without distressing them to the point of dysfunction or collapse. In National Socialist Germany, for example, such efforts were begun. But such efforts require the preexistence of the new leadership stratum we intend to build.

One could also argue that our Cosmotheism cannot at this time promote national unity, because it is known by so few and professed by even fewer. But that critique is putting the cart before the horse. We have a new nation to build, and before we build that nation we must build the hard core of those who will dedicate themselves to that goal. The unity and dedication of that select group is what matters now.

In this series we will continue exploring the idea of a new spiritual path for our race — culminating with the revolutionary Nature-based religion of Cosmotheism, a faith uniquely suited for the men and women of our race. That’s all coming up right here on American Dissident Voices.

* * *

You’ve been listening to American Dissident Voices, the radio program of the National Alliance. The National Alliance is working to educate White men and women around the world as to the nature of the reality we must face — and organizing our people to ensure our survival and advancement. We need your help to continue. Please send the largest contribution you can afford to National Alliance, Box 172, Laurel Bloomery, TN 37680 USA. Make your life count. You can also help us by visiting natall.com/donate. Once again, our postal address is Box 172, Laurel Bloomery, TN 37680 USA. Until next week, this is Kevin Alfred Strom reminding you of the words of Richard Berkeley Cotten: Freedom is not free; free men are not equal; and equal men are not free.