The Old Bronze Age Mindset Meets the New “Christian Vitalism"

“Christian Vitalism” could easily become a new syncretism, the attempted fusion of biblical faith and pagan religion.

Oct 13, 2023

Dear friends and supporters:

The article below is an adaptation from and a condensation of my chapter “Bronze Age Pagan Masculinity Versus Biblical Age Christian Masculinity” in CCL’s impending book Virtuous Liberty: A Christian Defense of Classical Liberalism and the Free Society Against Cultural Leftism and the New Right from the Center for Cultural Leadership, as well as the chapter “From Old-Fashioned Pagan Masculinity to Postmodern Machismo and the New Misogyny” in a new book tentatively titled Covenant Sexuality from the Ezra Institute.

Introduction

Since Leftist egalitarianism has gained the upper hand in Western culture, the leading political component, in fact, of the larger Sexual Revolution since the 1960s, we should not be surprised at the emergence of a conservative counter-revolution reasserting male-female differences and traditional social hierarchies. The impulses behind this reaction are warranted: sexual egalitarianism assaults God’s creational order and sows social chaos. However, since the counter-revolutionaries are usually not guided by the word of God but by alien, worldly presuppositions, they offer no cure for the disease and in some cases their alternative proposal is every bit as injurious as the disease itself. One of them is ancient paganism.

Enter the Bronze Age Mindset.

The Bronze Age Mindset

Bronze Age Mindset (BAM) is both a book and movement targeting young white right-wing males. The author (who also hosts a wildly popular X [formerly Twitter] account) designates himself the anonymous Bronze Age Pervert. He has since been widely identified as the Romanian-American far-Right figure Costin Vlad Alamariu. He holds a Ph.D. from Yale and his dissertation was titled “The Problem of Tyranny and Philosophy in the Thought of Plato and Nietzsche.” The BAM Wikipedia entry states (with supporting documentation):

Bronze Age Mindset gained a cult following in right-wing circles including staffers of the Trump White House and on Capitol Hill, according to anonymous sources described by Politico and Huffington Post. National Review writer Nate Hochman claims that many of his peers who read the book and [Michael] Anton’s review of it [in the Claremont Review of Books] ended up interning at the Claremont Institute, and asks, “Why did every junior staffer in the Trump administration read ‘Bronze Age Mindset?’ There was something there that was clearly attractive to young conservative elites.” In the summer of 2018 it was among the top 150 books sold on Amazon sitewide, which is notable according to Anton and Dan DeCarlo since it was achieved without the aid of a publicist or book deal. In October 2019, it was still ranked third in Ancient Greek History and #174 in Humour on the Amazon best-seller list.

BAM romanticizes, embellishes, and seeks to revive the spirit of the ancient pagan world in countering the evils of modern Western civilization, which it sees as terminally diseased and fit only for a quick and violent death. Christians who have correctly pinpointed the emergence of neopaganism from the Left, notably in its sexually egalitarian feature, might be surprised at the seemingly out-of-nowhere emergence of a competing right-wing version of paganism.

But BAM it every bit as pagan as Leftist neopaganism and by far more explicit. The book is a rambling, punchy, raunchy, occasionally intellectually coherent argument against modernity; against feminism; against human equality of all sorts; and, notably, against biblical Christianity.

To BAM, the hope for humanity is a revival of a very pagan past.

The Bronze Age Males

The vanguard of that pagan revival is a cadre of robust, muscle-bound, beautiful young males animated by the “life-force” of nature. BAM is animist (a supernatural principle pervades all life), pantheist (god is nature itself), and vitalist (life is dependent on a principle beyond chemical or physical forces). It is deeply indebted to Charles Darwin’s evolutionary naturalism and its ominous implications for mankind (only the fittest survive — and should be allowed to survive) and Friedrich Nietzsche’s nihilistic existentialism: there is no God, so man must be his own god, creating his own morality, truth, and world. These intellectual predecessors are music to BAM ears, because they create a quasi-scientific justification for a self-validating master race. (What could possibly go wrong?)

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BAM holds that to deny the one true God is not to deny the gods. Indeed, the beautiful young white muscular males will themselves become the new gods (“[m]any of the Greek heroes and gods had fair hair and blue or grey eyes,” Alamariu alerts the reader). They will cultivate their self-deification by “sun and steel”: lying in the sun every day and soaking up its health-producing power, and in fact, becoming sun-worshipers. In tandem they must take up a regimen of weightlifting to enhance the godlike beauty of their physique. “Only physical beauty,” Alamariu opines, “is the foundation for a true higher culture of the mind and spirit as well. Only sun [worship] and steel [weightlifting] will show you the path.” Beautiful male bodies are the pinnacle of nature, “the body in its glorious and divine beauty.”

In this Bronze world, females are subordinate creatures whose consummation of sexual desire drains young males of life-force. Therefore, girlfriends and marriage should at best be a tangent, necessary evil. Life’s real focus should be the formation of a camaraderie of young white muscular pirates and the domination of all inferiors, that is, all who are not other Bronze Age Males.

Pirates? Yes. They do not support themselves by work or vocation, but rather by piracy — they pillage and take at will. Work and sweat and toil are debasing; the pirate is the original form of the “free man.” They revel in a world they create, a world of absolute freedom on which they impose their will to power. Parents must, therefore, allow sons freedom from any oversight to express their life-force in our otherwise decadent world.

Eventually, they will grow up to create a white ethnostate of their own, separate from the rest of human civilization, which they will visit occasionally to solve its recurrent problems and to exert their inexorable will. Let it never be supposed, therefore, that utopianism is an exclusively Leftist concept. BAM is right-wing pagan utopianism at its zenith.

The ultimate cause of all modern decadence is feminism, Alamariu contends, and we live in a “gynocracy,” the rule of women. The only way out of this “absolute hell” and ““iron prison” of modernity is a reversion to ancient pagan animas and pantheism recognizing that the basic truth of humanity is the life-force we must cultivate in impressionable but spiritually, psychologically, and sociologically hungry young men.

Bronze Age Politics

BAM envisions a rigidly hierarchical social order with a certain kind of superior human (the Bronze Age Male) at the apex. But every social order implies a secondary yet important political order, and the Bronze Age political order coheres precisely with its social vision. It cannot be democratic, and by this BAM does not mean the sort of pure democracy that the Anglo-American tradition deplored, but, rather, precisely the sort of classically liberal order espoused by England and the United States and the modern West, influenced by biblical Protestantism: the rule of law; constitutions and bills of rights; religious, political and economic liberty; negotiated politics; peaceful political transitions; and so forth.

This classical liberalism leads to the egalitarian decadence we see around us, including ethnic heterogeneity. There is no way to create the BAM ethnostate without eliminating this Western, Christian-shaped constitutional democracy.

In the piratical world of the BAM, “the only right government is military government… We need warlord rule,” Alamariu advises. And in actuality, the rationale for classical liberalism is just a conspiratorial veneer designed to cover up its own sordid will to power. The U.S. Founders, for example, were merely seeking “dominion and freedom of space to expand.” They couldn’t care less about a constitution, individual rights, free speech and press, as they altruistically claimed. Like Nietzsche, BAM suggests that behind the curtain of every political rationale is the wizard imposing a will to power.

While the most biblical political order possible in a fallen world is one of principled liberty and self-government within the bounds of law (ultimately God’s law), the BAM political order is government by the young, beautiful, body-building, sun-worshiping elite gods imposing their will on their inferiors. The only free citizens must be the governing pirate class.

The Bronze Age Mentality Versus Christianity

By its very nature, therefore, BAM must repudiate the heart and soul of Christianity. The Bible, to the BAM, is a texture of myths. Christ is not a hero because true heroes never sacrifice; they take territory. Man is not created in God’s image, because there is no God to create anything. There is no creation. Matter is eternal. There is no resurrection, only reincarnation.

Perhaps Alamariu’s most explicitly anti-Christian tenet, however, is found in his statement that

So much of this [monotheistic] story makes time a line and makes matter conditional on a deity or creator that lives outside it: the creation of matter out of nothing, the creation of your soul out of nothing. Matter is dead, and in some ways, homogeneous, and its meaning is “divine” only in the sense that it reveals the creation of the external deity, or even better, just the laws he made to govern. It seems and feels wrong, or runs against the immediate perception of the world, so it requires faith, a concept unknown to ancient pagans of all kinds. For this reason, the Romans considered Christians and Jews to be no different from atheists. (emphasis in original)

BAM is thoroughly existentialist. There is only this material world and what humans (especially the Bronze Age Males) make of it. There can be no faith. WYSIAYG: What you see is all you get. And what you get is a divinized natural order: there is no benevolent, sovereign Creator and Redeemer God behind it and working within it all.

But God’s word tells us that without faith, it is impossible to please God (Heb. 11:6). Therefore, BAM is blatantly contra-Christian. And the reason the imperial Romans considered Christians atheists is not because the Christians believed in faith, but because they repudiated all the false gods of the ancient world and demanded allegiance to the one true God. In other words, the primitive Christians were considered atheists precisely because of their explicit repudiation of the kind of religion BAM is trying to revive.

The Bronze Age Mentality Christians and Conservatives

This contra-Christianity has not prevented BAM from influencing modern sociopolitical conservatism and conservative Christianity. Just as androgynous paganism has deeply infiltrated the Left, so Bronze Age paganism has influenced significant sectors of the Right, including the Christian Right.

Matthew Continetti has shown how the New Right has become suspiciously like the New Left in its statist lunge. The New Right is an influential, mostly younger segment of American conservatism convinced the American Founding Protestant experiment of liberty under law has been a failure (“as momentous as this founding was, it is also where our current trouble began,” writes Jason Michael Morgan) and must be supplanted by a new conservative statism that crushes its Leftist enemies by any means possible. Continetti says:

The first thing to say about the New Right is that it can get weird. Its ranks are composed almost entirely of men. They inhabit a social-media cocoon where they talk a lot about manhood, and strength, and manliness, and push-ups, and masculinity, and virility, and weight-lifting, and testosterone. “Wrestling should be mandated in middle schools,” write Arthur Milikh and Scott Yenor in the [New Right] collection Up from Conservatism. “Students should learn to build and shoot guns as part of a normal course of action in schools and learn how to grow crops and prepare them for meals. Every male student should learn to skin an animal and every female to milk a cow.”

The influence of BAM is palpable, whether most in the New Right have read the book or not. The New Right is not simply opposed to sexual egalitarianism (as it should be). In addition, it advocates “muscular” politics, meaning the abandonment of the biblical idea of the rule of law applying to all equally, checks and balances on political power (since politicians, too, are depraved, even those on “our” side), and the state’s role as limited to protecting life and liberty and property. The New Right wants to out-Left the Left at its political power game. Virtue is the exercise of coercive political power. Virtuous liberty be damned.

“Christian Vitalism”

Conservative Christianity has not been spared the poison tentacles of BAM. A leading platform is the American Reformer, a cadre of youngish Protestants who blame the Protestant political philosophy of classical liberalism (liberty under law) for the evils of modern culture. Human freedom leads to sin; therefore, freedom must be abolished. (Apparently God himself was mistaken to give Adam and Eve free will in the garden.)

In the American Reformer, Christian Winter espouses “Christian Vitalism,” arguing that young men are attracted to BAM because it offers a counter to the confines of modernity in its non-hierarchical, egalitarian order. What we need is a modified vitalism, not BAM’s pagan version, of course, but a revival of nature, which leads to human flourishing. We need to set before the eyes of young men not the heroes and gods of ancient Greece and Rome but Christian forefathers of masculine fortitude.

Winter argues that theory and theology are insufficient to persuade these young men. They need set before them muscular, masculine, overcoming Christian heroes they can emulate. The idea of enlisting Christian heroes is indeed a noble objective (just read Hebrews 11), but the quick, makeshift strategy of “Christian Vitalism” in the face of the popularity of BAM as the best way to appeal to young men and forestall their gravitation to pagan vitalism is what Francis Schaeffer called a “form of the world spirit.” It seems very much like a “seeker-sensitive” program for the 21st century among the very people who would have derided Bill Hybels of Willow Creek and of Rick Warren of Saddleback for fashioning an ideal faith to appeal to the unchurched “seekers.”

While correlation is not causation, it is highly suspicious that “Christian vitalism” just seemed magically to appear after, and as a consequence of, BAM. And it would seem less selective or even disingenuous if its heroes included obese Christian intellectuals like G. K. Chesterton, emaciated Christian prisoners like famed Bulgarian pastor Haralan Popov, and urbane and modest Christian poets like Gerard Manly Hopkins. I suspect, however, that these mighty Christian men are not the sort of male Christian heroes Winter has in mind.

This Christian-modified vitalism veers toward a new syncretism, the attempted fusion of biblical faith and pagan religion. If unchecked, it will be no less poisonous than the syncretism of ancient Israel when it attempted to fuse biblical-covenantal faith to the religion of the surrounding pagan nations. God abhors syncretism, and he sent his prophets to both plead with Israel and fulminate against its apostasy. Let us pray that “Christian Vitalism” reconsiders before it walks itself into the syncretist camp.

Recently Jeffery J. Ventrella, CCL Senior Fellow and noted Christian leader, posted on Facebook a reminder to the young Christian masculinists talking so much about the necessity of weightlifting that physical fitness, while creditable, is not a fruit of the Spirit. I re-posted his statement. The pushback was swift and severe. One of the nation’s young Christian masculinist leaders wrote privately begging me not to support this warning since I would alienate my audience of young men influenced by Christian masculinity (which, in reality, is the syncretistic “Christian Vitalism”). I responded that truth is truth and my interest has never been in avoiding offending a sector of my audience succumbing to sinful, worldly temptations.

It is, moreover, difficult to believe Christian-modified vitalism has grappled with the issues surrounding how the Bible’s teaching on masculinity (what of it there is; 95% of the Bible’s commands are not sex-specific) applies in an informational and postindustrial world. The Bible’s exhortations to and expectations of strength with reference to men are not arguments leveled against the sort of egalitarian and androgynous society presently afflicting the West. To argue as many conservatives today for the proper “roles” of men and women is to surrender the battle already. In the words of David Polansky:

Once we acknowledge the need to establish masculine roles is more pressing than the need for masculinity itself, the cat’s already out of the bag. We can argue, for example, that certain gender roles are salutary or desirable, but having admitted to ourselves that these are in fact roles, they necessarily lose their seriousness. It all becomes a kind of elaborate game. This is, incidentally, why the “trad” [traditionalist] accounts one finds on social media [like BAM] have the feeling of camp. The men are caricatures of manliness, just as the women are caricatures of womanhood. They have the same uncanny feeling one gets from encountering AI.1

In God’s creational world (even a fallen one not overrun by egalitarianism), masculinity is not a “role” to be recovered but a natural existence. How that looks in an age divinely blessed with labor-saving devices like automobiles and smart phones is not identical to how it looks in a premodern age that requires most men to skin a sheep for clothing, forge a wheel for transportation, or fell a tree for shelter. If it is necessary to revive an age that requires robust physical strength for everyday tasks, the Bible’s authority and application are severely emaciated. The man’s strength as a customer-serving warrior in the economy of contemporary culture and the wealth of free markets with which God has blessed the West, for example, is just as masculine as his strength had to be in premodern cultures. Assuming the physical strength necessary for modern bricklayers is the sort young Christian men need to aspire to impoverishes the Bible’s authority and dismisses vast areas of contemporary culture that require a different kind and measure of man’s strength.

Conclusion

If young Christian men are seeking guidance in our apostate egalitarian age, they should start with the book of the Bible written specifically and explicitly to young men: the book of Proverbs. They are not called to recover masculinity; they are called to be godly men; nothing more, nothing less. Proverbs teaches that the true man is the man of God, and the man of God is the man of wisdom. Not a muscled physique but a righteous life is the mark of the true man. Care for the body is, of course, a biblical imperative since the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit (we must never be body-hating Gnostics). However, physical fitness is not a fruit of the Spirit, and if young males wish to become true men, they must begin with the fear of the Lord, not with a CrossFit regimen. This syncretistic adaptation of BAM to Christianity the book of Proverbs would identify as folly, whose end is destruction.

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Personal

I’ve gotten behind because of tidying up my Dad’s final matters (he went home to glory on September 17). Sharon is headed this coming week for an 11-day visit to her own father in western Pennsylvania to provide for his care.

Check out the great article “Not a Tragedy” on the Hamas massacre in Israel by CCL’s Senior Scholar of Public Theology, Brian G. Mattson.

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Yours for the King,