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The Christian Question
The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity:
A Sociohistorical Approach to Religious
Transformation
James C. Russell
New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
$19.95 US
xiv + 258 pp.
Reviewed by Samuel Francis
“Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism,” Oswald Spengler wrote
many years ago. What he meant was that Christianity’s endorsement of such ideas
as universalism, egalitarianism, peace, world brotherhood, and universal altruism helped
establish and legitimize the ethics and politics invoked by socialists and
communists. Socialists and communists don’t always agree, however, which is why
another German scholar, Karl Marx, pronounced that religion is in fact a conservatizing
force, the opiate of the masses, the drug that prevents the workers of the world from
rebelling against their class enemies.
Both of these Teutonic heavyweights might have profited from reading James C.
Russell’s The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, since it speaks, at least
indirectly, to the tension between their different views of Christianity, differences that
continue to be reflected in political and ideological disputes on the European and
American right today. The main question in the controversy is this: Is
Christianity a force that supports or opposes the efforts of the right to defend the
European-American way of life? Christians on the right argue that their religious
commitments are central to Western civilization, while pagans and secularists on the right
(especially in Europe) argue, with Spengler, that Christianity undermines the West by
pushing a universalism that rejects race, class, family, and even nation.
Mr. Russell, who holds a doctorate in historical theology from Fordham University and
teaches at Saint Peter’s College, does not quite answer the question, but his
immensely learned and closely reasoned book does suggest an answer. His thesis is
that early Christianity flourished in the decadent, deracinated, and alienated world of
late antiquity precisely because it was able to appeal to various oppressed or
dissatisfied sectors of the population -- slaves, urbanized proletarians, women,
intellectuals, frustrated aristocrats, and the odd idealist repelled by the pathological
materialism, brutality, and banality of the age.
But when Christian missionaries tried to appeal to the Germanic invaders by invoking the
universalism, pacifism, and egalitarianism that had attracted the alienated inhabitants of
the empire, they failed. That was because the Germans practiced a folk religion that
reflected ethnic homogeneity, social hierarchy, military glory and heroism, and
“standards of ethical conduct ... derived from a sociobiological drive for
group survival through ingroup altruism.” Germanic religion and society were
“world-accepting,” while Hellenic Christianity was “world-rejecting,”
reflecting the influence of Oriental religions and ethics. By “Germans,”
it should be noted, Mr. Russell does not mean modern residents of Germany but rather
“the Gothic, Frankish, Saxon, Burgundian, Alamannic, Suevic, and Vandal peoples, but
also ... the Viking peoples of Scandinavia and the Anglo-Saxon peoples of
Britain.” With the exception of the Celts and the Slavs, “Germans”
thus means almost the same thing as “European” itself.
Given the contradictions between the Christian ethics and world-view and those of the
Indo-European culture of the Germanic peoples, the only tactic Christians could use was
one of appearing to adopt Germanic values and claiming that Christian values were really
compatible with them. The bulk of Mr. Russell’s scholarship shows how this
process of accommodation took place in the course of about four centuries. The
saints and Christ Himself were depicted as Germanic warrior heroes; both festivals and
locations sacred in ancient Germanic cults were quietly taken over by the Christians as
their own; and words and concepts with religious meanings and connotations were subtly
redefined in terms of the new religion. Yet the final result was not that the
Germans were converted to the Christianity they had originally encountered, but rather
that that form of Christianity was “Germanized,” coming to adopt many of the
same Indo-European folk values that the old pagan religion had celebrated.
Mr. Russell thus suggests, as noted above, a resolution of the debate over Christian
universalism. The early Christianity that the Germans encountered contained a good
many universalist tendencies, adapted and reinforced by the disintegrating social fabric
and deracinated peoples of the late empire. But thanks to Germanization, those
elements were soon suppressed or muted and what we know as the historical Christianity of
the medieval era offered a religion, ethic, and world-view that supported what we today
know as “conservative values” -- social hierarchy, loyalty to tribe and place
(blood and soil), world-acceptance rather than world-rejection, and an ethic that values
heroism and military sacrifice. In being “Germanized,” Christianity was
essentially reinvented as the dynamic faith that animated European civilization for a
thousand years and more.
Mr. Russell’s answer to the question about Christianity is that Christianity is both
the grandmother of Bolshevism (in its early universalist, non-Western form) and a pillar
of social stabilization and order (through the values and world-view imported into it
through contact with the ancient barbarians). Throughout most of its history, the
latter has prevailed, but today, as Mr. Russell argues in the last pages of his work, the
enemies of the European (Germanic) heritage -- what he calls “the Euro-Christian
religiocultural fusion” -- have begun to triumph within Christian ranks.
“Opposition to this fusion, especially as it might interfere with notions of
universalism and ecumenism, was expressed in several of the documents of the Second
Vatican Council,” and he sees the same kind of opposition to the early medieval
Germanic influence in the various reform movements in church history, including the
Protestant Reformation, which always demand a return to the “primitive church”
-- i.e., pre-Germanic Christianity. It is precisely this rejection of the European
heritage that may have driven many Christians of European background out of Christianity
altogether and into alternative forms of paganism that positively affirm their racial and
cultural roots.
Whatever primitive Christianity or true Christianity or historical Christianity may or may
not have believed and taught, what is indisputably happening today is the deliberate
extirpation from Christianity of the European heritage by its enemies within the
churches. The institutional Christianity that flourishes today is no longer the same
religion as that practiced by Charlemagne and his successors, and it can no longer support
the civilization they formed. Indeed, organized Christianity today is the enemy of
Europe and the race that created it.
Mr. Russell has produced a deeply learned book that assimilates history and theology,
sociology and comparative religion, and even sociobiology and genetics within its
pages. Moreover, it is an important book that addresses a highly controversial and
philosophically and culturally significant issue that few others will address at all.
Samuel Francis is an award winning columnist and associate and book review
editor of The Occidental Quarterly
