I read a lot of neoreactionary blogs. I appreciate the work of a lot of neoreactionaries. I link to neoreactionaries. I am indebted to neoreactionary Anomaly UK for his invaluable assistance with the Golden Circle. Neoreactionaries tend to be intelligent people, and I consider them by and large my allies.
However, I dont think I am a neoreactionary. The reason I dont believe I am a neoreactionary is quite simple: My attitude toward religion is fundamentally different from that of any neoreactionary I’ve ever seen.
My religious belief is, from the neoreactionary perspective as best I grok it, quite a naïve one. When I say I am a Christian, I mean it in this sense:
I am of the opinion that this world was in fact created by God, and that moreover, God is a single Essence as well as a communion of Three Persons, the Second of Whom became a man, and lived, suffered and died, and then rose from the dead, in history, in time. I am quite willing to accept that Christ’s life and death are myth, in the sense Tolkien used the term, but nevertheless I also believe they actually happened.
Moreover, I believe that, to unite people with Him in order to save their souls, Christ established a visible, hierarchical Body on Earth, whose purpose is, first and foremost, sacramental: to confer the Grace of God through the Holy Mysteries for the salvation of souls. I believe that the Eastern Orthodox Church is that Church today.
When I say I am Orthodox, then, I dont mean that I see Orthodoxy as somehow useful to my agenda, as a way to strengthen the culture or maintain social order or build a community or something, and that as a result of that I’ve adopted the forms of Orthodoxy or joined myself to an Orthodox Church. Rather, I mean that I believe Orthodoxy to be the Truth. By implication, then, other religions are, to a greater or lesser degree, false.
Of course, I believe that a society founded on these truths will probably function better than one which denies them. But you cant restore the Faith for that reason. As C.S. Lewis said, if you think you can, you ‘might just as well think [you] can use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist’s shop.’
Now, it’s possible that I’m wrong. No one’s actually defined sincere, exclusive, non-esoteric religious belief out of the neoreaction as far as I can tell. But I see few to no neoreactionaries professing it (though they certainly dont oppose it). For that reason I’m inclined to think I belong more to the Orthosphere, despite spending more time among the disciples of Moldbug.
Thoughts? Am I wrong? Is my religious attitude compatible with the neoreaction?