Who Is Enculturating Whom?

Orthodox enculturation of a land is the working whereby the Holy Ghost acts as a leaven within all the cultural spheres, great or small, of a people - cleansing them, perfecting them, filling them with Grace.  What emerges is a unique Christian culture, a combination of the unchanging Tradition of the Orthodox Church with the particular history of a particular tribe in a particular place.

What has happened in the States, however, as in so much else in their lives, is an inversion of the normal Orthodox way.  One all too often sees the spirit of worldliness invading and enculturating the Orthodox Church to its ways:  Many an Orthodox immigrant has been lured away from the True Faith for the less wholesome atmosphere of the Methodists, Baptists, etc. in order to fit in better with his Mammon-worshipping neighbors.  The clergy, too, falter at times.  The Encyclical for Independence Day (4 July 2018) of His Eminence Archbishop Demetrios of the Greek Orthodox Church of America is an ensample.  A couple of outtakes:

As we commemorate Independence Day, we are gathered in Boston for our 44^th Biennial Clergy-Laity Congress.  We are meeting in a city that has deep historical connections to the struggle for independence, a place where events supported the cause of liberty, and significant effort and sacrifice secured freedom and the birth of a new nation.

 . . .

We are blessed to live in a nation and society that values liberty and in a place where our freedom in Christ is joined with a freedom to worship, to minister, and to serve as we are led by God. We are free to work together as brothers and sisters in Christ, free to show and lead others to Him, and free to pursue the unlimited potential of our faith.  . . .

Source:  https://www.goarch.org/-/encyclical-of-archbishop-demetrios-for-independence-day-2018

Forgive us, but does His Eminence truly think that we are ‘free to pursue the unlimited potential of our faith’ in a place where same-sex ‘marriage’, pornography, transgenderism, abortion, suicide, casual marijuana use, and easy divorce are openly promoted?  In a place where most restaurants and work cafeterias ignore the fasting rules?  In a place where the typical company wage-slave could not attend the vast majority of weekday services of the Orthodox Church?  In a place where monasteries are so few in some areas that a drive of several hours is necessary to reach the nearest one?

Is it really wise for His Eminence to praise ‘the birth of a new nation’ that was conceived in Free Masonry, king hatred, and all manner of heresies?  Is it wise for His Eminence to uphold the false history of the war-mongering Pres Lincoln, the socialist Francis Bellamy, et al., that ‘America’ is ‘one nation, indivisible’?

Would it not have been better for His Eminence to praise kingship in general, and the saintly Orthodox kings and queens, princes and princesses, of all times and places, from England to Brittany to Romania and Georgia, in particular, whose lives fill up quite a thick book?

http://ibmgs.org/lives.html

(Early chapters available here:  www.orthodoxinfo.com/general/pious-kings-and-right-believing-queens-fr-james-thornton.pdf)

Would it not have been much more fitting for him to honor the heroic martyrdom of Tsar Nicholas II and the rest of the Russian royal family, which also happened on July 4^th (1918), rather than the birth of the nation that has done more than any other to overthrow the God-ordained institution of kingship, and whose actions have led to the slaying of thousands of Orthodox in Serbia, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Egypt, and the Ukraine, and the quiet policy of whose leadership is to crush any independence of a sister Orthodox country (Russia) and bring her back under the heel of the un-Christian Western political and financial Elite?

We are fairly certain His Eminence knows better.  We pray he will have the courage to say and do what he ought in the days to come, and I hope that he will also pray for me, an unworthy sinner.

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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 Cancer of Civil War Fabrication, Now and Then

Another year-day (anniversary) of the Battle of Gettysburg is upon us.  Paul H. Yarbrough shares some thoughts that start from that historical point and then go into the notion of a new civil war that is so much talked about at the moment:

https://www.prisonplanet.com/congressman-u-s-is-heading-towards-a-second-civil-war.html

https://www.prisonplanet.com/professor-civil-war-in-america-has-already-begun.html

The battle for control of government between opposite factions for the same government is the textbook definition of civil war. So be it. In 1863 Lincoln stated “we are now in the midst of a great (emphasis added) civil war, etc., to decide this and that etc.” To paraphrase H.L. Mencken----BS!  We were not, and never had been in the midst of a great CW then, any more than we were in 1775. And whatever kind of a war the 1860s brought, as Mencken pointed out, Lincoln had actually reversed the sides’ causes. “The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves.” H.L. Mencken

And seventy-five years earlier “we” had not revolted against a monstrous king and unilaterally declared a national independence in an effort to overthrow his government or throw the king out. Our 1776 Declaration was a summary decision of all (as each) after several had written and, in convention, signed and ratified their own declarations of independence: Rhode Island, New Hampshire, New Jersey, South Carolina and Virginia.

The July 4, 1776 act was one where seceding individual colonial governments chartered and standing under individual covenants of the sovereign crown authorized by a king (George III at the time) removed themselves as sovereign individual states (not a single consolidated state of 13) from the British Crown. These separate governments came together in unity to fight a war via a confederation as there was strength in numbers and thus signed a single document supporting such determination.

Today we are bombarded almost daily with the idea that “this country” is on the verge of civil war. Every T.V. channel I have had the misfortune to have on at some point has had some commentator yelp that he has never seen such a division in our country: “Almost civil war” he barks.

If we are now in the  midst of such a thing as some of our conspicuous (not prominent) pundits, experts, analysts, take your pick ..ad nauseam, shout, we are of 4 sides (a bit of history many of our history “scholars” leave out with their historical review, the fact that there were 4 major factions in the election of 1860—NOT simply Democrats and Republicans where the Republican were the gods against slavery and the Democrats were the “racists” of the day) with such fellows as Victor Davis Hanson, alleged historian, and his National Review Lilliputians claiming a conservative uniform and the Democrats-called liberals who never met a story they could not turn into political lucre, there remain those who, though disdainful of the above paradoxical bilateral allies, might agree with either on certain current issues should those Allies reveal any degree of integrity. This is the third (my) side. But back to this later. First, we must mention the fourth side.

I submit there is a fourth side though less tutored than any of the others, 1860 or now. Today, the fourth is the side of what might be called, “the man on the street.” The one occasionally whom is asked by a television anchor (for a time-filling tidbit): “Who was the first President of the United States?” The answer might come back (and usually does) as anyone from John Lennon to Dennis Rodman. One must have a certain amount of compassion for some of these people, as they have probably had a poor family life or were inculcated exclusively in public education--something akin to having syphilis. Sadly, however, they are a political class in our newfound twentieth and twenty-first century democracy as they have like every other warm body over the age of 18 been given (by government, not God) the “right” to vote.

I assume the Hansons, D’Sousas, Limbaughs, Kilmeades, Hannitys et al spent too much time in public schools. Or, maybe they never went to school—who knows. Who cares? I haven’t taken a poll but many of the third-siders spoke at the polls in November and voted (for those who did vote) for Donald Trump.

But Mr. Hanson et al, there is a storm brewing down South, at least among me and my friends. You can take your Neocons, your Establishment Republicans, your spurious conservatives (yes, small “c”) and your Donald Trump and bury them with your monument mischief in any hole you can find. Before you get my vote, I will help with a draft Hillary movement and vote for her over your candidates even if she’s in jail (where she should be0. And I will support a draft Lois Lerner as VP (wishfully Hillary’s cellmate). If your ancestral ilk can destroy the republic in 1865, me and mine can make the attempt to destroy your pretentious conservative sandbox in 2018.

Slavery was not an American South invention. African/American slavery largely developed as a cruel Christian concept (manstealing) and developed into a terrible Sub Saharan African diaspora where only 4% of those impressed ended up in the American South: the remainder in the American North, Brazil, The Spanish, British and French West Indies. Once scattered to the Western Hemisphere, as Jefferson later said, “we have the wolf by the ears,” (auribus teneo lupum). That would be the Union’s wolf, not the Southern part of the Union’s wolf.

Ultimately all slaves outside of the South were released through manumission (owners paid by the government). Apparently, the racist South had to be pillaged and burned by the Hanson et al ancestors in order for all God’s children to be freed. Hanson also manages to (as does Fox News with it histrionic history lessons) tell us Southerners what racist pigs we were and, his and its current musings indicate we still are.

That was the old civil war and its history, the above first two sides claim. But it is nonsense. It is now and, it always has been and, it always will be. The War Between the States was fought at least on one side (mine) by an honorable people who wanted to govern themselves and be left alone apart from national demons like you, your stripe and the British Parliament in 1776.

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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!

Off-Site Post: ‘The Religion of Americanism’

We have written of magick as one possible religious path that folks in the several States might walk in the future.  Another possibility is not a new religion but merely the strengthening of an already existing one:  the cult of Americanism.

Jay Dyer describes it this way:

American churchianity, and the West in general, are a giant atheism factory.  . . .  The rot of these institutions has many sources, the more theological of which, I outlined in my video on the Decline of the West.

As I’ve mentioned, the mass promotion of atheism lacks the power of any real hold on man’s heart because man is a god-worshipping being.   For the classical American Protestant, for example, the Constitution becomes the new inspired text, the “founding fathers” become the new church fathers, America becomes the new “city on a hill” slash mystical body of Christ, and the “invisible hand” of the free market is the new divine providence.  . . .

Source:  https://souloftheeast.org/2017/06/11/cia-ecumenism-religious-liberty-are-the-statist-sex-cult-of-jeroboam/

One could add to this.  The Constitutional Convention of 1787 is an Ecumenical Council.  Election campaign season, with its great physical and spiritual exertions, is Great Lent.  Presidential Election Day is Holy Pascha/Easter.  The regular working of the legislature, courts, etc. is the Divine Liturgy, where grace is mediated to the patriotic faithful through the sacraments of ‘constitutional’ laws, rulings, and so forth (unconstitutional = heretical, without grace).  Etc.

In other words, because Protestantism (ironically) puts God at such a distance from man, in the [u]nited States he has created a new god closer to him, the Messianic American nation, to worship and adore.  In this new religion, salvation lies in the perfect working of the American political system and in participating in that political life.

David Brooks declares this rather plainly:

 . . .

The rest is at https://usareally.com/437-the-religion-of-americanism

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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!