Patriot Front’s Christianity Problem

Have you seen the videos? A few dozen or sometimes a hundred young men, all wearing slightly different shades of khaki pants, navy shirts, white diaper-looking face coverings, marching through some city carrying shields and upside-down American flags. They chant slogans about “reclaiming” America, pose in front of monuments, film the whole thing to post on Telegram, and disappear back into a U-HAUL before the public has any idea who they were.

The organization was founded in 2017 by Thomas Rousseau after the collapse and fragmentation of Vanguard America, the white-nationalist organization whose members participated in the Charlottesville rally. They’ve also collected whatever weirdos have sifted out of other now-dead organizations like Identity Europa or American Identity Movement. Patriot Front has since cultivated a much cleaner image than the organizations that preceded it. Swastikas are out. Americana is in. The branding emphasizes the American Revolution, classical architecture, frontier imagery, flags, founding-era quotations, and a vague language of national rebirth. They put up stickers, do some vandalism, hang banners from overpasses, organize hikes and boxing events, and periodically stage highly choreographed marches intended to generate propaganda footage.

This is part of why Patriot Front confuses people.

To the average Republican voter, the masks and plastic LARP-store shields look like some sort of federal entrapment operation; They find them cringe or far too bizarre to be associated with. To people on what has come to be known as the “dissident right” (who generally possess a much lower social IQ than your average normie), Patriot Front looks disciplined, masculine, and refreshingly willing to leave the internet and actually do something. To journalists and activist groups, it is generally described as a white-nationalist or fascist organization. Patriot Front itself prefers language about “American identity,” “heritage”, and national restoration.

To highlight what the organization actually looks like from the inside, I recently spoke for a little over an hour with a former member I will call John. He says he spent roughly three years in Patriot Front, long enough that he was not simply passing through. He joined while he was in college, at a time when the conventional political options around him seemed unserious. Campus Republicans looked like a debate club. Immigration and demographic questions seemed important to him, while the conservative establishment seemed unwilling to deal honestly with them. Patriot Front, by contrast, appeared to contain people willing to get into the street and act, or at least to do what comes across online as “taking action”.

That appeal should not be difficult to understand, even for someone who finds the organization repulsive. Young men are attracted to purpose, brotherhood, physical activity, risk and the feeling that what they are doing matters. If existing institutions offer them little besides podcasts, donor emails and opportunities to knock doors for politicians who do not know their names, somebody else will eventually offer them something more exciting.

John eventually concluded that Patriot Front was not delivering what it promised either. He described its activism as a treadmill: the same stickers, the same demonstrations, the same propaganda, year after year, largely serving to advertise Patriot Front itself. He isn’t the only former member to notice this. While someone is immersed in the organization, he said, it can take over a huge portion of his life. His friends are in the group, his weekends belong to the group, and ideological doubts become socially expensive because any sign that he is drifting produces suspicion. John compared some of those dynamics to a gang: paranoia, purity testing and the knowledge that if you cease being aligned, the people around you may very quickly cease trusting you.

That is the practical problem, and reason enough for young men to avoid wasting their time, but the theological problems are worse.

Americana is not the ideology

Patriot Front’s public presentation is curated. At least, they do their best. If somebody knows the organization only through its propaganda, he can easily come away with the impression that this is simply a harder, more based™️ version of American patriotism. There are flags, eagles, revolutionary imagery and increasingly visible Christian aesthetics. You do not generally see members marching beneath giant portraits of Hitler. If you didn’t make it in the Boy Scouts or get a bid to a fraternity, maybe you’ll fit in here.

The difficulty is that the internal ideological world revealed in leaked accepted membership intake interviews looks considerably less wholesome.

In the video of my conversation with John, I included a section summarizing several of those interviews. Prospective or accepted members describe Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler’s speeches, Julius Evola, George Lincoln Rockwell, The Turner Diaries and National Socialist propaganda as important influences. Some explicitly call themselves National Socialists or fascists. One candidate claims to be Orthodox Christian while wanting Jews removed from the country. Another attends church but describes himself as a deist. Another is a National Socialist pagan. One says plainly that he puts race first. One details that he is fixated on the idea of terrorist attacks.

None of this means that every Patriot Front member is secretly a pagan Nazi. John actually told me that some number of the men he knew sincerely professed Christianity. Some are probably actual (supremely gullible) Christians who have been convinced by Telegram memes to waste their 20s ranting about their race fixations, carrying plastic shields, and frisking each other in the woods.

According to John, Patriot Front contained Christians from different denominations, pagans, secular men, and people with stranger religious beliefs. The important organizational question was whether these people could work together. The organization did not require agreement on the Trinity, the resurrection, the authority of Scripture or much of anything else ordinarily considered foundational to Christianity. The unifying principle was political and racial.

A Christian organization can contain people who are imperfect Christians. A political organization can contain Christians. Neither fact tells us what ultimately governs the organization. If Christians, pagans, deists, and racial mystics can all cooperate comfortably so long as they agree on the racial project, then Christianity is not functioning as the foundation of the coalition. It is one permitted identity inside it.

The question becomes what happens when the permitted identities conflict with the thing everyone is actually there to accomplish.

Aryanity

This is where Aryanity enters the story.

Aryanity is an extremely fringe and made up racial religion that attempts to combine elements of Christianity, paganism, evolutionary hierarchy and racial mysticism into something new. Its own material explains this. In the video included during my interview, Aryanity teaches that race and religion should be made effectively inseparable. It speaks of submission to a natural racial hierarchy and to the authority of supposedly higher-agency Aryan men. Survival of the race is treated as an overriding good, and Christian moral concepts such as mercy and unconditional love are blamed for weakening Western civilization.

This is not a Southern Baptist arguing with an Orthodox Christian about icons, it is a completely different false religion built around race.

John said that materials he had seen suggested that some relatively important Patriot Front members close to Rousseau were involved with Aryanity and that people in that network had attempted to recruit Patriot Front members into it. John, who now takes his Christianity considerably more seriously than he did when he first entered Patriot Front, accurately calls Aryanity heretical.

The point is not that Patriot Front is secretly the Church of Aryanity. I have never claimed that.

The point is that this supposedly American-patriotic organization has an ideological ecosystem porous enough that people involved in an openly hyperracial, anti-Christian religious project can operate alongside professing Christians without the entire arrangement immediately collapsing.

Remember that your pastor might be in this organization, but you’d probably be able to tell by how he behaves elsewhere. Race idolatry supplies them the common ground that theology cannot.

That is a problem I have written about repeatedly in the context of National Socialism. Modern Hitler apologists often respond to evidence of anti-Christianity inside Nazism by pointing to Christian language, Christian party members, crosses, prayers, references to Providence or the Nazis’ official endorsement of something called “Positive Christianity.” This proves much less than they think it does.

Political movements are perfectly capable of using religious language while subordinating religion to political goals. We recognize this when the left does it. Does “loving your neighbor means allowing abortion” ring any bells? National Socialist documents I have discussed elsewhere make the hierarchy clear: Christianity was acceptable when it could be made useful to race, party, and ideology. When Christianity placed moral limits on those things, the conflict became unavoidable.

The same basic question applies here: what happens when Christ and race disagree?

If Christian teaching requires something that appears politically disadvantageous, which one gives way? If the Sermon on the Mount looks weak, is the Sermon corrected by racial theory? If a pagan member thinks Christianity helped destroy Western civilization, must he abandon that belief, or does everyone simply agree not to discuss it while hanging the next banner?

If Christianity is merely one identity tolerated inside a racial coalition, then putting a cross on the propaganda does not solve the problem.

Christianity and Christian aesthetics are not the same thing

Patriot Front has leaned more heavily into Christian imagery in recent years. During the interview, we discussed material that included explicitly Christian prayer and imagery, including a prayer asking God to protect “Thomas our leader.” John did not dismiss the people involved as cynical atheists. He believed many of them were completely sincere.

At the same time, John said that based on conversations in which he personally participated, including calls with Rousseau, his understanding was that Rousseau himself was “not particularly religious.” He allowed that Rousseau may simply have been private about his beliefs, but that was the impression John came away with. Sincerity is not the issue.

A person can sincerely pray and still have a badly disordered political theology. He can sincerely hold a crucifix while making his race-idolatry the functional center of his worldview. He can sincerely believe he is defending Christianity while embracing political assumptions inherited from people who regarded Christianity as weak, “too Jewish”, universalist, or biologically destructive.

The useful question is not whether somebody involved with Patriot Front says a prayer. The useful question is what his Christianity is allowed to forbid. Is Christianity permitted to apply limiting principles to the organization’s conduct and worldview?

If the answer is “not if it interferes with the racial project,” then we have learned considerably more than we would from counting crosses in Telegram JPEG propaganda.

Da joos

Patriot Front’s public propaganda also avoids making Jews the obsessive center of its messaging in the way some openly neo-Nazi groups do. This has occasionally been offered as evidence that the organization has moved beyond the ideological world from which it came.

John’s description of internal attitudes does not support that interpretation.

When I asked whether there was much disagreement inside the organization about Jews, he said hostility was essentially across the board. Members differed in emphasis. Some were consumed by the issue, while others considered Jews merely one problem among many, but John did not remember a meaningful faction that rejected the basic framework. The membership ancestry standards confirm this.

According to John, prospective members could possess some limited amount of non-European ancestry and still be accepted. Jewish ancestry was treated differently. When I asked what percentage of Jewish ancestry would disqualify somebody, he immediately answered, “One drop.” He said Rousseau was explicit and adamant about this rule.

That is an extraordinary standard for an organization marketed around “heritage Americans.”

Apparently the American identity of a man whose distant great-grandparent was Jewish can evaporate during a genealogy discussion.

It becomes increasingly difficult to argue that all of the older racial ideology disappeared simply because the graphic design improved.

What are we even doing here?

Even somebody completely uninterested in the theological question eventually runs into a practical one: what exactly is Patriot Front trying to accomplish through its actual strategy?

John’s term “treadmill activism” is helpful because Patriot Front undeniably does a lot of things. Members travel, train, march, place propaganda, paint stencils, organize regional events and spend enormous amounts of time documenting all of it. But doing things and accomplishing things is not the same thing. This can be easy to miss if your brain is running the software of niche internet communities, wholly disconnected from real life.

This same criticism appeared in July in an open letter written by another former member under the name Hawaiian Hyperborean. Unlike me, he is broadly sympathetic to Patriot Front. He wrote warmly about his former comrades, described some of his experiences in the organization as among the best times of his life, and openly expressed hope that the organization would succeed. He also described essentially the same problems John did.

Members continually cycle through. Men become inactive and quietly disappear. The organization can generate repetitive visual propaganda without producing political achievements proportionate to the sacrifices being demanded from its membership.

The strategic contradiction is obvious. According to John, Rousseau discouraged members from voting because participation in elections legitimized an illegitimate political order. Patriot Front also officially rejects initiating political violence. So what is left?

Marching, propagandizing, recruiting and building the organization until, somehow, the accumulation of activism produces a revolutionary political transformation that neither ballots nor force are supposed to bring about? They love to talk about the Overton Window because it is not an objective barometer of success. “Vibes on X” does not actually correspond to much at all, especially because your X is different from everyone else's X.

Members pay the price

The political destination may be vague, but the cost to individual members can be extremely concrete.

The Hawaiian Hyperborean substack post describes men losing jobs and educational opportunities after being publicly identified. John separately described members spending substantial amounts of their own money on travel, stickers, banners and supplies. During his time there were no ordinary membership dues, but the members themselves often financed the activism. For men in their 20s, every dollar flushed down the toilet is not going towards building a family or actual institutions.

John also discussed what has sometimes been described as a “parallel economy” for people who had become unemployable after being doxxed. He was careful to say that he did not personally work in these businesses, so his account here is secondhand. The men he knew who had participated, however, did not describe positive experiences. He recalled complaints about people working for significant periods while expecting compensation that either did not arrive or did not match what they had been led to expect. I can confirm this is the case based on my own personal relationships with individuals within Patriot Front.

The social dynamic can therefore become self-reinforcing. A young man joins because he already feels alienated from mainstream institutions. His friendships increasingly come from the organization. He becomes publicly identified and loses access to ordinary employment or social networks. He then depends more heavily on ideological friends for companionship, work and purpose, which gives him even greater reason not to question the ideology that placed him there.

John described exactly this kind of pressure. Once someone begins drifting ideologically, trust evaporates immediately. That is not a small cost to pay for another batch of amateur-edited march hype footage.

The YQ (Youth Question)

One of the more disturbing portions of the interview concerned younger recruits.

John said Patriot Front membership was officially restricted to adults, although exceptional 17-year-olds could be admitted when he was involved. He also described later evidence pointing toward separate youth organizations functioning as funnels for eventual Patriot Front recruitment.

Leaked discussions presented in my interview video appear to show people associated with these projects talking about keeping the Patriot Front connection less obvious, maintaining plausible deniability, and eventually moving older participants into the organization. In one recording, a member himself uses the word “grooming” to describe preparing 15, 16, and 17-year-olds for later Patriot Front membership.

Parents should at least understand that this broader ecosystem exists, particularly because political radicalization no longer requires somebody to stumble into a skinhead bar. It can begin through memes, Telegram channels, gaming communities, Discord, etc.

What is highest?

There are completely legitimate reasons that young men become disgusted with mainstream politics. There are legitimate criticisms of immigration policy, elite hypocrisy, atomization, collapsing communities and a conservative establishment that often seems better at fundraising from problems than solving them. Pretending those frustrations are imaginary will only guarantee that the people willing to acknowledge them first gain credibility.

But the existence of a real grievance does not baptize every movement that offers a (poor) explanation for it.

The deepest problem I see in Patriot Front is not that there are strange people in the membership. Every political movement contains strange people. The problem is the principle that allows men with radically contradictory religious beliefs to cooperate without resolving those contradictions. Those exercising leadership and influence within the right-wing cannot compromise on subjects such as these and expect to be blessed by God.

The Christian, pagan, deist, Wehraboo, and racial mystic can all apparently fit beneath the same umbrella because the non-negotiable question is racial. That should tell us what occupies the highest position.

“The human mind is, so to speak, a perpetual forge of idols.”

“For what is idolatry if not this: to worship the gifts in place of the Giver himself?”

• John Calvin

Historic Christianity can recognize the existence of nations, peoples, families and inherited loyalties without making any of them God. Once race becomes the standard by which Christian doctrine is accepted, modified, or discarded, the relationship has been reversed. Christianity is no longer judging the political ideology. The political ideology is selecting whichever portions of Christianity are useful to it.

That is why the Aryanity connection matters. It is why the pagan members matter. It is why the “Positive Christianity” comparison matters. It is why the Hitler-adoring membership interviews matter. It is why an organization can become visibly more Christian in its aesthetics while remaining ideologically hospitable to men whose worldview is fundamentally incompatible with Christianity.

The flags are American now. The graphic design is better. There may even be a crucifix in the JPEG. The underlying question has not changed.

Is Christ allowed to judge the race, or is Christ useful only insofar as He serves it?