American Dissident Voices broadcast of March 1, 2014
by Kevin Alfred Strom
A “TAX DODGE.” A “bogus religion.” Something he “abandoned” in later years in hopes of attracting Christians.
So have William Pierce’s opponents, both within and without White nationalist circles, characterized Cosmotheism, the religion founded by Dr. Pierce.
(ILLUSTRATION: Dr. William Pierce, founder of both Cosmotheism and the National Alliance. Image source: Kevin Alfred Strom)
But these characterizations are false.
The Cosmotheist world view — the view that our race is the vanguard of the Universe’s evolving self-consciousness — was central to everything that Dr. Pierce wrote, uttered, and built during the last quarter century of his life.
The allegation that Dr. Pierce never believed in Cosmotheism and concocted it to get a tax exemption is so obviously preposterous that it really can’t be taken seriously. I’ll squash that idea with a heavy steel hammer in a future program. The most dangerous false claim about William Pierce and Cosmotheism, however, is more subtle and therefore harder to see, and it has even been embraced by some who claim to carry William Pierce’s banner: the idea that he essentially abandoned Cosmotheism — and his opposition to Christianity — in later years in order to make the National Alliance and his other efforts more “Christian-friendly” and to implement a “big tent” approach in which the National Alliance leadership cadre could include men and women whose morals and values were based on ancient Semitic scriptures.
This claim is not only false, but it is actually the reverse of the truth.
In its very early years, before Dr. Pierce’s world view was fully formed, the National Alliance and its newspaper Attack! were geared toward encouraging a racial-revolutionary attitude among White youth who opposed the degenerate Jewish-inspired “counterculture” of the early 1970s. Though the official founding of Cosmotheism was eight years in the future in 1970, during those eight years Dr. Pierce wrote article after article critical of the Christian churches and of Christianity generally. In those years and immediately afterward, in his Attack! and later National Vanguard newspapers he published such articles as: “The Role of the Church,” “Churches Bent on Suicide,” “Churches Misdirect Young Americans,” “A Rite of Summer,” and others with a decidedly critical attitude toward the Hebrew-derived faith.
Dr. Pierce’s seminal speech, Our Cause, written to explain the mission of the National Alliance in 1976 when the group was but six years old, is Cosmotheist both in its deepest meaning and in its tone, though written at a period during which Dr. Pierce still entertained the idea that “Jesus the Galilean” might have been a non-Jew fighting against the Jewish establishment of the time. One of the speech’s most inspiring passages is the following:
“Our purpose is the purpose for which the earth was born out of the gas and the dust of the cosmos, the purpose for which the first primitive amphibian crawled out of the sea three hundred million years ago and learned to live on the land, the purpose for which the first race of men held themselves apart from the races of sub-men around them and bred only with their own kind. It is the purpose for which men first captured lightning from the sky, tamed it, and called it fire; the purpose for which our ancestors built the world’s first astronomical observatory on a British plain more than 4,000 years ago. It is the purpose for which Jesus, the Galilean, fought the Jews and died 2,000 years ago; the purpose for which Rembrandt painted; the purpose for which Shakespeare wrote; and the purpose for which Newton pondered. Our purpose, the purpose with which we must become obsessed, is that for which the best, the noblest, men and women of our race down through the ages have struggled and died whether they were fully conscious of it or not. It is the purpose for which they sought beauty and created beauty; the purpose for which they studied the heavens and taught themselves Nature’s mysteries; the purpose for which they fought the degenerative, the regressive, and the evil forces all around them; the purpose for which, instead of taking the easy path in life, the downward path; they chose the upward path, regardless of the pain, suffering, and sacrifice that this choice entailed.”
Some sixteen years later, around 1992, Dr. Pierce’s views had evolved to the point that he was embarrassed by the “Jesus, the Galilean” phrase, as he told the Alliance’s Membership Coordinator (and current Director) Will Williams.
Williams writes: “Our Cause is an important speech, given in 1976. I was inspired by it as [many] are today, but not because Dr. Pierce mentioned Jesus as he did, in passing. Look at that sentence in its context, and remember that this was written by him [38] years ago. Soon after I went to work for Dr. Pierce in 1992, knowing how he felt about the adverse impact of Christianity on the race, I asked him specifically why he thought he had to add that, to me, repulsive sentence about the Galilean. I still remember exactly where we were standing at the time, and his defensive reaction: ‘Well, Goddamn, Will, what am I supposed to do now, do the speech over and leave that sentence out?’ There were too many audio tapes in circulation by then to redo Our Cause and leave that part out. Believe me, he wished he hadn’t put that reference to Jesus in that speech.”
But we don’t have to fast forward 16 years to see Dr. Pierce abandoning any hint or hope that Christianity or the figure of Jesus could be of any help in advancing the racial cause. By 1977, it could be fairly said that Cosmotheist ideas were foremost in Dr. Pierce’s mind. In that year he recorded two important speeches with an explicitly Cosmotheist basis, originally delivered at National Alliance meetings at the Alliance’s National Office in Arlington, Virginia: Human Dignity: A Racial Ethic and Cosmotheism: Wave of the Future. In the early 1980s I restored and edited those recordings for publication in the National Vanguard Books catalogue. What wasn’t included on the copies that were sold, though, were the openings of the meetings, which included the Cosmotheist affirmation, read out loud by all in attendance. Here is that affirmation:
“There is but one reality. That reality is the Whole. It is the Creator, the self-created. I am of the Whole. I am of the Creator, of the self-created. My purpose is the Creator’s purpose. My path is the path of the Creator’s self-realization. My path is the path of divine consciousness. My destiny is godhood.”
Also in 1977, Dr. Pierce published “Conservatism or Radicalism,” which I included in the book The Best of Attack! and National Vanguard (1984), in which he speaks of the spiritual foundations of the National Alliance: “Our dream is a progressive dream, a dream of unlimited progress over the centuries and the millennia and the eons which lie ahead of us. It is no conservative dream of peace, no sheeplike dream of ease and consumption and safety, but a dream of the achievement of our Destiny, which is Godhood. It is the only dream fitting for men and women of our race; it is the spirit of the Creator, it is the Universal Urge within us, expressing itself through our race-soul….
“We don’t hope to make revolutionary idealists out of the egoistic and materialistic masses, but we do hope to awaken and inspire and recruit that minority of our people in which the Divine Spark already burns brightly enough to illuminate their souls and their minds so that they can grasp our Truth. And the way to do that is to present our Truth to them as purely and as plainly and as clearly as we possibly can—not to dress it in a conservative disguise, which leads only to confusion.
“We want everyone to know that we understand that what’s really important is not whether we can elect a government which won’t try to impose racial quotas on us or whether we can achieve domestic tranquility but whether the Truth that is in the race-soul of our people shall overcome the alien falsehoods which rule us now, so that that Truth can guide us once again to the upward Path, to the Path of the Creator’s Self-Realization, and so that we can once again become agents of the Universal Will—except this time fully conscious agents—and resume our never-ending ascent toward our ordained Destiny.”
That, according to William Pierce, is the fundamental basis of the National Alliance. That’s not a philosophy or a strategy at all compatible with traditional Christianity or the more recent “Christian Identity” variant which retains the Hebrew scriptures but posits that White people are the “true Israelites.”
In 1978, Dr. Pierce published “What Is to be Done?”, also available in The Best of Attack! and National Vanguard, in which he delineates the organizational structure necessary for our dream to become real: “[W]hat is to be done to save our race, in spite of itself?
“…The answer, in brief, is that an organization must be built which satisfies the following requirements:
“It must be, first of all, not an ad hoc organization, but an organization based on fundamental principles, an organization with a world view, essentially religious in nature, shared by every member of the organization.
“It must be, in structure, a hierarchical organization, like an army — or a religious order — with the degree of understanding, of commitment, and of discipline increasing with the level of responsibility in the organization.
“It must be, in scope, an all-encompassing organization, an organization which not only generates propaganda and which recruits and trains new members, but which becomes eventually a community unto itself, self-sufficient spiritually and materially, providing all the functions and capabilities needed for carrying out its task — ultimately a separate state within the state.”
A state within a state, a new society, led by an elite imbued with an essentially religious mission — a Cosmotheist mission — which defines not only the purpose of its members’ lives, but the purpose of Life itself in the Universe: This is Dr. Pierce’s vision of a White future. Those who reject it place themselves outside of the Alliance. Those who suggest a “National Alliance” in which Identity adherents and zealots who base their values on Semitic scriptures can be leading figures have placed themselves outside of the National Alliance — whether they know it or not.
In the same year, William Pierce penned “The Faustian Spirit,” in which he warns that our race must not “become a race solely of lawyers, clerks, laborers and merchants, but remain a race also of philosophers, poets, and inventors: of seekers of ultimate knowledge, of strivers toward the perfection which is Godhood. When we take the longest viewpoint, we can see that the Faustian spirit, tenuous though it may be, is European man’s entire justification for existence.” The idea expressed here by Dr. Pierce is fundamentally at odds with Christian doctrine.
In “Criteria for a White Future,” he explains that the members of the organization that will save our race will necessarily have undergone an all-encompassing “spiritual renewal” which will revolutionize their values at the most fundamental level. Does that sound like it is compatible with Presbyterianism or “British Israel” or Sunday school homilies? I don’t think so.
In 1980’s “Why the West Will Go Under,” Dr. Pierce discusses the human qualities worthy of survival, the same qualities we should seek in building National Alliance cadres: “The[se people] must be free of the superstitions and prejudices of this age; those who are mentally bound to this age will go down with it…. They must be motivated by a single purpose, the overwhelming importance of which is always foremost in their minds; it has been the purposelessness of this age on which the West has foundered, but the new age will be illuminated and shaped by a common purpose transcending all other considerations: namely, the purpose of bringing forth a higher type of man and attaining thereby a higher level of consciousness in the universe.”
One of the most important statements William Pierce made on the subject was 1982’s “On Christianity,” published in the National Alliance Bulletin and now available on nationalvanguard.org, in which he says “No honest, conscientious Alliance member can maintain his membership in the Alliance and also in an organization which is fundamentally opposed to the goals and principles of the Alliance. The former member who belongs to the Moral Majority acted correctly in resigning from the Alliance, and the same applies to others: Any Alliance member who is also a member of a church or other Christian organization which supports racial mixing or Zionism should decide now where he stands, and he should then resign either from his church or from the Alliance.
“In fact, the great majority of Alliance members who originally had some Christian church affiliation have already made their decisions and left the churches….
“If, despite everything above, there are Alliance members or prospective Alliance members who still consider themselves Christians, then it must be in the sense that they value the specifically White elements of Christianity which have been added since its origins — the great art, the great music, and the great architecture produced by White men during the centuries in which the Christian churches ruled Europe — and that they also share the White spiritual feelings which have been eloquently expressed by many men and women who were Christians and who applied the adjective “Christian” to feelings which, in fact, came from deep within the White race-soul and existed long before the advent of the Christian church. Such Christians we can call our comrades and be proud to have in our ranks.”
So, when “big-tenters” say that Christians were accepted as members in Dr. Pierce’s National Alliance, they are technically correct — but there were strict restrictions, and spiritual evolution had to already be present to a large degree. And an evolution in spiritual values, an evolution beyond Christianity, was certainly expected of any who took a leading role.
Dr. Pierce’s 1997 radio essay, “On Churchgoers,” which on balance is deeply critical of Christianity, is sometimes quoted by “big tent” advocates because of one passage toward the end of the piece: “I say to all of my friends, to all self-respecting White men and women, Christian or not: Let’s not concern ourselves with doctrinal quibbles now. Let’s not concern ourselves with whether or not our neighbor believes in virgin birth and walking on water; let’s concern ourselves with whether or not he cares about the survival of his people and is willing to do something for that survival. If he or she does care, and if he or she is willing, then he is our brother, then she is our sister.”
Clearly, Dr. Pierce didn’t want conflict between the Alliance and racially conscious White Christians. We’re both on the same side in a titanic struggle for survival. Even in reaching out to these well-meaning folks, though, he urged them to place their scripture-based doctrines lower on their scale of values than their racial consciousness. But the “big tenters” want to use that paragraph to argue that believing Christians ought to be able to form part of the Alliance’s leadership cadre, something totally contrary to what Dr. Pierce said again and again.
It’s clear that Dr. Pierce’s views on spirituality evolved over time, but in quite the opposite direction claimed by the “big tent” folks. By the mid-1990s, the National Alliance had issued its Membership Handbook, which was still in force at the time of Dr. Pierce’s death in 2002. Its section on Christianity — which Dr. Pierce defined in its pages as an “opposing ideology” — is the strongest evidence imaginable showing that, in William Pierce’s view, the Middle Eastern faith was incompatible with the qualities sought in National Alliance leaders.
In the Handbook, he discusses Christianity as an asset of our race’s enemies: “Egalitarianism in turn gains support from Christianity, which declares all believers equal [as in the verses]: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.’ (Galatians 3:28) By denigrating all worldly aspects of life, where natural inequality is so manifest, and emphasizing the otherworldly, which is less subject to scrutiny, Christianity has been able to maintain without revision much of the original egalitarianism which gave it a strong appeal to the slaves and other dispossessed groups in the decaying Roman Empire. Today Christianity provides a moral prop for those who want to justify the doctrine of human sameness.”
I’ll publish the entire National Alliance Membership Handbook section on Christianity as an appendix to the written version of this program. But let me illustrate its essence here with these passages: “The immediate and inevitable fact which forces us to come to grips with Christianity is that the mainstream Christian churches are all, without exception, preaching a doctrine of White racial extinction…. The occasional anomaly—a Catholic bishop in Poland speaking out angrily against Jewish arrogance, a few Protestant groups in the United States expressing sympathy for oppressed Palestinians—does not invalidate the rule.
“…We are obliged, therefore, to oppose the Christian churches and to speak out against their doctrines. But we do not, as some groups have done, accuse the Christian leaders of being false Christians. We do not say, ‘We are the real Christians, because we stand for the values which the mainstream churches stood for a century ago, before they were subverted.’ We do not reach for our Bibles and point to verses which seem to be in accord with the policies of the National Alliance and contrary to the present policies of the Christian churches. A diligent Bible scholar can find in the Judeo-Christian scriptures support for–or ammunition against–virtually any policy whatsoever.
“…Christianity, like the other Semitic religions, is irredeemably primitive. Its deity is thoroughly anthropomorphic, and its ‘miracles’—raising the dead, walking on water, curing the lame and the blind with a word and a touch—are the crassest superstition.
“We need ethics; we need values and standards; we need a world view. And if one wants to call all of these things together a religion, then we need a religion. One might choose instead, however, to call them a philosophy of life. Whatever we call it, it must come from our own race soul: it must be an expression of the innate Aryan nature. And it must be conducive to our mission of racial progress. Christianity, as the word is commonly understood, meets neither of these criteria.”
This, the most profound rejection of Christianity he ever published, came late in Dr. Pierce’s life and in the full maturity of his judgement. It was still being printed, still in full force and effect, when he died. Yet it was the first of his writings to be censored and excised from National Alliance publications by those who, by chance, bad fortune, and bad judgement, inherited the name — but not the essence — of the National Alliance.
APPENDIX
from the National Alliance Membership Handbook
2.d Opposed Ideologies
…
2.d.vii. Christianity
The National Alliance is not a religious organization, in the ordinary sense of the term. It does, however, have to concern itself with religious matters, because religions influence the behavior of people, society, and governments. The doctrines of various religious groups—Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, et al.—deal with temporal as well as spiritual matters and therefore often conflict with National Alliance doctrine.
Christian doctrines are of much greater concern to the National Alliance than the doctrines of other large religious groups, because Christianity is the most influential religion in the United States, Europe, and the rest of the White world. Most members of the National Alliance come from families which are, or a generation ago were, at least nominally Christian, and very few come from families which practice, or practiced, Islam, Buddhism, or other religions. Furthermore, the history of our race for the last thousand years has been inextricably bound up with Christianity. The National Alliance really cannot avoid taking positions regarding Christian beliefs and practices, despite the complications this causes in our work.
The immediate and inevitable fact which forces us to come to grips with Christianity is that the mainstream Christian churches are all, without exception, preaching a doctrine of White racial extinction. They preach racial egalitarianism and racial mixing. They preach non-resistance to the takeover of our society by non-Whites. It was the Christian churches, more than any other institution, which paralyzed the will of White South Africans to survive. It is the Christian establishment in the United States which is preeminent in sapping the will of White Americans to resist being submerged in the non-White tide sweeping across the land. Most Christian authorities collaborate openly with the Jews, despite the contempt and abuse they receive in return, and the rest at least follow Jewish policies on the all-important matter of race. The occasional anomaly—a Catholic bishop in Poland speaking out angrily against Jewish arrogance, a few Protestant groups in the United States expressing sympathy for oppressed Palestinians—does not invalidate the rule.
We are obliged, therefore, to oppose the Christian churches and to speak out against their doctrines. But we do not, as some groups have done, accuse the Christian leaders of being false Christians. We do not say, “We are the real Christians, because we stand for the values which the mainstream churches stood for a century ago, before they were subverted.” We do not reach for our Bibles and point to verses which seem to be in accord with the policies of the National Alliance and contrary to the present policies of the Christian churches. A diligent Bible scholar can find in the Judeo-Christian scriptures support for–or ammunition against–virtually any policy whatsoever.
Beyond the immediate conflict between us and the Christian churches on racial matters, there is a long-standing and quite fundamental ideological problem with Christianity. It is not an Aryan religion; like Judaism and Islam it is Semitic in origin, and all its centuries of partial adaptation to Aryan ways have not changed its basic flavor. It was carried by a Jew, Saul of Tarsus (later known as Paul), from the Levant to the Greco-Roman world. Its doctrines that the meek shall inherit the earth and that the last shall be first found fertile soil among the populous slave class in Rome. Centuries later, as Rome was succumbing to an internal rot in which Christianity played no small part, legions of Roman conscripts imposed the imported religion on the Celtic and Germanic tribes to the north.
Eventually Christianity became a unifying factor for Europe, and in the name of Jesus Europeans resisted the onslaught of Islamic Moors and Turks and expelled the “Christ-killing” Jews from one country after another. But the religion retained its alien mind-set, no matter how much some aspects of it were Europeanized. Its otherworldliness is fundamentally out of tune with the Aryan quest for knowledge and for progress; its universalism conflicts directly with Aryan striving for beauty and strength; its delineation of the roles of man and god offend the Aryan sense of honor and self-sufficiency.
Finally Christianity, like the other Semitic religions, is irredeemably primitive. Its deity is thoroughly anthropomorphic, and its “miracles”—raising the dead, walking on water, curing the lame and the blind with a word and a touch—are the crassest superstition.
We may have fond memories of the time before the Second World War when pretty, little girls in white dresses attended all-White Sunday schools, and Christianity seemed a bulwark of family values and a foe to degeneracy and indiscipline. We may cherish the tales of medieval valor, when Christian knights fought for god and king—if we can overlook the Christian church’s bloodthirsty intolerance, which stifled science and philosophy for centuries and sent tens of thousands of Europeans to the stake for heresy or witchcraft.
We may even find Christian ethics congenial, if we follow the standard Christian practice of interpreting many of its precepts—such as the one about turning the other cheek—in such a way that they do not interfere with our task. But we should remember that nothing essential in Christian ethics is specifically Christian. Any successful society must have rules of social conduct. Lying and stealing were shunned in every Aryan society long before Christianity appeared. Our pagan ancestors did not need Christian missionaries to tell them how to behave or to explain honor and decency to them—quite to the contrary!
Historians may argue the pros and cons of Christianity’s role in our race’s past: whether or not the unity it provided during a period of European consolidation outweighed the loss of good genes it caused in the Crusades and the bloody religious wars of the Middle Ages (and through the Church’s policy of priestly celibacy); whether the splendid Gothic cathedrals which rose in Europe during four centuries and the magnificent religious music of the 18th century were essentially Christian or essentially Aryan in inspiration; whether Christianity’s stand against the evils of self-indulgence—against gluttony and drunkenness and greed—was worth its shackling of the human mind in superstition or not. One thing already is clear, however: Christianity is not a religion that we can wish on future generations of our race.
We need ethics; we need values and standards; we need a world view. And if one wants to call all of these things together a religion, then we need a religion. One might choose instead, however, to call them a philosophy of life. Whatever we call it, it must come from our own race soul: it must be an expression of the innate Aryan nature. And it must be conducive to our mission of racial progress. Christianity, as the word is commonly understood, meets neither of these criteria.
The fact is that, completely aside from the racial question, no person who wholeheartedly believes Christian doctrine can share our values and goals, because Christian doctrine holds that this world is of little importance, being only a proving ground for the spiritual world which one enters after death. Christian doctrine also holds that the condition of this world is not man’s responsibility, because an omnipotent and omniscient deity alone has that responsibility.
Although some Christians do believe Christian doctrine wholeheartedly, however, most do not. Most instinctively feel what we explicitly believe, even if they have repressed those feelings in an effort to be “good” Christians. Because of this many nominal Christians, even those affiliated with mainstream churches, can, under the right circumstances, be persuaded to work for the interests of their race. Other nominal Christians—especially those who stand apart from any of the mainstream churches—have interpreted Christian doctrine in such an idiosyncratic way that the contradictions between their beliefs and ours have been minimized.
For these reasons we want to avoid conflict with Christians to the extent that we can. We don’t want to give unnecessary offense, even when we speak out against the doctrines of their churches. We don’t want to ridicule their beliefs, which in some cases are sincerely held. Some of these people later will reject Christianity’s racial doctrines. Some will reject Christianity altogether. We want to help them in their quest for truth when we can, and we want to keep the door open to them.
Members who want to study the subject of Christianity and its relationship to our task in depth should read Which Way Western Man?, by our late member William Simpson. The book’s initial chapters describe the spiritual odyssey of a man of exceptional spiritual sensitivity, who was far more intensely a Christian than nearly any Christian living today and who eventually understood the racially destructive nature of Christianity and rejected it.
A more concise study of the difference between the Christian world view and ours is given in Wulf Sörensen’s “The Voice of Our Ancestors,” which was reprinted in National Vanguard No. 107.