This business of neo-paganism is quite interesting, because it rests on such obviously stupid and fraudulent foundations--quite as foolish as Wiccan but it is part of an ongoing rebellion against Christendom. Quite apart from the question of whether there is or are God or gods, we have--to the extent we have a civilization of any kind--a Christian civilization. To attack it is to join the enemy. I have explained this many times to the leading neo-pagan thinker alive in the world today, but his hatred of the Church is a force that cannot yet be overcome. One Catholic friend of his once explained to me, he hates the Church because he hates his country and he hates his country because ultimately he hates himself. All of the good things in ancient paganism were incorporated into the Medieval Church, which makes the Reformation--as well-intentioned as many Reformers were--a disaster for Christendom.

Yes, although religion is only part of the explanation, non-believing Catholics tend to live better than non-believing Protestants. In turning religion--which is a matter of behavior and custom--into ideology--a question of ideas about faith, grace, etc.--Protestants stripped Christianity of much of its power to inform, reform, and transform society. Obviously, they did not intend to do this, but it happened.

Let me illustrate the difference between Catholic-Orthodox Christianity and Protestantism by the microcosmic examples of men who drift away from religion in their early 20's--a very common phenomenon. When a Protestant ceases to practice his religion, he often--not always but often--finds himself rejecting the ideas--is there a God? Did He create the universe and send his son to die and be reborn for us? He will not come back unless he receives a shock that makes him doubt the anti-Christian ideology he has absorbed from the world around him. The Catholic or Orthodox male will also drift away, probably in equal or greater numbers, but since for him religion is not simply what he believes in but a way of life involving weddings and funerals and baptisms and house blessings and saints' days and a million other things in which his womenfolk are involved, he can never get entirely away. Indeed, I have known many Orthodox men who go to church for a few minutes in the beginning, slip away to drink and smoke with their friends, and then return at the end. As they get older, however, and less preoccupied with success or women, they begin to stay a bit longer and by the time they are 70, they may be pillars of the Church. Among Italian Catholics, it is sort of a joke that the ushers tend to hang out in the narthex--important business, naturally. The point is that while they may not believe much of anything, they remain connected by an umbilical cord that brings them nourishment and solace.

I do not say that traditional Anglicans and Lutherans do not have some equivalent mechanisms, only that Protestantism in general has not been so good at informing the entire society. This is the flip side of the fact that church-going Protestants are often more moral and responsible than regular Catholics. I do not at all wish to enter into religious polemics here, but I think the issue Frank has raised is quite real and quite important, and the only two choices seem to me to lie in 1) conversion of European Protestants to the Catholic Church or 2) Medievalizing Protestant Churches as some Calvinists are trying to do. By the way, the failure of the Catholic Church in the USA is, I believe, primarily the result of Americanization, a process that has tended to make the Church more ideological and less Medieval.

I am closing this thread and transferring the discussion to my most recent entry on immigration, where it will be easier to keep track of everything. I do want to thank anyone who has been at all patient. Some of the more foolish attacks have reminded me that we should spend some time and scan in much of our writing on immigration. When my good friend Peter Brimelow was writing only about business, we were being attacked by the neoconservatives for our strong stand against illegal and mass-legal immigration. We have not changed our position.

Anthropologists distinguish between savages and barbarians on a number of levels. Rather than go into them, let us just say that the Celts and Germans whom the Romans met were barbarians–people living in a settled social order, with agriculture, metal work, etc.

Perhaps the Romans misunderstood them or were biased/lying even.

Whatever the case, belief in god, even just an abstract belief, seems impossible for the Nordics I meet. They've been brought up to view religion as a sort of insanity that clouds reason, so perhaps the symbolic belief in odd folklore would fit them, who knows...

Note: I'd be more concerned about Asatru if I thought many actually believe in it. Did C.S Lewis believe in god(s) when he was a pagan?

Siena and Lucca, by contrast, are not only physically well preserved but also there is some continuing sense of local identity. The same is true in parts of Greece and France.

They do like to work (relatively), they are organised and efficient, and they are naturally empathetic I believe. Are they truly too abstract and unattached, or simply corrupted by culture/societal forces? Are they perhaps more susceptible to mass media and more prone to bending to peer pressure?

Or, I hate to say it, has the Catholic church been more effective than the Reformed churches at encouraging morality? And if so, what can be learned from this?

The northern mind and morality is abstraction. It is capable of kindness, loyalty, and perverse horrors depending on what is conceived. The attachments aren't, sadly, as biological and irrational as are the southern Europeans you mention. So, can they be saved? (rhetorical...)

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Are there any tradition minded thinkers focusing on this? Are there any Reformed traditionalists focusing on anything, haha...

Do you know whether anyone has conducted a DNA ancestry analysis of Northern Italy to determine how much of it is Celt and how much Germanic?

Interestingly, the Germanic impact on central and northern Italy would seem to be mostly on the upper classes. What appears to be Germanic blood in Lombardia may well be Celtic, certainly the dominant note in the ancient world and according to a modern geneticist Celts still predominate north of the Po. This led my quondam friend Umberto Bossi, after seeing Mel Gibson’s movie on William Wallace, to declare; “Io sono Braveheart.” It was about this time that a student group in Merate (roughly SW of Lecco) was formed, I Giovani Celti Meratesi. They invited me to address them on their Celtic inheritance. I began by observing they were all drinking Coca Cola. I pointed out that everywhere they are found, Celts drink distilled spirits: Whiskey in Scotland, Ireland, and the South; Slivovica in Serbia and Slovakia, grappa in Piemonte and Lombardia. “I Celti non bevono Coca Cola,” I exclaimed. Embarrassed, the boys sneaked out and brought back beers.” “Va bene?” I left feeling I had corrupted them. On the other hand, there are clearly German types. My good friend the novelist Eugenio Corti, although he speaks only a few words of German, is taken everywhere in Europe and elsewhere for German.

What Dr. Fleming says is correct. Rome is less decadent than, say, Berlin or Prague, which one can certainly gauge by the level of debauchery in the night life. Nevertheless, I still felt least "at home" while living in Rome than I ever did living in France, Germany or the UK. Perhaps it was my Midwestern Protestant upbringing. Perhaps I'm used to Celtic-Germanic decadence.

Here is a problem today, for Frank and others to consider, one that I have been reflecting on for some years. Being wild Celts, we are drawn to wild places and peoples. Unfortunately, when the fires burn down and the wild ones are corrupted by modernity, they sink into swinishness and a kind of loutishness that we have no evidence for from the Mediterranean. As much as I would like to live in or visit the modern equivalent of the Wild West or Ireland before the Normans came or the Highlands in the age of Rob Roy, those places are for the most part ruined or in the process of being ruined, whereas the decadent parts of Mediterranean Europe not only preserve a good deal of monuments, ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, but also a way of life that although not Christian is not exactly swinish either. I dreamed for years of visiting Ireland and Scotland but other than landscape, they are for me somewhat depressing--Ireland more than Scotland. On one side I have ancestors from Kerry, from a town that was only recently ruined by development. Siena and Lucca, by contrast, are not only physically well preserved but also there is some continuing sense of local identity. The same is true in parts of Greece and France. I am not saying this to discourage a love of Celtic places--far from it--but only to make the observation that in postChristian Europe, the countries that were under the Roman Empire preserve more than traces of civility, while the people beyond the limes have reverted to brutishness.

Anthropologists distinguish between savages and barbarians on a number of levels. Rather than go into them, let us just say that the Celts and Germans whom the Romans met were barbarians--people living in a settled social order, with agriculture, metal work, etc.--and, say, Apaches, Eskimos, and Hottentots. The peoples of the Valley of Mexico will be either civilized or barbarian depending on point of view. I am ethnocentric enough to be repelled by child-murder and cannibalism, to say nothing of the use of fecal matter and urine in medications. For the Greeks and Romans, a certain level of human kindness was implied by civilization.