Was Ralph Waldo Emerson a Satanist?

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I first seriously read Emerson for an American Renaissance seminar at San Francisco State University in the mid-80s. I was the only student who actually enjoyed the sonorous cadences of the sage of Concord. My classmates thought I was bluffing, or, failing that, perverse.

Emerson’s encomiums to authenticity, nature, and the transcendent resonated with me. This was the best of the American spiritual inheritance, of what Harold Bloom called the American religion. Among all the cults and Bible-thumpers and maladapted European sects, Emerson’s Unitarianism was uniquely nourishing, and uniquely “American in a good sense.” It had inspired Thoreau, a hero of my days in the high school library. I recognized belatedly that this was the religion I had inherited, to the extent I had inherited any, from my grandmother, a member of the congregation at the famous Frank Lloyd Wright church in Madison, WI.

Unfortunately, by the late 20th century, Unitarianism had abandoned its Enlightenment roots and become a religion of “anything goes.” As long as you can sing Kumbaya off-key, you’re in. Today we have Unitarian ministers who don’t believe in God. No doubt there will be Satanist Unitarian ministers in the not-too-distant future. (Will they perform human sacrifices during Kumbaya sing-alongs?)

Unitarianism and America have gone crazy. That is one reason I accepted Islam (“Unitarianism with camels”) and eventually found my way to Morocco. I now find myself agreeing with E. Michael Jones and the Ayatollah Khomeini that America is “the Great Satan.”

But is that Emerson’s fault? Dr. Jones thinks the sage of Concord was some kind of proto-satanist who bears responsibility for all that followed. That may not be as unfair as blaming Jesus for the Crusades and Inquisition, but still.

Below is my recent debate with E. Michael Jones on the question, “Was Emerson a satanist?” Note that Emersonian Unitarianism, like Islam, rejects the Trinity in favor of Divine Unity, focuses on Jesus’s message rather than his mode of death, and does not accept the doctrine of Original Sin.

Was Emerson a Satanist? Kevin Barrett Debates E. Michael Jones

KB: Well, we'll talk about that more, but here's another interesting long story on the demographic revolution. Everybody who is susceptible to the propaganda from the modern secular world pushing us towards hedonism, individualism, and anomie will not have children, or very few, whereas the minority of people who are immune to that propaganda and continue to have large families will leave all of humanity as their descendants. And those people are, by and large, religious.

So demographers are noticing that the future is likely to be more religious than the present, because that minority of people who are still having large families is disproportionately religious. And that's going to lead up to our discussion of Emerson and matters of religion, because religion is going to matter in a world that goes back to religion.

EMJ: Yeah, well, the meek will inherit the earth.

Was it Emerson who that said that?

No. Quite the opposite.

And that leads us to “Cherchez le Juif,” which is the article that set off the Emerson debate. That was your latest article in the form of a book review of La Défaite de l'Occident by Immanuel Todd. It’s an excellent review. I agreed with just about everything. Let’s talk about the rest of the article and then the part about Emerson.

Yeah, so I'm saying America's the great Satan. How can you disagree with me?

I don't. I think you got that part right.

Well, then let's get into the woods. Let's get into the weeds here of how it became the great Satan, which is basically my new project. I'm working on a book about American identity. And that's what Todd is talking about. He said basically that the American empire is failing because the hidden grammar of the American empire is Protestantism and Protestantism has evaporated. That's, I think, a sound thesis. I think that's exactly what's going on.

But then we have to get into the weeds here. Well, what do you mean by Protestantism? What is it? He goes to the Max Weber thesis, which is a total cliché that distracts everyone from the real story, which is that Max Weber's Spirit of Capitalism was written in reaction to Sombart's book, which says basically the Puritans were Jews.

That's a key issue. He doesn't understand what Protestantism is. He just has this cliché.

What is the essence of Protestantism? Especially Puritan Protestantism? Who wrote the epic, the Protestant epic? It's John Milton, the Puritan, who signed the death warrant of the king and then wrote Paradise Lost.

And who's the hero of Paradise Lost? It's the devil. And so Satanism is the essence of Puritanism, which is the essence of Protestantism, which is the essence of America.

He also doesn't really give full justice to the fact that the group that dethroned the Protestants is, of course, the Jews.

Because he's a Jew. And if you're a Jew, “Jew” is not a category. It's like asking a fish, “are you wet?” No, the fish doesn't know he's wet. And the Jew doesn't understand his own category.

Was Emerson a Satanist?

Let's move on then to the part that we're planning to debate, which is the question: “Was Emerson a Satanist?” I certainly wouldn't disagree with you that the hero of Paradise Lost is Satan. William Blake famously made a big deal out of that. And yes, certain kinds of highly individualistic mysticism can veer off into Satanism.

And the question is, is this the case for Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great American Unitarian? And since I'm a lapsed Unitarian who then ended up on a camel—Muslims being Unitarians with camels, as you informed me long ago—I feel it’s incumbent upon me to defend the turgid prose of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I see Emerson as more of a mystic who would be comparable to a drunken Sufi.

Sufism, Islamic mysticism, split into the sober Sufism of Junayd and the drunken Sufism of people like al-Hallaj, who famously blurted out, I am the truth. And al-Haq, The Truth, means God. So Hallaj was taken by his peers as saying, I am God, which of course would be a satanic kind of thing to say. So he ended up getting literally crucified for that, and for various other political intrigues going on at the time.

In any case, he blurted out these things from deep in his spiritual state, some of which were far from consistent or prudent. That's the drunken Sufi tradition.

Certainly in “Self Reliance,” Emerson veers off in that direction to a certain extent. That kind of “drunken mysticism” is probably not something you want to recommend.

But does that make him a Satanist?

I think if you read the whole essay in context, and especially in the context of his larger body of work, there's no way that Emerson is a Satanist. His main disciple is Thoreau. Does Thoreau remind you of Anton LaVey or Michael Aquino? I don't think so.

So he's something other than Satanist.

What about that passage? I've already cited the passage in “Self-Reliance” where someone says to him, “well, suppose they (your inspirations) come from below?” “And I replied, they do not seem to me to be such, but if I am the devil's child, I will live then from the devil. No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.” That's Satanism. That's the devil. He's saying it himself. Now, the interesting question is, is he the devil's child? Who said he was the devil's child? What you have here is the reaction against Calvinism. Because Calvin the Puritan said that you were totally depraved, and that was the legacy that he grew up with.

There were people who could not- the drunken Sufis you're talking about were known as antinomians in Massachusetts Bay Colony. Ann Hutchinson was one of them. The Quakers are examples of this, where you just sit there and wait for God's inspiration, the Holy Spirit, to inspire you, and then everything you say is infallible. This is why nobody could talk to a Quaker in Philadelphia. This is why they gave up on talking and they decided to do art.

You have to contextualize this, okay? So you're talking about Anton LaVey. There's a certain period in the decline and decay of American culture that led to that, okay?

Perry Miller wrote an interesting essay about what happened here at this particular moment in time (the mid-19th century). You had these people who were Satanist revolutionaries theoretically, but they lived conventional bourgeois lives when it came to their families. And that's precisely the the moment we're talking about here with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was a neighbor of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who understood what it meant to be the devil's child, and wrote “Young Goodman Brown” about that.

All this recognition of what Emerson was doing, but he was still the guy…Rose Hawthorne would write memoirs about how “Mr. Emerson came over and gave me a piece of candy and patted me on the head.”

That doesn't sound like a Satanist.

But intellectually, he was a Satanist, the same way in a sense that John Milton was a Satanist, because I'm saying Satanism is the essence of Protestantism because it's based on rebellion. That's the quintessence of America.

Yeah, well, I think there's some truth to that. But again, let's look at what he's saying in context, especially the quote" “if I'm the devil's child, then I will live from the devil.” Let's start with the opening to “Self-Reliance,” where he says, “I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter, which were original and not conventional.” What he's talking about is what in Islam we call niyyah or “intention.” Polishing your niyyah is having good intentions. And purifying your heart is another way of thinking about it.

Now, I think Emerson is reacting to a specific situation. It's not just that he's surrounded by Puritans who are terrified of the evil of (allegedly) depraved human nature, and he's reacting against that. Worse, he's surrounded by hypocrites. Nifaq, hypocrisy, is one of the cardinal sins in Islam and probably everywhere else as well. So he's surrounded by people who are not living in tune with their true natures. That is, they feel one thing and they say another thing. They're preaching virtue while practicing vice. And Emerson, as a serious religious person, wants to get his heart to the point where his heart is virtuous. But what he sees around him is a profoundly corrupt society, as this puritanical American society has become super materialistic. And now everybody is worshiping “the Jewish God of money,” as Marx said. And they're saying things about charity like “weshould all be saving the poor, starving people of Haiti” or what have you. While they're maybe not taking care of their own families and people in their own community. There are all sorts of hypocrisy all around him.

So what this essay is really about is eliminating hypocrisy by purifying one's intentions and going from “just faith” all the way to spiritual beauty or purity. In Islam, that's going from iman or faith, which could also be translated as “heart knowledge,” to ihsan, or beautification of the soul.

His friend asks, “But what if that's from the devil?” Because his friend is still this Puritan who's afraid of his own impulses. He's been turned into a conflicted soul by the puritanical tradition colliding with American materialism.

So Emerson's saying, totally trust yourself. “Your heart is vibrating to that divine string.” (The line about trusting your real nature “even if it were from the devil”) is hyperbole. They (intuitions from his true nature) “do not seem to be to be such” (from the devil) because they're not. It's divine inspiration. It's not satanic inspiration.

When hyperbolically, he says, “but if I am the devil's child, I will live then from the devil,” that’s a rhetorical, hyperbolic statement. And when he talks about a foolish consistency as the hobgoblin of little minds, he's talking about people who take him too literally when he says something like this without understanding the context.

Okay, that's great. It's always been a mystery to me how you could go from “Self-Reliance” to Islam because Islam means submission, right? So here you have the opposite of submission. You have rebellion. I mean, you're trying to explain it, but once you say this, if you're a writer, you release something into the ether and you don't know where it's going to go. If you say you're of the devil's party and you're promoting “trust thyself”…it happened to Emerson during his lifetime, because one of his great followers was Walt Whitman, the poet, who dedicated Leaves of Grass to Emerson, causing him much embarrassment because of its homoerotic descriptions.

So I'm saying that the intention of the writer is not always the best guide to how his works are going to be received. And I'm saying he situates himself in a trajectory that has led to where we are today, which is basically “nobody can tell me what to do.” It's kind of like the libertarian stupidity that you find in so many people, where they're being led around by the nose, by the manipulation of their desires, and they consider themselves the most independent group of people in the world.

I don't disagree with you that his work situates itself in a trajectory that has led to extreme narcissism and self-indulgence. If there was somebody following up on Emerson today, expressing the spirit of this age the way he expressed the spirit of his age, they might call their essay “Self-Indulgence.”

I think the crucial issue is sexual morality. There's a passage where Emerson goes to England and he meets Carlyle. And Carlyle introduces him to German idealism, which is basically where he got this idea that the mind is its own place. That's what Satan said: “The mind is its own place.” And now you've got Germans saying the same thing, interpreted according to this Puritan understanding. But Emerson got into an argument with Carlyle, and I think Coleridge as well, about sexual morality. He said, “if you think that most American men are not virgins when they get married, you're crazy.” I think this became the crucial issue. This is what allowed the respectability in Concord, where Hawthorne and Emerson were good married men—they’re fathers, they’re pillars of the community—at the same time Emerson harboring the satanic notion of rebellion that would reach its crucial turning point with the collapse of sexual morality in America, which is what the Jews brought about, and that's how the Jews eventually took over our culture.

Well, again, I agree. There's a lot of truth to that. But I think that Emerson's assumption was that the self that you're being true to is the higher self, not the lower self. And I think he just took that for granted in the essay “Self-Reliance”—although with his hyperbole, maybe he confused some people. But I think that stark difference between the higher self and the lower self is one of those things that you should (intuitively) know, right? You should know within yourself that the bestial lusts after all kinds of ego gratification, sensual gratification and so on, the part of you that wants to stuff your face when there's some junk food that's superficially tasty, the same kind of thing in sex and all kinds of other physical pleasures—that's not what he's talking about, obviously.

But as you say, it can lead there. So you're right to some extent, Mike, that Emerson's rebellion against the hypocrisy around him, which was tied into the institutional form of religion in a very materialistic society, had something dangerous about it. Just like the Protestant rebellion against Catholicism—and perhaps, though I know you wouldn't agree with this, the Catholic rebellion against original Christianity which may have been best preserved in Orthodoxy. Each time Christianity goes west it gets worse, from Orthodoxy to Catholicism to Protestantism to secular atheist materialism.

In that context, Emerson is rejecting the hypocrisy and small-mindedness of the people around him in that situation (of puritanism giving way to materialism). And that hypocrisy has been integrated into the institutional church. So Emerson is rebelling to some extent against the institutional church. And that institutional church is necessary and it can't be completely thrown away. You can't just live for yourself.

Well, that's the problem. He had an institutional church that had no right to be the institutional church because it was conceived in rebellion against the church that Christ founded. I'm talking about the Puritans. That is not a church. That's a sect that the English thought it was so crazy that they basically drove them out and hanged Cromwell's body because it was so repugnant in so many different ways. But when it came over to America, it was the only game in town.

But I think there's something to this about this journey westward, certainly in America, because at this point you've got, what do you have? You have a bunch of Englishmen showing up in a world that they had never seen before and they're trying to make sense of it. How do you do this? The only thing they had was the Bible. And so one minister said, we are on an errand into the wilderness. And the wilderness he was talking about was John the Baptist. It was a gloss on John the Baptist.

Well, the desert on the other side of the Jordan has nothing to do with Massachusetts, the forest, but that's all they had. And what happened is as this settlement moved west, you had the essence is Calvinism coming into relationship with existence. Which is the woods. And it had to be modified. They had to modify it because it didn't work. They had no legitimacy. The Protestants had no legitimacy as a church, but they were the only game in town in New England. They tried to come up with a Puritan explanation of their legitimacy. They failed completely. By the time of Solomon Stoddard, who created the halfway covenant, they knew it.

Wait a minute. Is election, which is a requirement for the church—can you pass that on to your children? Well, nobody could figure that one out. And so by the time of Jonathan Edwards, it collapsed. But what didn't collapse was this constant movement westward of all these people who had to survive. So they had to come into some type of alignment with reality or existence, and that's what formed the American character. And I'm saying the classic example of this is Daniel Boone, who started off life as a Quaker. How are you going to move into Indian territory as a Quaker? So what happened is that he had to modify this ridiculous—He had to change his hat.

He had to make a different hat, a coonskin hat instead of a Quaker hat.

He had to pick up a gun. That's what he had to do. He had to pick up a musket. So he's a Quaker carrying a musket.

He had to eat wild game instead of instant oatmeal Quaker oats.

I think that this is what Emerson is trying to do. He's trying to come to some type of understanding of what is happening. I think Paul Johnson called him the first American. He's the first American because he's understanding the mutation that had to take place in the identity of Americans, because they had a foundationless sect

Yeah, I think you're right. That's why he's the real thinker of the American Renaissance. But getting back to that issue of institutionalized religion that gets woven into a social fabric full of hypocrisy, and then authentically religious people and especially mystics seek genuine religious experience by purifying their souls…Let me quickly mention that Laurent Guyenot last night on my show said that I should ask you about the beginning of Protestantism, with Luther standing against the selling of indulgences, those “get-out-of-jail-free cards” absolving sins. Laurent said “E. Michael Jones would have been on the side of Luther.” Is that true?

No, absolutely not. And secondly, if you think indulgences caused the Reformation, you're a superficial thinker. And if you think that Yahweh is the devil, you're a blasphemer. And that's the problem with Guyanaud's analysis. He's crippled by Marcionism, okay? We have to make a distinction between people who are hypocrites and religions which are intrinsically hypocritical. Quakerism is by definition a hypocritical religion. Ben Franklin discovered this. There's a passage in the autobiography. They're sailing to Philadelphia and suddenly a ship appears on the horizon and the captain says, “women and children below board, all able-bodied men take up a gun.” And one of the guys was a Quaker. And he picks up a gun because they had to defend themselves. And William Penn was one of the Quakers who goes down below board with the women and children. It turns out that it wasn’t a pirate ship. So afterwards, William Penn upbraids the Quaker for taking up a gun. And the Quaker said “thou didst not complain when thou thought was a pirate ship.”

This is complete hypocrisy baked into their religion, because they wanted to retain their property but they would not defend it when it was threatened. And that's the hypocrisy that is institutional, that had to go before America could… And that's what Daniel Boone learned. And there's a difference there.

And to talk about the Reformation either in England or in Germany without talking about the avarice of the lower aristocracy who simply wanted to steal church property and then cook up a theological justification after the fact is not to be in contact with reality. There was hypocrisy on both sides. Or maybe more of it on the Protestant side. Look, hypocrisy is not—there's always hypocrisy, okay? It's the tribute that vice pays to virtue. So it's always going to be here.

That is not the driving force behind the Reformation at all.

Okay, and then just in half defense of Marcionism, it does seem to me that some of the ultraviolence around the American conquest of the Americas by the Puritans and all their various successors is very beautifully captured in one of the greatest-ever American novels, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, which is kind of hard to read. It's so bloody. Some people can't go to movies because they're too violent. Well, this is a book that's hard to read. Maybe one of the very few books that I've ever read that's that hard to read. But it echoes with Old Testament thunder and brimstone as it describes massacres.

You're absolutely right. The Puritans were Judaizers. That means that they went to the Old Testament for the models that allowed them to understand the world, and one of them they took away was Amalek. The Jews are still talking this way about Palestinians. It is a misinterpretation of the Old Testament, like Marcionism is a misinterpretation of the Old Testament, but it is one that the Puritans had, and it characterized, it epitomized, and it directed their whole attitude toward the Indians and the conquest of the Indians that was not shared by Catholic France and by Catholic Spain.

This is a purely English phenomenon. When the English showed up in Nova Scotia the Presbyterians said, we're bringing Christ to you people. And at that point, the French had already intermarried with the Mi'kmaq for centuries. And they said, no, we're Catholic. Well, at that point, they said, no, you're not, because Catholics are an abomination. And if you don't go along with this, there will be consequences. And then they put bounties for scalping the French Micmac. And when that didn't work, they shipped them off to Louisiana, where they became the Cajuns. This is the historical difference between the Protestant attitude toward the Indians and the Catholic attitude toward the Indians. And if you don't understand it, you don't understand history of the United States of America.

Well, the Protestants refused to intermarry with the Indians because they viewed them as goyim or a lesser race due to their Old Testament focus, etc. And they were somewhat more genocidal, maybe due to the Old Testament's genocidal aspects: Amalek, for example, to quote Bibi Netanyahu. But ultimately, the main difference was the intermarriage, right? The Catholics, especially the Spanish, enslaved and massacred and looted the Native Americans every bit as much as the Protestants did.

Are you talking about Cortez? This is a paradigmatic example of the conquest of Mexico. It's one of the greatest stories ever told. And the fact of the matter was that the Aztecs had established this genocidal hegemony over every other Indian tribe in Mexico at the time, and they would march them up the pyramids and cut their hearts out. A regime like that is not going to go quietly. It had to be brought down by military force.

But long after that, Indians, because they were available to be captured as slaves, were rounded up, made slaves, put to work in the mines of Potosi and other places, worked to death under horrific conditions. Overall, as I understand it, the atrocities committed by Catholics in the Americas were probably at least as great as those committed by Protestants.

I disagree. And even if you're talking about individual acts of injustice, you're talking about what happened to the Mexican people. The Mexican people are the cosmic race because of Our Lady of Guadalupe. This is a fact of history. It's not some pious Catholic myth. Her tilma is in Mexico, you can look at it if you want, at which point she appeared as a mestiza, which meant the intermarriage of the Spaniards and the indigenous people.

I'm saying this is fundamentally different than the attitude that English Puritans had toward the indigenous people. The Catholic Church in Mexico did not view Indians as Amalek. There's a fundamental difference there.

I think the Old Testament thumping Puritans did indeed share some of that mentality with Bibi Netanyahu and his friends over in Occupied Palestine. Anyway, my pro-Emerson side—I don't have any foolish consistency about being totally pro-Emerson—I admit that you're right about some of these things, especially his place in overall intellectual history and what egotism, which people could draw from this essay, Self-Reliance, has led to. So, yeah, I'm still split, just like our image here suggests, without any foolish consistency at all.

Any last thoughts on Emerson and Cherchez le Juif?

Yeah, I think we're at a crisis because we don't know what it means to be an American. It's important for you and me to understand what it means to be an American, because we obviously come from different traditions, whether it's the Emersonian Protestant or the Islamic tradition. And we have to have some type of lingua franca that allows us to talk together as Americans. And I think the only way that we have to hammer out this issue right now is the Jewish control of our culture. This is the issue that has to be resolved. It has to be resolved by Americans, for Americans, even if they differ in terms of fundamental issues.

That is the essence of what America was. The essence, we have to have a moral consensus, which is what John Adams said. And which means we cannot tolerate either abortion or Zionism. These are beyond the pale. This should be beyond political difference. We should have a unanimity. We have to come back to this unanimity in support of the moral law, because otherwise we're going to end up very badly. We're already in bad shape and the future looks even gloomier.

Yeah, I agree with that. And as far as the Emanuel Todd's claim that Protestant American culture has collapsed, I think that's true. And to me, one of the better sides of that Protestant American culture is represented by Emerson. Maybe it's a personal thing for me, because my grandmother, who was a bit of a nature mystic—she was the only person with any religious sense in my family—was a Unitarian and a follower of Emerson and Thoreau. But whether it's due to that kind of partisanship that I inherited or my reading, I have found the Emerson side of American Protestantism had a lot of positive aspects compared to the Jewish-dominated culture that we've had since World War II and especially since the coup d'etats that overthrew John F. Kennedy and then the coup d'etat on 9/11, which were supreme expressions of the Jewish takeover of the United States from the Protestants.

So maybe we need to use that African proverb, “if you're lost, go back to where you were before you were lost,” and say we need to go back to the very best of pre-World War II Protestant-led America. I don't know where else we're going to go. Maybe what we need to do is go back there and then get on a camel. In other words, start praying five times a day, start looking to the Quran for guidance, and submitting to God in islam, surrendering to God.

So if Emerson would just get off that high camel and surrender to God: “Get off that camel, Emerson, spread out your carpet, and perform sujood with your forehead on the earth!”

Self-reliance and Islam are completely incompatible. They're the complete opposites. But you seem to have brought them together in some miraculous way.

What I'm saying is that America needs to get back to its Emersonian virtues, and then “get off that high camel and put your forehead on the floor.”

That's where we're going to have to leave it. So thank you so much, Michael Jones. Always enjoy communicating with you across this vast gulf of cultures and religions that's actually probably not even as far as Wisconsin to Indiana was, back when I was in Wisconsin. Looking forward to a lot more conversation in the not too distant future, inshallah.

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kevinbarrett.substack.com