The American South has always been a collection of tight-knit communities rooted in family. The earliest settlers were often relatives or from neighboring European villages. From the very beginning, this was the case almost unilaterally in America. Families immigrated together and moved in unified collectives across desired locales across the colonies. The first families of Virginia were mostly descended from the same subset of ancestors and intermarried for nearly 300 years. The same can be said of the New England stock. The largest difference between New England and the South is how families organized themselves and their society. In the Northeast, families founded towns and developed congregational centers that created established institutions tied to familial legacy. However, in the South the structure consisted around family farms, churches, and traditional customs. These organizing principles replicated themselves as the country expanded and migrated westward. A distinct clan culture developed across America, particularly in the South. This was the basis of American society.
The Scots-Irish as America’s Covenant People
The clan is traditionally an extended familial unit that congregates together in a particular locale where they have been situated generationally. The ethnic group that historically exemplified this the most was the Scots-Irish who transplanted a legitimate clan culture rooted in ancient traditions. They, like the Puritans in New England and the pax-Germania in the Upper Midwest, defined an entire region in the U.S. and went on to influence several others.
Descended from Scottish who settled in Ulster, they were shaped by border warfare, clan loyalty, Calvinist theology, and a suspicion of distant authority. These experiences cultivated a culture that prized household sovereignty, covenantal bonds, and collective self-defense. In stark contrast to Yankee notions, communities were not built around abstract ideals but around interlocking families, churches, and farms. The family, not the isolated individual, was the primary unit of social, economic, and political life. Liberty depended on familial partnership rooted in land, faith, and mutual obligation. This familial structure directly informed political habits. Authority was respected when it was local, personal, and accountable; it was resisted when it was distant, arbitrary, or imposed without consent.
Theologically, the Scots-Irish influenced the American religious landscape as much or more so than the Puritans. Presbyterianism practically defined all of early America outside of select locations. Organized around elders rather than bishops, Presbyterianism habituated ordinary men to deliberation, representation, and rule by covenant. This ecclesiastical structure became a training ground for republican governance. Presbyterian church governance also reinforced clannish tendencies and expressed itself in the formation of covenantal communities. It is no accident that regions shaped by Scots-Irish settlement became strongholds of republicanism—suspicious of aristocracy, wary of centralized bureaucracy, and deeply committed to the rights of conscience and property.
The Scots-Irish did not merely contribute to American culture; they embodied a way of life in which freedom, faith, and family were mutually reinforcing. Clan culture held sway in much of these United States until WWII.
Our Postmodern Dilemma
All of this we are losing or have already lost. This entire conception, which is not uniquely American, but has taken on unique idiosyncrasies in our historical context, is threatened with extinction. It may be too late already, but there seem to be some gasps for breath in this tradition that provide hope of life.
The dilemma is threefold:
- We have forgotten who we are historically
- We have a distilled sense of community
- We have unfettered immigration
Most Americans today have a vague sense of what “American” means and it does not go beyond apple pie and the 4th of July. They have no historical conception of themselves as a situated people with a duty towards preservation. We no longer understand what our ancestors were doing here, what they created, and why it was good. This is largely due to being routinely told that our ancestors were bad people doing bad things, but it also is a reflection of an ambivalent culture that has engulfed the American mind. Historical consciousness has largely been replaced and quietly sedated by a genocidal media complex that wants you to think nothing and own nothing. What passes for culture in today’s “market” is pathetic and limp-wristed. We have replaced any meaningful cultural creation with profane entertainment. Inherited memory has suffered mass amnesia and psychosis, creating a people who cannot even remember what they did last week or why.
People have also become disconnected to where they are from by living in suburban jungles that disassociate you with the natural world and distort your image of meaning. Less people own land and are no longer generationally tied to it. Place, tradition, and custom have largely been set aside for convenience and commercialism. There is no sense of self or how one’s self resides within a situated communal setting. You are surrounded by people, but know nobody that well and none of your neighbors can be relied upon for help in your time of need. Very few people grow gardens in the backyard or frequent the local farmers market for their sustenance. Americans are vastly out of touch with the land of their inheritance and have no idea how to interact with land in any meaningful way. I am reminded of how much the Southern Agrarians, Richard Weaver, and Wendell Berry have spoken about this phenomenon.
Unfettered immigration (both illegal and legal) has destroyed any sense of authentic “nationhood” or the shared experience of a people. It was this shared experience and commonality of history that formed covenant communities and protected the posterity of the members. The influence of migrants creates an environment where it is harder to retain the influence of the clan and the homogeneity of local custom and culture for future generations. It is important to note that the peoples of the early Republic were diverse in their distinctions, but they were all from an inherited Christian tradition rooted in Western Civilization. And if they weren’t (such as African slaves or indentured servants), they were slowly grafted in by exposure to the Gospel and their covenantal relationship with their Anglo-American masters. Today, we no longer attempt this and the vast majority of migrants arriving in America are so culturally varied and hostile that they are impossible to graft into a larger Anglo-Protestant framework. We have allowed our posterity to be squandered and trampled over by third-world migrants and refugees who have no business stepping a hundred miles within American soil. Yet, we have allowed them to take up residence in our towns, infiltrate our local governments, and brow-beat us. Don’t mistake me for being heartless; I do feel sorry for many of these people whose countries are unstable and dangerous. But, they need to step up and invest in their own native lands, not move to mine and replicate their perverse “societies” next door. This has been made apparent in Europe where Muslim migrants have made rural English and French villages unfit and unsafe to live in. In America, the influx of migrants as a source of cheap labor; be it Latino, Muslim, or Indian, have set up shop in quaint cities, towns, and villages around the country, bringing their degrading practices with them. Natives, or Heritage Americans, are being forced out of their historic habitations because they don’t want increased crime and grime. Many younger Heritage Americans cannot afford to live in their hometowns or own property because the prices are too high or there are no options available as the government has bought up properties and distributed them as affordable housing options for these migrants. America surely is the greatest nation on earth when it turns away its own native population for a bunch of strangers who have barely been here for 15 minutes.
In order to reestablish a clan culture, we have to stop these destructive migration patterns and re-empower what many have coined “heritage Americans”; those whose families have been here generations, often prior to the Revolutionary War.
So, what can be done about our dilemma?
Curing Our Cultural Amnesia
M.E Bradford once stated: “We should learn from the political credo of the Venetians, who never forgot the history that had made them a special nation. To be a patriot is to embody our connection to the national bond through devotion to a “practice.” It is good to be enthralled by dogmas of the quiet past, remembering who and what we are.” He was right, potently right; and we failed miserably to heed his call.
We need to regain a true sense of our own history. Classroom textbooks and historical bestsellers are worthless. If you want to understand yourself and your home, start by talking to your older relatives, inquiring about stories from your family’s past. Genealogy is essential for reclaiming a clan culture. If you barely know the people you come from, you’re highly unlikely to fight to protect it. Go to the cemeteries where your ancestors are buried, visit historical sites near your area and cherish the memory of the events that took place there, learn your local history and take pride in the accomplishments of your people.
We must, once again, honor our past and heritage by remembering the men who historically stood firm and embodied the values of our tradition. And we must promote the men today who do the same. This requires cultivating such men for leadership and the transmission of cultural knowledge by simultaneously retaking existing institutions and creating alternative ones so virtue is protected, cherished, and encouraged.
We also must honor the things that made America and our regions what they are. We must deliberately remember and practice the customs, stories, and moral commitments that shaped America and its distinct regions. This is not a one-size-fits-all approach, but there remain enduring elements that create a shared patrimony worthy of protection and renewal. What bound historic America together was its Anglo-Christian identity. At our core, we are still a people defined by this past; a Christian inheritance that our ancestors expected us to steward well.
That is why the most paramount aspect of curing this amnesia is remembering and reasserting our Christian identity. Christianity undergirded all of Western Civilization, including the American republic and we must retrieve this above all else. We are a Christian people. The Christian religion is naturally dogmatic and by its dogma we must order our society and maintain moral standards that inspire a culture of repentance and regeneration. A Christian people are essential to ordered liberty because Christianity forms the kind of moral character that makes freedom sustainable. Political liberty cannot endure where there is no self-restraint, no reverence for truth, and no recognition of limits. This understanding guards against both anarchy and utopianism. It encourages governments toward covenantal faithfulness and obedience to a law higher than itself.
We cannot continue to alienate ourselves from our own heritage, it is time to embrace our past and reintegrate it into our present.
Land as Covenant
For most of American history, land was not primarily a commodity but an inheritance, something held in trust for descendants rather than optimized for short-term gain. Familial land ownership created continuity, customs, dialects, churches, and local economies survived because families stayed generationally invested. When land passes out of families and into absentee, corporate, or bureaucratic hands, culture thins. What replaces it is interchangeable space, not place. Land anchored memory and responsibility; it linked generations through labor and inheritance. To own land was to be answerable to the past and obligated to the future. It was tied to the Christian principle of stewardship. Farms, churches, burial grounds, and family homes were not interchangeable assets but repositories of meaning. Familial land ownership was the material foundation of America.
As land passed out of families and into speculative or corporate hands, this moral ecology weakened. Mobility increased, but continuity declined. The erosion of familial landholding undermined the very conditions that had made local self-government possible. When families become transient and rootless, politics becomes abstract, ideological, and brittle—no longer mediated by kinship or place. Traditionally, local self-government was grounded in kinship rather than distant administration. The early American republic assumed such mediating institutions would exist; liberty depended on them. Where families are strong and land is locally owned, authority remains close, accountability is personal, and politics is less ideological and more practical.
Recovering a healthy vision of family and familial partnership does not mean reviving every custom of the past. It means recognizing that strong families are pre-political institutions; they form citizens before governments ever legislate. When families are stable, intergenerational, and rooted in place, they create the conditions for ordered liberty. When they fragment, the state inevitably expands to fill the void.
This can easily be seen in the stark differences between urban/suburban environments and rural ones. More urban areas are composed of unrelated peoples and it’s a collection of disjointed, interethnic individuals. The government is larger and more involved because there’s little stability or hierarchy to naturally guide order. In rural areas, government is typically small and viewed with skepticism. The same families who have been in that vicinity for generations, sometimes hundreds of years, have cultivated stability, communal memory, and identity.
Preservation, then, is not merely aesthetic—it is political and moral. A culture of clans and small republics resists homogenization, protects inherited ways of life, and allows regional character to persist. In this sense, the preservation of America’s republican character is inseparable from the preservation of family as a durable partnership and of land as an inherited trust. Remembering that inheritance is not an exercise in nostalgia, it is a reminder that republics endure only where households do.
Defending the Clan, Rejecting the Stranger
In order to resurrect America’s clan culture, we have to exclude those who cannot be a part of it in any successful or meaningful way. We have to defend the clan. You would not allow some strange transient, speaking a foreign language into your home to stay for an unspecified amount of time amongst your wife and children. The same principle applies to immigration. It’s simply about protection and a defense of inherited culture. The egalitarian Marxists would have you believe that this is racism, nativism, and some great sin. Not so! It is simply a love of and devoted respect toward your own people that you are willing to say “No” to others in defense of and out of preference for your clan. It does not mean you think less of the stranger. This is a necessary habit to cultivate in order to establish any meaningful culture that can be preserved intact to future generations. Past generations in almost every western country understood this and took it for granted, but we officially abandoned this principle after WWII.
An opposition to this concept stems from the false notion that America is an “idea” or “melting pot”. The idea that somehow, as long as you believe in the abstract concept of equality and say the pledge of allegiance every morning, anyone from anywhere can become an American, is a fallacious notion and highly destructive to the preservation of localism and cultural identity. “Conservative” institutions have long paraded this concept to avoid an accusation of racism, but it is clear that this approach failed in so many ways and it’s largely the reason those who claim its mantle have conserved absolutely nothing of any consequence.
In order to have a defined culture that is rooted in historical experience and kinship, you have to be able to say “No” to others and those who are simply at odds with your inherited ways of being. Any people that fail to do this will become culturally ambiguous and then culturally rejected in their own native land by non-natives. We must put our kin and countrymen first, respecting and preserving their dignity and integrity. Only when we do this, will we rightly order our affections and restore America’s clan culture, reinstituting a covenantal bond between past, present, and posterity.
Conclusion
Psalm 74:20 states, “Have regard for the covenant, for the dark places of the land are full of the habitations of violence.” This particular Psalm likely references the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple during the Babylonian invasion in 586 BC. It is a cry to the Lord regarding national destruction, captivity, and exile. The psalmist is appealing to God’s faithfulness and asking Him to remember His people and deliver them from such tribulation.
We must address our dilemma if we have any notion of self-respect and preservation left. Restoring America’s historic clan culture is vital to confronting the three components I have discussed. Restoring clan culture does not mean romanticizing the past, but re-anchoring identity in households that endure across generations and see the preservation of homes, fields, cemeteries, and stories as a moral duty. It means asserting a Christian supremacy in our land, where our historic faith is cherished and valued in the public square. It means saying “No” to those who cannot belong and refuse to acknowledge who this country belongs to. Without these core values, which our forefathers cherished, we have little hope of reclaiming our heritage and retaining what is rightfully our inheritance.
It is time for Americans to remember who we are and why we are here; re-establishing kin and covenant for our sake and our posterity’s.
The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily those of the Abbeville Institute.
