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. 
 

Noah Webster of Connecticut, with not atypical New England Yankee arrogance, proclaimed in the preface to his spelling textbook (published in 1783), ‘Europe is grown old in folly, corruption and tyranny—in that country laws are perverted, manners are licentious, literature is declining and human nature debased.  . . . American glory begins to dawn at a favourable period, and under flattering circumstances.  . . . a durable and stately edifice can never be erected upon the mouldering pillars of antiquity’ (Merrill Jensen, The New Nation: A History of the United States during the Confederation 1781-1789, Northeastern University Press, Boston, Mass., 1981, p. 105).  From the outset, the United States have had an inclination away from reverence for the past and tradition and toward innovation (the South has done better in this regard, particularly before the War, but has lost her way lately). 
 
This is obvious in the attitude of US leaders towards Christianity.  For them, redemption of the world from the Fall was not to be achieved by uniting man and the creation with the Holy Trinity once again via the Church, but primarily through the work of political theories and systems.  Three authors uncovered some striking material in this regard, from amongst which is this crucial paragraph: 
 
‘This transference of religious fervor to national ideals became the heart of American civil religion.  Christians began to suggest, as the Congregationalist John Mellen did in 1797, “that the expansion of republican forms of government will accompany that spreading of the gospel . . . which the scripture prophecies represent as constituting the glory of the latter days.”  This shift greatly strengthened the American republic, endowing it with a new sense of lofty purpose.  The nation rather than the church easily emerged as the primary agent of God’s activity in history’ (Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, George Marsden, The Search for Christian America, Expanded Edition, Helmers & Howard, Colorado Springs, Col., 1989, p. 114; bolding added). 
 
Despite their Christian exterior, United States citizens interiorly are remarkably post-Christian.  The Church has been debased, and the union of States, particularly its political system, exalted.  God is no longer a Person with Whom they seek communion, healing from the brokenness of the Fall, and so forth; he is more of an impersonal deity who interests them only insofar as he/it will ‘bless’ their enterprises:  ‘God Bless America,’ as the old song goes, though it resembles more a magical incantation (i.e., a command directed at God) than a traditional Christian song or hymn.  Such a god has a very strong resemblance to the pagan, philosophical Greek conception of the divine:  ‘Ancient Greek philosophy developed a highly systematic theology governed by logic.  Logic defined God’s existence as necessary, but his existence remained a theoretical hypothesis.  God is empirically inaccessible, but must exist because logic demands a first cause.  We conceive of this first cause as an abstract essence, as the sum of the attributes which the first cause must have to be truly divine’ (Christos Yannaras, Orthodoxy and the West: Hellenic Self-Identity in the Modern Age, Chamberas and Russell, trans., Holy Cross Orthodox Press, Brookline, Mass., 2006, p. 25). 
 
Logic likewise makes some sort of deity necessary for the post-Christian American Experiment, and like the ancient Greeks, they have imbued it with the attributes they think it needs to have in order to be of use to them, attributes which have shifted over the years, from a cold, distant creator and governor found in the Declaration of Independence, to the pantheistic god of Thoreau and Emerson and the other Transcendentalists, to the god of retribution and judgment of Lincoln and Julia Ward Howe, to the indulgent god of Oprah and George W. Bush. 
 
But in deconstructing the True God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – in this way, they have likewise deconstructed themselves, who are made in the image of the All-Holy Trinity.  If they feel that they are trapped in an oppressive bureaucratic machine-world (and many do), to borrow some imagery from Paul Kingsnorth, it is because they have made their primary god a political system of mechanical checks and balances that operates according to the laws of physics, with a philosophically and logically constructed deity of lesser importance that stands behind it. 
 
Making a secular political system their god means that the Trinitarian model of a community of Persons living in humility and love has largely been lost in the States, which results not only in the present oppressive technocratic structure of society – ‘This denial not only invalidates the mode of existence taught in the Gospels,’ Yannaras says, ‘but also destroys human life as community.  Bureaucratic and authoritarian structures dominated social life, and freedom was mortgaged to officialdom’ (p. 42) – but also in the erosion of the idea of the human person itself:  ‘ . . . their suffering was the result of the denial of personhood, of life as personal communion and relation, which diminished not only the Gospel’s transformation of sin and death into a loving self-denial and faith, but also our power to attain to the full stature of human maturity implied by risk and freedom’ (Ibid.). 
 
A purely political solution to this problem of an ontologically crippled and dissolving man does not exist, either in the US or anywhere else.  There must be an inward metanoia, a turning, away from the false gods, political and otherwise, they have set up and a return to traditional Christianity, to the Church, to the Holy Trinity, in which and in Whom we will find the means to reestablish ‘personal otherness and freedom as manifested in beauty, love and poetry – the logos of personal uniqueness’ (Ibid.). 
 
If folks of good will in the States feel that ‘the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak’ (St. Matthew’s Gospel 26:41), they need not fear, for they have a multitude of intercessors in heaven before God’s throne – the saints of their ancestors in Africa and Europe, and the more recent saints of North America, men and women and children who have acquired true personhood through their cooperation with God’s Grace – who are ready to help them if called upon, part of the ‘great cloud of witnesses’ (Hebrews 12:1) watching ardently the drama of salvation unfolding in the US and in all the other countries of the world. 
 
Noah Webster’s insult intended for Europe, that she has ‘grown old in folly, corruption and tyranny,’ now ironically applies to the United States themselves.  It is difficult to lay aside beliefs that have been part of one’s society for hundreds of years, but for the peoples of the States – no matter which cultural kin-group they belong to:  New England, Dixie, Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, and so on – their future hinges on whether they can muster the wherewithal to do exactly that if they wish to stop their descent into the post-Christian abyss.  A truly good life can be found and experienced and enjoyed only in a union with the True God, and not in overzealous attachments to political declarations and constitutions, or in self-anointed missions to regenerate the world. 
 
This does not mean that Christians in the States should ignore politics.  That would be counter to the meaning of the Incarnation.  Jesus Christ the God-man has taken on human nature in order to heal it, all of it.  Thus, it is the duty of Christians to sanctify all human endeavors with the Grace of God, including politics.  In those countries throughout history where Christianity has been adopted by the people and their rulers, the Christian leaven will be seen at work even in that sphere.  The law code of Athelstan, King of England from 924-939 A.D., is but one of many examples.  The opening section deals mostly with tithes for the Church.  But rather than being simply a dry list of legal requirements, there are parts that are also religious meditations: 
 
‘2. Let us remember how Jacob the Patriarch declared “Decimas et hostias pacificas offeram tibi,” (I will offer you tithes and peace offerings) and how Moses declared in God’s Law “Decimas et primitias non tardabis offerre Domino.” (You shall not be slow to offer tithes and firstfruits to the Lord). 
 
‘3. It suits us to remember how terrible is the declaration stated in books; “If we are not willing to render tithes to God, he will deprive us of the nine [remaining] parts, when we least expect it, and moreover we shall have sinned also.”’ 
 
Nonetheless, it is not the primary duty of the Church to conquer the sphere of politics but to proclaim the Good News to all men, baptizing them and making them ‘new creations’ in Christ (II Corinthians 5:17). 
 
When a Great Feast of the Lord other than Easter or Christmas, the one celebrating His Ascension for instance, garners as much attention and enthusiasm as a presidential election day, the peoples of the States will know they are beginning to make progress in properly orienting their affections. 
 

My country is not a snow-capped mountain
In the Colorado Rockies
Or a seacoast town in Maine
Or the tropical islands of Hawai’i.
Fine places to be sure,
With many fine folks,
But they are not my country.

My country is a little strip of land in Arkansas,
Near where the wagon wheel fell off –
The beginning of the Walton family homeplace there in Strong,
Where our roots have burrowed deeply down,
The source of our strength, unity, and identity.

You belong to Gen X or Z?
I belong to the Walton clan,
Whose line we trace back through four centuries
Of years on this continent, and beyond that
Over yonder in the Old Country.

You celebrate the birth of an abstraction
Called America on July 4th?
I celebrate the birth of an actual man,
Raiford Randolph Walton, my grandfather,
A leader in war and in peace,
And a patriarch of his kin.

You pride yourself on watching debates
Between a pair of Tweedle-Dums?
I would rather know about the pair of girls
Growing in my cousin’s womb.
My country is my family,
Here with the big hearts
And loving souls in little Strong,
And wherever else they may be,
In Dixie’s land, or further out beyond.
​

One would expect Mr. Douglass, if he were the sort of man shown in the Prager U videos, to have denounced this heinous act, but he did the opposite.  Here are his own words from 1860 praising John Brown and encouraging acts of violence and terror against Southerners: ​

And if Christianity still means anything to conservatives in the States, they might also want to know that Mr. Douglass venerated two rather questionable German thinkers – Ludwig Feuerbach and David Strauss (busts of them rested on his fireplace mantle), both of whom were intent on remaking Christianity to conform to skeptical, humanistic Modernity. 
 
This isn’t the first time that Prager U has been dishonest about the past.  They have posted videos about slavery and its role in the misnamed Civil War and about Reconstruction that have also told some exceptionally grand whoppers. 
 
For those who might think all this fussing about the past doesn’t amount to very much, they need to think again.  There is a direct line from Northern abolitionist thinking to modern insanities like homosexual marriage and trans rights.  Neil Kumar gets the ball rolling: ​

Rod O’Barr adds important details: ​

We see this exact same twisting of Christianity in President Biden’s 2024 Pride Month Proclamation: ​

God is not the author of sinful behavior, nor does He call upon us to support it, but the progressives today, like their radical abolitionist forefathers, continue to try to reshape Christianity to fit their beliefs. 
 
Given the slippery, downward slope of Christian revisionism the Northern abolitionists have placed folks in the US upon, how should one view slavery to avoid those false teachings and their woke offspring? 
 
To answer that, let’s look at El Salvador.  The situation President Bukele inherited was atrocious:  The murder rate, driven by gang violence, was at an unbelievably high level (one murder per hour by 2015).  Bukele’s answer was a forceful crackdown, mainly through mass incarceration of gang members: ​

Put another way, as long as there is sin, then slavery, whether in the form of Bukele’s massive prisons or the much milder Southern form of paternalistic bondage, may be needed to deal with it.  One of the South’s own notable Christian philosophers, Reverend Robert Lewis Dabney (reposed in 1898), says this in his usual inimitable way in his A Defence of Virginia and the South (p. 259): ​

Prager U has a problem.  Some of its content is informed by the same heretical, man-worshipping Enlightenment spirit that drove Northern abolitionists to support horrific acts of violence against Southerners and that still drives harmful ideologies like transgenderism today.  Folks in the States are growing rather desperate to see better times.  If they follow the Enlightenment path, they will not find it.  Only by rejecting idols and yielding to Christ will those times come, the same Christ who is able to take even lowly slaves and raise them up into the highest echelons of the Heavenly Kingdom.  It is written of St. Blandina (+177), one of the illustrious Martyrs of Vienne in France, ​

St. John (+1730), a Christian soldier captured by Turkish Muslims and made their slave, is another powerful example of a slave attaining the highest level of achievement for a man or woman – holiness, sainthood. 
 
Sin is the greatest problem afflicting mankind, not slavery.  The latter is the result of the former.  If we eradicate sin, we will necessarily eradicate slavery.  Freedom in Christ is therefore the truest and best form of abolition available to mankind.  That is the message that Prager U, Dr. Brumley, and all conservatives ought to be spreading, not a presentation of a Frederick Douglass who never existed nor utopian Enlightenment democratic theories.  Sowing these latter will only cause us to reap in tears and lamentations another harvest of virulent social justice ideologies and their fervent adherents. ​

The threats didn’t sit well with the Nigeriens, who responded with a mixture of politeness and frankness that any Southerner would approve of: ​

And, echoing the Declaration of Independence, he denounces the Empire’s quartering of troops in Niger while at the same time allowing lawless men to run about without hindrance: ​

The decrepit French Empire also faced reprisals from Niger for its meddling in Nigerien affairs: ​

These experiences have resulted in Niger looking to new countries for assistance: ​

Here at the South, we are experiencing the very same problems from an aggressive, arrogant, Yankee-dominated DC that Niger has, but our response thus far hasn’t been nearly as forceful as Niger’s.  The federal government wants to dictate to the Southern States on things ranging from what cars we can drive to transgender rights in public schools to the maps of our congressional districts, while they fail in one of the most basic governmental functions (public safety) by allowing millions of illegal immigrants to flood into the States.  Where is our will to counter these threats and survive as a Christian people? 
 
There are some glimmers of hope, as Gov Abbott and the Texas Legislature have made some moves to secure their State’s border, while other Southern States have bluntly said they will not comply with the Biden regime’s transgender rewrite of Title IX and have initiated some lawfare over it. 
 
Still, the main problem is spiritual:  Too many Southerners remain under the spell of the notion of a mystical, unbreakable union of the States and the exceptionalism of this union in world history.  Until we reject these false ideas, unite around the Christian Faith and our Southern patrimony, and seek out Christian and traditionalist allies in the world, we will continue to suffocate beneath Yankee/globalist culture and politics. 
 
The actions of Niger ought to inspire Southrons:  It is possible to break free from the tentacles of DC.  And having done so, should the Lord allow it, may our love for our Southland never wane again as it has so lamentably over the last several decades but remain fervent forever. 
 ​

Even before the colonies separated from Great Britain in 1776, the South has had an adversarial relationship with the Yankees of the north, who, because of their arrogance, have demeaned Southern culture and forcefully tried to transform Southrons into Yankees.  Southerners tried to put an end to that in 1861 but were unsuccessful, which resulted in even greater domination of the South by Yankees and their ideas over us these last 159 years.  Motivating Southerners to throw off the Yankee yoke is difficult because of this:  Yankee ways are so ingrained, Yankee power is so strong (through the federal government bureaucracy, media of various sorts, and giant corporations), that few desire to challenge it, even if it means the complete annihilation of Southern culture. 
 
It is at this point of despair that Dixie can gain a good measure of hope from her African cousins in Senegal.  Like Dixie, she has long been dominated by the equally boastful (equal to the Yankees, that is) French elite, who established a presence in Senegal in the 17th century.  Even after her independence in 1960, French influence continued to overshadow her.  But the presidential election in Senegal this past March has upended the status quo, as evidenced by the response of the upper French classes: ​

The quote at the end equally applies to the Yankee-Southron relationship: ‘If a Dixian is praised by a Yankee, you can be certain he is betraying his people; but if a Yankee criticizes a Dixian, this latter fellow is doing something good for the South.’

The author of the article goes on to say,

The Yankee Empire, like the French Empire, is diminishing in the world, thanks to evil actions of its own as well as to wise and prudent actions of other countries like Russia, China, India, Iran, and others. The South, thus far, has not contributed in any large measure to that decline. Yet it would be to the glory of the Southern people if someday someone would write of us that ‘Yankee imperialism found its grave in Dixie.’

But in order to reach such a decisive stage of development, the South will need to achieve what Senegal has of late:

Pride in Southern culture, an economy that benefits Southerners and not Yankee exploiters and usurers, cultural and political independence from Yankees – we have a long way to go, but if little Senegal can find the wherewithal to do this, cannot we at the South succeed also, we who have many more resources at our disposal to resist and depose the Yankee oppressors than the Senegalese have against the French?


It would truly be shameful for the Muslims to, yet again, outshine the Christians in their duty to oust foreigners who trample upon their long-held and sacred traditions.  From parents in Dearborn, Michigan, to Taliban soldiers in Afghanistan, to Senegalese voters and their new president, Muslims around the world have been doing just that.  May God rouse us here at the South from our apathy so that we will defend the better tradition, the Christian tradition, of our ancestors against the Yankee vandals. ​

Romanticize nature all you like;
Rhapsodize about her many delights.
But when the copperhead appears in the yard,
And cold fear creeps in and grips your heart,
Then you will know in your inmost parts
​That Adam’s Fall is no superstitious lie.

​The increasingly technocratic, anti-Christian trajectory of the West and other parts of the world is making traditional family life difficult to begin and sustain. This includes things like the LGBT cult, but also newer evils that go beyond them. Here are a few recent examples to illustrate:

Researchers have succeeded in creating synthetic embryos for the first time, without stopping to first answer the question of if they should be created at all. The embryos exist without the need for egg, sperm or sexual reproduction of any kind. They were engineered from stem cells and provide a window into the earliest days of human development.1


The scientists behind the synthetic embryos, including Magdalena Żernicka-Goetz, of the University of Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology, hope to study this so-called "black box" development period, as researchers are only legally allowed to grow human embryos up to 14 days.2


. . . While it’s currently against the law to attempt to implant a synthetic embryo into a human womb, the science is rapidly outpacing related regulations. "If the whole intention is that these models are very much like normal embryos, then in a way they should be treated the same," Lovell-Badge told The Guardian. "Currently in legislation they’re not. People are worried about this."


In animal studies, synthetic embryos implanted into mice wombs did not survive. Similarly, when synthetic monkey embryos were implanted into monkey wombs, pregnancies were induced, although the embryos spontaneously stopped developing after a few days.


However, if the synthetic embryos could one day grow into adults, we’d be entering into uncharted legal and ethical territory. Ethicist J. Benjamin Hurlbut of Arizona State University told Science that synthetic embryos represent "a matter of significant moral discussion and of significant moral concern."


Scientists are already working on how to grow life outside of a human womb and, in 2021, Hanna and colleagues grew a mouse embryo in a mechanical womb for about half of a typical gestational term — a time period equal to a human embryo at 5 weeks.


Growing mouse embryos "ex utero," the researchers said, is a valuable tool to investigate embryonic development in detail, but it comes with serious ethical questions, including might humans be next?


The answer is yes, as Hanna told MIT Technology Review, "This sets the stage for other species. I hope that it will allow scientists to grow human embryos until week five." Are we headed for an "era of motherless births," in which babies are grown in laboratories via artificial wombs? It does seem to be where the research is rapidly headed.


. . . According to the Genetic Literacy Project:

If anyone thinks this is just sci-fi fantasy, think again.  A member of Sweden’s parliament proposed at the end of 2023 that research be done on artificial wombs so that women would be freed of the ‘burden’ of carrying their unborn babies. ​

All of the above are guaranteed to destroy strong, healthy families and high birthrates; they will not remain isolated cases either but will try to insinuate themselves into the everyday life of the united States (our beloved Southland not excepted). 
 
These are certainly evil days.  The monks of Grigoriou Monastery on the Holy Mountain (Mt Athos) captured the essence of our times in their denunciation of the Greek parliament, which, under heavy pressure from the Biden administration, redefined marriage to include same-sex couples: ​

And yet they counsel us not to despair: ​

The Church must continue to speak out like this, boldly yet compassionately, like the prophets of old, as often as possible, to bring society back to sanity vis-à-vis the family.  The Orthodox bishops of Greece published a letter on the Christian family that serves as an excellent example of what could be presented to our neighbors.  The following is a central part of it: ​

Governments must do their part as well.  The US federal government is currently too paralyzed and/or too Leftist to do much of anything good, but State and local governments can still act decisively.  They can stop pushing the theory of evolution on school children, limit AI and social media use among minors, and outlaw synthetic human embryo research.  The Alabama Supreme Court has taken a very positive step in this direction by ruling that all frozen embryos created for IVF purposes are human children subject to the protection of all laws.  Southerners may rightfully take pride that this ruling came from one of their own States. 
 
But governments need to go further.  They need to codify via resolutions, laws, and amendments, the teachings of the Church outlined above regarding the family.  The structure of the tax code and other laws and regulations must be rewritten to give preference to families, especially those with lots of kids, rather than to atomized individuals.  Nullification of Obergefell v Hodges is also essential. 
 
The technocratic assault on the family must be faced manfully.  Special sessions have been called in Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and other States to deal with issues like tax rates, redistricting, and crime.  Those are worthwhile issues to discuss, but they pale in comparison to strengthening the family.  Governors and legislatures ought to adjust their schedules accordingly. 
 ​