Oliver on Which Way Western Man, part 1

American Dissident Voices broadcast of 15 March, 2025

by Kevin Alfred Strom

TODAY we present — for the first time in audio form, using the author’s own voice as training and programming parameters for an AI instance — Dr. Revilo Oliver’s review of William Gayley Simpson’s great book Which Way Western Man. This book is now in print and available from our bookstore at cosmotheistchurch.org.

This review of one of the greatest books of the 20th century is itself a magnificent work, as is to be expected from Dr. Oliver. Every racial-nationalist, indeed every responsible man, should read and hear it. It deserves to be part of the American Dissident Voices canon of audio works, and part of our National Alliance Radio Network.

Dr. Oliver begins with a survey of other noted men who, like William Simpson, left the ministry and attempted to expose the dangers and falsehoods of Christianity. In the following two parts of this series, Dr. Oliver will show us how Mr. Simpson’s book, and his story, and his revolutionary conclusions, are vastly different from theirs.

These are the words of Dr. Revilo P. Oliver — listen.

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Which Way Western Man? by William Gayley Simpson
a review; first published in National Vanguard and The American Mercury, 1979

European man must assert himself or perish.

by Revilo P. Oliver

TO ANSWER THE QUESTION posed in the title of his book, William Gayley Simpson has condensed into 762 closely-printed pages the experience, the research, and the philosophical thought of a lifetime. He is now 87, and he began to write the present book thirty-five years ago. It is a veritable encyclopaedia of everything that is directly pertinent to our race’s position in the world today and our problematic future.

The book is unique. What makes it so cogent is that it is both an intellectual autobiography and a synoptic treatise. The reader, even if he begins with conditioned reflexes that make him hostile to his own race, can follow, step by step, the process by which reason and intellectual honesty forced Mr. Simpson to his conclusions. His work may also be taken symbolically as an epitome or recapitulation of the course of Western civilization, which likewise began with the Christian faith of the Dark Ages and has now brought us to the point where we can no longer refuse to face the grim realities of the world in which we must either live or perish.

Born in 1892 in an educated but sternly Christian family, Mr. Simpson was graduated, magna cum laude, from a highly reputed theological seminary, became a minister, and, unlike most clergymen, he had a religious faith so ardent that instead of regarding some of the most striking parts of Christian doctrine as convenient subjects for professional oratory, he, like St. Francis, tried to live in logical conformity with them. Our race, like some others, has a strain of sentiment that can be excited by the idea of tapas, the mirific virtue and spiritual power produced by austerity, self-sacrifice, and self-mortification. The notion of tapas was a fundamental part of Aryan religions from India to Scandinavia, and it was not remarkable that our ancestors, accustomed to venerate Odin, a god who, by an act of supreme self-sacrifice, hanged himself on the great world-tree so that he might arise from the dead, should have accepted the cult of a god who had himself crucified and likewise rose from the dead; nor that, so long as they believed in their new religion, they held to the faith that spiritual excellence could be attained by inflicting degradation and pain on oneself. St. Francis was merely one of the many who had the fortitude to live up to that faith.

Mr. Simpson, too, tried to carry the religion to its practical consequences, but, unlike St. Francis, he did not lapse into a kind of amiable insanity. He learned from his dolorous experience that reality is not to be denied and that magic is either clever trickery or an hallucination. He realized that there was no way in which he “could be an honest man and remain a minister.”

Innumerable clerics, even in the darkest ages of Faith, found their creed unbelievable, but either took refuge in the Mediaeval aphorism, “populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur,” or, if not without honesty, accepted Cardinal Dubois’s celebrated dictum that God is a bogey that must be brandished in order to scare the masses into some semblance of civilized behavior. But since the forced unity of Christendom was effectively broken in the Sixteenth Century, not a few clergymen have publicly denounced the religion to which they gave assent in their youth. It will be worth while to illustrate the profound difference between their reactions and Mr. Simpson’s. And it will suffice to list the five who are now most generally remembered in this country.

Early in the Eighteenth Century the Reverend Mr. Thomas Woolston set out to “establish the truth of the Scriptures.” He soon saw that it was no longer possible to claim that the various tales in the Christian Bible were historical accounts of events that had actually happened, so he tried to defend them as allegories, as edifying and somewhat more dignified than Aesop’s fables. That device, however, was a rod that broke in his hands. He became a deist and published his Discourses, of which sixty thousand copies are said to have been sold in the brief time before the corporations in the salvation-business took alarm and he was, by a pious perversion of the law, thrown into the prison in which he died in 1731. He is remembered now for his influence on his contemporaries, but the Discourses are not really worth reading and, so far as I know, have never been reprinted.

At the same time, a far more acute and intellectually courageous mind was at work in Étrépigny, a small town half-way between Rouen and Paris. The Reverend Father Jean Meslier had an understandable reluctance to be burned at the stake, so he continued to discharge his professional duties and administer consolation to the credulous, but he composed a treatise of some 366 manuscript pages, of which he made and placed in responsible hands three copies, and which he further protected by calling it his last will and testament, to be opened only after his death, which occurred in 1733. After apologizing to his parishioners for having deluded them, he undertook a systematic analysis of religion in the light of the known laws of nature, common sense, and our instinctive morality. His work was surreptitiously but widely circulated in manuscript copies until 1761 or 1762, when it was printed in Holland. His Testament was drastically abridged and reduced to an inexpensive pamphlet by Voltaire, who attenuated much of Meslier’s argument, since Voltaire professed deism on the grounds that only belief in a supernatural being who would reward virtue and punish vice could induce even a modicum of honesty in men. (See particularly Voltaire’s letter to the Marquis de Villevieille, 30 August 1768.) Meslier’s devastating critique of belief in praeternatural beings is entitled Le bon sens in the French editions, but the English translation, perhaps to avoid confusion with Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, is entitled Superstition in All Ages, which is a little misleading, since the work is not a history of religions but a philosophical examination of belief in the supernatural. It was reprinted by The Truth Seeker in San Diego.

Christianity was really saved by the French Revolution, for that bloody orgy of murder, pillage, and revolutionary insanity convinced even Gibbon of “the danger of exposing an old superstition to the contempt of the blind and fanatic multitude.” The appalling outbreak of savagery, instigated by cunning conspiracies and only precariously brought under control after years of bloodshed, was a cogent proof of the irredeemably primitive nature of the masses, the multitude, which Franklin and Hamilton, echoing Horace and Erasmus, had justly called the many-headed beast. A majority of thoughtful men everywhere were convinced at last of the truth of Cardinal Dubois’s dictum, and, to the delight of the professional clergy, a majority of learned men undertook to profess, or at least not to attack, a religion which seemed necessary to maintain domestic peace and, indeed, to preserve the very basis of civilization.

Undeterred by these considerations, the first great apostate of the Nineteenth Century, the Reverend Mr. Robert Taylor, disregarded the pleas of his ecclesiastical superiors and friends, who urged him not to ruin a promising career in the Church in which his talents destined him for high office, by publishing facts that could only disturb the placid credulity or proletarian fanaticism of the lower classes. His Diegesis (1829), an historical investigation of Christianity and its relation to earlier religions, is a work of great learning and incisive scholarship, the more impressive today since many of the Christian gospels were still unknown when he wrote and he had at his disposal only a small fraction of the copious information about other early religions that subsequent discovery and research has now made available. Although his book inevitably contains errors of detail, it deserves careful reading today. It was reprinted in 1977 by Health Research Books.

In the United States, Colonel Ingersoll was not ordained, although he was the son of a clergyman and his early education gave him the familiarity with the Christian stories that he displayed in The Mistakes of Moses and his many orations. His campaign against Christianity inspired some holy men, notably the Reverend Mr. William Mahan, to forge some more gospels, but it inspired numerous others to foresake their business. Of the latter, the best-known today is the Reverend Mr. Samuel P. Putnam, an indefatigable public speaker who was generally regarded as Ingersoll’s most active disciple. His numerous speeches and articles, so far as I know, have not been collected, and are of interest today only as illustrations of “free thought” in a nation which, after the tragic defeat of the South in its War for Independence, hypocritically pretended it had not repudiated the principles on which it was founded, and was slowly, condignly, and perhaps ineluctably sinking into the slough of ochlocracy, euphemistically called “democracy.”

The most recent example of apostasy is the Reverend Mr. G. Vincent Runyon, who died less than a year ago and may have been the last clergyman to face the choice Mr. Simpson had earlier faced and to opt for honesty. Until he was forty, he says, “No man walked and talked with God more than I.” Then a sabbatical year gave him time for study and reflection, with the result described in his booklet, Why I Left the Ministry and Became an Atheist (1959).

The five whom I have listed above are certainly the best-known apostates. Their very names will suffice to make any one of our contemporary dervishes howl — provided, of course, that he knows enough about his business to recognize the names. They are universally regarded as having totally repudiated Christianity and doubtless believed they had done so. They were mistaken.

I have taken the space to list them not only to point a very significant contrast to Mr. Simpson’s book, but to emphasize the crucial fact that a man may earnestly and vehemently reject Christianity and yet remain, in very important areas of his thinking, Chrétien malgré lui.

(to be continued)

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We will continue this important series, “Oliver on Which Way Western Man,” next time, right here on American Dissident Voices.

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