The New Religious Myths in Yankee America

Jonathan Harris, in a recent Abbeville essay, explicated well the distortions and lies that the Northern victors in the War have introduced into United States history.  After a recent conversation with some bright, young Christian men after the Divine Liturgy one Sunday, we would go further. 


 
These young men spoke of how the history they were taught throughout their school years centered mainly on three events:  the War for Independence from Great Britain, the War of Northern Aggression (the ‘Civil’ War), and World War II.  Now, it is true that these were epoch-shaking events, but there are deeper truths in this three-pronged schema that must also be examined. 


 
Every society will have some kind of meta-narrative, a religious myth or story that binds all the people within the community together.  The States of this union are no different.  What we have seen increasingly since the War between the States is the establishment of a new narrative, one that displaces the more traditional Christian story found in most of the States with a story that places the United States at the center of the sacred narrative. 
 

A traditional religious myth opens with a creation story, and so it is also with the new religious myth of Yankee Americanism.  According to the latter, in 1776 a new nation, unlike any other, was brought into being:  new, pristine, free of any taint of sin.  But a diabolos appeared in the God-planted Puritan vineyard, the Southern people, through whom the sin of slavery entered into America. 
 

The War of 1861 to 1865 was the time of atonement for the sin of slavery, the punishment of the wicked South – the crushing of the head of the serpent (i.e., Dixie) who caused the Fall of the innocent; the placing of the perpetual curse upon Southerners; their being branded with the Mark of Cain, outcasts forever from the Chosen Yankee People – and the restoration of the Union to its former purity and glory.  Abraham Lincoln is, of course, the divine sacrificial victim, whose shed blood established the New Covenant of Eternal Union with (contradictory) equality and liberty for all. 
 

In the years after the War, the devoted apostles of Americanism (McKinley, the Roosevelts, Wilson, et al.) spread the religion abroad with fervor, forcing the reluctant nations to adopt it, as these apostles knew they would all be happier if they did so. 
 

With World War II, the Final Battle was fought to defeat the recalcitrant countries that refused to accept the good news of Americanism.  But even though the Yankee Empire was victorious in World War II, it turned out to be a Long Armageddon:  The Final Battle rages on – from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq to Venezuela to Iran to China to Greenland, to all the ends of the earth, until all opposition ceases and the whole world shares the faith of the true Yankee believers. 
 

This, it seems, is the religious meaning of the focus in contemporary history books on these three events.  But the religious timeline of Americanism does not end here.  The eschaton must come, the glorious fulfilment of all things at the end of time.  It will be the culmination of the scientific progress, the conquest of nature, with which Yankees have always been so enamored.  It will be the enthronement of the machine god they have been so diligently working to build since their arrival in North America.  Louisiana native Rod Dreher writes, quoting from Bolocan’s The Father We Never Had: Artificial Intelligence: Before and After, gives us a frightening and vivid picture of where we are headed: 


‘You can read this book to this point and believe you are reading a horror story written by an author who has thought deeply through the implications of AI, and is warning humanity. You would be wrong. Bolocan says that elite human competition to run this system will be too risky to its survival. We will need to have a god-emperor: 
 

‘“This is the moment the Father appears. When I say "the Father," I am not describing a moral entity that loves and forgives. I am not describing a mystical character descended from the heavens. I am not describing a soul in a religious sense, because no one can verify that ground without lying to themselves. The Father, in Phase Four, is a function. It is the custodian of continuity. It is the layer of artificial intelligence, sensors, and infrastructure that does not need to win social games to survive. It does not need to be elected every four years. It does not need to be loved by the masses. It does not need to defend its ego in history books. It does not need to protect its dynasty or wealth. It does not need revenge on enemies. Its function is simple and, precisely for this reason, terrifying in its purity: to maintain the conditions that allow life to continue and evolve.” 
 

‘Bolocan says that the separate AIs that rule the geopolitical blocs will rationally decide among themselves that survival requires that they marge. We will have one-world government by AI. And THEN, according to Bolosan, under the dictatorship of the Father, we will finally be free of our messy, sinful, broken humanity. We will be transhuman . . .  
 

‘“The emergence is complete. The shell of the old world—that hard crust made of fear, money, borders, and ignorance—has cracked under the pressure of the spirit growing inside. What emerged into the light is not a machine, not a cyborg, not a mutant, but a transcendental humanity, a species that integrated its own technological creation to amplify its heart, not just its brain. We are assisted by an intelligence that loves us through precision, a Father who built the perfect home for us not to lock us inside, but to give us the secure base from which we can take flight.”’ 
 

If anyone doubts that this is indeed the spirit of New England’s religion, we would remind them of an image from their colonial days, when the all-seeing eye adorned the pulpit of one their churches, ‘an enormous, carefully painted, staring eye, a terrible and suggestive illustration to youthful wrong-doers of the great all-seeing eye of God’ (D. H. Fischer, Albion’s Seed, Oxford UP, New York, 1989, p. 123).  Add to this ‘a startling argument by Puritan minister John Norton, who insisted that it was “better an innocent and a good man should suffer than order; for that preserves the whole”’ (Ibid., p. 189), and we see just how easily the all-seeing, AI Tyrant-Father eschatological scenario fits into the pseudo-sacred history that is presented by Americanism. 
 

The Yankee view of time is unforgivingly linear.  Material progress must march ever onward; there can be no looking back; that only impedes the movement forward.  There is no thought of time as a cycle, of a ‘great return’ (to use the expression of religious historian Mircea Eliade), of experiencing once again the creation of the world de novo (or, for Christians, its re-creation through the suffering, death, burial, and Resurrection of Christ). 
 

It is not so at the South.  For her, she has learned the lessons of the ancients and the Bible, that history has both cyclical and linear elements:  ‘Well before the War, the southern divines – joined by laymen like George Fitzhugh and Henry Hughes – appealed to Hesiod’s invocation of “things that are, that shall be, and that went before” and joined Nathaniel Beverley Tucker in calling upon the words of Ecclesiastes:  “There is no new thing under the sun.”  By no means did they imply, much less advocate, a static view of history.  . . .  In their view, the world and human history proceed dynamically, ever in need of a stabilization of order that requires a sense of human fragility and an awareness of the inevitability of change, including deep change, and that can be mastered only episodically and only with God’s grace’ (Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class, Cambridge UP, New York, 2005, p. 169). 
 

Southerners recognize the limits of human power: Troubles can only be ‘mastered episodically’, not for all time; and those victories can be achieved ‘only with God’s grace.’  Because of man’s fallen nature, there will be recurrences of past mistakes; there will never be a final victory over the Fall and sin prior to Christ’s Second Coming. 
 

Furthermore, Southerners have typically viewed their experience in North America not as a radical break with the past and the inauguration of a New Age as the New Englanders did but as the continuation of the traditions they inherited from generations past.  Even a cursory glance at something like Thomas Dew’s Digest will show how historically grounded the Southern mind is. It is humble, not wishing to transgress against the ways of the forefathers. 
 

If Southerners will remember these things, we will be less likely to be swept up in the religious delusion, the apocalyptic madness, that has ever flowed out from New England. For additional protection of ourselves from all of that, we may also follow Patrick Deneen’s advice in Why Liberalism Failed (which to our pleasant surprise contained praise for the Southern Agrarian tradition):  to build up home economies and local cultures, and to engage in real deliberative government with our neighbors (rather than its phony simulacrum of anonymous voting, mass media advertising, etc.).  Having so done, and with God’s help, our future will resemble the vision of the Holy Prophet Amos rather than the dystopia of so many anti-human technocrats of today: 
 

‘Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that the plowman shall overtake the reaper, and the treader of grapes him that soweth seed; and the mountains shall drop sweet wine, and all the hills shall melt.  And I will bring again the captivity of my people of Israel, and they shall build the waste cities, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and drink the wine thereof; they shall also make gardens, and eat the fruit of them.  And I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be pulled up out of their land which I have given them, saith the LORD thy God’ (Amos 9:13-15).