Inspired by a few recent posts in the "How Do You Imagine Jesus" thread, notably this one:
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Originally Posted by Mynydd
Christendom is Europe. Before that there was only people north, south, east and west of the Graeco-Roman world.
In effect, the Church has finally been given a fatal blow. Not coincidentially so has Europe been given a fatal blow with it.
As for Christianity being today a vehicle against the preservation of Europe, this is not something new. There has always been deviations in that direction. The most noticeable has been Calvinism.
If the Church has finally been infiltrated and deviated, and has stopped being the repository of Christendom and European values, it is for us to pick them up and raise them again. Not to join forces with those who have brought the deviation.
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I've beeing thinking a lot about this issue for quite some time. In the Spains, Ireland and Bavaria, it is difficult to imagine traditional ethnic culture without the church.
In other nations such as France, it is equally hard to imagine (or at least remember) a time when the church was integral to national consciousness. The French have Jeanne d'Arc, certainly a "nationalist" of a sort if one believes the hagiographers, but perhaps even more notably Rousseau, Voltaire and Diderot - who were strongly French in feeling and yet despised the church and its priests.
Then there are the born again "neo-nationalists," usually but not always American with some Germanic heritage, who posit a sort of idealized heathenism as the one true religion of Europeans.
What to make of this diversity? Is there room for such variety among nationalists today?