{"id":424,"date":"2010-04-07T15:25:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-07T15:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/2010\/04\/blood-and-soil\/"},"modified":"2015-08-12T14:40:59","modified_gmt":"2015-08-12T20:40:59","slug":"blood-and-soil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/2010\/04\/blood-and-soil.html","title":{"rendered":"Blood and Soil"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Jason Pitzl-Waters at The Wild Hunt<\/a> (which all Pagans should read every day) has a good piece on the \u201cAlternative Right\u201d<\/a> \u2013 political conservatives who take their cues from philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche and who include many Pagans, particularly followers of Asatru<\/a>. The most notable example is Dan Halloran<\/a>, the Pagan who was elected to the New York City Council as a Republican.<\/p>\n

One of the interesting items Jason points out is the Alternative Right\u2019s emphasis on \u201cblood and soil\u201d religions. Stephen McNallen of the Alternative Right website\u00a0explains first-hand what that means:<\/p>\n

They are innately tied to a specific people and cannot be transferred to another group without losing their truth, power, and integrity. Such religions are the distilled experience of a specific biological and cultural group from its very beginning. They spring from the soul of that people and from no other. They honor their ancestors, and not the ancestors of any other people.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jason does a fine job of critiquing the politics of blood and soil. I\u2019m not going get into that, except to say that I don\u2019t agree with the underlying philosophy, and that while \u201ccreat[ing] a strong in-group\u201d has its benefits, history shows that frequently degenerates into opposition to or outright oppression of \u201cout-groups.\u201d<\/p>\n

My interest in this is the concept that certain religions and deities belong to certain ethnic\/cultural groups and only to them. As a universalist and a UU who believes strongly in \u201cwisdom from the world\u2019s religions\u201d this seems wrong. If there is value in the religions of, say, Asia, why shouldn\u2019t I draw from them?<\/p>\n

On the other side, there is the issue of \u201ccultural appropriation.\u201d For me, though, this is really two separate issues. One is the issue of dabbling: people who lift ceremonies and such out of their religious context. They never get the true, deeper meaning of them because they haven\u2019t done the hard work to be able to understand them on a mystical level.<\/p>\n

The second issue is sensitivity to groups that have historically been oppressed. I can understand the Cherokee or Sioux who says \u201cyou took our land and now you\u2019re taking our sacred rituals?!\u201d The solution there is to separate the spiritual techniques from elements of cultural identity, then to reground the universal techniques in your own culture (where you stand a much better chance of truly connecting to something).<\/p>\n

But the fact that something feels wrong doesn\u2019t make it wrong (although it\u2019s usually a pretty good hint). Westerners in general and Americans in particular have made religion all about belief. It\u2019s pretty easy to change your beliefs. It\u2019s much harder to change your culture, and it\u2019s impossible to change your ancestry. So if I\u2019m going to argue against this, I need something more definite.<\/p>\n

First, the idea of Americans harping about \u201cblood and soil\u201d religion seems a bit incongruous. We\u2019re thousands of miles away from Germanic soil. And unless your parents or maybe your grandparents were immigrants, the odds on your blood being all or significantly all of one ethnic group are pretty long. As Bill Murray said about Americans in Stripes<\/span>, \u201cwe\u2019re mutts.\u201d<\/p>\n

More than that, though, this ignores the realities of human evolution. Humans split from chimpanzees about 5 million years ago. All humans have our deepest roots in Africa<\/a>, and all non-Africans are descended from a small group (maybe 150 people) who left Africa about 50,000 years ago. Whatever differences in our blood and genes developed since then are miniscule compared to our similarities.<\/p>\n

It also ignores the realities of human migration. Since those earliest explorers and migrants started moving north, then east and west, the history of humanity is the history of migrations and invasions. I live in Texas, but I was born in Tennessee. The ancestors in my family tree (i.e. \u2013 those who share my name) moved to Tennessee 150 years ago. Their ancestors came from Ireland, before that England, before that somewhere in the middle of Europe, before that somewhere in southwest Asia, and before that east Africa. Where should I draw the line on who is or isn\u2019t my ancestor?<\/p>\n

Finally, it ignores the reality of spiritual experience. I have met the gods of the Celts (or rather, I\u2019ve met some of them). I have met the gods of Greece, and Rome, and Egypt. They don\u2019t seem to be tied to blood and soil \u2013 why should I?<\/p>\n

In our disconnected Western world, the lure of tribalism is strong. We form tribes around our families, our religions, our schools and sports teams. It brings a sense of belonging that we yearn for. That\u2019s a good thing. But ultimately, we are all connected \u2013 we are all one tribe. We need not \u2013 and should not \u2013 lose our wonderful cultural diversity. But we cannot allow the love of our own tribe to degenerate into an ambivalence or an animosity towards other tribes.<\/p>\n

We have advanced as a species because we have learned that working together achieves more than working separately. We have moved from working as individuals to working as families to working as tribes to working as nations. At each step, we\u2019ve learned to develop \u201cin-group\u201d feelings toward a wider and wider variety of people.<\/p>\n

The next step in the evolution of humanity is not to revert back to tribalism, it\u2019s to extend those in-group feelings toward everyone and everything.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jason Pitzl-Waters at The Wild Hunt (which all Pagans should read every day) has a good piece on the \u201cAlternative Right\u201d \u2013 political conservatives who take their cues from philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche and who include many Pagans, particularly followers of Asatru. The most notable example is Dan Halloran, the Pagan who was elected to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1129,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nBlood and Soil<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Jason Pitzl-Waters at The Wild Hunt (which all Pagans should read every day) has a good piece on the \u201cAlternative Right\u201d \u2013 political conservatives who\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/2010\/04\/blood-and-soil.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Blood and Soil\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Jason Pitzl-Waters at The Wild Hunt (which all Pagans should read every day) has a good piece on the \u201cAlternative Right\u201d \u2013 political conservatives who\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/2010\/04\/blood-and-soil.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"John Beckett\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2010-04-07T15:25:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2015-08-12T20:40:59+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"John Beckett\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"John Beckett\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/2010\/04\/blood-and-soil.html\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/2010\/04\/blood-and-soil.html\",\"name\":\"Blood and Soil\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2010-04-07T15:25:00+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2015-08-12T20:40:59+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/#\/schema\/person\/b4c8980dc36f971434424c304ca429ad\"},\"description\":\"Jason Pitzl-Waters at The Wild Hunt (which all Pagans should read every day) has a good piece on the \u201cAlternative Right\u201d \u2013 political conservatives who\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/2010\/04\/blood-and-soil.html#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/2010\/04\/blood-and-soil.html\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/2010\/04\/blood-and-soil.html#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Blood and Soil\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/\",\"name\":\"John Beckett\",\"description\":\"Musings of a Druid, Pagan, and Unitarian Universalist.\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/#\/schema\/person\/b4c8980dc36f971434424c304ca429ad\",\"name\":\"John Beckett\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/0f50bfa2a79f70103847fe75540bb29c?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/0f50bfa2a79f70103847fe75540bb29c?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"John Beckett\"},\"description\":\"I grew up in Tennessee with the woods right outside my back door. 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