By Walt Garlington
Southerners who love Dixie are distressed by the steady erosion of her culture. Much has been lost due to overt attacks from enemies without and within as well as to our own carelessness and inattention over the years. Like our honorable ancestors before us, many want to rise up and take action, to join the battle wielding weapons of some kind – political, economic, religious, cultural.
A wonderful English writer, and Orthodox Christian, Paul Kingsnorth cautions us against this approach in his essay “The Moses Option“:
… I think it is safe to say that ‘activism’ is a child of the Western way of seeing. We are an ‘activist’ culture. We like to identify problems and then solve them. We like to generalise about particulars. We like abstractions. We exist to ‘save the world’ or to ‘fix’ it, or to offer ‘solutions’. It is never enough for us to live in this world, to be content with who and what we are, to accept God’s will. No, we have to improve things; remake them in our image. This is the activist mindset, and it has been elevated to the status of a grand moral cause. It is, I would say, the West’s reason to live: our Big Idea.
A gifted Southern writer of recent times, Marion Montgomery, had an expression of his own that strongly echoes these thoughts of Kingsnorth, that cultural renewal cannot be “poured in from the top.” Southern cultural renewal won’t be accomplished primarily by our activism, by our carefully crafted plans and actions. That is not to say they are completely unimportant, but much more important is what happens in our souls. If we are faithful in living a true Orthodox life, the Grace of God that flows out from that will cause quite an upheaval around us. Kingsnorth recounts instances of this from Orthodox history in his essay, these being amongst them:
Thousands of ordinary Christians allow the Roman authorities to burn them alive, feed them to lions, crucify or impale them in public. They do not resist their fates, and they often die smiling. Their sacrifice ends up Christianising the entire empire.
Other ordinary Christians share everything they own, give away the rest, and tend to the sick and dying even if it kills them too. Their sacrifice of love spreads their faith across continents, without the need for either missionaries or state support.
We should be clear: We are not advocating that Dixians become Orthodox simply to save Southern culture. That would be idolatry. But it is nevertheless true that the conversion of a people, the entry of an ethnos into the sacred garden of the Orthodox Church, sanctifies their culture, salting it with the holiness of the All-Holy Trinity that preserves it both in this life and in the life to come. We have seen this over and over again down through the years – from Spain and Scotland to Romania and Russia to the Aleuts of Alaska.
It seems a contradiction in terms: We reject the religious faiths that our immediate ancestors knew and practiced, Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, exchanging them for the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic faith of the Orthodox Church (that our more distant ancestors of Europe and Africa knew and loved) to save our souls and bodies, and in doing so we receive a revitalized Southern culture. Yet this is simply how real Christianity works, as Kingsnorth explains: ” … this whole faith, this whole path, is a paradox. That when we do the thing we do not want to do – the thing we fear – it turns out alright. That trying to ‘save the world’ may destroy it, but that sacrificing yourself for the world may, in the end, save it.”
Paradoxically as ever, we might find that, as a result, a Christian culture is born again and flourishes, for this is the only way they ever emerge: not through the sword, but through the cross.
That Southrons would learn to die that they and their works might endure forever – may our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ grant it.
Note: Mr. Kingsnorth expands upon the thoughts presented above in his speech given for the 2024 Erasmus Lecture, available here.
Walt Garlington is a chemical engineer turned writer and editor of the website Confiteri: A Southern Perspective. This longtime Southern Baptist, then Anglican, was united to the Orthodox Church in 2012 and makes his home in Louisiana where he attends a GOA parish.
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