A tall, handsome man stands alone in a courtroom, chin thrust high. “The first right on earth is the right of the ego,” he declares boldly. “Man’s first duty is to himself. … His moral obligation is to do what he wishes, provided his wish does not depend primarily upon other men. … A man thinks and works alone.” The figure in the courtroom is calm, magnetic, effortlessly charismatic. And he has more to say. “I wished to come here and say that the integrity of a man’s creative work is of greater importance than any charitable endeavor,” he pronounces with prophetic force. “Those of you who do not understand this are the men who’re destroying the world.”

The tall man’s message is powerful – so powerful, in fact, that it wins over his jury. The law is nullified, and he is vindicated – forgiven, that is, for dynamiting an apartment complex whose builders distorted his own architectural vision. The climax of Ayn Rand’s bestselling novel The Fountainhead is, of course, pure fantasy. But it is a peculiarly American fantasy: the fantasy of an utterly irrepressible human will, with a gravitational pull so powerful that the surrounding world and its silly morals bend around it. Rand’s character, Howard Roark, challenges the reigning gods of the polis head-on. And he’s rewarded for his audacity: his fate is not destruction, but apotheosis.

From Alexis de Tocqueville on, observers have frequently commented on the spiritual vitality of the American public. Religion has flourished in American soil. And yet something in the American heart still thrills to Roark’s defiance, though there is nothing Christian about Roark’s soliloquy. Nor, even, is there any classical language of the common good: Roark deplores such an appeal, as “the claim and justification of every tyranny ever established over men.” No, Roark and his will are justifications that need no end beyond themselves. They are uncivilized, or rather, they remake civilization in their own image.

This is the spirit of Friedrich Nietzsche. It is also a very American spirit. Looming behind the image of the pioneer is the shadowy mountain man, who roams and hunts and dwells beyond the polis, beyond constraint. Roark himself admits it: “This country was not based on selfless service, sacrifice, renunciation, or any precept of altruism. It was based on a man’s right to the pursuit of happiness. His own happiness. Not anyone else’s.” Such lawlessness is itself the object of fascination: American lore constantly returns to the archetype of the lone gunslinger who must take power into his own hands when institutions fail. Some stories, such as the 1943 Western film The Ox-Bow Incident, admit the moral ambivalence. But far more, like The Wild Bunch and Django Unchained, glory in it.

It’s not hard to understand the appeal. At the heart of the Nietzschean vision is an ideal of human excellence, construed in a particularly vitalist way. Only the truly excellent man, strong in body and soul, is capable of becoming a law unto himself. And so Roark, summoned into court as an aesthetic martyr, is no Christ figure, but Nietzsche’s Übermensch (superhuman). He does not suffer the scourge and nails as Christ did. Rather, his beauty, strength, and intellect are on full display. As Nietzsche himself might have put it, Ecce homo, behold the man. No gods and no kings.

Ross Douthat has said that “if you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.” It was such a post-religious world that Nietzsche foresaw long ago. That world has now arrived. Roark, like Nietzsche, was simply ahead of his time. Today’s Roarks have podcasts and X accounts.

No critic of Christianity, past or present, has matched Nietzsche for style or sophistication. Born into a pious household, he early on rejected the moralism of his day, charting an altogether different course. He had little interest in the traditional debates of theology and secularity, such as whether God exists. His critique was less metaphysical than ethical-political: Christianity, he argued, stands diametrically opposed to human excellence.

For Nietzsche, Christianity was a technology of power that allowed the weak and servile elements in society – the priestly classes – to disempower and subjugate the naturally stronger. With its promises of otherworldly salvation, its ethic of self-sacrifice and self-denial, and its commitment to the value of individual human lives – even those with disabilities and infirmities – the Christian faith enchained the greatest and strongest human specimens. But it need not remain so. Faith was on the wane. What might emerge after Christianity, Nietzsche wondered, in the absence of its ideological pollution?

Nietzsche was a bombastic and florid writer, with a proclivity for aphorisms over argument, and many of his Christian critics have felt free to dismiss him on that basis. But his central claim deserves a fairer hearing.

Classical Christian theology has historically treated God and Good as convertible terms. In other words, the Creator of heaven and earth is not merely a good entity among others, but Goodness itself. This means that there is no goodness in any dimension of created reality that is “incompatible” with God.

Scripture renders this moral vision more concretely. At Sinai, God speaks to his people, laying down the Ten Commandments that govern not merely God’s relation to his people, but the relations of people one to another. Jesus, as God in the flesh, later vindicates this same moral order; he comes not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it (Matt. 5:17).

In short, Christian thought has traditionally insisted that to live in accordance with God’s commandments is to participate fully in God’s goodness. And it is this claim that Nietzsche contests. For him, to live in accordance with the terms of Christian morality is to abandon other dimensions of human excellence altogether. Christianity’s refusal to acknowledge this excellence is precisely why, for Nietzsche, Christian morality is fit only for livestock.

Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity is implicitly grounded in the argument that there is a human goodness that is not the Goodness that is God. Just how is this other-than-divine goodness exemplified?

Nietzsche offers one answer: within the ideal human body, the material manifestation of human perfection. The creative instincts of his Übermensch require a fit vessel, a genetically superior specimen. There is a reason Rand’s heroes were always so aestheticized. While Nietzsche himself resisted racialized interpretations of his thought, his intellectual heirs have not been so restrained. In recent years, few have pushed Nietzsche’s logic to its terminus as boldly as the Yale-trained political philosopher Costin Alamariu, better known as the pseudonymous online provocateur Bronze Age Pervert. For Alamariu, genetic-supremacist politics is not merely an extension of Nietzsche’s thought; it is the dark core of Western philosophy itself. As Alamariu would have it, philosophy begins not in wonder but in eugenics.

This reality, Alamariu argues, was violently suppressed by generations of Greek philosophers, from Plato on, who feared the consequences of revealing the fact of biological political determinism to the masses. This means that the entire tradition of Western thought, the whole “Platonic-Socratic tradition,” was based on a lie, “born in an act of rhetorical obfuscation and conservative cowardice.”

Is this true to Nietzsche’s vision? It’s hard to see why not. Alamariu consciously identifies himself as Nietzsche’s successor, stressing that he is “trying to explain some of the implications of the work of Nietzsche for a world in which he is still the only prophet, and will remain so for some centuries.” And indeed, in Alamariu’s work, the logic of vitalism comes to full flower. For all its veneration of superior human specimens, vitalism ultimately subverts any sense of human exceptionalism, leaving – quite properly – only nature. Where Nietzsche left off, Alamariu simply finishes the job: Ecce simio. Behold the ape.

Alamariu mulls the same question as Nietzsche: Isn’t the Western way of life opposed to life itself? Surely, human beings were made for more than Starbucks and office jobs and TikTok videos. Surely, some human specimens are fitter and finer than others. And yet the West, operating as it does under a long Christian shadow, cannot easily shake its appeals to transcendental morality and universal human worth.

Christian rejoinders to this Nietzschean challenge, to the extent they’re mounted at all (which isn’t common; mostly, he is simply ignored), have often taken one of two forms. Either he is held up as a cautionary tale, epitomized by a much-circulated meme: “God is dead – Nietzsche. Nietzsche is dead – God.” Or, worse, he is merely misread as a “nihilist.”

And yet for those willing to linger over Nietzsche’s critique, it seems his arguments are not so easily dismissed as that. One cannot help but notice, especially among proponents of “classical education,” the curious paradox of concluding many “Great Books” educational sequences with readings in Nietzsche, as if the history of Western thought does in fact terminate in the revelation of the will to power. And most students in the humanities, especially at the graduate level, encounter Nietzsche’s ideas as refracted through left-wing intellectual projects. “In postwar America, the only respectable ways to interpret Nietzsche were either through the Nietzsche-as-existentialist framing,” Sheluyang Peng writes, “or the ‘New Nietzsche’ brought to America by French post-structuralists – interpretations that brushed away or reinterpreted Nietzsche’s more reactionary thinking.” Without Nietzsche, there is likely no Foucault, no Fanon, no Derrida.

The upshot is that, for the most part, Nietzsche’s ethical critique of Christianity – that its slave morality is an elaborate bid for power, and that its theology denies self-evident modes of human excellence – simply goes unrebutted. The worm is left to gnaw away, bit by bit, at Christian theology writ large.

Some Christians have taken a different tack. In recent years, the American conservative intellectual world has witnessed the emergence of various intellectual projects aiming to synthesize Nietzsche’s critique of Western modernity – and even Alamariu’s extension of that critique – with Christian theology. That might seem like an impossible task, given Nietzsche’s long-held status as “Christianity’s critic-in-chief.” But some “Christian vitalists” have attempted it nonetheless.

The “Christian vitalist” argument runs something like this: Nietzsche was right to condemn the weakness and failures of the society, and church, of his day. Alamariu is correct to condemn the weakness of the present world. But neither Nietzsche nor Alamariu understands real Christianity. Real Christianity is strong, conquering, masculine – and not afraid to inflict violence. As one Christian Winter, in an article entitled “Towards a Christian Vitalism,” puts it: “Nietzschean vitalists … will be won over by reading stories of Christian heroes or even more by seeing living examples of Christian strength. This requires Christian men who exemplify true virtù, men who, in earlier times, the average man would follow into battle.” Winter goes on:

These Christian men will have natural greatness which they will use for life-affirming ends, biblically understood. Such great men will not deny hierarchy. They will recognize both that their proper place is below the God of the universe and also that they have a duty to lead others according to the real talents and excellence that God has graciously given them. When young men see and look up to such men, and then discover that they are Christian – what then?

There is very little in this passage that Nietzsche himself would disagree with. And that’s because the substantive content of Christianity is almost entirely contrary to the vitalist ideal that Winter articulates. After all, Jesus begins his teaching with the words, “Blessed are the poor in spirit. … Blessed are the meek” (Matt. 5:3–14). To say that it is possible to look at and admire these Christian übermenschen, and yet not know they are Christian until they affirmatively say so, is to assert that there is nothing about these figures’ exemplification of excellence that is distinctively Christian. The move implicitly concedes that “Christianity” is something largely cut off from the natural order – the sort of pallid, otherworldly ideology that Nietzsche treated with contempt.

Winter’s approach is also anachronistic, treating comparatively late developments in the history of Christian thought – such as the specifically Germanic-influenced ideal of the “Christian warrior” – as representative of the Christian tradition as a whole. As historian James Russell explains in The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, for “Christianity to have been accepted by the Germanic peoples, it had to be reinterpreted in a primarily heroic and magicoreligious fashion that would appeal to military and agricultural concerns” – at the expense of “the soteriological, ethical, and communal dimensions of Christianity which had been preeminent in early Christianity.” Traditions do, of course, develop. But Winter’s argument for congeniality between vitalist and Christian categories necessarily implies a genealogy of Christian thought in which Christianity only becomes “fully itself” when its late-antique European expression is synthesized with Germanic pagan thought. That is a very audacious position to stake out.

Are Christians left adrift, then – forced to ignore Nietzsche or, for all intents and purposes, to surrender to him? Far from it. And a better answer to Nietzsche emerged within Christian thought at a surprisingly early point.

More than a century ago, Eberhard Arnold, who would go on to become a founder of the Bruderhof and a committed pacifist, articulated one of the most distinctive challenges to Nietzsche’s thought. Arnold penned his critique a mere nine years after the legendary philosopher’s death, publishing his doctoral dissertation, “Early-Christian and Antichristian Elements in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Development,” in 1910. Arriving as it does before the accretion of decades’ worth of scholarship, Arnold’s challenge to Nietzsche’s vision is arresting in its starkness, and in its comparatively unmediated encounter with Nietzsche’s claims. In Arnold’s work one finds the strangest of things: an eschatological vitalism, a summons to human excellence that subverts Nietzsche’s reasoning on its own terrain.

From the start, Arnold’s method is less analytical than biographical, treating the development of Nietzsche’s thought as a project worked out over the course of his life. As Arnold reads him, Nietzsche’s repudiation of Christianity was never merely incidental, but always integral, to the philosopher’s project. Nietzsche marched “in the same basic direction from the very beginning, especially that a hostile attitude toward Christianity is apparent in all his works, indeed, that this is their determining characteristic.”

And yet this did not devolve into a crudely nihilistic repudiation of life. Behind Nietzsche’s own concept of value, Arnold argues, was a very comprehensible concept of human vitality. “Dionysus versus the Crucified One! That alone is Nietzsche’s inner struggle throughout his development,” Arnold pronounces. “The advocatus diaboli [devil’s advocate], as Nietzsche was fond of calling himself, was ‘a religious enthusiast’ from beginning to end, who offered sacrifices to god, but to another god – Dionysus!” To be clear, Arnold is not charging Nietzsche with play-acting at paganism; he is simply underscoring that, for Nietzsche, real value lies in the chaotic, disruptive, immanent dimensions of the real – in those “Dionysian” facets of human excellence that Christianity must necessarily deny.

This Dionysian sensibility is, just as for Rand’s architect-turned-saboteur Howard Roark, “the coming into being, the bringing into existence, as the furious lust of the creative man, who at the same time knows also the wrath of the wrecker.” By contrast, the habits and practices of Christian faith must, for Nietzsche, “add up to a life fading and perishing, a life that in its hostility to existence has painted the world ugly and evil and has even saddled the reproductive instinct with a bad conscience.” Such Christianity offers only a crepuscular, necrotizing shadow of the Dionysian ethos.

And yet, for all his efforts, Nietzsche could never quite complete his own act of transvaluation, never quite personally relegate Christianity to the place of contempt he assigned it. As Arnold notes, Nietzsche “cannot keep from testifying that Christ on the cross remains the sublimest of symbols, however much he would rather loathe and detest it.” The crucified God fascinates and repels him in equal measure.

Thus far, Arnold has trodden now-familiar ground. But when Arnold’s study transitions from description into theological critique, things take an unexpected turn. Arnold does not, as might be expected, fall back on the promise of a kingdom not of this world. Quite the opposite: he takes Nietzsche’s attack head-on. Arnold argues directly that Nietzsche’s great aspiration, for the full realization of this-worldly life, can only ever be satisfied by a distinctively – not merely contingently – Christian way of existence.

Arnold begins by considering the crucified Christ who haunts Nietzsche’s steps, and the love shown by Jesus to all around him. But crucially, this love was utterly irreducible to sentimentality. Rather, it was bold in itself – the highest measure of strength.

Love for all was the fundamental trait of his character, so much so that he could not deny this love for one moment even to those who had him crucified. But this was not the feeble love that is prompted by fear of pain nor the last avenue of life open to a hypersensitive soul. Jesus demonstrated an unparalleled readiness and courage to suffer and die, an unparalleled power to resist all others and to endure the pain inflicted by them. Jesus possessed in the highest degree that love of which Nietzsche rightly says that people must be firmly grounded in themselves to be able to dispense it. It was love as a sharing of inexhaustible wealth, love springing from an abundance of strength.

This love, Arnold continues, “was love expressed in saving action, in manly and effective help, the love practiced in a weaker form by every high-minded physician, the love that a strong-minded educator endeavors to actualize on the basis of clear principles.” In Arnold’s telling, love is courage, and courage springs from total confidence. And no figure better exemplifies such confidence than the Son of God who was with the Father in the beginning.

Here, in taking up a favored example of some contemporary “Christian vitalists” – Jesus braiding a whip in his zeal against evil (John 2:14–17) – Arnold staunchly refuses to pit God’s wrath and God’s love against one another. Rather, Jesus’ anger simply reflects a more fundamental charity. “Arising as it did from inner strength and truth, this love could often only express itself in sharp anger at evil and baseness (Mark 11:15–19). … With unerring certainty and candor, it lashed out at the awful evils Jesus saw around him (Matt. 23:13–35).”

This confidence was shared by Jesus’ followers. As Arnold observes, “Original Christianity … offered the one real possibility of sustaining and invigorating everything strong and healthy in people’s being and to save and renew what is feeble and dying. It is far from true that the Christian congregations were composed of society’s rejects.” While Christian churches “did offer rescue and support to even the most down-and-out folk so as to help them become renewed, strong-willed persons,” it remained the case that “just as the original apostles belonged to the soundest and most vigorous elements among the population, just as Paul was an acknowledged, highly educated genius, so the Christian congregations did quite generally have strong and noble elements among them.”

Critically, though, for Arnold this confidence and nobility was never – as it is for Alamariu and others – rooted in biological inequalities. Even if “natural life with its physiological factors forms of course the indispensable basis for every change in human life,” it is the case that “these bodily elements are taken possession of by Christ and in his person become fused into healthy, vigorous newness of life.” Grace is not something superadded to a preexistent “natural” state, but something more transformative. This is why, for Arnold, “a Christian feels the same compassion for an intellectually and physically disabled person as for a brash and cocky person in perfect health. For Christians, nobody is excluded from the renewing work of grace, so they will offer their help equally to both.”

What does this transformation, this renewal, consist of? For Arnold, it comes in the form of “the vigorous life of a strong personality expressing itself in morally unwavering deeds,” in a love that has proved itself by total obedience to [Christ’s] words,” in Christians “courageously sticking out their necks and putting their existence at risk.” This confidence – an affirmation of life more profound than anything Nietzsche could conceive – may be exemplified by any human soul, under any bodily conditions. It is a confidence rooted in the fact that, as Arnold puts it, “what the God of the Old and New Testaments stands for is not the negation of the world and the earth but in the mightiest and deepest sense their affirmation, redemption, and revitalization.” The foundation of a vital Christianity is, in short, a profoundly eschatological confidence.

Arnold’s approach forecloses the use of violence to secure the good. Indeed, for Arnold, to rely on violent means is to cheapen Christian confidence. As he writes, “Christians have never been allowed to make use of powder and shot, lawsuits and litigations in fighting this struggle (Luke 9:54–55; Matt. 5:25, 38–42; 26:51–52).” The violent man is one who fears that only he, through his struggles, can forestall a coming doom. Those redeemed by Christ, living in the certainty of his victory, have no need of such crutches.

In Arnold, what emerges is a “Christian vitalism” of an altogether different order from that which would internalize and concede most of Nietzsche’s critique. It is an eschatological vitalism, grounding affirmation of every human life in a courage that flows from expectant hope in a renewed creation to come. It is a vitalism more lively than any Dionysian ecstasy.

Arnold’s eschatological vitalism may never win over the Bronze Age Perverts of the world. But it cannot help but cheapen their fascination with brutish and piratical ways of life, or with inhuman figures like Rand’s Roark. And it cannot help but shame those Christians who find themselves wistfully gazing in Nietzsche’s direction. In light of Arnold’s alternative, Dionysian vitalisms are pathetic denials of responsibility, flights from a way of life that hinges on real risk and real trust. People who live only for themselves, no matter how violently, necessarily cut themselves off from the full horizon of human experience.

Arnold calls his readers, whether or not they follow him in every particular, into an altogether different order of existence – to “a joyful, virile mastery of the world.” He calls us, that is, to an adventure with a destination in mind. “Not Nietzsche with his dismal night, his unending recurrence, but Jesus with the lightning and sun of his personal return will have the mightiest impact on this life.”