The intellectual world in which I lived during my most formative years was inhabited by men who believed in three things: truth, the church, and the South. The last of these, though least important metaphysically, was of the most immediate and real importance. I do not mean that it was a cause; these men did not believe that the South even still existed or even could exist. No, it was most important in the way a just-dead father haunts and holds the mind. One always goes about trying to explain who they are and why they were so important—hoping that the now vague memory will not be lost forever, but be picked up by someone anew. The South, I was taught, believed in establishment, leisure, and gentility.
The South believed in learning and being learned; not for publication, reputation, or success but rather for enjoyment, understanding, and for itself. What I learned more than these however was what the South did not believe. I was taught to appreciate the South through a sort of via negativa—by being told what it was not. The South did not believe in the Gospel of Progress, the prophets of Newness, nor the priests of Science.
One of the fundamental reasons for the South’s opposition to Progress was that Progress always involved the rape and destruction of nature and man’s relation to it. It was unlike modern environmentalism in that it viewed man as the purpose for nature. Nature, in and of itself, was meaningless without man to love and enjoy it. Indeed, nature for them was only a cloak of the supernatural. By being in nature, man came to be in the supernatural. It was the contention of those Southern men that all art, leisure, and religious sentiment derived from the very same source: the ground. Once man lost his sense of the mystery and inscrutability of nature, he would also lose his sense of self and his sense of place. He would become a wandering sprite with no home, no nation, and no purpose. This was the logical end of eternal Progress.
I came to believe wholly in this critical view of Progress and newness. I did not hope naively to resurrect it or discover it but I did lament its loss and search its traces everywhere. The greatest compliment I could grant a place was to say it “had traces of the South”. By this I only meant that the place had not been completely taken over by progress and the consuming urge. I did not mean, as some do, that I could imagine drinking mint juleps on the porch while the negroes sang Gospel in the field.
What I lamented most was that all the Southern states had not only capitulated and acquiesced to the new religion of Progress (how could they not?) but that the South had become willing and active participants in it. The South had gone from forced converts to Progress to Evangelists, Apostles, and even Developers of it. The South had collapsed under the weight of opinion and succumbed to the alluring temptation. There were benefits, of course. Old cities like Little Rock and Nashville were transformed into major metropolitan areas with new roads, new jobs, big stadiums, nice appliances, bigger houses, and even bigger TVs. The South led the nation in job growth, SUV purchases, and (along with California) created the McMansion. All of these things were benefits of capitulation to Progress. Indeed, it must be said that the South became more of a model for Progress than the North had ever been. The South became the new standard bearer of Progress.
The great irony in all of this, however, is that at almost the very moment that the South has forgotten its past and become an evangelizer of consumerism; the new Progressives (Al Gore and the environmentalists) have arrived to tell them that their views are from the ‘old world’ and that their lifestyles are destroying the world. Of course, the very reason that the South acts the way It does and consumes the way it does is because the North engaged in the great “Reconstruction” and succeeded. The South is reconstructed but now, it seems, must now be torn down again.
Written by Andrew Shivone, Chairman, Department of Theology, The Atonement Academy.
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