The Politics of Pagan Christianity: Today’s nationalist Christians should heed the message of the anti-Nazi theologian Henri de Lubac. (James R. Wood, September 20, 2025, Plough Quarterly)
Agrowing network of churches, publishers, podcasts, and conferences in the United States and Europe has begun to “just ask questions.” These “questions” are about things like the “traditional narrative” regarding National Socialism and the Holocaust, the benefits of “race realism” and “ethnically homogeneous communities,” and whether interracial marriage or interracial adoption should be censured and considered “relatively sinful.”
Skinheads and Klansmen we have long had with us. What has happened over the last decade is something else, something more disturbing: it is an intellectual and indeed theological retrieval of racial supremacist and separatist ideas within Christian circles. As we exit what British historian Alec Ryrie has called the “Age of Hitler” – that is, the age when simply identifying an idea as fascist or Nazi was enough to discredit someone – we find ourselves needing to do something that has not been necessary since the Second World War: we must vocally refute and resist racial supremacy and narrowly exclusivist and hateful ethnonationalism. In this resistance, we must argue as Christians. And, increasingly, we must argue against other Christians – or at least against people who profess the name of Christ.There are few better allies in this task than the French Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac. […]
The Jesuit theologian Pedro Descoqs, under whom de Lubac studied, famously defended Maurras. For Descoqs, and many Catholics at the time, an alliance with Maurras’s secular political movement was conceivable because of a reading of Thomas Aquinas that took his distinctions between the truths of supernatural revelation and the truths of natural reason to insinuate that supernatural considerations are not relevant to the political sphere. This drew on the Aristotelian idea that all natural beings are ordered to ends they can attain by their own powers. Maurras thus distinguished “political facts” from moral and religious realities, promoting a strict separation between orders of religion and politics. Descoqs defended Maurras, saying that his system dealt with this-worldly matters that need not be shaped by theological considerations. Religious considerations were increasingly deemed irrelevant to broader society and politics.
In Descoqs’s affirmation of Maurras, de Lubac sensed that Descoqs abandoned both the supernatural claims and the social demands of Christianity, thus becoming an ally of secularism. According to de Lubac, Maurras and his ilk opened the way to a Nietzschean “brutal return to instinct.” They celebrated base affections, fanning them into flame as “natural” aspects of human existence, and resisting the reformation of those “instincts” according to Christian revelation. In this, de Lubac sensed the legacy of Nietzsche, whose genius was his appeal to the desire for greatness. However, this desire for greatness was promoted to stoke hatred between groups, resulting in an interpretation of history as what de Lubac called a “war between the races,” which was antithetical to the universalism of the Christian faith, the call to charity, and the path of renunciation enshrined in the cross. De Lubac saw Nazism as a form of neopaganism that sought “to corrupt Christianity from the inside, paganize it, strip it of its universalism, its charity, and its sense of the cross.” De Lubac argued that the Nietzschean “racist faith” of the Nazis, which he described as a “myth of blood,” needs to be opposed by “our Christian and Catholic faith.”