The number 250 is an arbitrary number for a Southerner. The life of our people did not begin in 1776, but in 1607. Dixie celebrated her 250th anniversary in 1857, though few probably paid it the attention it deserved due to the violence being threatened against Southrons by the Yankees at the time. We are now in our 419th year of continuous existence as an ethnos, far older than the federation of States that has been so extravagantly fussed over these last few weeks.
A much more meaningful tally for Dixie would be 161 – the number of years since her fall to the anti-Christian forces of the North at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia. This marked the fall of the force restraining the ungodly powers in the Northern States, which have since gone on to wreak havoc all over the world. As such, this number of years – 161 – belongs in the same category as others in Christendom, which denote the fall of similar restraining powers of ungodly armies and nations and ideologues to those demonic forces, to their captivity by them:
-489, the number of years Serbia was subjugated to the Muslim Turks (1389-1878). Serbia for years was a bulwark against the Turkish advance into Europe but fell after a heroic stand in the Battle of Kosovo in 1389.
– 573, the number of years that Constantinople, the New Rome, the Queen of Cities, has been in captivity to the same Turkish Muslims. Constantinople for centuries performed the same duty the Serbs did, protecting Christendom from incursions by anti-Christian forces: Persians, Arabs, Turks. She fell in 1453 to the enemies who had battered her for so long a time.
This is the company of the Southern people: those who fought to defend Christendom against those who sought her destruction, even to the point of their own exhaustion, defeat, and captivity (which includes more people, nations, kingdoms, etc., than those listed above). This is the meaning of the Southern people in history: a restrainer, like them, of the spirit of godlessness that the Holy Apostle Paul told us would come upon the world (II Thessalonians 2:1-7).
The Southern pastor Reverend James Henley Thornwell recognized this when he said midway through the 19th century, ‘The parties in this conflict are not merely Abolitionists and Slaveholders; they are Atheists, Socialists, Communists, Red Republicans, Jacobins on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battle ground, Christianity and Atheism the combatants, and the progress of humanity the stake.’
The Southern Agrarian writer Andrew Lytle affirmed this once again in 1988 when he said in an interview, ‘ . . . I felt, later on in life, that Agrarian was too restricted to just farming. What we were trying to defend was the whole cultural inheritance of Christendom.’
Others have said similar things.
Too many contemporary Southerners overlook this, having been hypnotized by the abstraction of freedom. They have been taught formally in school and informally through the rest of the cultural media the wretched formula that America = individual freedom. Thus, that which is worthy of celebrating on the 250th anniversary of the independence of the 13 colonies from Great Britain is only this isolated ideal of liberty.
But this is wrong on at least two counts. First, true freedom is experienced not apart from others but precisely in community with them:
‘Religious life is communal, from the Southern potluck after a Baptist service to the Trapeza after a Divine Liturgy, real religiosity is always expressed communally. Are you pursuing participation in that communal life or are you driven by individual preferences? If the former, the odds of you sticking with a major faith skyrocket.
‘Even America’s Founding Father’s knew that “we must, indeed, all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” The common Orthodox phrase “we go to heaven together and hell alone” captures this same underlying fundamental law of God’s creation that underlies the familial, cultural, religious and political spheres. True freedom exists solely in submitting oneself to a greater whole that creates the environment that enables the one to thrive. A wife submitting to her husband who built a home for her to flourish and be the familial heart is far freer than the Strong Independent Boss Babe approaching retirement age. A son living in his father’s house building skills and stacking cash to build his own future home instead of grinding to earn just enough to pay rent to Wall Street is far freer than those “liberated” at eighteen.’
Second, the freedoms that we know here at the South and elsewhere in the United States do not exist in isolation from the cultural inheritance that makes them possible. In other words, they are only possible within the matrix of the Christian and European (largely English) culture that gave birth to them in the first place. If we lose the cultural patrimony of our ancestors, we will also lose many of our freedoms. That is a truth emphasized strongly by Dr Russell Kirk in America’s British Culture and in other works of his.
Thus, we return to the theme with which we opened, the defense of Christendom. Southerners, like the Greeks, Serbs, and others, battled fiercely to prevent the forces of evil from running rampant in the world. We were unsuccessful at the time. But history is not at its end, nor has the South added her last thread to its tapestry. Even now, in her weakened captive condition, she is attempting to play her accustomed role of restrainer of evil within the United States, as the various States within her are passing laws to reintroduce mandatory readings from the Bible into their public schools, to ban abortion, to combat the LGBT cult, to implement realistic crime policies, and so on.
We have also seen how some of those captive Christian countries have been liberated and have resumed promoting the Christian Faith: the building of the magnificent Cathedral of St Sava in Belgrade, Serbia, for instance. And there are prophecies from holy men like St Kosmas (+1774) and St Paisios (+1994) that those who are still captive, like Constantinople, will eventually be liberated as well.
Southerners must therefore not lose hope, nor abandon the Christian Faith to worship the idols of abstract, selfish individual freedoms being presented to them this 250th anniversary year and every other day of their lives. For our defense of the Church we have fought and suffered much in the past; as her defenders let us finish our course in the world, whether we remain under Yankee domination or whether we are granted a separation from them from the Merciful God. This is the duty given to us by Christ our Immortal King and God, and, as every true Southerner will remember, few things in life are more sublime than duty.
The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily those of the Abbeville Institute.
