Blut und Boden Sounds Scarier in German

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Introduction

The worst corruptions are corruptions of the very best things. The devil himself fell from a very great height, and it is not surprising that the greatest creational gifts can be turned into formidable idols. But it can still be really easy to make light of those people who react negatively to anything that smells like a “blood and soil” trope, doing so just because it was the Nazis who put that phrase on the map (Blut und Boden in German). “Stop freaking out,” they say. “What’s wrong with family ties? What’s wrong with a little topsoil for the garden out back?”

Home and hearth really are among the greatest created goods that we have been given, and a well-ordered society places a high priority on protecting it. The Fifth Commandment requires us to honor all such things with gratitude, Nazis or no Nazis. As Lewis says: “The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life.” And that ordinary happiness certainly includes the happiness of home and hearth right at the center.

But precisely because it is such a good thing, it becomes an implacable demon when impudent sinners start bringing their kinks into it—which they are currently attempting to do.

Suckled on a Creed Outworn

In his sonnet The World Is Too Much With Us, William Wordsworth lamented the materialistic disconnect between modern mammon-man, on the one hand, and pristine nature on the other. He yearned for an earlier time, one that he assumed represented a more wholesome integration of man with nature.

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

This poem was written around 1802, just a few years before Wordsworth began to return to his orthodox Anglican roots. So even though he came to make a good landfall, this yearning for a pagan past—driven by discontent with the turbulence, commotions, and distractions of modernity—is a yearning that has more than a few people today by the throat. It even has a bunch of anon-bots by the throat . . . things are that bad.

To appeal to another poet, in times like ours, when “things fall apart,” when the “centre cannot hold,” all the verities that you thought were verities start to come apart in your hands. You look around and you see that the “best lack all conviction.” You look around again, and you don’t see that you are being led by the nose . . . by the worst. But at least, you think, they are “full of passionate intensity.” You see the intensity all right, but you don’t see that it is arising from a very dark place. And so you start circling the drain, not understanding why the circular movements seem to be happening much more quickly now.

Let me describe how this process of theological disintegration is going to work. It starts out Lutheran, say. Then we have the renegade Lutheran stage. After that will come a syncretistic mash-up of Christianity and paganism. You have Rishda Tarkaan on your podcast, and you realize that he has some valuable insights. This would be the Tashlan stage. The next stage will be an overt worship of Odin—”I am a devotee of Odin, and am tired of pretending I’m not.” And then the final conclusion of the matter will be the claim to have descended from Odin.

It is this last bit of funny business that we are going to discuss today. I wanted to get out ahead of this so that people can stop sending me links about men marrying their sex-bot, and start sending me clips of their former youth pastor in his Druidic robes.

Dabbling That Can Suck You In

Now I grant that there is a stark difference between a Christianized people dabbling with foreign ideas and religions, and actually returning to them. There is more to being a Buddhist than buying wind chimes for your porch. There is quite a bit more to Islam than displaying a “Queers for Palestine” rag. There is more to devil worship than getting a Ouija board, and listening to Black Sabbath. In times of discombobulation, there will always be some people who just mess around the edges of other religions—the faith journey version of cultural appropriation. These people are to global ecumenism what eating at Taco Bell is to international cuisine.

But there are more than a few who call upon dark powers and then are astonished out of measure when the dark powers actually arrive. Not only dark powers, but good powers that they should not have roused. The evil antagonists in That Hideous Strength managed to do both . . . playing with fire and dark fire both.

Either way, it ends badly. Both ways, it ends badly.

The Wrong Kind of Blood and Soil

As you may know, I have labored to be grateful for my heritage—my people and my land. And as you might be able to figure out, I am related to my people by blood, and my land is made up of soil. So, there it is. Blood and soil. But I have also labored to distinguish this good and godly affection and gratitude from some of the more demented ideas that like to prance around under the banner of “blood and soil.” And the distance between the two positions (between the stance and the prance) is actually the distance between salvation and damnation.

When we die, one of the scriptural expressions for this is being “gathered to your people” (Gen. 25:8; 25:17; 35:29; 49:33; Num. 20:24; 31:2; Deut. 32:50). Grace completes nature. Grace fulfills nature. Come to think of it, nature is already nothing but grace, and so the whole thing is grace upon grace.

But in order for grace to complete the nature of home and hearth, all of it has to go on the altar. The way that grace completes nature is that grace gives back to us in resurrection what we surrender to Him to be crucified. So it cannot be the path of wisdom to argue that surrendering home and hearth to Him is somehow not necessary because they are “good things.” Grace does not complete a nature that is not surrendered. The completion of nature by grace is a resurrection, and in order to have that resurrection, the thing to be completed must die.

When surrendered and restored, God makes possible a profound affection and love for The Things of Earth. The man who hates his wife (Luke 14:26) is thus equipped to love her as Christ loved the church (Eph. 5:25). The man who places home and hearth before Christ is trying to make his home a place where people will bite and devour one another (Gal. 5:15).

So what is the distance between gratitude and affection, on the one hand, and malice and conceit on the other? When you come to the end of your life, there is a profound distinction to be made between being gathered to your people, and being tumbled into the Void. The air is thin there, and it is hard to hear the screaming.

This is a box that people really don’t understand as they are deciding to open it up. All they know is that the label says home and hearth, blood and soil . . . nothing but wholesome happy thoughts inside. They are blindly reacting to the globalist imperative that insists we deracinate everything and everybody, and because it is an reaction, they lurch into a flirtation with the wrong kind of blood and soil ideology. The italics are there for a reason. There is a good and godly affection for your land and your people, and as already mentioned, it is actually required by the Fifth Commandment.

But it remains the case that if you get on the wrong train—and there is a wrong train at this station—you will find that there is actually no platform at the last stop. There will be nothing for it but to step off into the Void.

Divine Descent

I said earlier I would discuss the matter of divine ancestry, and so here we are. Now in raising this topic, I am talking about something other than an interest in your family tree, or the pleasure you have in discovering that your great great grandfather invented the paper clip.

In paganism, one of the things that a undue fascination with ancestry and bloodlines will create is a lust to be descended from the gods. Just as the terminus of paganism ends in blood sacrifice, so also the genesis of it begins with the ultimate justification for such behavior. This is not simply a feature of the ancient world. This impulse is very much with us today. If modern man gropes his way back to pagan man, as is happening, he will discover that paganism is as paganism does. Nothing about living after the Industrial Revolution makes this kind of thing impossible.

During the Second World War, the Japanese claim was that the Emperor Hirohito was a direct lineal descendant of Amaterasu, the sun goddess of Shinto mythology. One of the requirements the Americans placed on Japan in the terms of surrender was that he had to publicly disclaim this.

Louis Farrakan maintains that blacks are the Original Man, created by Allah. Not quite divine, but still a lot better than the whites. The whites were cooked up a lab by a scientist named Yakub, and it was just the sort of thing he would do.

The Romans held that they were descended from Mars through Romulus and Remus. And they were also descended from Venus through Aeneas. The Athenians, naturally enough, thought they sprang from Athena. Stands to reason—just look at the etymology. And Alexander the Great maintained that he was descended from Heracles, and why not? Another angle on his greatness was found in the legend that his mother Olympias conceived him courtesy of Zeus.

One Aryan origin story had the superior master race coming from the northern island of Thule, where the sky god Darwin had ravished a Germanic shield maiden named Brunhild. Okay, I made part of this one up, and I acknowledge that I ought to be more careful. Don’t want to be giving anyone any ideas.

The bottom line here is that once you have decided to vaunt yourself no matter what, the sky’s the limit. Actually . . . not even the sky’s the limit. Time to ascend the sides of the north. And once you are detached from reality to such an extent, you will say anything to keep your followers as conceited as you are, and this frequently requires that Ancestry.com turn up some explanation for your greatness.

The correspondence view of truth doesn’t matter any more. All you need is a committed following, and the kind of chutzpah that enables you to pull off the “that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it” game. Our political factions are so entrenched now, and so inflamed, that a leader of one of them could declare that he’s a girl now, for example, and his tribe would just circle the wagons. “If he says he’s a girl, he’s a girl.” I can’t imagine that he would lose any of his true believers if he added a postscript that said he was a girl who was descended from Zeus.

I mean, that claim is actually more plausible than his claim that he is a maiden.

Idolatry Doesn’t Have to Make Sense

Idolatry—which is to say, rebellion—is a matter of the will. It is not intellectually coherent, and it doesn’t need to be coherent in order to attract and keep followers. Notice how the Israelites pitched the idea of the golden calf to Aaron:

They acknowledged that Moses had brought them up out of the land of Egypt. But nevertheless they turned to a different set of gods, in order to worship them as the ones who brought them up out of the land of Egypt. This is a world in which your religious life is contained entirely inside your head, and consists entirely of things you want to believe.

And what you want to believe is dictated by your lusts.

And all of this is why Christ, the giver of every good gift, is also the one who summons us to follow Him by picking up a cross. The only way to enjoy His good gifts properly is by following Him, and there is no way to follow Him apart from repentance and faith. What do we repent of? All of our varied forms of idolatry . . . and it doesn’t much matter if you have been serving some globalist Baal in Brussels, or some local baal in a grotto near your rural homestead. The message of the gospel begins with repent. We must repent of valuing anything more than we do Christ.

Bloody Soil and Dirty Blood

It really is Christ or chaos. And it doesn’t much matter if it is a reactionary chaos or a revolutionary chaos. If you are not following Christ in accordance with His assigned pattern of death and resurrection, then the only thing you are going to do with that blood and soil when you get it is to defile that soil with the blood of some bystander.

The only way out is the blood of the only righteous man who ever lived. We must repent and follow Him. His blood does not defile a land, but rather cleanses it. But it is not possible to press that cleansing power into the service of any ideology. Rather, the ideology must be brought to Him, and there put to death.

What will follow after such a death . . . well, you just have to trust Him. But it’s good, I tell you.