‘The Head of the South’

 

From Jamestown till the sundering of Seventy-Six,

The head of the Southern people wore a monarch’s crown,

James the First to George the Third,

With the Puritan interregnum

An unnatural interruption

Of the patriarchal order.

In the new dispensation after independence,

Still was there a head on Dixie’s body,

An agrarian aristoi of country gentlemen,

Led by a trio of Johns –

Taylor of Caroline, Randolph of Roanoke,

And the mighty Calhoun of South Carolina –

And the finest of them all, the chivalric Lee.

Upon the death of the General

Came the times of calamity,

Without a head to lead and guide the South.

After the decay of the old planter class,

A dozen brothers led for a time.

Then Strom Thurmond tried but was denied.

Today we have only scattered voices

Raised in protest of an aberrant order,

While our old traditions are banished from the land,

Exiled further by far than Alfred the King was in Athelney.

Yet in that blessèd man is all our hope,

The first king of all the English folk,

Who saved them from an alien foe

And raised up the prostrate Church.

The headless South a head once more has found in him,

Crowned with the garland of God’s Grace,

Fairest of the line of English kings.

Beseech him, brothers and sisters,

Beseech him on bended knee

To be our father, our patriarch,

This day and all succeeding ones,

To restore wholeness and vitality

To a family shattered and weak.

The twilight of death is nigh upon us,

And soon total darkness,

If the Light of that deified head we reject.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

Protestants Misunderstand the Church

 

Evangelical Protestant Alex McFarland made a curious statement recently on American Family Radio – namely, that it is not important what church you belong to but that you belong to Christ.  This is a terrible mangling of the nature of the Church.  It makes the Church superfluous, unnecessary.  It destroys the idea of the Church as the actual Body of Christ of which He is the Head.  Instead Mr McFarland presents us with the grotesque image of a disembodied head connected to individual believers by a slender thread or artery of some kind.  It likewise undermines the idea of any kind of visible, identifiable, corporate body of faith and practice here in the world that has kept the True Faith through the centuries since the days of Christ and His Apostles.  This of course leaves us with the ‘invisible church’ that Protestants are so fond of, whose boundaries are unknown and unknowable here in the world, but will only be revealed in the next life and the next age (this is their way of papering over their perennial disagreements on doctrine).

None of this is correct.  Christ is inseparable from His Body, which is the Church, and not just any generic ‘church’ but the Orthodox Church of the Apostles, Martyrs, and Prophets.  To be a part of Christ is to be a part of that Church, and vice versa:  To be united to the Orthodox Church is to be united to Christ.  One cannot be a churchless Christian, belonging solely to Christ but not His other members.

Once again, we appreciate the zeal of Protestants like Mr McFarland, but their pride in not submitting themselves to an authority other than their own private interpretation of the Bible (or such books as they have left within it after throwing out several during the Reformation) leads them and their followers into the pit of false teaching – over and over again.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

St Herman Monastery 2027 Calendar

 

The St Herman of Alaska Monastery’s 2027 calendar is now available to order and features the Orthodox history of Bithynia and the saints of that land.  Orders, which help support the Monastery, may be placed here:

https://www.sainthermanmonastery.com/St-Herman-Orthodox-Calendar-p/cal_current.htm

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

‘The Yankee Obsession with Purity’

 

The history of Yankeedom began in New England with a group of Englishmen and women who believed that the Church of England was totally corrupt (and that they were not) and that they had to separate themselves from it in order to be saved:

‘The first wave of colonists came to Plymouth (which was later absorbed by Massachusetts) in 1620. These settlers were Separatists, but we often call them the “Pilgrims.” English Separatists believed that England’s legally established church was corrupt and irredeemable. They wanted to hold their own private church meetings instead of going to Church of England parishes, but it was not legal in England to start an independent congregation. Facing severe persecution, some English Separatists had already fled to the relatively freer climes of Holland.

‘Some of the Separatists in Holland worried about the corrupting effects of Dutch culture too. In 1620, just over a hundred people sailed to Plymouth on board the ship Mayflower. Upon arrival, the men of the colony signed the Mayflower Compact, committing themselves to the creation of a “civil body politic” that was devoted to “the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our king and country.”’

As Yankee culture matured and crystallized, there would be other outbursts against peoples they believed to be impure.  Dixie was one of those peoples they scorned as such, and it helped precipitate the War and Reconstruction:

‘That same year [1860] William H. Herndon [of Illinois, a close friend of Lincoln’s] proclaimed that “Civilization and barbarism are absolute antagonisms.  One or the other must perish on this Continent.  . . .  Let the natural struggle . . . go on.  . . . I am thoroughly convinced that two such civilizations as the North and the South can-not co-exist on the same soil.  . . . ”

‘ . . . scarcely had the war ended when the Nation announced that Northerners must “colonize and Yankeeize the South, . . . in short to turn the slothful, shiftless Southern world upside down”’ (Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture:  Celtic Ways in the Old South, U of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, 1988, pgs. 260, 269)

For righteous Yankees, the barbaric Southerners either had to be eradicated or transformed into Northerners.

The eugenics movement (genetic purity) in the US was begun under Yankee auspices:  Charles Davenport of Harvard was a leader; Indiana passed the first sterilization law; and New York City hosted the Second International Eugenics Congress in 1921.

The violent murders committed by LGBT individuals (against Christian students in Tennessee and Minnesota, and against conservative activist Charlie Kirk in Utah) are the latest instantiation of the Yankee spirit that restlessly seeks to ‘cleanse’ society of those elements it sees as undesirable.  Per Dr Clyde Wilson:

‘The violent rhetoric and assassinations being perpetrated today against conservatives are exact copies of the hate and murder committed against Southerners by abolitionists in the 1850s. They are from the same Yankee culture and personalities.’

From an historical perspective, it is interesting that this Yankee obsession with purity has antecedents in the schismatic and heretical groups that afflicted the early Church in Africa.  Groups like the Novatians and Donatists believed that the Church in this world consisted of perfect saints, and all those who sinned were to be expelled from the congregation.  Church Fathers of Africa like St Cyprian of Carthage (+3^rd c.) and St Augustine of Hippo (+5^th c.) rebuked them for these teachings.

‘The presence of those who have sinned does not destroy the sanctity of the Church; the tares do not prevent the wheat from growing.  The Novatians taught that the presence of one who had lapsed infects all of society, as it were, and it is then no longer holy.  “But with us,” writes St. Cyprian, “according to our faith and the given rule of divine preaching, agrees the principle of truth, that every one is himself held fast in his own sin; nor can one become guilty for another . . .”’ (Saint Hilarion Troitsky, On the Dogma of the Church, Fr. Nathan Williams, translator, Uncut Mountain Press, 2022, p. 470).

‘According to Donatist doctrine, there must be no sinners in the Church.  . . .  The society of the Donatists approved this requirement; among the Donatists there was no one with any kind of vice.  When the Donatists separated, this was a separation of the wheat from the tares . . .’ (pgs. 553-4).

This is the same self-righteous spirit that was present several centuries later in the separatist Pilgrim/Yankee Errand into the Wilderness.  But St Augustine rejects it:

 . . .

The rest may be read here:

https://www.reckonin.com/walt-garlington/the-yankee-obsession-with-purity

Or here:

https://www.geopolitika.ru/en/article/yankee-obsession-purity

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!