You bring up the scenario of imagining an ideal ‘neoreactionary polity’. I’d say this, and the question you asked about the nature of neoreaction, is too broad. As many have pointed out, neoreaction is really just an overarching rejection of what has come to be known as ‘modernity’, and it has various facets loosely associated with it. With that in mind, looking for the ideal neoreactionary polity is as useful as looking for the ideal black polity. Obviously black people are diverse in culture, belief, and political ideals as are neoreactionaries. There’s not a one-size-fits-all here.

But coming at this from a Christian standpoint, allow me to share some musings I have had on this topic in the abstract.

Rousas John Rushdoony proposed in his founding of ‘Dominion Theology’ or ‘Christian Reconstructionism’ a very nuanced view of Biblical law, that being that Christians have long been mistaken about the fate of the moral revelations God gave to the Israelites. Whilst many declared that the Civil Laws of the Old Covenant were rendered null and void with the destruction of Ancient Israel and did not apply outside of it, Rushdoony contended that this was a misinterpretation, and that Christians should, for example, support the traditional stoning of adulterers and blasphemers.

While Rushdoony presented this view with academic slickness rather than the hellfire sermon of a rural preacher, I personally find his arguments to be theologically untenable, however the reason I bring his perspective up is because it is precisely the Civil Law we are talking about when we describe what a Christian Neoreactionary might want his ideal society to look like.

Let us assume (I think rightly) that we are under no continuing obligation to God’s Civil Laws. What do we have? Well, we have the Moral Law. God told us what was inherently good and inherently wicked. Since the time of this law, we have used the moral code of God to craft our own legal systems. Take sodomy for example. Same sex encounters are punishable under the Ancient Israeli Civil Law, by death. But what else does God say? He states that the acts are an ‘abomination’, and their immorality is also later bolstered in the New Testament. It is for this reason that up until recently, civilized man deemed sodomy to be a reprehensible crime against nature. It has been punished in a variety of ways throughout history, from death (in keeping with the Civil Law tradition), to many ways not sanctioned by the Civil Law, such as castration, imprisonment, fines, or exile.

I think this is in a broad sense the correct train of thought, theologically and politically, we take the Moral Law as the basis of the culture at large, but the civil law code is up to us now. God has given you the principles, and it is up to you to apply them using your rationality.

So what of religious pluralism? I think what you get across in the piece is that if one religion lays the framework of a society, the other religions are essentially put upon. Not in all cases, but in many. Look at how Christians live in majority Muslim nations like Pakistan, or even (crossing the religious-ideological boundary) how Muslims live in Communist China. Despite inherent conflict, these uneasy relationships have been the foundation of societies for millennia and were acknowledged. It is only really in the modern world that we have leaders pretending now that there is no ideology at the core of the state, that everything is egalitarian and tolerant and accepting and accommodating to all groups and ideas.

We know this to be a lie, of course. Same-sex ‘marriage’ and abortion are not random outcroppings of an unbiased society, but the edifices of the Cathedral’s own religion. The same Cathedral that declares impartiality. We like to think ourselves superior to Pakistan and Communist China in this regard, but this is a thin veneer, a falsehood, an obfuscation. In a pluralistic society, nothing is unbiased.

The obvious solution to preventing these kinds of conflicts is an ideologically and religiously homogenous society. Hard to imagine, but neoreactionaries should find vivid imaginations an asset, not a weakness. Let us imagine a society with Christian Theonomy enshrined into law, a society in which all people (whether true believers or not) confess to be Christians. Minor sins are unpunished (and indeed unpunishable), but are taken care of by general cultural disapproval. Larger sins incur legal penalties, carefully thought out and just. The church is an independent facet of the state, and all attend it with zeal and an air of pride in their nation and their religious identity. Leaving out more specific discussions of economic structure, and governmental power division, perhaps this is what a Christian neoreactionary should imagine when he dreams up his ideal polity.

The big questions remain, how large could such a state conceivable remain functional (city state, regional cloister?), how would such a state be realized and insulated from outside incursions and cultural influence, and most importantly, how can one ensure that the ideology that girds the polity remains potent and invigorating for generations to come.