A Western Way To Save The West

In a desperate attempt to try to save the West from global imperialism, some on the far right, and in the New Right, have jumped too quickly to affirm the way of Islam—some have even converted. (see "The Reds, The Browns and the Greens or The Convergence of Totalitarianisms” by Alexandre del Valle.) One can understand how the Right could become impatient with the slow ways of Christianity and Conservatism, which have barely even recognized dynamic evolution.

The Theoevolutionary Church seeks to save the West by applying both Western religion and Western science. How much better it is not to abandon ones history and ones people when the going gets very rough. The Theoevolutionary Church holds that we must evolve to the God we know from our Traditional religion, and we do so by means of such things as selection, divergence, and local variety. And this is guided by light federalism, protected by nationalism, and counseled in all things by the Traditional Church.

In any case all the revealed religions, including Islam, connect in the same Involutionary Inward Path to the God Within. This is a strong basis for ecumenism. Then, all can join the Evolutionary Outward Path to Godhood in the Theoevolutionary Church.

Economic Nationalism

In our reflections on the European New Right, Localism, etc., it should again be mentioned that Nationalism defends our internal freedom to be localists, and does not contradict the light Federalism and States Rights of our Founding Fathers. Under Economic Nationalism we can even be Libertarian. Our defense and security should be second to none. Only Nationalism can protect us against large states and powerful alliances.

Ideologists in the European New Right have been virtually forced to think of joining with Russia to protect themselves, even though they share our Western heritage. American imperialism, which economic nationalism opposes, has made enemies of our friends in Europe and in Russia, and we should be friends, since the Western world is under-breeding and the South and East are expanding.

The Theoevolutionary Church and Archeo-Futurism

Guillaume Faye has reached deep into the world, and we can affirm much of what he has seen.

In his long essay, “L’archeofuturisme,” Faye, a leader in the old French New Right, now advocates a return to archaic values while upholding future technology. Faye expects global catastrophe and he wants to meet the great catastrophe with a combination of new science and ancient traditional solutions. The past and the future can harmonize in a new European Order of the North (Eurosiberia), with many sovereignties. Without such a foundation we will be overrun by the South and East.

The Theoevolutionary Church has seen the same global catastrophe and our solution contains a similar harmony of the past and future. We prefer the term Evolution to “Futurism,” and Catholicism to the “Archaic.”

The Theoevolutionary Church seeks to synthesize Traditionalism---which contains essential insights of the Traditional religion, with Evolution---which contains essential insights of the sciences. Traditional Catholicism teaches us how we may see and know God, and how to live in the world---including the slowly channeled additions of the Theoevolutionary Church. Evolution, understood bio-spiritually, teaches us how we may evolve to God. This is how we would reconcile the opposites of the material and spiritual, the immanent and transcendent, traditional and modern, archaic and future.

Conservatives believe that there exists a legitimate presumption in favor of things long established. Centuries of accumulated wisdom make the Traditional Church like a Golden Age that still exists.

David Livingston reminded us (Chronicles) that the thousands of little localities, which the New Right prefers, were seen from around 1100 to 1500 in the Christian Commonwealth. There was no central authority, although the Christian civilization was vast. There were thousands of divided sovereignties, secular authorities were independent of one another. There was no such thing as the State in Christendom. And in the center of Europe was the light federalism of the Holy Roman Empire.

We need not embrace historical determinism, the West is dying, yet even individual action can profoundly alter the drift of the times. Think of one brave little French girl, Joan of Arc, who changed the world.

Psychological Wholeness Requires Transcendence

Hypothesis on Jung

I don’t think I have a problem seeing Carl Jung’s “Self” as both immanent and transcendent (we would say Spirit here). Psychologically it is immanent, religiously it is the Soul and transcendent. Jung strongly implied that only immanence exists.

If Jung cannot reconcile the immanent and transcendent, then he cannot claim wholeness. Wholeness is not whole within an immanent Self, it is not enough to reconcile opposites within the immanent domain, the transcendent must also be reconciled to achieve the true wholeness.

Religion does this, psychology does not seem to do this. Yet I see no reason not to use both in achieving psychic and religious health.

I think Jung was at least disingenuous–perhaps understandably–in not stating clearly that he thought the immanent Self was alone God, although he may have had personal difficulties in completely believing this himself; if the God Self is transcendent, one would in fact feel doubt.

The Theoevolutionary Church (TC) achieves wholeness in reconciling material evolution with spiritual Godhood, in the evolution of the material to the spiritual, thus defining the Soul and Spirit within as both immanent and transcendent.

Wholeness in TC can also reconcile Pagan with Christian symbols, e.g. as biospiritual evolution involves diversity and variety in competition. The problem of abusing collective archetypical symbols, which Jung feared, is lessened when evolution is understood in all its diversity as the way to attain the transcendent Godhood, which one can immanently discern, religiously and psychically within, as the Self, or Soul. When evolution is considered, the “Other” can be defined at least as competitor, if not as “evil,” without being considered psychologically unhealthy.

Defining Jesus as historically the “Christ” sent to teach us the Doctrines of the Church, allows us to see God within, and, with the Social Doctrines (including the channeled additions of TC) allows us to evolve successfully to God (Ordered Evolution). This is sociobiologically and psychologically healthy, allowing the collective (Church, State, People) the social bonding necessary for both psychological and spiritual success.

The Sacred Continuum

Religious thinkers believe that God exists outside of the psyche, outside the unconscious mind, whereas most psychologists say God is in the unconscious only, or they say we can, in any case, only experience God in our psyches, wherever God might come from. I see a continuum here, with the psychologist examining how we might experience God psychologically, leading up to the religionists, who examine God beyond the senses, beyond the unconscious mind. Biology and Sociobiology lie further back on the continuum, before psychology. And the artist exists almost like a brother to the religionists and the psychologists, exploring the same areas, or in the best art, in affirming the sacred. This continuum suggests something like the “total art work” hypothesized by Richard Wagner. The Evolutionary Christian Church contains the sacred continuum, from the simple to the complex to Godhood.

Energy for renewal

History moves and new facts arise. After the Reformation the Church seemed to lack the energy to define traditional social ethics in a new way, and this helped secular capitalism take over. Calvin’s spiritual individualism had softened society for economic individualism. Now the Church is dragging behind the secular world in relating to evolution, which allows the secular world to define evolution.

Evolution is a central dynamic of nature, and therefore of Godhood, and it needs to be channeled into traditional Christian ethics. With energy for renewal, evolution is attached to evolution in the Theoevolutionary Church. We can see God in the traditional way, and we can evolve to Godhhood, guided by the Church, in the natural evolutionary way.

Jung And The Traditionalists

Carl Jung did not deny an Absolute God, he said he knew that God exists but he denied our ability to fathom this God outside of our individual psyches, which is more the position of Western science.

This position put him on the outs with Traditionalists like Ananda Coomaraswamy, Frithjof Schuon and others who know that we can see the Absolute with the mystic Intellect.

The Evolutionary Christian Church (ECC) affirms both perspectives, more or less: 1. We can know the Absolute by way of knowing the Soul within, given religious discipline. 2. We affirm evolution, the jewel of science, in the conception of bio-spiritual evolution to Godhood .

ECC harmonizes science and religion, the spiritual and the material, the micro-soul and spirit within and the macro-evolution to God.

Future and Past Utopias

While examining various “utopias” in the latest issue of “What Is Enlightenment,” it seemed to me that evolution better fits the linear future, with its “world to come,” future heaven, the arrival of the Messiah, the golden world arrived at last, etc. Conservatism, which allows for slow change channeled into Tradition, also fits well from this perspective.

Traditionalism, on the other hand, fits better with past Golden Ages, Paradise, and utopias of the Hindus and Greeks, which look less positively upon evolution and change, often with outright rejection of evolution.

Nihilists and many anarchists in modern times often think in terms of dystopias, the future as living hell. Without grounding in religion, dystopias tend to develop in the mind.

Teilhard de Chardin’s “Noosphere” seems to depend too much on inherent goodness evolving to bring us all together with involution, whereas evolution, in its creativity, works through divergence and competition, as well as with Chardin’s integration.

The Theoevolutionary Church affirms the world to come, the arrival of heaven, and the Messiah, or Godhood, with bio-spiritual evolution toward Godhood working in concert with the Traditional Church and its sacred inward methods of seeing and knowing God.

Resolving Dualities

The problem of dualities, i.e. religion/science, sacred/profane, archaic/modern, mythological/historical, poetic/scientific, biological/spiritual, as examined heroically by, among others, Guenon and Jung, usually ends with one side wanting to recuperate only the former, Tradition, and the other the latter, Science. Can the two ever meet?

The two meet in bringing biological evolution into the spiritual. Traditional religion is devoted to where it applies best, seeing and knowing God, morality, social philosophy, etc., and science is applied to evolution, biology, even string theory, etc. The two are combined in the Evolutionary Christian Church, adding to Tradition the evolutionary element concerned with higher intelligence and higher consciousness. Thus, you have the evolution of the biological all the way to the spiritual, ultimately to God, guided by traditional religion. The dualities are this way reconciled.

On Bigness

Imperialism, Big Business Globalism, and Big Government, break down into smaller nations, states and localities, as Bigness has always done throughout history. Localism, variety and divergence are natural and harmonious with human nature. The question is what will be the extent of the damage done by the latest attempts at Bigness?

When Bigness fails, force is often used, yet even force can’t stop the devolution into smaller units. Big Business tactics of offering money, pleasure, power, the good consumer life are more manipulative. China is now trying these things with its population. Will Western Civilization be mortally wounded? Will the globe be polluted beyond repair? Will Western people survive, since we are not replacing ourselves?

Religion has always been the foundation of Civilization. The Theoevolutionary Church will support the redeeming of life, the renewal of localism, bonded by the Church. Without religion pernicious Bigness will rise again.

Selling The Collective Unconscious

The liberal wing of Jungian spiritualists tend to want to use the Collective Unconscious–which all people share–as a basis for understanding peace and equality between all races and cultures. This is naive, and perhaps manipulative.

Archetypes in the Collective Unconscious, such as the Royal, Warrior, Magician and Lover, (as defined by Neo-Jungian Robert Moore) were obviously useful in human survival and reproduction, which is why they have been inherited. We should not overlook this inherited purpose. These Archetypes came by way of natural selection and competition in evolution and to define them as promoting peace between all people is deceiving.

When Evolution is seen as the deepest activating force in the cosmos, and in ourselves–which is the position of the Theoevolutionary Church–then competition and natural selection look healthier. Jungians tend to neglect, or de-emphasize, the very creator of the Collective Unconscious, which is evolution. Perhaps evolution should be given its own central Archetype?

Competition, Variety, Diversity, and Localism harmonize with our evolutionary nature, and these are reflected in the Conservative doctrines of the Theoevolutionary Church. As we have said elsewhere, to love ones neighbor is not literally to love the whole world, which would be contrary to human nature, it is to love one's kin, one's group. This definition harmonizes with the definition of love of God: evolution takes place best in diverse, separate groups, thus in loving one's group and loving ones neighbor we love God, and we love God by evolving to God. We love the world in the sense that we affirm the right of every group to love its own neighbor, its own group, then all groups may love God by evolving to God.

Objection To Anarchism And Revolution

R. H. Tawney said the remedy for bad laws is good law, not lawlessness. Like the revolutionary, the anarchist hungers for a society in which order and fraternity reign without the “tedious, stale, forbidding ways of custom, law and statute.” (Luther) The revolutionary thinks order and fraternity naturally well up in their native purity from the heart.

“The task is not to destroy but to revitalize the existing social order, which though vitiated, still has valuable resources which would be criminal to destroy or neglect.” (Jean Ousett)

Counter-revolution does the opposite of revolution. It renews social bonds instead of breaking them, it co-ordinates the classes rather than to disorganize or antagonize them.

Human institutions are often a tragic parody of our hopes and ideals; some men hate men for this weakness, and cry revolution, others know that man will never be perfect and work with the imperfect social institutions built by man.

Objection To Dualism

Traditional Christians can rightly object to the dualism between the spiritual and material that Luther inadvertently introduced, thereby causing the divorce of spiritual restraint from secular activities, which helped transfer the maintenance of Christian morality to the state. This made men unable to climb upward plane by plane, men had to choose between the spiritual and the material. As R. H. Tawney put it, monasticism was secularized.

In the same way, in separating evolution from the Church and the spiritual, the Church must not make the mistake Luther made in the Reformation, this puts evolution in the hands of secularists and science alone and removes it from Christian morality.

The Theoevolutionary Church places evolution in the hierarchy of planes that reach to Godhood. Higher consciousness and higher intelligence are religious goals, they reflect the nature of Godhood and they are evolved from the simple to the complex in an ascending plane.

Economics Influenced by Religion

In an imperfect world with imperfect people, who do you want to attempt to control your inevitable, economic activity, secular lawyers, or religion? The Church made this noble attempt in the Middle-Ages, without perfect success, of course, but they at least didn’t give up and redefine greed as “free enterprise,” and avarice as “economics,” to use the terms R. H. Tawney used. The Church insisted that economics was the servant not the master of civilization, which it eventually became.

Economics should once again be influenced by religion, in a system strong enough to stand against criminal unscrupulousness but elastic enough to admit legitimate transactions, admitting the imperfection of man, unlike communists and capitalists who believe that perfection is possible.

Should usury once again be prohibited? It should be policed at least by a religious ethos.

The Philosophical Base

We apply the deeper understanding of human nature coming in from the fields of sociobiology to the philosophical basis of the natural law, as defined by Aquinas in the "Summa Theol.." That is, “every law framed by man bears the character of law exactly to that extent to which it is derived from the law of nature. But if on any point it is in conflict with the law of nature, it at once ceases to be a law; it is a mere perversion of law.”

The Evolutionary Christian Church affirms natural law, which for us includes material, biological, evolution advancing all the way to supermaterial Godhood. Evolution is derived from nature, and we believe our religious laws should not be in conflict with the laws of nature. Perversions of religion and natural law should be adjusted, and we have adjusted them.

Evolution And Economics

Our purpose is set by the divine plan of the Kosmos, to which we strain every interest and activity. The happiness of man is the vision of the divine essence, and above that, the actual evolution to God. The Traditional Church defines the vision of divine essence, the Theoevolutionary Church joins to this, the evolution to God.

This planned achievement creates a functional theory of society, a society of gradations, from physical necessities to spirit. Religion “leads the things that are lower to the things which are higher, through the things which are intermediate.” (This seems like a good definition of Conservatism.)

Society becomes stable when it organically strains upwards. Like the human body, society is composed of different members, each member has its own function.

With the Theoevolutionary Church, a fourth part is joined to the other three parts of the Church: priests, defenders, laborers; and the fourth is the evolving species. Gradations help the lower to the higher by way of religion.

Economic interests are essentially subordinate to the real business of life, that is, the vision of divine essence (Inward Path), and the evolution to God (Outward Path). Labor is necessary and honorable. Trade is necessary too. Finance can be sordid, if not immoral, and it seems best when the state has some form of economic nationalism to protect the nation's business and people. Basically, I prefer the free market approach to business with as little government interference as possible. We can’t be communists. Men will work more and dispute less when goods are private than when they are common. The value of goods are what people are willing to pay for the goods.

As in economics, profit should not become an end in itself and only a means, so also Evolution is not an end but a means to reach God. Therefore, undue value must not be given to the evolving species who have not yet achieved Godhood. Like a winning coach on a winning team, the leading players are a vital concern but the whole team must be always improving and advancing. In keeping with natural evolution, this is not a formal eugenics, this is a better appreciation of higher intelligence, higher consciousness and refined complexity (which after all are attributes of God) joined to Christian values and morals.

This suggests light federalism, natural divisions, localism, along with a church infused state, but with religion separate from the state.


(The view above, in regard to capitalism and the old Church values, was adapted to my thinking from R.H Tawney’s excellent old study: “Religion And The Rise Of Capitalism," 1954)

The Profound Conservatism Of Including Evolution In Church Tradition

It is not the affirmation of evolution that has doomed the Modernists, it is the rejection of evolution which has doomed the Traditionalists.

The Modernists destroy the Church by rejecting Traditions, the Traditionalists destroy the Church by rejecting evolution.

The Conservative seeks to harmonize the differences and contrasts, and to “order novelty” (to adapt Whitehead’s definition of beauty.) Including evolution in Church Traditions is a profoundly Conservative action.

The Theoevolutionary Church, affirms the Traditions initiated by Christ and the Apostles in the Inward Path, and includes the biological evolution to supermaterial Godhood in the Outward Path. Traditions help us see and know God, supernaturally, evolution helps us reach God naturally and supermaterially.

Social traditions create the environment for our evolution to Godhood. The Theoevolutionary Church places high value on higher consciousness and higher intelligence, which are attributes of the Godhood we seek to evolve to.

Tradition And Evolution In Harmony, Unlike Modernism

How can Traditional Christianity relate to evolution? Not as the modernists attempt to do, by changing the  Traditional. All the Traditions of the Church from Christ and his Apostles can be maintained as the most authentic and, indeed, the sacred way to see and communicate with God. And Traditional Christian social and economic teachings must be maintained as the best way for men to live. Nothing of Tradition is rejected in the Theoevolutionary Church, as it is in Christian modernism.

What is added to the Traditional way of seeing and communicating with God---which is the glory of Tradition ---is the bio-spiritual path to God through evolution. Tradition creates the best, ordered, environment for evolution to take place, and it is most harmonious with the laws of nature and the natural law. We can affirm this in the new science of sociobiology, which finds Traditions as also often having been the best way to survive and reproduce successfully.

Our symbol shows Tradition and Evolution dynamically together. “Reason” gets it “food” for thought, as someone put it, from the above aspect of the symbol, where intellection or Revelation take place, and the below aspect of the symbol bring knowledge through observed phenomena. Truth depends on both, even though science tends to deny Revelation and Revelation denies science. Both work together in the Theoevolutionary Church.

Naturalism is represented by the lower half of our St. Andrew cross, supernaturalism by the upper half. Intellection in the upper half suggests the Omega of God, observed phenomena in the lower half suggests the Alpha of God. We are not asked to make a choice between these.

The Theoevolutionary Church Does Not Affirm Liberalism

The Theoevolutionary Church (TC) affirms evolution but it does not affirm Liberalism. The ideas of liberalism, developed in the Enlightenment, eg. the idea that each individual is completely free, that human nature is perfect, and that man’s human reason is as good as it gets, are not fully affirmed by TC.

Unlike the Traditionalists we see human nature evolving toward a higher and higher nature, human nature is not perfect and thus we are subject to change.

Man is not completely autonomous, as the liberals suggest. We are created with a nature that has a purpose–Godhood’s purpose. We obey the laws of Godhood when we obey the laws of nature, which including the ultimate evolution to Godhood.

Secular democracy, government from below rather than from above, is not the end of all political systems. The state could protect religion. None the less, light federalism, subsidiarity, and localism are the preferred political system.

This is not liberalism.

Direction In Evolution

To imply that genes “seek” or “strive” to survive and reproduce successfully, and that they create culture and even religion to enhance their survival, seems to give a “cause,” or “direction,” to the genes. But evolutionary thinkers do not really want to give a “cause” to natural selection, other than the cause of successful survival. Why should there be this “cause?” It just “is,” the evolutionists might say, sounding not unlike some religious people.

This conception of “striving,” is central to religion, as John Haught has written about in "Deeper Than Darwin." And it is logical, it seems to me, to apply the same “direction” of striving regarding religion as one does to the genes: striving for survival of the genes when hypertrophied, means striving for the immortality of the genes; and immortality has defined Godhood. This is the biological “teleology” that evolutionary thinking seems to lead to, although all evolutionary thinkers want to deny “direction” in evolution. There is direction in evolution, and life’s striving is directed toward immortal survival, which has always been defined as Godhood.

We identify the striving, the cause behind evolution as the activating Spirit-Will, which activates life before life is shaped by evolution.