Essays like Bruna Frascolla’s that reveal the links between the false religious beliefs that abound in the United States and their negative social and geopolitical effects are valuable things. But there are claims and generalizations in her essay that are patently wrong and in need of clarification. Doing so will aid in freeing the world from the delusional and dangerous US hegemony that she and others rightly denounce.
Let’s begin with her statement about US origins: ‘ . . . the United States is a country founded by Puritans.’ First, the US aren’t a single country. More on that later. Second, if one does a little looking, he will find that the earliest permanent English colony in North America was not in Puritan New England (first settled in 1620) but at Jamestown in non-Puritan, Cavalier Virginia (the progenitors of the Southern people) in 1607. The two colonies were manifestly different.
The people who first settled the South (or Dixie, as she is affectionately called by the people of that place) and gave her the main features of her culture were largely from southwest England, where rural farming life, hierarchy, large manors, few cities, and tradition in religion (high-church Anglicans) and politics (royalists) were highly valued (David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, New York, Ny., Oxford UP, 1989, pgs. 240-6).
Those who settled the New England States were quite the opposite. They came mainly from the southeast coastal counties of England, where industrialism, densely populated cities, equalitarianism, and rebelliousness in religion (Puritanism) and politics (Cromwellian roundheads) held sway (pgs. 42-9).
These cultural differences have continued down through the centuries and are still with us today, as seen in religious attitudes, voting patterns, speechways, etc., as ably demonstrated by Professor Fischer in the book cited and also in a documentary produced by the Abbeville Institute, a Southern heritage organization. It is thus a manifest error to lump all the States into the New England Puritan mold.
And this leads to another error by Miss Frascolla, that Unitarianism was wildly popular outside of New England. She claims at one point, ‘In the United States, however, there was no serious attempt to repress them: in the 19th century, the Unitarians took over Harvard and elected a president, John Quincy Adams,’ and then later, ‘Thus, the United States had nothing remotely similar to the Inquisition, and Unitarianism enjoyed the same freedom as any other religion. There is no room, in the institutional history of the United States, for the category of heretic. Nothing is heresy, everything is religion.’
The phenomenon of Unitarianism was mostly limited to New England. By 1833 Boston by herself had nearly 100 Unitarian churches, while the Southern States never had more than three (Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview, New York, Ny., Cambridge UP, 2005, p. 788; to anticipate an objection, for those who may be tempted to believe the caricature of the South as some kind of evil gulag for Africans, please don’t believe it. Many readers of web sites like Strategic Culture, Geopolitika, etc., will be familiar with the lies told about Chinese abuse of the Uighur Muslims; it is a similar situation with Southern slavery. At least be so curious as to read this and this). J. Q. Adams as a candidate was attractive mostly to the voters of the New England States. If not for the three other candidates in 1824 splitting the vote of the States of the South, the Mid-Atlantic, and the old Northwest, he would likely have lost, as he did in 1828. It wasn’t union-wide Unitarian sympathies that placed him in the president’s chair; it was an abundance of candidates for the position.
Furthermore, Southerners were keenly attentive to the existence of heresies, and sought to keep them out of their land. To quote but one line of what could be many: ‘During the War, southern preachers forcefully reiterated a long-standing theme: Atheism, apostasy, and heresy had corrupted northern society, weakening scriptural faith and piety, whereas southern society had resisted such evils and remained untouched’ (Genovese, p. 634). Likewise, some Baptist congregations in the western parts of Dixie, when it came to Unitarians, ‘resorted to expulsions’ (p. 788).
Miss Frascolla is correct in concluding that liberal ‘religious freedom’ leads to things like transgenderism and other sexual perversions, but this only serves once again to draw distinctions between the various cultural regions that exist within the US. New England is unsurprisingly a major proponent of the cult of sexual liberty, while conservative States in the South, the Great Plains, and elsewhere have passed laws to prevent gender transitioning of minors, ban LGBT-friendly books in public libraries, and so on.
These cultural divisions have repercussions outside the borders of the United States. Southerners are more habituated to look askance at foreign adventures. One of her sons, Henry Hughes of Mississippi, expressed well the Southern spirit of restraint in foreign policy when he wrote,
. . .
The rest is at https://www.geopolitika.ru/en/article/generalizations-about-us-hinder-geopolitical-advances.
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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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