The short answer is no.

The New York Times thinks it’s on to something in promoting a Pew study that, at first glance, demonstrates that the “economic differences among the country’s various religions are strikingly large, much larger than the differences among states and even larger than those among racial groups.”

The reality is that “religious” differences largely track the racial-and-IQ spectrum that organs like the New York Times don’t like to talk about.

First off, the “Hindu” sample is so selective it should probably be thrown out. In Race Differences in Intelligence, Richard Lynn demonstrates that IQ on the Indian subcontinent covers a very wide bell curve; this results mostly from the great racial heterogeneity of the Indian people (or rather peoples), whose elite displays the characteristics—and intelligence—of their Aryan ancestors. Those who make it all the way to America on a H-1B visas are, no doubt, the crème de la crème.

Anyone who wants to know how we got to the point of all this Diversity nonsense and multicultural madness, and where it came from, should watch this short film called The House I Live In. Starring Frank Sinatra, it came out in 1945, and was created “to oppose anti-Semitism and racial prejudice.” It was awarded both a Golden Globe and an Academy Award in 1946.

The plot’s pretty simple. Sinatra, playing himself, heads outside for a cigarette break in the middle of a recording session, where he happens upon a gang of about a dozen young boys chasing and cornering another kid, getting ready to pummel him. Sinatra intervenes, asking what the trouble is. The ruffians explain that they want to beat the kid up because they don’t like his religion. One tells Sinatra “he’s a dirty -” but Frank cuts him off before he can finish the sentence.

Frank then has a talk with the boys, and shows them how wrong they are. Does he tell them that, while religion is important, going around beating up people with a different religion is not appropriate behavior? Nah, Frank cuts right to the chase. He tells them:

“Look, fellas, religion makes no difference. Except maybe to a Nazi, or somebody that’s stupid.”

Christians like to complain about “modern day” Hollywood denigrating and downplaying Christianity, while insisting that back in the good old days Hollywood respected Christianity. But even back in 1945 Hollywood was giving Oscars to a movie that says that anyone who thinks Christianity is better than other religions is either a Nazi, or stupid.

Sinatra then goes on to explain that we’re all Americans, no matter what we believe, and “prejudice” and “intolerance” are wrong, because even though we all may not see eye to eye on religion, we’ve got to stick together to fight “the Japs.” And, yes, he says “Japs”, repeatedly. The kids then stare wide eyed as Frank breaks into an expurgated rendition of the title song.

The film is based on the song of the same name, The House I Live In. It’s all about America being a multiracial, multicultural Disneyland. But the songwriter was livid that the movie makers cut the verse that explicitly refers to blacks out of the movie. He even got tossed out of a theater for protesting the excision. But the people that made the movie knew that America wasn’t quite ready for a movie promoting that much Diversity just yet. No matter; they had plenty of time, and now they push not only racial integration, but miscegenation non-stop. And it goes without saying that if they were making the movie today, they would no doubt still leave in the line comparing evangelicals to Nazis for thinking religion is important, but they would take out the stuff about “Japs.”

Nowadays, of course, the message of the movie is considered mainstream. Who doesn’t love “tolerance” and “diversity” these days? But back then, the idea that race and religion were meaningless trivialities was only being pushed by radicals, Jews, and Communists. Forced racial integration was considered to be a Communist plot, largely because it was a Communist plot. And if you think I exaggerate, just consult some history books. Christians and conservatives of today love to pretend as if they’ve always stood for and promoted interracial marriage, integrated schools, integrated churches, Civil Rights laws, etc., and that Martin Luther King was the embodiment of Christian conservatism. But nothing could be further from the truth. Conservative evangelical churches in the era between WW 2 and the 1970s railed against racial integration, and opposed all efforts to mix the races. Probably not five white preachers out of a thousand would’ve conducted an interracial marriage in 1964. Conservatives and Christians weren’t “marching with Dr. King”; the non-blacks marching with MLK were Quakers, liberal apostate “Christians”, commies, beatniks, and, overwhelmingly, Jews. (One of the rare exceptions was Billy Graham, and he certainly didn’t take a prominent position in the Civil Rights crusade, because he knew it would kill his ministry. But he did invite King to pray at a New York City revival, and insisted on integrated seating at all his revival meetings. He was widely denounced by conservative Christians for these actions.) Again, just check the history books if you doubt that modern day shibboleths on race were considered far out, dangerous radicalism by Americans up until quite recently, and that the people pushing such things were generally Communists.

But if you don’t have time to read some history books, just watch the credits for this Academy Award winning movie. It’s like a Who’s Who of Hollywood Communism and radicalism. Sinatra was just their front man.

Let’s start with the man who wrote the lyrics to the song on which the movie is based. In the movie he’s credited as “Lewis Allan”, but don’t pay any attention to that. His real name was Abel Meeropol. He also wrote Strange Fruit, the song about lynching in the South which Billie Holiday made famous, and which TIME magazine called the most important song of the 20th century. Holiday claimed she wrote it in her autobiography, but that was a lie. And who was Abel Meeropol? Our good friend Max Blumenthal tells us that he was “a Jewish school teacher”, but there’s a bit more to it than that. Quite a bit more. Remember Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the nice Jewish couple executed for giving our atomic secrets to the Soviet Union? Well, after they were executed, Abel Meeropol adopted their kids. Was that because he took pity on a couple orphans? Possibly. It might also have to do with the fact that the “Jewish school teacher” was an “ardent Communist” himself. Funny how Blumenthal forgot to mention that little fact…

OK, so we’ve seen that the lyricist for the song which inspired the movie was some strange fruit, indeed. What about others? Well, Earl Robinson wrote the music for the song. You remember Earl Robinson, right? He was one of the notorious Hollywood Ten, who were blacklisted for refusing to tell Congress whether or not they had ever been members of the Communist Party. Of course, every single one of the Hollywood Ten either was or had been a member of the Communist Party. Most still were. Robinson also wrote the music for other songs, like Ballad For Americans, an anthem all about how race and religion don’t matter. It was performed at the Communist Party national convention of 1940. (They also played it the GOP convention that year, which oughta tell you something.) Robinson also wrote Black and White, a celebration of the Brown vs. Board of Education travesty of jurisprudence. You’ve probably heard a watered down version of Black and White – Three Dog Night had a #1 hit with their less blatantly political form of the song in 1972.

OK, so the guy who wrote the words to the song that inspired the movie was an America hating Communist. And the guy who wrote the music was another Communist. Anyone else? Well, there’s also the guy who wrote the screenplay for the movie. His name was Albert Maltz, surprise, surprise, and he, too, “was a man on the rise both inside and outside of the Communist Party.”

Yes, The House I Live In, and its message, was a Communist production through and through. And make no mistake. The message of the movie wasn’t that people shouldn’t go around beating up Jews. We have no problem with that message; we oppose violence against anyone. But that wasn’t the message of the movie. The message was that religion and race are meaningless trivialities, and anyone who disagrees is either “a Nazi” or “stupid.”

In 1945, that was a radical Communist idea. Now, it’s a mainstream view parroted by nearly everyone.

In his comments on my discussion of alternate modernities, Paul Gottfried observes that in our present situation there's no educational program, system of alliances, or political and cultural strategy that seems likely to get us out of the hole we're in.

I agree. If we start with what I called the modern "attempt to base social order simply on this-worldly empirical man," we can't get anywhere, because we can't escape the problem of conflicting wills fighting over who gets what. The only way to deal with that problem is by some combination of force and fraud, and any new combination of programs, alliances, and strategies is just going to be one more configuration of force and fraud. Why should our force and fraud work out better than everyone else's? Haven't the possibilities been tried and found wanting?

The problem, it seems, is the basic modern understandings that make our present situation what it is and so condition all the programs, alliances, strategies, and so on that now seem reasonable and practical. Things won't get a whole lot better until those understandings change, and that won't happen because some group of activists and theoreticians puts together a system of understandings that's more to their liking and tries to get them adopted by the dominant forces in society.

In particular, as Paul notes, right-wingers aren't going to create a better world by getting together and aligning themselves with selected religious institutions, "command[ing] the political class and its allies in the media, the entertainment industry, and public education to change their worldview," and educating the masses into an outlook more to their liking. Among other problems, religious institutions themselves are affected by the dominant understandings.

But what then? If we don't like the way things are there must be some response--alcohol, skydiving, suicide, whatever--that makes sense even if political maneuvering is not likely to do much for us.

My proposal was to "go back to first things." What defines the political situation is what seems best and most real to the people involved, and if the situation is impossible those things must change. Current understandings have basic problems that (among other things) lead to a view of man as essentially asocial and eventually mean various forms of tyranny as well as "mindlessness and incompetence on the part of rulers and ruled."

It follows that the dissatisfied need first of all to understand the world better, and in a way that enables them to live in a manner more worthy of human nature. That, of course, is a prepolitical issue. It's worth dealing with in itself, since doing so will help ourselves and our families and friends. It's more than just a personal matter, though, since such initiatives can spread and transform social life. At some point some initiative will--it's happened before and will happen again--so why not ours if it's superior?

The present setup has basic contradictions, and won't last forever any more than other social arrangements have. With that in mind, those with an outlook and way of life that is more true and more worth living by should make their pitch and see what catches on and endures. As I commented, "revolutions begin in thought, and the way of thought that makes people most functional and enables them to deal most intelligently with the world has a good shot at winning eventually."

The proposal sounds impossibly conjectural and long-range, but when there is no obvious quick fix you drop day-to-day events as your reference point and do what you can for what could work in principle. If what's needed is a change in basic understandings then that's what you should pursue. Modernity makes effectiveness the measure of thought, but to deal with the world effectively you have to deal on their own terms with issues that precede effectiveness, like what is real and good.

Such an approach might get results soon: things might be better than they seem, late modernity might be a bubble about to burst, the Church (which like everything else has its own characteristic way of functioning) might be about to revert to type, or something nobody has thought of might happen. Or it might take effect slowly or not at all. The same is true of every approach, though, and the basic point is that this approach--unlike others--could work in concept, and is worth pursuing on its own terms even if it does not.

The big question is what a superior way of thought would be. On that point opinions differ and discussion is necessary. In order to deal with man as he actually is and the problems politics actually present we need an outlook that's adequate to the world as we experience it. It seems clear, to me at any rate, that such an outlook requires an understanding of practical rationality not limited to technology and of knowledge not limited to modern natural science.

Otherwise we cannot, among other things, understand people. To understand and deal with life and human beings as we find them, I suggested that "something like the Christian soul, or at least a human essence that by nature is oriented toward the good" is necessary. Whether I'm right on that is a matter for discussion. Still, each of us in his manner of life displays what he thinks is most real and most worth living by. We're more likely to make progress on basic issues to the extent we articulate and examine such commitments. Our problems today really are that basic, which is the reason there seems to be no exit from them.

[The tenth in a series on inclusiveness. Read parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, and IX.]

I've said that inclusiveness has a religious quality. To say it is a kind of religion is not to say it works well as one. Religion defines the place of man in the world, but inclusiveness reflects the modern outlook, which has difficulty dealing with such issues. It likes unitary theories that lead to clear conclusions, so it tries to dissolve the world into man or man into the world. Neither makes sense, so moderns--including liberals--oscillate between the two and settle on neither.

Cartesian egos

At bottom, liberalism views the individual person as the Cartesian ego--a disembodied subject with no qualities other than the ability to have experiences and make choices. If we accept that understanding, and view the external world from the radically subjective standpoint that results, it becomes something we construct from our sensations for the sake of our goals.

Such an understanding affects our attitude toward the world. It makes every particular tie to things outside ourselves seem an intrusion that has somehow gotten hold of us and is dragging us down. The result is a compulsion to destroy attachments that make claims on us. Hence the need for sexual liberation, abolition of social roles, mass third-world immigration, multiculturalism, and so on. Society must be destroyed as a network of particular persons and relationships in a particular setting and turned into an abstract neutral schema for the satisfaction of desire.

The role of the other

The matter cannot rest there, because the Cartesian ego is so odd philosophically. It is not part of the world of experience, and it is unclear how something with no positive qualities could be embodied. The result is difficulty understanding our place in the world. Am I the only reality, because the subjective outlook is so privileged, or am I not real at all, because I have no enduring tangible qualities or connections? With respect to ourselves, such difficulties lead to insecurity, narcissism, and identity crises. With respect to other people, they lead to an obsession with the non-Western other.

Non-Westerners are defined as such by the fact they do not have the free-floating Cartesian ego as their self-understanding. Since they do not view themselves in that way, they can be seen as embodied and part of the world of experience. That gives them a very special though ambiguous significance. From one perspective the Cartesian outlook turns whites into abstractions who hardly exist at all, while nonwhites remain vibrant concrete realities. From another, it makes nonwhites a colorful background--part of the Stuff White People Like--that accessorizes the narcissism of white liberal Cartesians. There is no way within the liberal outlook to choose between the two, so particular liberals flop back and forth depending on mood and circumstances.

Horizontal transcendence

The problem often takes a religious form. The absorption of traditional religion by inclusiveness reflects in part an effort to maintain religious values in a scientistic world. In such a world God is unthinkable, so people fall back on themselves. Their concerns and desires are what they know--indeed, they are That Than Which No Greater Can Be Conceived--so why not treat them as divine?

The problem is that radical self-centeredness is not a satisfactory religion. We need a moral and spiritual order beyond ourselves that enables us to place ourselves and make sense of our situation. One possible solution is horizontal transcendence: standing in awe before other people as ineffably and unclassifiably other, disclosing to us a reality that cannot be reduced to our own purposes and categories, and imposing peremptory moral obligations on us through their needs and desires.

On such a view, those most radically other than ourselves become natural exemplars of the holy. However, the solution is unstable because in fact the non-Western other is evidently no more holy than we are. One can respect someone's good qualities and human dignity, but it is silly to overlook whatever flaws and limitations he has, or take him more seriously than ourselves or those to whom we have a more immediate connection.

Once again, the outcome is a messy compromise, this one between self-involvement and sentimentality about third-world peasants. Something of the sort is a very common solution among spiritually-inclined liberals, especially those among them who find it natural to express their souls in peasant-themed home decor, fashion accessories, and cooking styles.

Like Communism, Islam relies on a domestic fifth column -- the Allah-worshiping Rosenbergs, Philbys, Blunts, and Hisses -- to subvert the civilized world. It also relies on an army of fellow-travelers, the latter-day Sartres and Shaws in the ivory towers, on “liberal academics and opinion-makers" -- as the late Sam Francis once put it -- who "sympathize with Islam partly because it is a leading historical rival of the Western civilization they hate” and partly because they long for a romanticized and sanitized Muslim past that substitutes for the authentic Western and Christian roots they have rejected.

Those roots must be defended, in the full knowledge that those who subscribe to Islam and its civilization are aliens, regardless of their clothes, their professions or their places of residence. They sense Western weakness and expect that if Islam supplies the only old religious tradition left standing 50 years hence, it may attract mass conversion. That would indeed be the end of the West, its final surrender to the spirit masterfully depicted by Jean Raspail in the preface to the 1985 French edition of his Camp of Saints:

The West is empty, even if it has not yet become really aware of it. An extraordinarily inventive civilization, surely the only one capable of meeting the challenges of the third millennium, the West has no soul left. At every level -- nations, race, cultures as well as individuals -- it is always the soul that wins the decisive battles.

The story that Raspail tells is rooted in a “onstrous cancer implanted in the Western conscience.” One word, "Srebrenica," embodies it perfectly. Its roots are in the loss of Faith, and in the arrogant doctrine -- rampant in “the West” for three past centuries now -- that man can solve the dilemma of his existence by his unaided intellect alone.

If that loss is not reversed, the game is over anyway -- proving yet again that where God retreats, Allah advances.

Before 1914, both the West and the Muslim world could define themselves against each other in a cultural sense. What secularism has done, since replacing Christianity as the guiding light of “the West,” is to cast aside any idea of a Christian social, geographic, and cultural space that should be protected. Islam, “extreme” or “moderate,” has not softened, however. The consequences will be very serious unless Muslims are either “westernized” -- that is to say, made as willing as Christians to see their religion first relativized, then mocked, and its commandments misrepresented or ignored -- or else Christianized, which of course cannot happen unless there is a belated, massive, and unexpected recovery of Western spiritual and moral strength.

As things stand now, the West faces two clear alternatives: defense, or submission and acceptance of sacred Arab places as its own. The latter is the visceral preference of the Western elite class, and "Srebrenica" is its totem.

Islam should not be blamed for being what it is, nor should its adherents be condemned for maintaining their traditions. We should not "hate" it, nor ban it, if it reforms itself to the standards of a civilized, that is, non-Muslim society. If it does not happen -- and miracles are always possible -- it should be banned, of course. The Kuran’s exhortations to the believers to annihilate the non-believers, to confiscate their land and property, to take their women and enslave their children are clear and unambiguous, and the fruits have been ghastly. In the present state of Western weakness, such Muslim firmness may appear attractive to the legions of cynical nihilists and lead further millions to the conclusion that we should all become Muslims, since our goose is cooked anyway, spiritually and demographically.

Those of us who do not cherish that prospect should at least demand that our rulers present that option fairly and squarely. To pretend, as the ruling elite does, that Islam is “a religion of peace,” rather like Episcopalianism, is stupid or deeply dishonest.

Islam might have been made much less threatening if the West had not conciliated or sponsored its most threatening exponents. Islam was exposed to a devastating collapse in credibility within the Arab world itself in the middle of the twentieth century. The forces of secularity were very strong indeed. But America opposed them at every turn because they were socialist or communist or simply not “in the national interest.” America gave whole-hearted support to the worst nation on earth: Saudi Arabia, a veritable hotbed of raw barbarity that makes Kim Jong Il look eminently clubable. As the economies of real states falter and haltr, the Saudi petrodollars are poured into establishing violent fanaticism as the big alternative.

“As a man thinketh, so is he.” The real problem of the Muslim world is not that of natural resources or political systems. Ernest Renan, who started his study of Islam by praising its ability to manifest “what was divine in human nature,” ended it -- a quarter of a century and three long tours of the Muslim world later -- by concluding that “Muslims are the first victims of Islam” and that, therefore, “to liberate the Muslim from his religion is the best service that one can render him.”

Islam is a collective psychosis seeking to become global, and any attempt to abet such madness is to become part of the madness oneself. The purveyors of "Srbrenica" are worse than criminal: they are mistaken.

Tradition makes us what we are. The institutions that are dominant today want to make us more manageable as human resources, so they destroy all traditions but those of consumerist careerism. The latter, of course, include pluralism and inclusiveness.

People usually don't like it when things that are close to them are attacked for someone else's benefit. So why doesn't everyone join the traditionalists and overthrow the technocrats?

Our civilization rots toward final collapse, and there is scant reason to conserve the ideas and institutions that brought us to this point. Since its inception in the age of Enlightenment and Revolution, the modern West has been on a suicide mission. The current era might very well be its terminal phase as global-scale crises multiply, a factor which only seems to heighten the sense of impending catastrophe. From the grand pyramid schemes wrought by the financial class to far-flung wars for universal democracy, multiculturalism and demographic displacement by masses from alien lands, our power elites are hastening the rush to Judgment Day.

This trajectory to dissolution is driven above all by a profound arrogance. Contemporary society is assured in its faith that humanity can transform the world in service to its desires. This mentality extends as well to “lifestyle choices”, where carnal materialism is propagated as the guide to successful living. Under the ideology of individual liberation, man tears away from the Transcendent and careens through death toward a state much worse than nothingness. Spiritual suicide, whether collective or individual, precedes the physical action.

A recent piece here at Alternative Right advocating suicide as a supposedly “honorable” way out of life casts in stark relief the ultimate choice we must make: shall we serve God, out of love and then duty, or do we rebel? For Truth, beauty and the Good are opposed by the incoherence, absurdity and darkness of rebellion. The oath “non serviam” brings with it a finality and gravity incomprehensible to those still living, a spiritual peril one can dismiss for now- but not forever.

From The Occidental Observer.

I heard Naomi Cahn and June Carbone talk about their book, Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture (Oxford, 2010), on Commie Radio Pacifica, so you can be sure there is a “progressive” message. As summarized in their op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor, the idea is that families in Blue State America are thriving, while families in Red State America are failing because they are too hung up on old fashioned ideas like sexual abstinence.

There is an obvious dishonesty in this approach because it completely ignores race in the analysis in an effort to pin the blame on traditional sexual beliefs and customs. Blacks and Latinos who live in urban areas and in very Blue States exhibit high rates of teenage pregnancy, non-marriage, and dropping out of the education process — much higher than Whites in Red State America.

So what they are really trying to explain is variation in family patterns among White people. And there they have a point. Red State White America is in a crisis. (Indeed, it’s no accident that Red State America is where most of the much-commented-on White anger is coming from.) The data they are summarizing really relate to some of the correlates of education which are in turn linked to IQ. But we have known at least since The Bell Curve that higher IQ people not only are more likely to go further in the  educational system, they are more likely to have stable marriages, they don’t have babies outside of marriage, and they begin child bearing later. These people are more likely to live in large urban and suburban areas where there are jobs for educated people.

One spring day in the late 1980s, my mother took me for an interview to my future elementary school in Moscow.  A few standard questions later, a teacher and the principal, active Party members, inquired whether I knew what great national holiday the country was celebrating at that time.

My family had spent the entire weekend coloring eggs and baking paschal cake. That holiday was Easter, of course!

The women's hair pulled into sleek conservative buns got even tighter.

"Little girl, on April 22^nd, we celebrate Lenin's birthday. Do you know who Lenin was?"

"He made the Revolution". I was six years old.

A single raised eyebrow.  "No, little girl. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was the leader of global proletariat".

The country was in flux. It celebrated the millennial anniversary of Christianity in Russia soon afterward.

The way in which Europeans idiomatically describe their homeland - the national ideal -- is rather telling. For the French, this ideal is la belle France. Germans take pride in die deutsche Treue. Englishmen praise merrie olde England.

Russians believe in Sviataia Rus' - Holy Russia. This concept already circulated in writing around the mid-16^th century, just after Ivan Gorzny -- the Formidable, not the "Terrible" -- purged the last vestiges of the Golden Horde.  He modified Church ceremonies in order to overtly mimic those of Byzantium: when Constantinople fell to the Turks a century earlier, Moscow became the Third Rome. As a spiritual heir of the vanquished Second Rome, united Muscovy principalities adopted the dual-headed Byzantine eagle.

For me, Orthodox Christianity, national tradition, and family history are synonymous.

The memory of one's own baptism is a very strange thing. While the Church was not outright forbidden in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, it was not condoned -- certainly not in the Third Rome. My mother had my baby brother and me baptized in secret. I remember getting onto the subway escalator, my God-mother's hand, the smell of incense, decorative gold flickering in the dark, and what seemed like a giant copper baptismal font.

This mystical atmosphere of an ancient ritual is alive inside an Orthodox church, and is most evident during the Easter Cross Procession. Servants of God, clad in white and gold, carry icons and flags like medieval Slavic warriors, and sing hymns a capella in Old Slavonic. The faithful are not far behind, lighting the streets of cities at home and abroad with hundreds of tiny wax fireflies.

I descend from the clerical class of the Russian empire. My great-great grandfather Gavriil was a priest, and so was my great grandfather Ioann.  Orthodox Christianity has two types of clergy - white and black. White priests are limited in Church hierarchy, but are permitted to marry.

If the millennial celebrations of 1988 were an official return to Orthodoxy, then 1938 marked its lowest point through violent repressions.  Clerical affiliation was much like the scarlet letter under early Bolshevik regime.  Ioann was a proto-presbyter of the largest Russian Orthodox church in Tbilisi, Georgia. His son -- my grandfather -- was only allowed to attend evening school: he was a relative of a "socially harmful element" in the 1920s and that of the "enemy of the people" in the 1930s.  An "enemy of the people", my great grandfather challenged the Godless state, refused to recant the Christian teaching, and paid for it with his life.

Not every member of the clergy had that level of integrity - this religious institution was infiltrated by the secret police until the Soviet collapse - but many did. Contemporary Russian Church officially recognizes religious victims of Soviet repressions.  I don't know how Ioann was murdered and where. He is certainly not canonized, but I think of his heroism every time I hear the mention of "new holy martyrs" during evening prayers.

By surviving under Communism and reuniting with the Russian Orthodox Church outside of Russia after decades of separation, the Russian Orthodox Church became a renewed source of moral and spiritual authority for its followers.  I don't question the motivation of our politicians attending the services, many of whom had traded the red star for the candle. Their presence reinforces Russian Orthodox Christianity as the dominant culture, while the sincerity of their faith is between them and God.

After a rebirth of its own, the Russian Orthodox Church is staunch, conservative, exclusive, ceremonial, and that's just how I like it.

Here's an account from Njal's Saga , ch. 97, of a debate that took place shortly before the conversion of Iceland to Christianity in the year 999:

Thangbrand and his messmate fared right through the west country, and Steinvora, the mother of Ref the Skald, came against him; she preached the heathen faith to Thangbrand and made him a long speech. Thangbrand held his peace while she spoke, but made a long speech after her, and turned all that she had said the wrong way against her.

"Hast thou heard," she said, "how Thor challenged Christ to single combat, and how he did not dare to fight with Thor?"

"I have heard tell," says Thangbrand, "that Thor was naught but dust and ashes, if God had not willed that he should live."