Black Metal Lord Attends Quaker Meeting (and Discovers the Victorian Capitalists)

From The Occidental Observer, July 14, 2009

Seventeenth-Century Quakers

Christopher Donovan’s recent article, “Notes from Central Pennsylvania: The Very Long Arm of Egalitarian Propaganda,” reminded me of the time I attended a Quaker meeting here in England, sometime in early 2004. Back then, I lived in one of two lonely rural cottages and had as my neighbor a recently divorced former police sergeant, G., who described herself as ‘a Jesus nut’. Despite my being the director of a radical Black Metal record label, we were on neighborly terms, and I would talk to her about eugenics and she would talk to me about her work helping homeless teenagers. G., a Baptist, was skeptical of institutional Christianity, but she did enjoy attending church services, and was an indefatigable proselytizer, to the point where she operated under the assumption that, if you were not a Christian, this was not because you did not agree with Christianity (that was impossible), but because you had not had Jesus’ message correctly delivered to you. To this effect, she attempted, by inviting me on three different occasions to one or another church service (each time of a different denomination), to see if she could find a form of Christianity that would appeal to me. I knew her purpose, but I agreed to come along anyway, as, having been raised a Catholic, and having an incurable scientific disposition, I saw this — why not? — as an opportunity to observe up close some of the less well-known denominations.

On the appointed day, I met up with G. in the center of Guildford, where the Religious Society of Friends (as the Quakers, or Friends, designate themselves) has a meeting house, situated at the top of North Street, and at the bottom of a solitary and rarely noticed side alley. My incursion into Quaker territory did not begin well, for the entrance hall leading to the interior was decorated with shelves groaning under the weight of stackfuls of leaflets, making emotional appeals to combat poverty and disease in Africa and the rest of the Third World. Whenever I see this type of literature, I roll my eyes, for I consider it an attack directed against me: Even if the Christians mean well with these initiatives, there is always a subtext of White guilt and an odious crypto-Marxist anti-White guilt-mongering message lurking beneath the surface. The sponsorship of such literature is inevitable in a militant Christian setting, however, given the emphasis conventional interpretations of Christian doctrine place on charity, humility, self-abnegation, confession, and repentance; and the way these values harmonize with the politically correct discourse in the contemporary West.

The meeting itself was an intriguing experience. There were only around seven to ten persons in attendance. Each took a seat along a circle of plastic chairs, and sat in expressionless silence. They were not attired in their Sunday best, as is often the case with Catholic services: They were plain in dress, style, and appearance. There was no décor on the walls or anywhere else. The meeting began and ended without ceremony, and consisted of maybe forty minutes of Friends sitting in silent meditation, with only one interruption, courtesy of the gentleman seated next to me, who at one point decided to share a thought with his coreligionists (the thought — known as ‘vocal ministry’ among Friends — was listened to, but not verbally, gutturally, or even gesturally acknowledged).

Although I had researched the movement in advance and was prepared for what I encountered, I still could not help but admire Quakerism’s extreme nonconformity and radical purity in matters of worship. In a perverse way, it was not unlike the more orthodox and reactionary forms of Black Metal, a very extreme form of Heavy Metal, whose minimalism and austere aesthetics are consequent to the genre’s fundamentalist notions of ideological purity, Nietzschean artistic praxis, and anti-commercial integrity.

What was most interesting to me, however (and the reason I was especially keen on observing modern, real-life Quakers), was the fact that this tiny sect — not unlike modern Jews elsewhere — had played a hugely important economic role in Victorian England. . . . Read the rest of the article.