The Yankee Obsession with Purity

The history of Yankeedom (those States generally north of the Ohio River and beginning with Minnesota heading east, but also including their descendants further west: California, Oregon, Washington, and Utah) began in New England with a group of Englishmen and women who believed that the Church of England was totally corrupt (and that they were not) and that they had to separate themselves from it in order to be saved:

 
‘The first wave of colonists came to Plymouth (which was later absorbed by Massachusetts) in 1620. These settlers were Separatists, but we often call them the “Pilgrims.” English Separatists believed that England’s legally established church was corrupt and irredeemable. They wanted to hold their own private church meetings instead of going to Church of England parishes, but it was not legal in England to start an independent congregation. Facing severe persecution, some English Separatists had already fled to the relatively freer climes of Holland.

 
‘Some of the Separatists in Holland worried about the corrupting effects of Dutch culture too. In 1620, just over a hundred people sailed to Plymouth on board the ship Mayflower. Upon arrival, the men of the colony signed the Mayflower Compact, committing themselves to the creation of a “civil body politic” that was devoted to “the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our king and country.”’

 
As Yankee culture matured and crystallized, there would be other outbursts against peoples they believed to be impure. Dixie was one of those peoples they scorned as such, and it helped precipitate the War and Reconstruction:

 
‘That same year [1860] William H. Herndon [of Illinois, a close friend of Lincoln’s] proclaimed that “Civilization and barbarism are absolute antagonisms. One or the other must perish on this Continent. . . . Let the natural struggle . . . go on. . . . I am thoroughly convinced that two such civilizations as the North and the South can-not co-exist on the same soil. . . . ”

 
‘ . . . scarcely had the war ended when the Nation announced that Northerners must “colonize and Yankeeize the South, . . . in short to turn the slothful, shiftless Southern world upside down”’ (Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South, U of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, 1988, pgs. 260, 269)

 
For righteous Yankees, the barbaric Southerners either had to be eradicated or transformed into Northerners.
 

The eugenics movement (genetic purity) in the US was begun under Yankee auspices: Charles Davenport of Harvard was a leader; Indiana passed the first sterilization law; and New York City hosted the Second International Eugenics Congress in 1921.

 
The violent murders committed by LGBT individuals (against Christian students in Tennessee and Minnesota, and against conservative activist Charlie Kirk in Utah) are the latest instantiation of the Yankee spirit that restlessly seeks to ‘cleanse’ society of those elements it sees as undesirable. Per Dr Clyde Wilson: ‘The violent rhetoric and assassinations being perpetrated today against conservatives are exact copies of the hate and murder committed against Southerners by abolitionists in the 1850s. They are from the same Yankee culture and personalities.’

 
From an historical perspective, it is interesting that this Yankee obsession with purity has antecedents in the schismatic and heretical groups that afflicted the early Church in Africa. Groups like the Novatians and Donatists believed that the Church in this world consisted of perfect saints, and all those who sinned were to be expelled from the congregation. Church Fathers of Africa like St Cyprian of Carthage (+3rd c.) and St Augustine of Hippo (+5th c.) rebuked them for these teachings.
 

‘The presence of those who have sinned does not destroy the sanctity of the Church; the tares do not prevent the wheat from growing. The Novatians taught that the presence of one who had lapsed infects all of society, as it were, and it is then no longer holy. “But with us,” writes St. Cyprian, “according to our faith and the given rule of divine preaching, agrees the principle of truth, that every one is himself held fast in his own sin; nor can one become guilty for another . . .”’ (Saint Hilarion Troitsky, On the Dogma of the Church, Fr. Nathan Williams, translator, Uncut Mountain Press, 2022, p. 470).

 
‘According to Donatist doctrine, there must be no sinners in the Church. . . . The society of the Donatists approved this requirement; among the Donatists there was no one with any kind of vice. When the Donatists separated, this was a separation of the wheat from the tares . . .’ (pgs. 553-4).

 
This is the same self-righteous spirit that was present several centuries later in the separatist Pilgrim/Yankee Errand into the Wilderness. But St Augustine rejects it:
 

‘Augustine takes a completely different view of the earthly state of the Church. For example, . . . he says of the Church that in her there are many sinners . . . . And so it ought to be, because the Lord likened the Church to a net containing different fishes. When the net is brought to shore, then the fish will begin to be sorted: the good fish will be put into vessels, and the bad will be thrown back into the sea. The net is the Church; the present age is the sea; the shore is the end of the age. But while the net remains in the sea, the fish are together, both good and bad’ (p. 554).
 

Contra the Donatists and the Yankees, the separation of the saints and sinners does not happen in this world: It happens at the end of the world, when Christ returns (p. 556).
 

What St Augustine recommends is very similar to what one finds here at the South, where sinners and saints live together. St Hilarion paraphrases his teachings in this regard:
 

‘One ought not to sever fellowship with sinners, but one must naturally withdraw from fellowship in sins. Sinners in the Church can be of no harm. They should only be excluded in extreme cases, but peace should be preserved . . . . If this exclusion would break the peace, it were better to exclude them only from one’s heart’ (p. 555).
 

This spirit of gentleness toward the wayward is evident all throughout Southern culture: in the rascals who themselves make up a portion of our literature, in A. B. Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes or G. W. Harris’s Sut Lovingood tales, and in the great patience of God as he leads the sinners of Flannery O’Connor’s stories to repentance (in Wise Blood for example). This is again consistent with the mercy seen in the African Church: ‘According to Origen, the Church is not a society of saints, but a hospital established by Christ for the human race that lies sick with sin’ (p. 390, bolding in the original text).


 
The underappreciated modern Greek writer Alexandros Papadiamandis expresses this spirit well in his own writings:


 
‘Although the divine aspect of Orthodox worship always precedes its human aspect, this does not devalue its human character. Papadiamandis does not attempt to make the Church’s ceremonies and liturgical services either “mystical” or “respectable.” The priests in his stories do not cultivate the atmosphere and spirit of “angelism,”. . . . While Orthodox worship is directed toward God, the faithful offer the hymns of worship as one body, conscious of their brethren. They live and move with ease and freedom, as though they are in the house of their Father. They do not feel that they need to act in a certain way or that they should display an ethos different than the one they have in their life outside the church.


 
‘The faithful of the Church in Skiathos live in this spirit of freedom and love in Christ. They are not disturbed by Aunt Marios, a troublemaker who makes a fuss if another woman takes her seat in church. They accept both the eccentricity of old Daradimos, who has the bad habit of saying out loud whatever the priest, the reader, and the chanter are about to say, and the annoyance of Captain George Konomos, who casts scornful expressions at Daradimos for doing this. . . .

 
‘Whatever hour the faithful go to the service, they are well received, for all feel that each person is a member of the Body and of their community. They all live the communion offered by the ecclesiastical gathering in a human but substantial manner, not insincerely, as a matter of habit, or pietistically’ [the latter are all typical of Yankee worship—W.G.] (Anestis Keselopoulos, Lessons from a Greek Island, From the “Saint of Greek Letters,” Alexandros Papadiamandis, Herman Middleton, translator and editor, Protecting Veil, 2011, pgs. 133-4).

 
Is this not an excellent encapsulation of Southern community life, with all of its colorful characters jumbled together – a description very much akin to characters in Wendell Berry’s Port William novels or James Kibler’s Clay Bank stories?

 
These experiences of unity in diversity are not possible in Yankeedom, which has always had the tendency to expel those who contrast with the strictly imposed uniformity, lest impurity creep into the community: Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, et al.

 
This gives fresh evidence for the claim that Yankees are really Gnostics. In their mania for purity and uniformity, they reveal their inability to cope with the multiform nature of reality and their desire to collapse all beings into a simple monad, namely the individual self. The talented Southern writer John William Corrington, who like some other recent Southern defenders (Richard Weaver, M. E. Bradford) died tragically young (may the Lord bless them and their work) – Mr. Corrington describes the Gnostic’s desire to strip the world of complexity:


 
‘What is unbearable about the world is not flesh as flesh, or matter as matter. It is the ineradicable duality of existence. It is that there are other things than oneself. The core of gnostic thought in every form is finally almost pathetically, terrifyingly simple. It is the overpowering childish wish that all things should be oneself, that one should be the cosmos and all beyond it. . . . The very act of differentiation and its realization is a cleaving away from the individual consciousness all else to be placed in the dualistic or multifarious perspective of the process of reality. . . . Thus the gnostic, for all his noted horror of dualistic reality, is not in fact so much against flesh or matter as such, but passionately desirous that all polarities should collapse, all dichotomy vanish into one—and that the one should be himself’ (The Southern Philosopher: Collected Essays of John William Corrington, Allen Mendenhall, editor, University of North Georgia UP, Dahlonega, Georgia, 2017, pgs. 171-2).

 
There have been many calls to restore Christianity to public prominence in the States following the murder of Charlie Kirk. Large numbers of people believe that the early Yankee model of a Christian society, the Puritan-Pilgrim model, is a legitimate one to imitate. They are mistaken. That paradigm is a replica of the heresies of years past. It is not incorrect to say that the Yankee spirit, obsessed as it is with purity, with homogeneity and the absence of complexity, which were such integral parts of the early heresies, is at least partly responsible for the death of Mr. Kirk, whose murderer disagreed with him to such an extent that he felt compelled to remove his presence from the cosmos lest it go on tainting it with ‘hate’ (if the reporting on him being Mr. Kirk’s murderer is true; there are reasons to believe it is not).

 
What is needed instead to re-establish healthy communities with a genuine diversity are the older Christian traditions found in Dixie, Africa, and Greece, as explored above.

 
Make no mistake: Sometimes separation is necessary. There came a time when even the Apostles had to shake the dust from off their feet of those places that rejected the Gospel, when the Church councils had to pronounce anathemas against the heretics who would not accept correction and discipline for their false teachings. We have probably reached such a point in the United States, as discussed previously.
 

For a mild, non-censorious Christian community where saints and sinners can peacefully coexist isn’t possible in the Gnostic-Donatist-Yankee kind of world. The latter will always be hunting for and waylaying The Other, unable and unwilling to countenance his existence.