The project of Americanism is
heretical. It had its birth in the
transference of the ability to confer salvation from a religious body, Christ’s
Church, to a political body, the United States.
This spiritual disease was initially limited to the New England
colonies, but it gradually spread elsewhere, eventually infecting all the
colonies/States as a result of various events:
the Great Awakening, the French and Indian War, the War for Independence
from Great Britain, the War between the States, WWII, etc.
Because the political body of
the US has replaced the Church, we must not expect to find saints in the usual
Christian sense of that word – holy men and women and children who are
overflowing with God’s Grace. Instead,
the ‘saints’ of the US will be those who either exemplify the worldly,
post-Christian, American ideals of liberty and success or who sacrificed in
some way to uphold the salvific political system of the States (or both).
The most exalted of that
pantheon of new-style gods and goddesses is President Abraham Lincoln, who is
the martyr par excellence of Americanism. The comparisons of Lincoln to Christ are not
few in number:
“If you see a parallelism,” one reverend defended, “you cannot
say the preacher makes it. If it exists, God made it.” (Another claimed that
the assassination of Lincoln was “without parallel in all the annals of earthly
history!” but quickly added, “excepting Him…who was the only begotten of
God…and hence not to be brought into comparison with mere man. Excepting only
the God-man our Savior, there has never been so sad a death!”
Despite disagreements over the degree to which explicit
parallels between Lincoln and Christ could be made, both blacks and whites used
the same biblical language to construct their image of Lincoln. Lincoln was
often implicitly compared to Christ, quickly earning the title of
“Martyr-President.” In many cases the two martyrdoms were simply juxtaposed and
the audience was left to draw its own conclusions. “Jesus may, by wicked hands,
be crucified, but His cause lives. That is a part of God’s plan. Abraham
Lincoln has fallen a martyr…But whilst our hearts are bleeding, our hopes are
not crushed.”
. . . “In all future
history his name will stand beside that of Washington. If he was the father of
his country, under God, Abraham Lincoln was its savior” (Source).
Because Lincoln is Christ,
America is also the Church:
But not all analogies were between Lincoln and Christ. The day
after Lincoln’s death, a Philadelphia newspaper editorialized, “The blood of
the martyrs was the seed of the church. So the blood of the noble martyr to the
cause of freedom will be the seed to the great blessing of this nation.” Here
the central analogy was not between Christ and Lincoln, but between Christ’s
church and Lincoln’s nation (Ibid.).
And Lincoln isn’t merely
analogous to or equal to Christ; he perfects the work of Christ:
Reverend Henry Bellows of New York City informed his
congregation that “Heaven rejoices this Easter morning in the resurrection of
our lost leader . . . dying on the anniversary of our Lord’s great sacrifice, a
mighty sacrifice himself for the sins of a whole people.” In Philadelphia,
minister Phillips Brooks assured his flock that, “If there were one day on
which one could rejoice to echo the martyrdom of Christ, it would be that on
which the martyrdom was perfected” (Ibid.).
But this is not all. Lincoln is also the Holy Prophet Moses,
leading the peoples of the States to the Promised Land of political/economic
utopia:
Many extended this characterization of Lincoln as Moses and
applied it to the country as well. “We have passed the Red Sea and the
wilderness, and have had unmistakable pledges that we shall occupy that land of
Union, Liberty, and Peace which flows with milk and honey.” What the author
envisioned was not the America which then existed, but rather the America
promised by the potential of Lincoln’s leadership. Lincoln was “the Moses of
our American Israel” who was supposedly “called of God to lead us throught the
great and terrible wilderness of strife, to the promised land of unity, peace,
and concord.”
Lincoln, however, was killed at the threshold of that new
country as Moses was not allowed to pass into the promised land. He was “our
Moses, who, under God, has lead us through the wilderness,” and who was struck
down “in full view of the Promised Land, the land flowing with milk and honey.”
Lincoln had stood on the precipice. He had ensured the future of his people yet
been unable share in them (Ibid.).
For those who have studied a
little actual history, these claims that Lincoln ushered in some new era of
‘unity, peace, and concord’, that he ‘saved the union’, etc., are easily seen
for what they are: a pile of rubbish. He is rather the Apollyon of the original
political agreement between the States.
A recent Southern Agrarian writer, Tom Landess, explains:
This Union did not come about accidentally. Lincoln created it
out of his own imagination and then invented a rhetoric to justify it, a
grammar that has been used ever since that time. You must realize that before
the War Between the States, virtually all Americans believed that the nation
was a loosely connected alliance of political states, each with a sovereign
will of its own and a right to resist the power of central government, which,
since the beginning of the Republic, was regarded as the ultimate enemy.
“Keep it small, keep it diversified” was the view of federal
authority held by the Founding Fathers; but Lincoln believed—and said in the
Gettysburg Address—that the Founding Fathers were wrong, that they had
imperfectly conceived the nation at the outset and that he, Abraham Lincoln,
had a responsibility to refound it, to bring about a “new birth.” What he meant
by this “new birth” was the emergence of a strong, centralized government which
had the will and the power to impose a certain conformity on its membership.
If you want to know where the idea of Big Government came from
in this country, it came from Lincoln.
In addition to a strong central government, the Founding
Fathers also feared a chief executive who exercised absolute power. The tyrant
was the ultimate villain in an increasingly diversified political order, and we
must remember that, as a matter of strategy, the Declaration of Independence
denounced the sins of George III rather than those of his duly elected
Parliament despite the fact that the poor king was considerably less
responsible than the people’s representatives. Indeed, it was only later, in
1861, that Abraham Lincoln finally became the imperial ruler that Thomas
Jefferson denounced in the body of the Declaration (Source).
Another Southern writer adds,
. . .
The rest is at https://orthodoxreflections.com/a-false-martyr-and-a-true-martyr/.
--
Holy
Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema
to the Union!
