Outsiders travelling through the South often remark on the large number of churches here compared with other parts of America. Billboards with Christian messaging about sin and repentance and Jesus and salvation greet passers-through on major interstates, cheering some and vexing others -- attracting or repelling thereby -- according to the viewer's spiritual condition.
While the modern, more industrial and commercial, 21st-Century South is certainly far more lax in its faith, and far less Southern, than in former times, its comparative faithfulness, as a region among regions, is beyond dispute.
The South's persisting power to cheer and attract, and to vex and repel, is evidence of its persisting cultural life and identity, rooted in older and truer Christian practice. And this persisting power raises two questions for the Providentially minded.
Why is the South more Christian than other parts of America? And what role will the South play in America's future?
The short answer to the first question points to ultimate causation: Because God, in His good pleasure, dispensed grace thus, for some deep and unfathomable but perfect reason(s). That is why Southerners, to this day, and especially in Confederate circles, both proudly and humbly self-identify as "American by birth, but Southern by the grace of God."
The longer answer to the "why more Christian" question is a complex historical web of proximate or intermediate causes. Since colonial times, many factors have formed and eroded and reformed Southern identity and the Southern mind and outlook.
Before the War for Southern Independence, an agrarian South, grown up from colonial and frontier struggles, inclined to deep dependence on the Lord for His favor in sustaining that way of life. In the years leading up to what Southerners call "the War", the agrarian South, drawing from the experience of its revolutionary and secessionist struggles against Crown and Parliament, responded to aggressions on multiple fronts by an increasingly commercial and industrial and philistine and Godless North.
These Yankee aggressions included: legislative warfare by unconstitutional tariffs aimed at systematically defrauding and plundering the Southern people; vitriolic and false-philosophical moralistic agitation over slavery aimed at subverting the South's wise and stable social system of ordered liberty; and tyrannical political machinations aimed at reducing the Southern states from voluntary co-equals and partners within the Union to conquered provinces.
In the period from 1815 to 1860, Southern intellectual victory over the North -- both inside and outside the halls of the federal government, and on the full range of policy issues of the times --preceded Southern military defeat in the War. Southern champions including John Randolph of Roanoke, John C. Calhoun, and James Henley Thornwell -- by true philosophy and true theology rooted in Scripture -- crushed by refutation all forensic opposition from the North.
Specifically, in the period from 1830 to 1860, by the mysterious operations of an All-Wise Providence, the work of defending slavery by Scripture rendered the South, as a people, more Christian than ever before. Searching the Scriptures for proof texts, Southern apologists found ample and overwhelming confirmation of their position in both Testaments of the Bible. Indeed, the whole exercise of defending the peculiar institution against Yankee abolitionist attack -- by immersing Southerners more deeply in the Word -- rendered the Southern people more Scriptural and orthodox in their Christian faith. For the Southerner, sound faith and well-run society were linked, as were unbelief and anarcho-tyranny.
Meanwhile, the corresponding inability of the North to defend abolition or emancipation by Scripture moved the North to abandon Scripture and to deny its Divine authorship. This disgraceful abandonment and denial were preferable, in the eyes of proud Yankeedom, to admitting error before God (and the South) and to repenting for officious intermeddling in and subversive agitation against social arrangements with Divine authorship and sanction. It was in fact this disgraceful abandonment and denial — like another Fall of man -- that set the North and its people on the path of total metaphysical rebellion against God and His hierarchically ordered creation, a rebellion now known as Yankee-Marxist "progressivism."
So, this Southern intellectual and forensic victory in debate over the North — combined with the North's profoundly sinful reaction to that defeat -- explains in part how the old-time Calvinist faith of the pilgrim fathers in New England withered and was finally totally subverted in favor of secular, atheist, and materialist French "Enlightenment", Emersonian Transcendentalism.
But these glorious and truly Ciceronian and Pauline forensic victories by the South over the North during the antebellum period, while confirming the faith of the Southern mind, fueled bitter Northern hatred that would prove vengeful. And so, after the war of words came the shooting war.
And the War, of course, further developed Southern identity and stamped the Southern mind in profound and indelible ways. Four years of heroic, bloody, self-sacrificial struggle for hearth and home and political independence -- against a hateful and heathen foreign invader bent on total war and total domination and the total spiritual destruction of a Christian people -- could hardly do otherwise. But the military conflict, following hard on decades of heated debate, galvanized the mind of Southerners as nothing else could against all things Yankee.
Overwhelmed in the end by superior numbers and materiel, an ever-defiant Southern people resolved -- after a thoroughly exhausting war that left their physical world in ruins -- to persist spiritually in being Christian and Southern.
Defying all "reconstructive" efforts to wipe out Southern identity and to assimilate the conquered people as pliable and faithless subjects into the Yankee empire, the people of the South persevered under a Yankee military occupation that stretched in South Carolina until 1877 — over a decade after Appomattox. From 1865 until the 1890s, the Southern states were either under direct military occupation or under the threat of re-invasion and re-occupation.
Throughout this period and up to the present, Southern patriot redeemers, bent on redeeming the militarily conquered South from evil Yankee influences, have asserted themselves in their Christian-Southern principles whenever and wherever possible, opposing, reversing, and ever acting as a conservative brake on the lunatic and demonic policies of atheistic Yankee egalitarianism.
These redemptive assertions by Southerners since 1865 have been by recourse to the Christian classical republican principles of constitutionalism, ordered liberty, and race realism that had characterized the Old South. And this now brings us to answering, at last, our second question: What role will the South play in America's future?
Today, in 2023, the "one and indivisible" United States — the old nemesis of the Christian South -- is rapidly spiraling downward and falling apart socially, morally, economically, politically, and spiritually. Since Appomattox, the Yankee United States empire, as General Lee predicted, has become "aggressive abroad and despotic at home."
Under Biden the Usurper, an atheistic United States now wages war against Christian Russia on the other side of the world, while deliberately holding its own border wide open to Third World invasion, for anti-white and thoroughly corrupt partisan political reasons. Under Yankee atheism and forced political centralization, America has murdered over 63 million infants by abortion since 1973, putting all atrocities attributed to the Nazis, for example, in the shade.
Since Appomattox, Yankee imperialism and globalism, aimed at world domination, have made the United States the most hated and despised country in the world, and put us all at risk of nuclear annihilation. And with a "federal" government now dominated by carnal or anti-Christian Jewry, all manner of homo-trans perversions are being forced on Americans just as America, ruled by corrupt oligarchs, leads the world in child sex-trafficking.
But against the wicked Yankee empire, the Christian South still stands as principal bulwark and brake and rallying point and beacon of hope. Her long tradition of resistance to tyranny; the inspiring examples of her great heroes; the powerful and striking and unequivocal Christian symbolism of her quintessentially American Confederate battle flag; and the simple and strong and enduring and persevering conservative Christian faith of so many of her people today --these together render the South the natural and inevitable leader of future, free America. And sure signs of this leadership are the heavy blue-to-red-state migration now underway, along with regular states' rights pushback by Southern governments against wokeness and DC.
Southern strength and Southern perseverance, now as yesterday, are rooted in the Christian faith of her people. And the core of Christian faith is the love of truth. And this Holy love, implanted by the Lord in the elect when born again, is what sets believers apart from unbelievers.
Victory by perseverance in Jesus the Truth and in all His truths is the grand and unstoppable strategy of the Christian South. Jesus' central political truths include: constitutionalism, with its clear recognition of sin nature and the need to constrain it; ordered liberty, by which quanta of freedom are allowed to each individual according to his fitness to exercise it responsibly; and race realism, the recognition that Divine distribution of common grace gifts of intelligence and character, according to His All-Wise plan, differ between both individuals and the races of man.
The Almighty determines, according to His perfect wisdom, the times when good enterprises succeed in this earthly life, and when they do not. The duty of man in every era is to strive for the Good.
In the 1860s, on every issue, the South was right and the North was wrong. Though defeated militarily, the South won by being drawn closer to God. Though winning militarily, the North lost by being further alienated from the Lord, like the reprobate man given over to his all-consuming sin.
In the grand scheme of human history, the War for Southern Independence was but a single battle, and the conflict between Christian goodness and atheistic evil rages on over the earth until Judgment. And as the wheel of Providential history slowly turns, by Christian perseverance, by God's grace, the South is now, in the 21st Century, achieving victory after Appomattox over the wicked and atheist Yankee United States.
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Winston McCuen is a metaphysician and political philosopher and Christian apologist. He is a Reformed believer, native South Carolinian, proud son of the Confederacy, and outspoken Southern patriot. He holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in philosophy from Emory University, is a John C. Calhoun scholar, and a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Furman University in history and philosophy. Formerly a welding instructor, philosophy instructor and Latin teacher, he holds multiple welding certifications and is a senior certified nuclear metallurgical welding engineer.
