Louisiana’s governor, Jeff Landry, has gotten his nose bent out of shape over the LSU women’s basketball team not showing proper respect for the ‘national anthem’. This is a monumental waste of time and energy. There are much more important things here in Louisiana he should be focused on (like the La. Legislature’s current session, to name but one). Besides that, there simply was no anthem for the [u]nited States prior to 1931. Why get your underwear bunched up over something that is such a novelty?
But it is worse than all that. All those songs that people consider in some sense to be national anthems of the uS are very worldly minded:
There is hardly any mention of God in them, and no mention of Jesus Christ a ’tall. And when God is mentioned, the invocation is inevitably tangled up with building the Kingdom of Man, not the Kingdom of God. Regrettably, as dear as the song ‘Dixie’ is to our people, its lyrics are also bereft of any real spiritual depth and value.
For the Christian Southern people, we must do better. We can, in fact, do much better. For there is a hymn to the Lord Jesus and His Life-Giving Cross, sung on the Third Sunday of Lent in the Orthodox Church (the Sunday set aside to honor the Cross of Our Lord midway through Lent) that would serve as a wonderful anthem for our people. The lyrics are as follows:
Come, O believers, let us venerate the life-giving Cross. For Christ, the King of glory, voluntarily extended His hands on it and raised us up to the original blessedness, after the enemy long ago had captured us with the bait of pleasure, and caused us to be exiled from God. Come, O believers, let us venerate the Cross, by which we have been granted to crush the skulls of our invisible enemies. Come, all you families of the Gentiles, let us sing hymns to honor the Cross of the Lord. “We salute you, O Cross, for you are the complete redemption of Adam who had fallen. In you our most faithful leaders boast, for by your power they have mightily subdued the foreign enemy. Now we Christians with fear and awe salute you with a kiss, and we glorify God who was nailed to you, and we say, ‘O Lord, who were nailed to the Cross, have mercy on us, for You are good and benevolent.’” (Source; music sheets for singing this hymn are here.)
This hymn resonates in powerful ways with themes dear to the Southern heart: salvation from sin and death, heroism, Christian leadership. In explaining the Sunday of the Holy Cross, the Church emphasizes these points while also drawing out others that Southrons can relate closely to (Eden/Paradise, heavenly joy, agrarianism, Resurrection, etc.):
As we have “crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Galatians 5:24), and will have mortified ourselves during these forty days of the Fast, the precious and life-giving Cross is now placed before us to refresh our souls and encourage us who may be filled with a sense of bitterness, resentment, and depression. The Cross reminds us of the Passion of our Lord, and by presenting to us His example, it encourages us to follow Him in struggle and sacrifice, being refreshed, assured, and comforted. In other words, we must experience what the Lord experienced during His Passion - being humiliated in a shameful manner. The Cross teaches us that through pain and suffering we shall see the fulfillment of our hopes: the heavenly inheritance and eternal glory.
. . .
The rest is at https://identitydixie.com/2024/04/13/a-christian-anthem-for-dixie/.
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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!
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