The
Holy Apostle Paul warned the elders over the Christians in Ephesus that
‘grievous wolves’ and other dishonorable men would arise in their congregation
shortly after his leave-taking from them (Acts 20:29, 30). We believe that such men have come amongst us
here in the South, where many of the churches have become yet another means by
which to destroy Southern culture and identity, whether knowingly or
unknowingly.
Displaying
the American Flag
Many
congregations in the South display the flag of the [u]nited States either
inside or outside their church buildings.
Doing so is a silent acknowledgement that they agree with the principles
represented by this flag. This in effect
forces Southrons to spit upon the legacy of their forefathers, who tried
valiantly to defend the truth that the union is voluntary, made up of unique,
independent countries (States).
Displaying the uS flag declares the opposite: that there is ‘one nation . . . indivisible’,
and that if any State dares try to leave it, THE NATION has every right to
force her to stay in.
There
are a whole host of other ideas bound up with this flag, but the other main one
we wish to focus on under this heading is the idea that ‘America is the last
best hope of mankind’. Ralph Waldo
Emerson put
it this way: ‘America ... appears
like a last effort of divine Providence in behalf of the human race.’ Such ideas are a blasphemous slur against
Christ and His Body the Church. They are
a declaration that the gates of Hell have overcome the Church brought into the
world on Pentecost, and that now God has raised up another, a better, ‘church’
- the Nation of America - to do what the other failed to do, to finish bringing
salvation to the world.
A
country may have within it many, many Christians, but it will never be completely
identical with the Church. But one of
the Yankee legacies (or heresies) is just that:
That ‘America’ is the Church and vice versa. Nevertheless, it remains precisely the
Church, and not Puritan, Emersonian, Lincolnian America, that is the ‘last
effort of divine Providence in behalf of the human race’.
But
there are other errors of Modernity that have taken hold of Southern churches.
Anti-sacramentalism
In
his book The American Religion, Prof Harold Bloom explains that what
passes for Christianity in modern America hinges on two un-Southern attitudes: God must be experienced by the individual in complete
isolation from 1) other people and 2) the creation (Simon & Schuster, 1992,
p. 32). We will take the second of these
first.
The
creation has always been for Southerners, as for their forebears, a means of
encountering God, of experiencing the grace of His presence, ‘a “second book”
of revelation’ (James Farmer, Jr, The Metaphysical Confederacy, 2nd
edn., Mercer UP, 1999, p. 88). Such ideas
are present in numerous poets, novelists, and theologians of the South. Some of their sentiments are expressed in the
following:
Far from seeing conflict
between revealed religion and nature, they [subscribers to natural theology]
insisted upon the mutual dependence of the two.
The order and beauty so manifest in nature pointed, for them, to a
supernatural wisdom and directed the observer to a divine cause, thereby
confirming and reinforcing the teachings of Scripture. . . .
For the educated clergy, and especially the Presbyterians, the idea of
being apathetic or fearful about the study of nature was simply
unacceptable. To reject the study of
God’s handiwork was to close one avenue through which man might approach the
Almighty. To fear the consequences of
rational inquiry into nature was to separate the Creator from his creation
(Farmer, pgs. 88-9).
The
Rev James Henley Thornwell once wrote,
“External nature, to
reason, . . . becomes an august temple of the Most High.” Since mortal man was not capable of rising to
the full contemplation of God through His Word, he “must study God in his
works, as children who cannot look the sun in the face behold its image in the
limpid stream” (Farmer, p. 89).
A
recently departed Romanian priest, a renowned theologian, amplifies these
thoughts:
The economy of God, that
is, his plan with regard to the world, consists in the deification of the
created world, something which, as a consequence of sin, implies also its
salvation. . . . Salvation and deification undoubtedly have
humanity directly as their aim but not a humanity separated from nature, rather
one that is ontologically united with it.
For nature depends on man or makes him whole, and man cannot reach
perfection if he does not reflect nature and is not at work upon it. . . .
. . . The glory of Christ on Tabor was spread
out over nature too. Yet, for the eyes
and senses of the many it can remain hidden, while nature can be degraded and
affected by the wickedness of the few.
In its turn, nature can be the medium through which the believer
receives divine grace or the beneficent uncreated energies, just as it can be
the medium through which influences driving him toward evil flow out upon him
(Fr Dumitru Staniloae, The Experience of God, Vol. 2, The World: Creation
and Deification, Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2000, pgs. 1, 3).
The
summit of this sacramentalism is of course in the elements of the Holy
Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper: the bread
and the wine, the fruits of the earth happily united with the brotherly labor
of mankind and consecrated by the Holy Ghost, so that the divine presence of
the Logos, the Lord Jesus Christ, in creation is intensified to the greatest
degree possible.
Having
noted this cooperation of labor that is necessary in observing the rites
surrounding the Eucharistic meal, we will now turn to the other spiritual
illness ravaging Southern churches that we noted above: individualism.
The
Solitary Individual
The
aforementioned Orthodox priest, Fr Dumitru, will help us transition. He writes,
Thus, when nature is
maintained and made use of in conformity with itself, it proves itself a means
through which man grows spiritually and brings his good intentions toward
himself and his fellow men to bear fruit; but when man sterilizes, poisons, and
abuses nature on a monstrous scale, he hampers his own spiritual growth and
that of others. This confirms the fact
that nature is given as a necessary means for the development of humanity in
solidarity . . . .
. . . Through work, moreover, every person
obtains the means necessary not only for himself, but also for his
neighbors. Humans must work and think in
solidarity with regard to the transformation of the gifts of nature. Thus, it is through the mediation of nature
that solidarity is created among humans, and work, guided by thought, is a
principal virtue creative of communion among humans (Ibid., pgs. 3, 4).
Wendell
Berry continues these themes in his poem ‘The Farm’:
Be thankful and repay
Growth with good work and
care.
Work done in gratitude,
Kindly, and well, is
prayer.
. . .
No gratitude atones
For bad use or too much.
This is not work for hire.
By this expenditure
You make yourself a place;
You make yourself a way
For love to reach the
ground.
In its ambition and
Its greed, its violence,
The world is turned
against
This possibility,
And yet the world survives
By the survival of
This kindly working love.
. . .
Soon you have salad greens
Out of the garden rows,
Then peas, early potatoes,
Onions, beets, beans,
sweet corn.
The bounty of the year
Now comes in like a tide:
. . .
Eat, and give to the
neighbors;
. . .
Later will come the fall
crops:
Turnips, parsnips, more
greens,
The winter squashes,
cushaws,
And pumpkins big as tubs.
“Too much for us,” you’ll
say,
And give some more away.
(A Timbered Choir: The
Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, Counterpoint, 1998, pgs. 141, 143, 144)
Churches,
more so than farming villages and any other community, are not playgrounds for
mere individuals. A man reflects the
image of his Maker, the Holy Trinity, the most when he lives in the same manner
as the Trinity, as a being in loving communion with others. To live alone, or even to live solely for
oneself while in the midst of others, is a mark of rebellion against God and
against other men and the angels; it is the rejection of community, the way of
the devil. It is unsurprising, then, to
find Rev Thornwell describing the Church as an ‘organic body’ and having ‘an
organic unity as the supernatural product of the Holy Spirit’ (The Collected
Writings of James Henley Thornwell, Vol. I: Theological, Banner of Truth
Trust, 1986, pgs. 44, 45).
The
Church Fathers, whom Southerners have been inclined to read, emphasize the need
for others in our lives, especially in the context of Church life. The fourth-century Father, St Basil the
Great, writes,
And if indeed we all, who
share in the one hope of our calling [Eph. 4:4], are one body, having Christ as
head, and are each members of one another [1 Cor. 12:12], if we are not fitted
together in the Holy Spirit to join in concord into one body, but each of us
chooses the solitary life, we will not serve the common good with coordinated
planning according to God’s good pleasure, but fulfill our own passion for
self-indulgence. When we are split off
and divided, how can we preserve the relationship and service of the members to
each other, or our submission toward our head, that is Christ? . . .
the one receives each of these [gifts of the Spirit, 1 Cor. 12:8-10] has
it no more for his own sake than for the sake of others. Consequently, in community life the activity
of the Holy Spirit in one person must pass to everyone together. So the one living by himself perhaps has one
gift, and he makes it useless because it is uncultivated, buried in the earth
within himself. This indeed involves
great danger, as all see who have read the Gospels. But when many live together, each indeed both
enjoys his own gift, multiplying it through sharing, and profits from the gifts
of others as his own (On the Human Condition, St Vladimir’s Seminary
Press, 2005, pgs. 120-1).
And
selfish individuals in the present, sundered from community, will likewise have
no love for their departed ancestors. Though
their labors have made our lives possible, we will neither remember them, nor
honor them, nor pray for them.
Tinkering
with Tradition
And
here we come to another profound point, the handing down of the patrimony of
our ancestors to present and future generations. Prof James K. A. Smith writes throughout his
book, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation,
that ways of thinking and acting are inculcated in people far more by the
physical rituals or liturgies we perform day by day than by intellectual or
rational study. Therefore, if our
Southern churches are constantly changing their modes of worship, exchanging
ancient rites for the fads of the day created with secular marketing
techniques, it is not ‘the faith which was once delivered unto the saints’ (St
Jude’s Letter, v. 3) that we will be receiving. And if this is how flippantly modernist
churches handle the Apostolic deposit, with how much less care will they handle
the traditions of our Southern forebears?
Church
and Culture
Though
politics grabs most of the attention, it is the churches we must be most
concerned with. For, as many are fond of
repeating nowadays, politics is downstream from culture. And culture, as T. S. Eliot reminds us, is
the incarnation of a people’s religious beliefs. Thus, if Southern churches teach us by word
or act that Americanism is our creed; the severed, autonomous individual is
paramount; that the creation/sacraments, community, and history, are of no
importance; that the old liturgies may be replaced with cushy theater seating,
rock bands, virtual campuses, and ‘obscene’ (to use Miss Flannery O’Connor’s
word) video screens that strive to give us a hit of carnal euphoria before
buying a cup of coffee at the Starbuck’s attached to the hideous architecture
of the ‘worship center’ - if this is what is being passed off to Southrons as
Christianity, then there is little hope that Dixie’s centuries-old culture will
survive. For its survival hinges on
retaining the ‘older religiousness’ Prof Richard Weaver dwelt much upon. If political separation from Washington City
and Greater Yankeedom is a good goal for the South (and many think it is), it
will have to be preceded first by a religious separation, by an escape from
Yankee Fundamentalism and other innovations, and a return to much older modes
of Christian thinking and worship - the very soil which gave birth to and has
nurtured the South all these many years.
--
Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England,
South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð,
unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
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