‘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!

‘Cause for Concern for Republicans in Louisiana’s Fifth Congressional District’

 

It is a given with most political observers that a Republican candidate will win Louisiana’s fifth congressional district election.  Still, we were left uneasy after watching PAR’s candidate forum (available for viewing on their YouTube channel).

Those participating were the following:  Senator Stewart Cathey, Misti Cordell, chairwoman of the Louisiana Board of Regents, Representative Mike Echols, Rep Gabe Firment, Dan McKay, attorney, and Rep Pat Moore.  Moore and McKay were the Democrats of the bunch.

Mr McKay disqualified himself pretty handily.  His answers to nearly every question were long and rambling and not very germane to the issues being discussed.

Sen Cathey and Rep Echols came across like robots programmed by conventional Republican advisors, mouthing some really worn out slogans and platitudes – Sen Cathey especially so.  They were also the two who seemed to lose sight of the fact that the 5^th district isn’t just a squiggly shape carved out of a monocultural blob on a map called America.  There actually is a unique Anglo-Celtic-French-African culture here in this part of Louisiana, in this part of the South, but you wouldn’t know that if you listened to Sen Cathey and Rep Echols.

Rep Firment turned himself into a one-trick pony, focusing too much on his insurance reform legislation.  We do give him credit for bringing God and Church into the discussion, however.  Too many people in politics want to make themselves autonomous from Christ rather than subordinate to Him.  Rep Firment’s mention of God’s guidance of His life was a refreshing departure from that.

Mrs Cordell also brought religion into the debate in her opening statement, calling herself a ‘woman of faith’.  But that was the end of it, which begs the question, faith in what or whom?  Zeus?  Allah?  Krishna?  The Holy Trinity?  That question was never answered, which is unfortunate.  If Republicans are going to bring up faith, they need to be confident enough to say clearly what they believe.  This kind of timid phrasing on something so important and foundational is about as pleasant to listen to as drinking a steaming glass of horse urine.

Mrs Cordell presented herself in classic outsider fashion, but unfortunately to such a degree that her amateurism would seem to disqualify her rather than promote confidence in her.  If someone is so bereft of political experience as she says she is, there is strong reason to believe that she will simply be overwhelmed by the lobbyists and others who make up the powerful Establishment in DC were she to win the election.

Which brings us to Rep Moore.  . . .

The rest is at https://thehayride.com/2026/10/garlington-cause-for-concern-for-republicans-in-louisianas-fifth-congressional-district/.

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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!

‘September’s Harvest’

 

The cool autumn air is chasing out

The heat of summer; the creation gladly

Rests therein.  Crickets fill the nighttime

With their gentle chirping.  The fruits of the earth

Ripen, gathered in by man and beast alike.

In this ninth month of the year, in September,

On the ninth day – a mystical number,

Denoting the ranks of the angelic hosts –

A harvest of holiness was garnered

Gladly from the Church of the Western Lands:

Ciaran the wonderful monk of Ireland,

Who died at thirty-three, like his Master;

Wulfhild, loving mother of English nuns;

 . . .

The rest is at https://www.newenglishreview.org/articles/septembers-harvest/.

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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 NEW New South’

 

Since the tragic fall of the Old South

To fanatic Yankee invaders

In the fiery revolution,

Her all-wise and virtuous conquerors

Have sought in many ways to re-mold

The Southern mind, to re-create

The Southern identity.

From the bounty of their over-flowing benevolence

Dixie has learned that her agrarian ways

Are an obstacle to the ostentatious wealth

Of rapacious industrialism,

That Southerners are racist to the core

And forever will be such subhuman brutes

In need of bureaucratic tutelage,

That her accent is a disgrace

To be discarded quick as can be,

And her noble and valiant leaders

A pack of lousy, lazy liars

Best left forgotten in the mildewed leaves

Of musty, rotting books and letters.

Oftentimes have Southerners accepted

The distortions of Yankee propaganda,

Yielding and bending into the preferred shape

Of the New South of the Northern dream.

But their victory was not complete

Despite some dismal, woeful times,

For we have seen the symbol of their defeat,

The sign of the birth of the NEW New South –

The Philokalia on the dashboard

Of a Southron’s banged-up pick-up truck.

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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 History of the Bible’

Jeff LeJeune opened the door to this subject with his thoughtful essay on St Jerome, so we thought we’d step on through it and expand a bit on the theme of the history of the Bible.

As Jeff said, a correct translation of the Holy Scriptures isn’t an optional extra for Christians.  Heretics have often twisted the meaning of Biblical passages to support their false teachings.  They are still doing this today as it regards things like LGBT identity. 

This really does have existential implications for man and his salvation.  It is imperative to have a right translation of the Scriptures.

Jeff presents St Jerome’s Latin Vulgate translation (4^th century A.D.) as the key moment in the history of Biblical translations, but it actually occurs much earlier and is more miraculous.

That moment takes us back to the 3^rd century before Christ, to Alexandria in Egypt and the writing of the Septuagint:

‘The Septuagint derives its name from a document called the Letter of Aristeas that purports to relate how the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek. According to Aristeas, King Ptolemy II of Egypt wished to enlarge the famous library of Alexandria with a copy of the Hebrew Scripture, but translated into Greek so that it could be understood. Accordingly, seventy (or in some accounts seventy-two) learned translators were dispatched from Jerusalem to Alexandria circa 280 B.C. Working separately on the island of Pharos, the seventy were later astounded to find that their translations agreed word for word and believed that the Holy Spirit must have inspired them.

‘From then on the translation was known as the Septuagint from the Greek word for the "seventy" (i.e. the seventy-two translators).  Hence, the Roman numeral LXX for seventy is often used as a modern shorthand way of referring to the Septuagint.’

The Holy Elder Simeon who held the Infant Christ in his arms was one of the 72 translators of the Septuagint, miraculously kept alive by the Lord, which would have made him over 200 years old (at the least) at that moment.  This gives extra poignancy to the prayer he offered during that encounter, ‘Now, O Master, let your servant depart in peace’:

‘An interesting tradition exists in the Church that St. Simeon, who embraced the forty-day old Christ Child in the Temple (see Luke 2:25-35), was one of the original translators of the Septuagint. Accordingly, he wished to translate the Isaiah 7:14 passage as "young woman" rather than "virgin," disagreeing with all the other translators on the grounds that it was illogical for a virgin to be with child. As a result, the Lord told him that he would live to see the event come about, which inspires his famous prayer, "Now, O Master, let your servant depart in peace..." when he holds the infant Messiah. Seeing the prophecy of Isaiah fulfilled, he "departs in peace" at the age of 276.’

The Church Fathers hold that the Septuagint is divinely inspired:

‘The Church extremely reveres the translation of the 70 — the Septuagint. St. Irineus thinks that the holy interpreters were as much inspired by the Holy Spirit, as the prophets and apostles (Irineus 3, chap.11, 4). St. Justin the Philosopher in his "Addressing to the Greeks," Tertullian, St. Cyprian, blissful Augustine, Clement of Alexandria call the translation of the 70 as God-inspired. St. Basil the Great calls it the most famous in the Church.’

 . . .

The rest is at https://thehayride.com/2025/10/garlington-the-history-of-the-bible/.

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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!