Groyperism vs Christianity?

(Here are my comments to Faith and Law’s “Men on the Hill” yesterday. I enjoyed the conversation with young congressional staffers and others who attended.)

Groyperism, a subculture of online trolls aligned with far-right Nick Fuentes, has become popular especially among young men including Christian young men.

The appeal is obvious. Young men like boldness, irreverence, bravado, defiance, adventure, clarity naughtiness, raunchiness, the appearance of manliness, bright primary colors versus opaque subtlety, which can seem uncertain, vague, and weak.

Regarding groyperism, maybe current events in Iran are instructive. I well recall the 1979 revolution that overthrew the Shah and brought the Ayatollah Khomeini and the mullahs to power. Iran’s young men, living amid relative prosperity and stability, were angry and impatient. Their regime was secular and mundane. Radical Islam offered drama, struggle, a bold narrative, and demonology. The Shah was incongruently oppressive but also weak, controlled by America, the West and Israel. His regime was prosperous but did not speak to the soul or the heart. He advanced women’s rights and tolerated religious minorities. Again, such weakness. Real men could not tolerate these outrages. Revolution!

The young men who fomented Iran’s disastrous Islamist revolt did not have the internet, but they trolled with VHS tapes imported from Paris, where the Ayatollah Khomeini was exiled. In the political sense, groyperism incarnates the existential impatience with which all humanity struggles, and to which young impatient men are especially prone.

Groyperism assumes that older generations are exhausted, irrelevant, lazy, feeble. They have completely failed, and their failure has deprived us today of what we deserve. So, we must burn down what was and rebuild based on our own needs and rely on our own supposed wisdom. After all, there is supposedly nothing to lose!

Of course, I understand this perspective, having been young man once myself. As a teenager I rushed home after school to listen on the radio to feisty Pat Buchanan excoriate the Carter Administration with unvarnished rhetoric. Then he was the voice of conscience as Communications Director in the Reagan Administration. I did not like how later he opposed the Persian Gulf War and Israel’s “amen corner” which foreshadowed troubling rhetoric about Jews. But in 1992 I voted for him and his “pitchfork rebellion” in the GOP primary against “King” George H. W. Bush, who seemed squishy, dull, and hollow. Buchanan’s famous speech to the 1992 GOP Convention about a culture war in America and taking back one city block at a time militarily seemed to me thrilling. It also sharply contrasted with former President Reagan’s speech later that same evening, which was irenic, humorous, and hopeful about America.

Later Buchanan wrote his revisionist anti Churchill WWII history, claiming war against the Third Reich was mistaken. William Buckley famously wrote that Buchanan was guilty of antisemitism. More recently, there have been groyper declarations that Buchanan has prevailed against Buckley, who represented the dead old consensus, while Buchanan was the John the Baptist of new more robust action.

Perhaps Buchanan’s high-octane verbiage foreshadowed groyperism, although he now seems antiquated and genteel compared to today’s provocateurs. As an older man, I now have different views of Buchanan and his burn it down style.

Today’s groyperism of course goes well beyond Buchanan’s insinuations against Jewish people. Nick Fuentes has self-identified with “Team Hitler.” Others flit about the edges of Team Hitler but rejoice in violating post WWII taboos against anti-Jewish caricatures. In this vein, groypers will tout the superiority of white people, disdain legal and social equality for women, and scorn traditional virtues of human respect, compassion, mercy, self-denial, modesty, humility, and dignity.

Such qualities are now deemed weak, and in this weakness are ceding the field of action to the “enemy,” whoever that may be. Of course, these very virtues form the core of the Christian ethic and are embodied in Christ Himself, who prevailed against all His enemies by refusing to fight and resist on their terms.

Yet many groypers profess to be Christian, and many groypers whether Christian or not appeal to many Christian young men, many of whom have decided that Christian virtues have no specific value in political debate and struggle and are actually a hindrance. Under this thinking, these virtues if valid at all, belong only inside the church or the home, not within realpolitik, which is warfare without moral boundaries.

I have been asking many young men and many who work with young men whether they listen to Nick Fuentes. The answer has typically been yes, but they do not take him very seriously. Yet poison still has its impact even if not treated seriously. And many young men, and others, are absorbing poison, if unconsciously, with predictably negative results.

Responding to groyperism would have been easier several decades ago, when there were gatekeepers and enduring respected institutions. In fact, several decades ago, in the pre internet era, groyperism could not have emerged, except distributed through quirky hard copy newsletters or at niche, sparsely attended political meetings.

Mainstream media have lost their monopoly of course and are irrelevant to young people, who hearken to online social influencers who resemble pagan warlords after the fall of the Roman Empire. These influencers emerge very quickly, developing their niche audience of sometimes millions, while still unknown to the vast majority of people outside their special sphere.

In Christianity, denominations have collapsed as centers of authority. Even pastors, unless themselves social influencers, have been sidelined. Christian online audiences curate their own sources of individualized authority who are far more entertaining, provocative, and compelling than denominations or institutional churches with their official clergy ever could have been. Churches and their pastors of course are weighed down by the realities of daily life, stewarding property, paying bills, serving the needy, trying to sustain wide communities of people who don’t completely agree politically but do follow Christ.

These duties make ordinary churches and clergy seem boring, ineffectual, timid, and irrelevant. They are careful and restrained. But online groypers through their podcasts and social media are unyielding, electrifying, supposedly speaking truth to power, responding to every controversy and crisis of the moment with quick takes, relying on a facile demonology that encourages listeners to assume the worst about people they already despised.

And these online groypers, unlike traditional churches and clergy, don’t rely on long-term trust and ancient doctrine for their support. Unlike traditional churches and clergy, they are not restrained by the Christian ethic of turn the other cheek, patience, kindness, and sacrificial love. The online groypers completely rely on controversy, polemics, anger, fear, hatred, and sheer entertainment to build and sustain their followings. Any hesitation or admission of error on their part would allow their online empires to crumble and collapse. So fresh meat must constantly be served up raw.

Realistically, traditional Christian sources of authority cannot compete directly with groyperism, any more than Christ would have performed in the coliseum. He responded to Pilate with silence. Rhetorical combat was not His game.

So traditional Christianity must rebut groyperism by sticking with its 2000-year program, however mundane and ill-suited to our times. This means teaching sound doctrine, incarnating virtues of self-sacrifice and love of enemies, and avoiding the temptation to respond to the moment, every moment.

Christianity cannot and will not be effective by joining gladiatorial games. We have our own arena, which is the church, which at all times and everywhere must teach and demonstrate love for all people, respect, forbearance, and patience. God loves our enemies as much as He love us. And while groypers marinate in calamity, conspiracism and apocalypse, Christianity teaches God is sovereign and operates on His own schedule.

Groyperism often relies on nostalgia, claiming there was some era where the right kind of people were in charge. But that era was only before the Fall in Eden. Our world has ever thereafter been sinful, with even the best of men and women making terrible mistakes. Groypers tell us that Eden was taken away from us by elites, Jews, racial minorities, etc. But Eden fell because in Adam’s fall, we sinned all.

Groypers tell us that we deserve so much better. But from a Christian perspective, none of us deserve anything but divine judgement. Instead, we receive divine mercy and grace, all of it undeserved.

Groyperism turns Christianity into a parochial tribe contending with other tribes for power and booty. But Christians are not a tribe. We are the church universal and Body of Christ, who suffer and persevere by God’s grace, across nation, culture, and time, into eternity.

Groyper politics are Manichaean, evil versus good, and apocalyptic, and gnostic by claiming special insider knowledge for the groyper community. But a Christian view of politics knows that all are sinful, that all are contending over competing interests, which can only be mediated by compromise, patience, and some level of approximate trust.  

For Christians, in contrast with groypers, no form of politics will establish complete righteousness on this side of the eschaton. We can only work and pray for approximate justice and peace, under divine mercy.

Groyperism relies on pornographic sensationism to tease and excite its followers. But ultimately it can lead nowhere but to frustration and oblivion. It’s a dangerous flight from reality.

Mature Christians, and just sensible people, should avoid its temptations. Addictions are captivity.

The Christian response to groyperism is not to fight with it but to transcend it, to witness amid it, to proclaim the Gospel of salvation and peace to all people, and to exemplify a human ethic of dignity and respect. Maybe our model is Saint Telemachus, who in year 404 AD disrupted gladiatorial games in Rome’s coliseum, prompting the mob to kill him, but ultimately inspiring their abolition. 

On the excitement and entertainment level, Christianity cannot in the same space compete with groyperism. It can only operate with quiet confidence that eternity, with a peace that passes all understanding, is more compelling than online pyrotechnics.

And for young men who are seduced by groyperism, however ironically or with whatever detachment, we should point to the one true and good man who in His life and on the Cross took upon Himself all the burdens of the world. Or let’s point to His followers like Saint Telemachus who witness against self-indulgent cruelty and pay with their lives. That is true manhood and true victory.

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