By Stephen Borthwick
Anyone who has grown up in the melting pot of immigrant religiosity of the industrial northeast has a very specific vision of Southern religiosity – evangelical, provincial, low-church, and rabidly anti-Catholic, among other things. Even growing up in a household sympathetic to the South, I had plenty of condescending ignorance about the way Southrons practiced their religion. Grab a Bible, flip on Billy Graham, and say “Amen”, and you’re more than half-way there.
Nuance to any ignorant view comes only with closer acquaintance – and that closer acquaintance for me took the form of spending more than three quarters of my adult life south of the Mason-Dixon, from Washington, DC to Memphis, Tennesse, thence to Maryland and now in Georgia. I found the rich history of traditional Christianity throughout the South and met a large number of High Church Southern men and women, Anglicans and Catholics and – especially surprising to me – Orthodox Christians. It is this last group that played the greatest role in my religious life: I was received into the Orthodox Church by a Georgian; in Pennsylvania I heard liturgy at a parish Bishop George, abbot of the Hermitage of the Holy Cross in West Virginia, and the pastor of my parish now is an Appalachian convert.
Today, there are more than two hundred thousand Orthodox believers throughout the South and seventeen Orthodox monasteries. They are a mix of immigrant communities and American converts: Greeks, Syrians, Russians, and a half dozen other Orthodox nationalities and jurisdictions, many taking root in the heart of the so-called “Bible Belt.” With the massive demographic shift occurring in the South due to improving economy and growing cities – especially apparent around Atlanta and in Northern Virginia – it is worth considering the way Orthodoxy fits into Southern identity and a Southern way of life, and why the growth of an Orthodox community does not have to mean a change to Southern culture such as other population shifts have effected.
Read the rest at the Abbeville Institute.
Stephen Borthwick is a history teacher who was raised in the Anthracite Region of Pennsylvania with a deep love and admiration for Southern culture and sympathy for the Great Cause shared by his Irish-American predecessors who were Copperhead Democrats and mine workers exploited by Republican industrialists. He has a PhD in European history from the Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and is blessed to be living just outside of Gainesville, Georgia, with his wife and two children.
