By Walt Garlington, an Orthodox Christian living in Dixieland. His writings have appeared on several web sites, and he maintains a site of his own, Confiteri: A Southern Perspective.
Americanism is antithetical to the Gospel. Consider the Lord’s words to the Holy Apostle Peter:
Then answered Peter and said unto him, Behold, we have forsaken all, and followed thee; what shall we have therefore? . . . And every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name’s sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life (St Matthew’s Gospel 19:27, 29).
For those chasing the ‘American Dream’ (i.e., ever increasing worldly riches), the path is similar but the end is completely different. These men leave behind family and homeland, renounce their culture, cut themselves off from their inherited traditions/customs, etc., and travel to lands unknown not for the sake of gaining Christ but for the sake of enlarging their annual income. (Some do come to escape religious persecution, but their religious zeal is generally no match for the lust for money that confronts them in the States, as we shall see in more detail below).
The industrial titans of the US are the inspirational icons for the Dream chasers: Henry Ford, John Rockefeller, now Elon Musk, whose SpaceX IPO will likely make him the first trillionaire in the world. He was born and raised in South Africa but left when he was still a teenager, looking for the proverbial greener pastures:
“I came to North America because I felt this was where there was opportunity to do great things in technology,” he said in 2013.
The familiar pattern repeats itself.
This clamoring for the wealth of the world contrasts starkly with the goals of older societies, whether classical or Christian:
Ancient thought sought a “virtuous circle” of polities that would support the fostering of virtuous individuals, and of virtuous individuals who would form the civic life of a polity oriented toward the common good. Much of the challenge faced by ancient thinkers was how to start such a virtuous circle where it did not exist or existed only partially, and how to maintain it against the likelihood of civic corruption and persistent temptation to vice (Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, Yale UP, New Haven, Conn., 2018, pgs. 99-100).
Americanism largely rejects this form of communally focused, common-good polity with virtue for its end in favor of an unleashing of individual ambitions for the sake of economic prosperity, etc.:
In order to unleash the productive and scientific capacity of human societies, a different mode and order had to be introduced—a completely new form of political technology that made possible a technological society. That form of technology was the modern republic—posited on the rejection of the key premises of ancient republicanism—and above all it rested on the harnessing of self-interest in both the public and the private realms in order to secure human liberty and increase the scope, scale, and extent of human power over nature.
The precondition of our technological society was that great achievement of political technology, the “applied technology” of liberal theory, our Constitution. The Constitution is the embodiment of a set of modern principles that sought to overturn ancient teachings and shape a distinctly different modern human. It is a kind of precursor technology, the precondition for the technology that today seems to govern us. According to James Madison in Federalist 10, the first object of government is the protection of “the diversity in the faculties of men,” which is to say our individual pursuits and the outcomes of those pursuits—particularly, Madison notes, differences in the attainment of property. . . . the government itself is to be given substantial new powers to act directly on individuals, both to liberate them from the constraints of their particular localities, and to promote the expansion of commerce and the “useful arts and sciences” (Ibid., pgs. 100-1).
The Puritan (or broader Protestant) attachment to capitalism, as analyzed by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, linked hard work, frugality, and worldly success to signs of divine election. This ascetic drive fueled capital accumulation and modern capitalism but, stripped of its religious foundation, fostered a hollow materialism.
Alexis de Tocqueville describes the result of the ‘divinely written’ federal constitution with horrific accuracy:
“A native of the United States clings to this world’s goods as if he were certain never to die; and he is so hasty in grasping at all within his reach that one would suppose he was constantly afraid of not living long enough to enjoy them. He clutches everything, he holds nothing fast, but soon loosens his grasp to pursue fresh gratifications” (quoted in Russell Kirk, ‘Christian Doctrine and Economic Order,’ Rights and Duties, Spence Publishing Co., Dallas, Texas, 1997, p. 227).
Sadly, the situation in the States would grow even worse in the years that followed Alexis’s observations. The South, as a largely agricultural people less interested in the ‘cash nexus’, as Richard Weaver calls it in The Southern Tradition at Bay, and more interested in older, more humane ways of living (following the natural rhythms of the seasons rather than trying to control nature, a deep love of family, ancestors, tradition, and unmodern forms of Christianity) – the South was a restraint within the union upon the desire for inordinate economic expansion and upon other unhealthy appetites.
This the industrial Northern States could not abide, which helped precipitate the War of Northern Aggression (a.k.a., the misnamed Civil War) which put an end to the influence of the traditional South within the union:
Among the consequences of the Civil War and Reconstruction had been the enfeebling of the old Constitution, the subjugation of the agricultural economy, the corruptions of the Gilded Age, and the triumph of a secular order with Protestant roots but divested of faith in a transcendent order. Between 1860 and 1870 a revolution had been worked, and [Orestes] Brownson found that revolution to be an American variant of Jacobinism (Ibid., p. 236).
The post-War constitutional changes further engrained money-chasing into the life of the United States:
. . . we need not wonder that the treatment of the southern states during Reconstruction, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, made him [Brownson] almost despair for the American Republic. He perceived in the measures of the Radical Republicans a design to crush the agricultural South, to employ the power and resources of the federal government for the stimulation of heavy industry, to concentrate power in a central government and in great profit-making corporations, to gratify special economic interests at the general expense (Ibid., pgs. 233-4).
Such developments have had a woeful effect upon Christians. Dr Kirk continues:
This thoroughly secularized American state would not remain neutral on moral questions. As the general government consolidated its power over the years, it would interfere increasingly with the concerns of the Church. . . .
Might the Church withstand the pressures? Indeed, might the Church cohere long in the licentious American democracy with its ungoverned appetites and revolt against authority? (Ibid., p. 236)
The spirit of Americanism wars against Christianity:
“There is a subtle influence at work which undermines the authority alike of the parent and of the magistrate, with Catholics as with non-Catholics,” Brownson wrote to his son in 1870. “Catholics as well as others imbibe the spirit of the country, imbibe from infancy the spirit of independence, freedom from all restraint, unbounded license. So far are Catholics from converting the country, they cannot hold their own” (Ibid.).
Americanism is not friendly toward traditional, liturgical Christianity. It is especially an implacable enemy of the Orthodox Church, which has not compromised the Faith as have Protestants and Roman Catholics.
The spiritually blind and confused MAGA celebrants of the 250th anniversary of America will deny it vehemently, but the United States have become in reality a manifestation of the spirit of Antichrist.
But this does not mean we are doomed. For Christ will always be able to overcome Antichrist. And where is Christ, that we may ask Him for His help and healing and renewal, for cleansing and sanctification? We will find the God-man in and through His saints, Who are part of Him, part of His Body, the Holy Orthodox Church. And they are not far from us, particularly the saints of our ancestors in Africa and Europe – St Cyril of Alexandria, the defender of true doctrine, St Columba of Iona, the Spirit-bearing missionary to the Irish, Scottish, and English, and all that glorious host – and the newer saints of North America, Sts Tikhon, Raphael, Jacob Netsvetov, and others. Let us draw near to them, becoming their close friends, that we might then through their intercessions be united to Christ and to His Father and the Holy Ghost.
The 250th anniversary isn’t quite the celebration it is being made out to be; many citizens of the States no longer believe in the false faith of Americanism. This year is more of a crossroads, where the two most fateful choices stand before us: Christ or Antichrist? That is what the peoples of the States must decide at this critical moment.
