Building Upon a Southern Ethnos Through True Faith

Delivered at the 3rd annual conference of the The Philip Ludwell III Orthodox Fellowship.

The theme of our gathering today seems a hefty one, so I’m gonna take a stab at connecting the dots between some of those points and my particular focus, while always keeping in mind the Fellowship’s guiding mission as described by co-founder Clark Carlton: “to facilitate the evangelization of the South by exploring the ways in which the traditions of the Orthodox Church can be enculturated here and now.”

Just what it is about Virginia, our namesake Philip Ludwell III, and Southern culture which are, again according to Carlton, “expressive of the eternal verities [of] the true, the good, and the beautiful” and are “capable of being baptized and becoming bearers of an authentically Orthodox tradition”? So, let’s begin with a definition.

What is a cradle? The simple answer, of course, is a bed for a baby. But cradle can also be “a place of origin or nurture,” with other uses of the word meaning “a supporting and protecting framework.” That is precisely what Virginia was and still is at its roots: a source of cultivation when we Americans were mere babes, and an inheritance that spawned our growth and still provides our shaping, even if we don’t always know or recognize it.

According to the Abbeville Institute’s documentary Virginia First: The 1607 Project: “Virginia, more than any other state, forged what most people throughout the world considered to be an ‘American’ culture. She was the home of presidents, jurists, and statesmen, explorers and adventurers, and some of the greatest military heroes in American history.”

“Her sons established the first permanent English foothold in America, blazed trails to the west, mapped the seas, drafted the founding documents, crafted our debates over the powers of the Supreme Court and the general government, provided the foundation for the Bill of Rights, established representative government, dominated the origins of American music, free religion, and the writing of history. America, as we know it, would not exist without Virginia.”

As educator Lyon Gardiner Tyler, son of US President John Tyler, wrote: “The United States of America are mere words of description. They are not a name. The rightful and historic name of this great republic is Virginia.”

The Virginia Constitution was the first written constitution adopted by the people’s representatives in the history of the world. Virginia’s General Assembly, once known as the House of Burgesses, is the earliest English-speaking and most enduring legislative body in the Western Hemisphere. Its first gathering took place in Williamsburg in 1617 when the governor and representatives met in the choir of the brick church at Jamestown. This was three years before the Puritans even landed in Massachusetts Bay.

The 1607 Project poses the question: “What if Virginia, rather than New England, provided the model of American cultural and political development?” Their answer: Yes, adding that “Virginia should be the American sun, the ‘lamp of experience’” especially in our “world of destructive political and historical innovation.”

Historian Brion McClanahan says: Virginia “is looked at as deficient and defective by the modern standards … which says something more about the establishment of us moderns than it does about them old dead white guys.”

“Southerners love home,” remarks McClanahan. “This is true of many people throughout history, but place has, in part, defined the South. The earliest settlers to what became the South championed its … physical qualities: warm weather, a long growing season, bountiful plant, and animal life. Bad weather, disease carrying insects, and dangerous wildlife were annoyances to be tolerated if not overcome.”

“Southern culture easily developed in this environment,” he continues. “A worldview in which ‘heaven’ could be perceived on earth allowed the Southerner to find contentment. People, place, and community – a defense of hearth and home – became quintessential Southern traits … because Southern culture is unique and tangible, a thing to be savored not endured.”

As St. John of Kronstadt said, you can love your earthly homeland which “raised, distinguished, honored, and equipped you with everything,” while simultaneously recognizing that such attachment does not dwarf your “special love for the … holy, righteous, and incorruptible … heavenly homeland.” It’s all about balance.

Philip Ludwell III’s home was Green Spring, located 13 miles outside of Williamsburg. On December 28, 1716, he was born at this Tidewater plantation which had become part of his family’s story when his grandfather married the powerful widow Lady Berkeley. Green Spring wasn’t just historically integral as the former estate of Governor William Berkeley, it had also been the meeting place (from 1676 to 1685) of Virginia’s governing assemblies after all of Jamestown’s state houses burned down during Bacon’s Rebellion.

It was an aristorcractic culture into which our Ludwell was thrust and one in which there were rules of conduct for each person’s civic roles and family responsibilites. These traditions didn’t come out of thin air; they were instilled in Virginians in an effort to hang on to the ways of the mother country.

In keeping with those values, Virginia’s Anglicans saw attending church as a devotional act. Liturgies were short and homilies even shorter, with each gathering followed by a grand after-service feast. To these “little-o” orthodox Anglicans, faith was more about communal but quiet devotion, as opposed to the the lecture-heavy long sermons of the Puritans.

“The early Virginians were a practical and economic people, no less religious than their Puritan counterparts, only they were rooted in the land and looked to history and custom rather than reason, emotion, or revelation as their political guide,” explains educator Allen Mendenhall.

According to Encyclopedia Virginia, the Virginia Company of London “took seriously their obligation to provide for the religious instruction and solace of the colony’s settlers” and continued to assist in supporting Jamestown’s religious life up until the company’s dissolution in 1624 when Virginia then became a royal colony. But it wasn’t until 1619 that the Church of England was formally established by the House of Burgesses and “prescribed penalties for violating the moral laws of scripture.”

Our Ludwell was the the son of an influential Burgess, grandson of the first royal Governor of Carolina, a cousin of Martha Washington, and sister to Hannah Harrison Ludwell who (along with her husband Thomas Lee, the great-uncle of Robert E Lee) built Stratford Hall, where some of y’all visited yesterday.

Shortly after his graduation from William & Mary and his marriage to Frances Grymes, herself the granddaughter of a Virginia governor, Ludwell traveled to London where he was received through chrismation into the Orthodox Church on December 31, 1738, making him the first known Orthodox convert in the Americas. I heard a recent homily in which the priest explained that it was Ludwell “being introduced to and reading of Church history that interested him in Orthodoxy.” I can relate.

Back in Virginia, Philip immersed himself in civic affairs, serving as speaker in the House of Burgesses and in the Royal Governors Council, and at one point helping to commission a young George Washington as a colonel in the Virginia militia.

Philip took a risk with Orthodoxy since it was illegal to convert away from Anglicanism. Therefore, he practiced his faith in secrecy and solitude, although Philip was sent back to Virginia with a reserve of the Gifts (the precious body and blood of Christ), inspiring some to hypothesize that he may have been ordained a subdeacon.

Philip’s curiosity about Orthodoxy could’ve been a trap of the English, so it was also a risk for Fr Stephen Ivanovsky, the priest who served at the London parish. But fortunately, for Philip, his three daughters (who were eventually chrismated in 1762), and for all of us, the priest seemingly sensed Philip’s sincerity in “seeking the True Faith” and got the blessing of the Synod of Moscow to bring him into Holy Orthodoxy.

It’s thought there may have even been a chapel on the Green Spring property, since a mystery building “facing due East” was discovered there during archaeological excavations and whose “purpose and use” has never been ascertained. “Given Ludwell’s demonstrated Orthodox Christian piety,” writes scholar Nicholas Chapman, it’s possible “this could be the first Orthodox chapel in North America.”

It’s also postulated that in Philip’s Williamsburg home, there may have been an Orthodox chapel since the “basement contains an apse-like indentation facing east, an element that probably undermines the structural integrity of the building.” Furthermore, there’s newspaper documentation of visitors from Lebanon, Syria, and Greece to the Williamsburg area during these years, so some further postulate that there may have been Orthodox services held in Ludwell’s home.

But what we do know for sure is that Philip translated into English a catechism, three Liturgical services, prayers, and other texts. Also blessed by the Holy Synod of Russia was his translation of St. Peter Mogila’s Confession, a work “produced in reaction to the efforts of the Jesuits and Western reformers in the Polish-dominated areas of Old Rus.”

Philip died in 1767, well before the War for American Independence began, before the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom disestablished the Church of England in 1786, and before the Unitarian, Transcendental, Rationalist, and Dispensational philosophies forced their way down South over the following century.

During his time, Ludwells’s Virginia was thoroughly Cavalier, with a capital C, and is defined as “one of the court party in England in the time of Charles I … a Royalist, contrasted with a Roundhead,” whose definition is: “a Puritan or member of the Parliamentary party who wore his hair short – so called in derision by the Cavaliers who wore ringlets.”

New Englanders saw “King Charles I as Pharaoh, the Atlantic Ocean as the Red Sea, America as the Promised Land, and Boston as the new Jerusalem,” wrote Jewish scholar David Ariel, who claimed that the Puritans sought to create a new society – what he called the “Hebrew Republic” – based upon a mixture of Renaissance humanism and the social and economic ideals of the Old Testament.

This was, of course, in direct contrast to the ethos of Virginia’s Cavaliers who viewed the anti-monarchical and pro-dictatorial Roundhead leader Oliver Cromwell as the farthest thing imaginable from Moses, especially after his beheading of King Charles I.

In fact, Virginia was so loyal to the crown that when the English monarchy was restored in 1660 after Cromwell’s short-lived republican governance of the British Isles, King Charles II called her the “Old Dominion” as thanks. Moreover, many Cavaliers had fled to Virginia during and the English Civil War, thus, strengthening the Colony’s already distinct ethnos.

“The cultural differences … and mutual antagonism … that existed even among these British peoples [in the Colonies] were real, significant, and enduring,” writes historian Tom Woods. While Virginian William Byrd II said of the Puritans that “a watchful eye must be kept on these foul traitors” and Quakers called New Englanders “the flock of Cain,” Puritans asserted that Virginians were “the farthest from conscience and moral honesty of any number together in the world.”

“Our enemies are a traditionless and a homeless race,” Jefferson Davis wrote about the North, illustrating the sectional divide still present in the 1860s. “From the time of Cromwell to the present moment they have been disturbers of the peace of the world.” And I would argue that we can still feel that friction today.

So, that leads me to the perennial head-scratcher: What is the South?

Poet Allen Tate said that prior to the War Between the States, the South was America’s only European civilizational order, rooted in both the material of soil but the non-material of virtue, duty, and honor.

“The great M.E. Bradford … defined the South as ‘the expression of a vital and long-lasting bond, a corporate identity assumed by those who have contributed to it,’” notes historian Clyde N Wilson. “He was aware when he wrote that, most Southerners no longer live on the land but was suggesting that the bond, an ancient way of being, still had life.”

What is a Southerner? According to Wilson: “Like all human people, Southerners arise from a particular history and geography. But being Southern is essentially a matter of soul. I know I am Southern. You know you are Southern. We know it in other people when we see it.”

He adds, “And we know that being Southern means we share assumptions and attitudes that many other Americans do not know and do not understand and often intensely object to.” And so goes the Southerern saying: They hate us cuz they ain’t us.

Well, what in tarnation is a Yankee? According to McClanahan, “A Yankee is a particular breed of person who believes that everyone should live as he does, and if not, he will force you to bend to his will.”

“By Yankee, I do not mean all Americans who are not Southern,” notes Wilson. “I know half a dozen Italian-Americans who are simpatico with the South” while Yankees “are creatures of material (money) and abstractions.” The online mantra “A people not an economic zone” represents his latter point well.

He continues: “Consider the insistence that America is a ‘proposition nation’ and anyone who agrees with the proposition is an American.” This proposition is the “slogan [that] ‘All men are created equal.’ Now that is a very good idea that should govern the behaviour of Christians toward other human persons. But there cannot be any such country. What is happening here is that the slogan gives power to those who see themselves as entitled to interpret it.”

This “slogan” is rooted in the abstraction of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address which began: “Our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”  This was obviously a reference to the Declaration. But while Jefferson was referring to natural rights, Lincoln was pushing pure egalitarianism.

This is where some get the idea that “Orthodox America has a Lost Cause problem, one which distorts both United States history and the tenets of the Orthodox Church in order to marginalize, exclude, and even to endanger members of its own flock.” That’s an actual quote from the first hit piece against the Fellowship. It was also asserted that our missionary organization is “a threat to the integrity” of our “fragile American democracy.”

Sure, these tropes are both highly irresponsible and easily mockable, but really, those who push them should be pitied and prayed for. Afterall, the hatred is not in what we are, but in what they are.

Nevertheless, I cite this because it exemplifies not only the “proposition nation” and what a maleable and amorphous ideology it is, but also how those who use it can manipulate the contradiction for their own benefit. As scholar Thomas Fleming rightly points out, ideologies are simply “systems that allow people not to think.” That’s dangerous business.

This widely accepted false proposition that “America is an idea” (and one elites claim is just downright unassailable) is due to presentism: an intellectual, social, and spiritual malady which strickens too many folks with the inability to reflect honestly on the past, themselves, and society. C.S. Lewis called it “chronological snobbery,” but all it really is is pride.

As my patron Saint, Ilia the Righteous of Georgia, said: A nation that forgets its own history “is like a beggar who neither knows his past nor where he is going.” For his love of country and advocacy for Georgian tradition, he was assassinated in 1907 by Social-Democrats.

History isn’t just about thinking; it’s about understanding. Thankfully, Orthodoxy encourages in us meekness and mercy, humility and love. Moreover, our faith instructs us to honor and pray for the dead, and practice gratitude toward our ancestors.

This brings me to the word crucible. It’s defined as “a pot … used for melting substances which require a high degree of heat.” So that works for our contention that Virginia is where American identity was forged.

But crucible can also mean “a severe trial or test.” In his speech from last year’s conference, Carlton said civic iconoclasm is an “attack on the cult of the dead” and is in direct defiance to Orthodoxy’s “sacrament of remembrance.” He explained this “demonic dichotomy” of the secular and sacred through the “excorcism” of the Charlottesville Robert E Lee monument which was ritualistically melted down. “The message here is that our ancestors are no longer a part of the community, no longer part of the American story,” he said.

The heathen rage, but their Schadenfreude isn’t satiated merely by razing statues, rewriting history, or renaming roads, schools, and military bases. It’s a ghoulish and ghastly permanent revolution aimed at erasing memory through material destruction.

Case in point: My family how now attended three reinterments of Southern dead, two of whom were military veterans. In 2021, we traveled to Tennessee, where Nathan Bedford Forrest and his wife Mary Ann were laid to rest after his monument and their bodies (which were both buried at the foot of the statue) were officially removed from Memphis – but only after barbarous radicals had already attempted to dig up the caskets up with their own garden shovels.

Then in 2023, we attended yet another reinterment: that of our ancestor A.P. Hill, whose body was buried beneath his monument in Richmond until it was deconstructed by the nihilistic powers that be. In fact, it was during this trip to Culpeper for Hill’s reburial that we decided to take a jaunt to Arlington National Cemetery to see Moses Ezekiel’s Reconciliation Monument.

For 109 years, the stunning statue was located just 36 minutes northeast of here till it was illegally removed two days before Christmas 2023. The monument served as the famous sculpture’s headstone, as well as the graves of 6 of his 10 VMI classmates, who fought alongside him but perished at the Battle of New Market.

The macabre madness is even more amplified because the monument with it’s pro-peace inscription from Isaiah was initially dedicated to heal the wounds of war. In 2027, it will supposedly return to Arlington, along with “interpretive panels” to “contextualize,” of course. But whatever you think of Confederates, no serious Christian should condone such gnostic acts as these.

The word ethnos is Greek for “nation” and refers to a collective united by the bonds of borders, language, culture, tradition, and religion – a “people, tribe, or group” sharing the tangible building blocks of customs and kinship. Such distinctions can create an an organic society: a fraternity uniting parts which are distinct. This is a time-intensive process that cannot be created or forced by sheer will of man.

Lincoln liked to say that both sides involved in the Late Unpleasantness “read the same Bible and pray to the same God.” But “Northerners were by and large atheistic toward the Southern God,” writes Jon Harris in his book Sacred Conviction (published under his pseudonym). Notably, “King’s Chapel in Boston became the first American church to adopt a Unitarian liturgy” and that was in 1785!

By the 1860s, the North wasn’t just brimming with Unitarians but also European rationalism and High Criticism, Humanists, Universalists, Transcendentalists, Quakers, Shakers, and utopian schemes like the Oneida Community and Brook Farm. According to Harris, the “belief that man is innatetly good and morally perfectible through education and social reform” was common up yonder, where “Reason was placed above revelation, with the result being man’s devaluation” and the “notion that man was not much different than an animal.”

Author Eugene Genovese observed that: “the political ramifications of the Southern Christian theology were enormous. For at the very moment that the Northern churches were embracing theological liberalism and abandoning the Word for a Spirit increasingly reduced to personal subjectivity, the Southern churches were holding the line for Christian orthodoxy.”

However, Tate bemoaned that even though there was a “common historical myth” and “a religious life” among Southerners, their Christianity was … utterly disorganized.” It was “a feudal society” with customs stemming from a biblical moral code, yet the South was “without a feudal religion” and its “religious mind was inarticulate, dissenting, and schismatical.”

Writer Gary Potter concurred, noting: “Even the ‘High Church’ Episcopalianism exemplified by Bishop [Leonidas] Polk and embraced by President [Jefferson] Davis was not very widely practiced by ordinary Southerners” by the 1860s. “Instead, too much of the South adopted, as Tate put it, ‘the Teutonic Puritanism of the New England textile manufacturers.’”

“The result was tragic,” Potter said. “Without the religion to support and sustain its civilization, the South, it can be said, lost the War Between the States even before the first shots were fired.”

The South’s increasingly disjointed religious beliefs are why journalist H.L. Mencken disparagingly pegged it “the Bible Belt.” Writer Flannery O’Connor famously remarked, “I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn’t convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God.”

When asked why Southern writers have a habit for writing about freaks, she replied, “I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological.”

It is these blurry but still-present and ever-valuable characteristics of the Southern ethnos that “predispose Southerners to receive the revelation of the fullness of the Gospel, to be found only within the embrace of the Holy Orthodox Church.” Like Jim Jatras said during his speech at last year’s conference: “When an ethnos dies, or is killed, the submerged components that led to its formation in the first place may unexpectedly stagger back into view.” So let’s focus.

Once upon a time, Orthodoxy was not Greek. Then, it was grafted in. Now, one cannot imagine Greece without Orthodox Christianity. During my family’s visit to Greece earlier this year, I hiked to the top of Aeropagus Hill, from where St Paul preached to the pagan Greeks. During this sermon, he noted the multiplicity of altars as a way to connect with the Athenians as an already-religious people. Initially, they listened intently but then cut St Paul short and began mocking him when he proclaimed Christ’s Resurrection and the coming Judgment of the World.

“The apparent failure of his speech, the lofty scorn, the haughty air of amused tolerance” of the Greeks “weighed on the sensitive nature of the Apostle,” wrote Henry Vollam Morton in his 1936 book In the Steps of St Paul. “Yet history has shown that Christianity has never been more triumphant than in apparent failure. The seeds had been sown.

“Paul could not know, as he gazed up at the temples on the Acropolis, that the day would come when the mighty Parthenon would be consecrated as a Christian Church dedicated to the Mother of God.” Nor could he know that a man named Dionysius, whose heart was softened by Paul’s preaching, would become Dionysius the Aeropagite, an eventual bishop, martyr, and Saint.

Let’s consider the patron of our host parish this weekend, St Herman. He and his seven monastic brothers generally “found a warm reception” amongst large swaths of Aleuts during the Russian Church’s missions to Alaska. Instead of imposing something seemingly foreign on the Aleuts, these early missionaries recognized and adapted some of the existing spiritual concepts of the natives, thus perfecting in the light of Christ those cultural qualities.

That is what we aim to do here in the Southland: serve the Church’s evangelistic mission among our neighbors by promoting the enculturation of the Orthodox faith into the South’s unique ethnos, no matter how faint or forgotten. To infuse and redeem the good, and then offer it all up to Christ; to point people back to Him; to bring those who are Christ-haunted through Orthodoxy back to God.

The Russian traders and settlers in Alaska often persecuted the natives, who were then defended by the missionary monks, while “many of the pagan shamans opposed their message and sometimes stirred up the people against them.” Consequently, “the Priest-monk Juvenaly was killed in 1796, becoming the First Martyr of North America,” explains the St Herman’s website.

We today also have our own “pagan shamans,” settlers, and commercial interests who push back against our missionary project of baptizing and blending the good of what’s here, and some of our natives are not near as receptive as were the Aleuts. Nevertheless, we persist and leave it all in God’s hands.

As my father confessor continually reminds me, struggles are providentially put in our life for our salvation. Likewise, the quintessential Virginian, Robert E Lee, said: “I think it is better to do right, even if we suffer in doing so, than to incur the reproach of our consciences and our posterity.”

Do we want a “Holy Dixie,” as my friend Ben Dixon put it? Yes! But Southern Orthodoxy isn’t our Tower of Babel and we sure don’t want to “Americanize” anything. Instead, the hope is that the Fellowship inspires a holistic approach which regenerates the South’s pious particularities back to the sacramental needs that it has for so long been lacking. This is about conforming our lives to the moral world around us – to the natural and mystical Trinitarian law – not reconfiguring the world to our desires.

I’ll end with what the great Lynyrd Skynyrd prophet and genuine North Florida cracker Ronnie Van Zant said of his song Simple Man, “It’s a prayer … we were writing for people like us who needed reminders to live true, love loud, and never forget where you came from.” That’s why we remember Philip Ludwell III, rally the Virginians back to their ethnos, and as Carlton explains, try “to understand all the ways in which we ourselves have been shaped by our history and … consider the ways in which this complex story – our story – enables us to respond to and live according to the Gospel today.” It’s really pretty simple.

The views expressed at AbbeilleInstitute.org are not necessarily those of the Abbeville Institute.

Dissident Mama

Truth warrior, Jesus follower, wife, and boy mom. Apologetics practitioner for Christianity, the Southern tradition, homeschooling, and freedom. Recovering feminist-socialist-atheist and retired mainstream journalist turned domesticated belle and rabble-rousing rhetorician. A mama who’s adept at triggering statists, so she’s going to bang as loudly as she can.

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