 Texas’s State legislators deserve a lot of praise for consistently writing and passing legislation, especially over the last few years, that aims to strengthen the Christian Faith in their State. It is precisely these efforts that have caused the anti-Christian opposition to reveal itself so completely. The Texas chapter of the ACLU, for instance, has raised objections to the following bills, which are not radical proposals for a predominantly Christian nation like Texas:
Most of these folks who object to the Texas State government’s attempts to reintroduce Christianity into the public school curriculum extol multiculturalism. Because Texas isn’t monolithically Christian, they argue, she shouldn’t advocate for one faith over another. Per the Tribune:
There are two things that should be taken into account on this point. First, those who are new arrivals in a place with an established culture (and Texas does have a long-established Christian culture, as we shall see) are expected to conform to the culture of the place into which they are settling. The Muslims, Buddhists, and others who want Texas to scrap her Christian school proposals are demanding the opposite, that the host conform to their demands. It is an immoral demand, but in the age of Revolution it is not too surprising to see it made. Second, we have a duty not simply to do justice to the present generation, but to the past generations as well. To use the worn-out secular Enlightenment terminology, that means that the dead also have ‘rights’ that we must respect. Texas’s ancestors established a Christian culture; their descendants are bound by a commandment of the Lord Himself (‘Honor thy father and thy mother’—Exodus 20:12) to uphold the good things their forefathers raised up and passed on to them as a precious inheritance. The newcomers ought not to demand that Texans break this commandment of filial piety and love for the sake of their false multicultural utopian ideal. The beginnings of Texas’s origins lie in the Spanish explorers and settlers of the 16th century. One of their principal aims in coming to North America was to plant the Christian Faith on this continent. One can see with just a cursory glance at place names in Texas that this is what they did. Some of those names include Saints’ names (San Augustine, San Patricio, San Saba), but there are other Christian references, too (San Angelo, referring to the holy angels, and Corpus Christi, that is, the Holy Body of Christ that is consumed at the time of Holy Communion by Christians, and the feast day established in Its honor). All subsequent generations of Texans have supported this culture, but now they are told it is an evil act to do so. They should ignore such calls per the foregoing. But there is another reason Texans should support their Christian culture, and it is the most important one – because Christianity is the True Faith. Joseph Pearce, writing at The Imaginative Conservative, elaborates:
Texas, as a part of Western Christendom, has found the Fulfilment of the ages, the Pearl of Great Price, in Christ Jesus. Those who now ask her to throw Him away for some other faith or ideal (such as religious neutrality or religious pluralism) are quite literally asking her to commit suicide. Mr. Pearce continues, and what he says of Islam can be applied to any religion aside from Christianity:
The Texas State government seems unwilling to deny Christ, for the most part, though there are some troubles on the horizon. Some folks within it are trying to water down Christ’s divinity (via the Tribune story linked above; bolding added):
The Church Fathers who fought so valiantly against heretics like Arius and Nestorius who denied the full divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ would be sickened by reading a phrase as careless as the one used by the Texas Education Agency: ‘a man named Jesus’.
Others in her government are trying to pander to the growing Asian population in Texas (also from the Tribune story): ‘A fourth grade poetry unit includes Kshemendra, a poet from India who “studied Buddhism and Hinduism.”’ Be such things as they may, the overall trajectory of Texas’s project to strengthen her Christian culture is generally positive, one that she will hopefully not abandon, for the sake of her own people and for the sake of other Western countries, who might be encouraged to repent of their own betrayal of Christ by her good example. The one thing that could derail all of this is Texas’s own constitution, which includes provisions that forbid the State government to place any force whatsoever on the human conscience as it relates to what religion one practices (especially Article 1, Section 6). This is an unfortunate holdover from the deistic/atheistic ‘Age of Enlightenment’. But the world, including the West, is moving away from the strict rationalism and religious skepticism of the Enlightenment; a rather wild and chaotic rush back towards religions of all kinds is now taking place. Texas could do herself and Christendom an act of great kindness by getting out in front of this trend, and rewriting the sections on religion to favor Christianity specifically for the sake of protecting her citizens from all the false and harmful religions and cults out there. Freedom of religion wouldn’t have to be abolished completely; other religious faiths could co-exist with Christianity, but if any of their tenets promoted anything that conflicted with Christian morality, such things would be declared illegal. Without such a proactive step, Texas faces a religious future that resembles the Wild West of her past. In such an environment, Texans will not flourish, and their culture will enter a phase of steep decline that Germany, France, and other Western European countries are currently undergoing for making that same fateful decision, for extolling religious pluralism/relativism instead of being faithful to Christ.
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 Could a Russian monk living in the remote woods of central New York State have anything relevant to say about Dixie? The answer to that question is a definite Yes. This monk was born Alexander Taushev in Kazan, Russia, in 1906, the Taushevs being amongst the nobility in pre-revolutionary Russia. After the Soviets gained power the Taushevs were exiled, in 1920. The young Alexander grew up in Bulgaria and was educated at the University of Sofia under a saint, Seraphim Sobolev, from which he received a degree in Theology. He was a teacher and administrator in parts of eastern and western Europe and was tonsured a monk in 1931, receiving the new name Averky in honor of St. Averkios of Hieropolis (+167 A. D.), and was also ordained a deacon. The next year he was ordained as a priest. In 1951, Father Averky arrived in New York State, where he became a professor and then rector of Holy Trinity Orthodox Seminary in Jordanville, New York, and was thereafter renowned for his commentary on the New Testament. In 1961, he was ordained Archbishop of Syracuse and Holy Trinity. He fell asleep in the Lord on 13 April 1976, and though he has not been officially canonized, he was regarded by his spiritual child St. Seraphim Rose (+1982) as a friend of God – a saint. What is of most interest to us for the purposes of this essay are those commentaries of the books of the New Testament. In them, Southerners will find a startlingly clear vindication of their traditions: honoring women by keeping them out of the grimy world of politics, a gradual end to slavery, a jaundiced view of money-getting, etc. In Archbishop Averky’s commentary on I Timothy 6, he reveals his basic principles on the idea of social revolution, always so much in fashion in various places of Yankeedom, while being mostly abhorred at the South. He is unequivocally opposed to it: ‘Chapter 6 of the epistle contains important instructions that resolve in the spirit of Christianity an important issue of social inequality, which so energizes the people in modern times. The general meaning of these instructions is that Christianity abhors violent social upheavals. Speaking in more contemporary language, Christianity encourages change in social relations by means of gradual development or evolution, by instructing and transforming great masses of mankind in the principles of true Christian love, equality, and brotherhood. Conversely, Christianity condemns the path of revolution, for it is a path of hatred, violence, and bloodshed’ (Archbishop Averky Taushev, The Epistles and the Apocalypse: Commentary on the Holy Scriptures of the New Testament, Vol. III, Nicholas Kotar, transl., Vitaly Permiakov, edr., Holy Trinity Seminary Press, Jordanville, New York, 2018, p. 132; this book is available as a handsome hardcover here). He then applies these principles directly to a subject that the South still wrestles with, slavery: ‘This is why Paul says, “Let as many bondservants as are under the yoke count their own masters worthy of all honor, so that the name of God and His doctrine may not be blasphemed” (6:1). Christian slaves must be especially careful if their masters are also Christian. “And those who have believing masters, let them not despise them because they are brethren, but rather serve them because those who are benefited are believers and beloved. . . . If anyone teaches otherwise . . . he is proud, knowing nothing, but is obsessed with disputes” (6:2-5)’ (pgs. 132-3). Abp. Averky says further about this in his commentary on Ephesians chapter 6, ‘Then the apostle exhorts slaves to show obedience to their masters, and masters to be fair and condescending to slaves. St Paul does not even touch the political or social issue of the legality or abolition of slavery. The Christian Church in general has never set itself the goal to drive forward external political or social revolutions. Instead, Christianity seeks the interior transformation of mankind, which then will naturally entail the external changes in the social or political aspects of the entire life of humanity’ (p. 73). Dixie was therefore not in the wrong for seeking a gradual end to slavery, but rather it was the Yankee abolitionists who were, who advocated precisely for the quick and violent end to slavery. The archbishop also addresses forthrightly the issue of feminism, an ideology despised by traditional Southerners and excoriated particularly well by Rev. Robert Lewis Dabney and Louisa McCord. The collective Southern distaste for it is illustrated easily enough by the reluctance of Southern States to approve the 19th amendment (granting suffrage to women) to the Philadelphia constitution. Abp. Averky, commenting on I Timothy chapter 2, is in accord with them: ‘St Paul’s position that the woman must be in a subordinate position and not have pretensions to primacy is based on the Biblical account of the Fall. Adam was created first, and then Eve; Eve sinned first, and then Adam. In addition, in Genesis 2:18, 2:20, and 2:22, we read that the wife was created as a helper for her husband, and naturally a helper takes a subordinate position to the one she is assigned to help. From Eve’s first sin, St Paul extrapolates that women are more likely to sin, and so they are not capable of a position of primacy. At the same time, we must keep in mind that the apostle does not mean all men and women individually (there are always exceptions to the rule), but humanity as a whole’ (p. 123). He says a little more on this subject in his commentary on I Corinthians chapter 11: ‘St Paul found this [women attending worship services with their heads uncovered—W.G.] to be improper for Christians and required that women keep their heads covered as a sign of their subordinate state relative to their husbands. . . . This head covering is then a sign of her modesty, submissiveness, and subordination to her husband. But lest the man consider himself greater than his wife and abuse his position, Apostle Paul reminds the Corinthians: “Nevertheless, neither is man independent of woman, nor woman independent of man, in the Lord. For as woman came from man, even so man also comes through woman; but all things are from God” (11:11-12)’ (p. 34). It isn’t a stretch to say that the world would be a better place without Kristi Noem and Kamala Harris, Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi, and their like strutting about the political stage, giving orders to all and sundry, but rather making sure their own homes are in order, while their husbands deal with matters of the polis. Lastly, Abp. Averky opposes the love of money, one of the pre-eminent Yankee vices that traditional Southrons never much cared for, while also laying bare its causes and the guises with which it is often cloaked. Writing once again about I Timothy 6, he says, ‘Knowing that, most of the time, discontent with social status is based on the passions of love of money, avarice, and envy for the rich under the guise of evangelical principles of brotherhood, equality, and freedom, St Paul warns against avarice and exhorts all to be content with little: “And having food and clothing, with these we shall be content” (6:8). External material riches are inherently dangerous, for they often lead to many sins and misfortunes [Traditional Southerners seemed to understand this at a deep level, as they were always quick to give away money to those in need, even to their own detriment—W.G.]: “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” (6:10). St Paul teaches Timothy to be a model of unselfishness and freedom from possessions, and to exhort the rich to hope not in riches, but in God’ (p. 133). Abp. Averky closes his commentary on I Timothy with two crucial sentences: ‘“O Timothy! Guard what was committed to your trust,” that is, the tradition. This is how the epistle ends, with an emphasis on the importance of the apostolic tradition for the faith preserved by the Church (6:20)’ (p. 133). Guarding the Apostolic tradition unchanged is vital for maintaining the Church, he says, but as Southerners we should also see something else here: We must receive it as an exhortation to preserve the Southern tradition intact. This is a normal action for any ethnos, and Southrons, whether European or African, will find it much more vivifying and fulfilling than loyalty to the shallow, deformed ideology of Americanism. Southern culture intersects with the world in many unexpected ways, as we have seen here in the life of a Russian monk on the run from the Soviet communists, whose Biblical commentary overthrows some of the tired criticism aimed at it still today. Glory to God for these surprising gifts! Thus, as we part, it is well to echo once more those words of the Holy Apostle Paul to his spiritual son St. Timothy that Archbishop Averky thought were so essential: ‘O Southron! Guard the tradition of your forefathers committed to your trust!’ May that sentiment never cease to resound in our hearts. |
