Orthodox Reflections

There seems to be quite a fair amount of cultural tone-deafness and historical ignorance amidst the episcopacy of the various Orthodox jurisdictions in the United States.  Abp. Elpidophoros of the Greek Archdiocese of America epitomizes this in his 2023 Thanksgiving Encyclical.  A mistake is made right in the opening line:

‘Our National Day of Thanksgiving arrives in a time when the world is in turmoil, and “wars and rumors of wars” (Matthew 24:6) cast a pall over the global community.’

The encyclical is clearly based on the ignorant assumption that all 50 American States, spread across more than an entire continent and belonging to unique regional cultures, are somehow ‘one’ and, thus, our ‘national day’ is one. Closely tied to that concept of ‘oneness’ is the concept of ‘indivisibility’. Anyone who has read more than the simplified comic book version of U.S. history (to use Dr. Clyde Wilson’s words) will understand that the United States are not now, and have never been, ‘one nation indivisible’.

Those words, and the erroneous concept they teach, are learned from the Pledge of Allegiance, written by a socialist, Francis Bellamy, in the 1890s:

What’s so conservative about the Pledge?

 

Very little, as it turns out. From its inception, in 1892, the Pledge has been a slavish ritual of devotion to the state, wholly inappropriate for a free people. It was written by Francis Bellamy, a Christian Socialist pushed out of his post as a Baptist minister for delivering pulpit‐​pounding sermons on such topics as “Jesus the Socialist.” Bellamy was devoted to the ideas of his more‐​famous cousin Edward Bellamy, author of the 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward. Looking Backward describes the future United States as a regimented worker’s paradise where everyone has equal incomes, and men are drafted into the country’s “industrial army” at the age of 21, serving in the jobs assigned them by the state. Bellamy’s novel was extremely popular, selling more copies than other any 19^th century American novel except Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Bellamy’s book inspired a movement of “Nationalist Clubs,” whose members campaigned for a government takeover of the economy. A few years before he wrote the Pledge of Allegiance, Francis Bellamy became a founding member of Boston’s first Nationalist Club.

 

After leaving the pulpit, Francis Bellamy decided to advance his authoritarian ideas through the public schools. Bellamy wrote the Pledge of Allegiance for Youth’s Companion, a popular children’s magazine. With the aid of the National Education Association, Bellamy and the editors of Youth’s Companion got the Pledge adopted as part of the National Public School Celebration on Columbus Day 1892.

 

Bellamy’s recommended ritual for honoring the flag had students all but goosestepping their way through the Pledge: “At a signal from the Principal the pupils, in ordered ranks, hands to the side, face the Flag. Another signal is given; every pupil gives the Flag the military salute–right hand lifted, palm downward, to a line with the forehead and close to it… At the words, ‘to my Flag,’ the right hand is extended gracefully, palm upward, towards the Flag, and remains in this gesture till the end of the affirmation; whereupon all hands immediately drop to the side.” After the rise of Nazism, this form of salute was thought to be in poor taste, to say the least, and replaced with today’s hand‐​on‐​heart gesture.

The Bellamy Salute, in use for the Pledge of Allegiance until 1942. Heartwarming, isn’t it?

Furthermore, the traditional view of the nature of the union of the States was that of a voluntary union.  Each State was equivalent to a nation of Europe or any other continent, able to come and go as she wished from the United States.  The historian Dr J. A. C. Chandler wrote a long piece on the U.S. constitution of 1787, explaining that view (we part ways with him on the purported ‘sovereignty of the people,’ however):

As an introduction to the subject, let us examine the Southern view of the nature of the constitution. To Southerners, the Union was a compact, entered into by separate and distinct political bodies. Such was the Union of the states under the Articles of Confederation, and such the South believed was the Union under the present constitution. According to this compact theory, the government of the United States was created by the states and all the powers of the Federal government are held in trust for the states themselves. Sovereignty, therefore, does not belong to the government of the United States or to any state government, but to the people who made the government of the United States and the states, that is, to the people of the several states taken individually and not to the people of the United States as one mass. These are the views expressed by Alexander H. Stephens, and, in general, were the views held at the time of the adoption of the constitution of the United States. Such were the views of Mr. Madison and Mr. Jefferson, and even of Mr. Hamilton himself, with reference to the question of sovereignty, though Mr. Hamilton differed from Mr. Madison and Mr. Jefferson as to the limitations placed upon the Federal government.

This view is verified in actual history by the fact that North Carolina existed outside the U.S. for a time, as did Texas and Vermont, before they decided to join the union.  And the Treaty of Paris of 1783 that formally ended the colonies’ war for independence with Great Britain names, in its first article, each former colony as a sovereign, independent country:

His Brittanic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz., New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to be free sovereign and independent states, that he treats with them as such, and for himself, his heirs, and successors, relinquishes all claims to the government, propriety, and territorial rights of the same and every part thereof.

Now, who was it that brought a violent end to this understanding of the union?  None other than Pres. Abraham Lincoln, whom Abp. Elpidophoros quotes sympathetically in his encyclical:

President Abraham Lincoln, in one of his precursor “Thanksgiving” proclamations (July 15, 1863), just days after the bloody victory at the Battle of Gettysburg, said: “It is meet and right to recognize and confess the presence of the Almighty Father, and the power of His hand, equally in these triumphs and in these sorrows.” In the midst of the brutal Civil War, Lincoln acknowledged the “presence” of God. And this is what giving thanks in all things really means.

Besides being a non-Christian who dabbled in the occult, he also waged total war against the South, violating the rules of civilized warfare that one is not to target civilians/non-combatants, which his generals would then continue against the Native Americans, and from there, sadly, his method has been used against many other countries in the world by the U.S. armed forces and their proxies – from the Philippines, to Germany, Japan, North Korea, and Vietnam, to Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, the Ukraine, and now into Gaza (this is not a complete list).  But speaking of Lincoln’s War of Northern Aggression in particular, here are some words from Valerie Protopapas that might interest the Archbishop and any other Orthodox bishops who think they ought to snuggle up to Pres. Lincoln around Thanksgiving time or any other time:

Interestingly enough, in this litany of atrocities committed against non-combatants and helpless prisoners, one of the groups to suffer most both during and after the war were the very people for whom, if one believes today’s rhetoric, the war was fought—the slaves. Sherman exhibited a virulent hatred of blacks. He believed them “obstacles to the upward sweep of history, wealth and White destiny—and he felt the same way about the Indian, a situation that eventually led to “incidents” such as Wounded Knee. Lincoln’s opinion of blacks is, of course, well known. When Lincoln met with Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens just before the end of the war, Stephens asked Lincoln what would happen to the former slaves—some three million—cast adrift in a desolated South and not permitted to migrate north. To this Lincoln smiled and repeated an old minstrel show line that they would have to “…root, hog or die.” What Lincoln meant by this was that it would be a matter of the survival of the fittest. Sadly, a great many former slaves—especially the very young and the very old—found freedom to be fatal.

 

The atrocities committed against the People of the South, military and civilian, men and women, white and black, slave and free, young and old, well and ill, sound and wounded are on such a vast scale that they cannot be comprehended, much less revealed in a small article. There are books on the subject such as Dr. Brian Cisco’s War Crimes Against Southern Civilians, but there are also writings suggesting that, in effect, the South had it coming. Given that the people of the South wished only to leave the Union without violence, and that the institution of slavery in those states was not unique to the region, neither was the South involved in the slave trade—that was a Yankee enterprise—it would seem that such horrific treatment of a people whom Lincoln declared to be Americans, citizens of his sacred Union, is inexplicable.

 

But holy wars are vicious. The enemy is not a man or a woman or a child or a neighbor or a brother— but an apostate, a blasphemer, an infidel—and as such, is worthy of no less than death—and even annihilation! That is why Lincoln, his government and his military waged bloody jihad from April of 1861 to April of 1865. Had the war gone on longer, the people of the South might well have been reduced to the conditions of the Cheyenne, the Apache and the Lakota Sioux. Certainly, Generals Sherman and Sheridan and their leader Abraham Lincoln would have shed no tears for their plight.

Apologists for the war on civilians in Gaza use prior US wars as justifications for Israeli murder of women and children

It is profoundly unthoughtful and indecent to quote Pres. Lincoln approvingly in an encyclical that is to be read in any Orthodox parish in the Southern States.  Have these bishops ever looked at the destruction that Lincoln and his generals visited upon Dixie during the War?  We invite them to do so if they have not.

We wonder:  How would Abp. Elpidophoros respond if someone quoted with satisfaction from a Turk who approved of the genocide of the Asia Minor Greeks in some document that he wanted the Archbishop to distribute throughout his diocese?  We do not think he would be too receptive.  We ask that he show Southerners, who continue to be shown genocidal rage by their ‘Yankee betters,’ the same consideration he would want for himself.

Finally, all of this talk by the Orthodox bishops about the ‘one nation of America’ makes little sense in the light of past efforts of the Orthodox Church at evangelism.  Those efforts were usually aimed at converting an actual ethnos, a people-group, a kin-group, a tribe, whatever name one wants to give it – that is to say, a group of closely related people who shared the same folkways and territory for a very long time.  That is not the approach of the Orthodox in the United States.  They are lumping the several different regional cultures all together, approaching them in the same ham-fisted way, as belonging to a single American culture, one that simply does not exist except in a mostly negative, nihilistic sense.  That is never going to work.  They must instead follow the approach of the successful Orthodox missionaries of the past – St. Nino of Georgia, St. Remigius of Rheims, St. Augustine of Canterbury, Sts. Cyril and Methodius among the Slavs, St. Stephen of Perm, St. Nicholas of Japan, St. Innocent of Alaska, St. John Maximovitch, etc.  What was their method?  They studied deeply the various cultures to which they were going as missionaries so that they would be able to present the Orthodox Faith to them in as understandable and desirable a way as possible.  We do not see that approach being used very often here in the United States.  The bishops act as though someone from Connecticut is no different from someone from Mississippi or Arizona, that New England is just the same culturally as Dixie, the Spanish Southwest, Hawai’i, and so on.

One of many maps trying to depict the regional, cultural diversity of the United States

That has got to stop.  Orthodox clergy must spend much more time learning the folkways and history of each cultural region and State (and the subcultures within them, like the Cajuns), and adapt Orthodoxy to them (just it has been adapted and assimilated beautifully over the centuries by the Greeks, Bulgarians, the Old English, Ireland, etc., etc.) if they want the Orthodox Church to flourish amongst the various peoples that comprise the United States.

The current union is on its way to breaking apart.  The cultural, economic, and political stresses are simply too great at this point to stop that process, it appears.  But unfortunately, the Orthodox jurisdictions in the U.S. are not prepared to minister well in the aftermath of that reorganization, blinded as they are with the notion of ‘one nation.’  But they can prepare themselves, both for the present and for the future, by learning about the real cultures within the United States and ministering to them as such, while de-emphasizing the dubious notion of ‘one people with one culture and one destiny’ that was forced upon the States by a violent group of socialists in Washington, D. C., led conspicuously by ol’ Abe Lincoln himself.

–Walt Garlington is 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.