American Blasphemy

Reading a little bit of history is instructive.  For instance, one can learn about what Christians experienced living under Muslim rule.  A new martyr from Epirus in Greece named Nicetas was tortured horribly for criticizing Islam: 

 
‘He departed to the villages surrounding the towns of Serai and Drama, where he castigated the villainous Ottomans, declaring his faith in Christ and condemning the false religion of the sordid Mohammed. Apart from this he distinguished between the mystery of the incarnation of Christ and the falsehood of the prophet Mohammed.  Since the blessed one taught all these things, he was put in jail.  There they burned him in the abdomen with fire; they put a crown of thorns on his head; they stuck reed splinters under his fingernails; they hung him upside-down and scorched his private parts. Then they led him away, thrashing and striking him, until they finally hanged him.  He met his end on February 19, 1809.’ 
 

It is written that he underwent these trials because he ‘was troubled by his thoughts. He always recalled that his ancestors were secret Christians, but on the surface they pretended to be Moslems. For this reason he resolved to be a martyr for Christ’ (Slain for Their Faith: Orthodox Christian Martyrs under Moslem Oppression, Leonidas Papadopoulos, Ellensburg, Wash., 2013, p. 181). 
 

Such was life under Muslim blasphemy laws (and so it remains).  Thankfully, such an oppressive system does not exist in the United States.   
 

Or does it? 
 

Since Lincoln’s unholy war, the United States have acquired a fanatical civil religion whose faithful members are quite ready and eager to spread it around the world and stamp out what they consider evil at home and abroad with all manner of coercive and destructive tools and methods.  The sociologist Robert Bellah has written some notable things about it: 
 

‘In 1967, Robert N. Bellah, an internationally known scholar on religion, published an article entitled “Civil Religion in America.” In it, he argued that the United States has a civil religion that is separate from any one specific faith system. General hallmarks of the faith include the idea that there is a God (or Divine Power) to whom we are accountable for our actions and that we have a (divine) purpose to fulfill. “The American civil religion,” Bellah says, “is not the worship of the American nation but an understanding of the American experience in the light of ultimate and universal reality.” Bellah goes on to argue that American civil religion has its own saints (e.g. George Washington), martyrs (e.g. Abraham Lincoln), holy days (e.g. Memorial Day), and symbols (e.g. the flag).’ 
 

This American civil religion underlies what Dr Clyde Wilson describes as the Proposition Regime: 
 

‘Lincoln defined America as a Proposition and defended his war of conquest as the means of preserving the government that was allegedly upholding that Proposition. He was not speaking for traditional American constitutionalism and republicanism or for the America that had been known up to that point. He appealed most strongly to the revolutionary agendas of three particular groups among Americans: profiteers who stood to benefit from a protected market and a highly centralized capital-friendly government; New Englanders, who, from their very beginning as a self-proclaimed Shining City Upon a Hill, had endowed America with a unique and sacred missionary role in history, under their direction; and German immigrants and other national unification state-worshipers, bastard offspring of the French Revolution, who had achieved a considerable ideological transformation of the North during the 1850’s. 
 

‘Together, they created the Proposition Regime—resting upon appealing inventions about an America of endless prosperity and progress, and uniquely virtuous violence in stamping out the grapes of wrath. These types are still in power today.’ 
 

Is it right, though, to equate life under this Regime to life under a Muslim theocracy?  A social observer as astute as Alexis de Tocqueville seemed to point toward similarities, and this before Lincoln’s war: 
 

‘Fetters and headsmen were the coarse instruments which tyranny formerly employed, but the civilization of our age has perfected despotism itself, though it seemed to have nothing to learn.  . . .  Such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved.  The master no longer says, “You shall think as I do, or you shall die”; but he says, “You are free to think differently from me, and to retain your life, your property, and all that you possess; but you are henceforth a stranger among your people. You may retain your civil rights, but they will be useless to you, for you will never be chosen by your fellow-citizens, if you solicit their votes; and they will affect to scorn you, if you ask for their esteem.  You will remain among men, but you will be deprived of the rights of mankind.  Your fellow-creatures will shun you like an impure being; and even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you, lest they should be shunned in their turn.  Go in peace!  I have given you your life, but it is an existence worse than death.” 
 

‘ . . . But the ruling power in the United States [i.e., the numerical majority—W. G.] is not to be made game of.  The smallest reproach irritates its sensibility, and the slightest joke which has any foundation in truth renders it indignant; from the forms of its language up to the solid virtues of its character, everything must be made the subject of encomium.  No writer, whatever be his eminence, can escape paying this tribute of adulation to his fellow-citizens.  The majority lives in the perpetual utterance of self-applause; and there are certain truths which the Americans can only learn from strangers or from experience’ (Democracy in America, Book I, XV, edited and abridged by Richard Heffner, Signet Classic, New York, New York, 2001, pgs. 117-8). 


 
De Tocqueville has aptly described the unspoken blasphemy laws that citizens of the United States live under today:  often not strictures that lead to physical harm – though the latter does happen at times – but what Rod Dreher calls soft totalitarianism, when life is made increasingly difficult as one is cut off from various necessary institutions like banks or schools because of the opinions one expresses and/or the beliefs one lives by. 
 


How much like St Nicetas’s life, then, is the Southern experience in this regard!  How many of us, or our parents, etc., like his parents, mouth devotion to the idol of Yankee Americanism while we secretly live as Southerners and Christians?  How many Southerners, for expressing their love for their Christian ancestors, for defending statues and other monuments dedicated to honoring their memory, for criticizing some aspect of the Declaration of Independence or the federal constitution, for revealing uncomfortable truths about figures like Cotton Mather, Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, et al., for voicing opposition to the American Empire’s unnecessary and unjustifiable wars of conquest, and so on, have been either physically assaulted or labeled horrible names – racist, traitor, unpatriotic, and the like? 


 
This being the 250th anniversary of the independence of the States from Great Britain, the pressure from the votaries of Americanism to worship at the altar of their Golden Calf will be more intense than usual.  We have noticed something encouraging to counter this gloominess, however.  The young folks of the South we have been meeting lately are more open to identifying as Southerners, to learning about and enjoying the culture of their forefathers and mothers here in Dixie, to – in the words of St Nicetas’s biographer – ‘castigating the villainous Yankees, declaring their faith in Christ and condemning the false religion of the sordid American civil religion.’  May the Lord grant them, and the rest of us Dixie folk, the courage of St Nicetas to do precisely those things all the days of our lives.