Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West

by R.R. Reno

Durkheim wrote, “which does not feel the need of upholding and reaffirming at regular intervals the collective sentiments and collective ideas which make its unity and its personality.”

strong gods are not golden idols or characters in ancient mythologies, as Durkheim recognized. They are whatever has the power to inspire love—love of the divine, love of truth, love of country, love of family.

are made for love. We do not want to rest in our solitary selves or in our “little worlds.” We desire to live shoulder to shoulder with our fellow man in the service of shared loves.

dig more deeply, identifying one or another spiritual malaise rooted in secularization and manifest in the low birthrates in Europe (and now in the United States as well), which bespeak a mentality that desires no future beyond the worldly self.

appeals are “unmasked” as racist or xenophobic. We’re often told that “Make America Great Again” really means “Make America White Again.” In these and other ways, our leadership class treats unwelcome political challenges as phobias to be denounced rather than ideas to be grappled with on their own terms. These powerful mental habits are debilitating, making our leadership class less capable of leading, not only because they can’t see reality but also because they transform political opposition to their rule

All of this suggests our leadership class is so thoroughly blinded by the postwar consensus that the only problems it can see are those of discrimination, exclusion, and conformism—nails for their open-society hammer. Meanwhile, the actual problems we face—atomization, dissolving communal bonds, disintegrating family ties, and a nihilistic culture of limitless self-definition—go unaddressed. When someone does speak up about them, he is denounced.

concludes that all is lost. Everything has crossed over into dissolution. But that is not true. Let us renounce the twentieth century’s false hold on our imaginations. The decades of catastrophe between 1914 and 1945 were not able to destroy everything worth sustaining. Monstrous men perpetrated great evils. Many were killed. But they failed to destroy the living practice of Torah. The synagogue endures. What began with Abraham continues. And because God’s chosen people did not cross the line, the last century failed to sever the nerve of Western culture. Let us reckon with this profound truth and apply it to our own time. The one-sided extremism of the open-society consensus—punitive political correctness, undiluted liberalism, and unfettered free markets—has done great damage. But it has not destroyed everything we love.