Hoosier Religion

Much of America's founding population had fled to the New World to escape the oppressive and degenerate quasi-religious bureaucracies of Europe.  It's no accident that our founding fathers, a group with a diverse range of religious perspectives, designed this nation with religious freedom in mind.  America in general and Indiana in particular served as a Petri dish of religious expression.  Most of the experiments, like the New Harmony community in Southern Indiana, failed - but others have proven quite durable.  While some, like the Peoples Temple of Jim Jones ended in disaster, others, like the Amish and Mennonite communities that are flourishing here, may ultimately prove more durable than the society around them.

Two defining characteristics of religiosity in Indiana are its universally Christian character and its liveliness.  Religion throughout Europe and among the cosmopolitans in America has been relegated to a status of lifeless ritual, struggling to remain relevant by cravenly following the modern trends.  An uncompromisingly Christian worldview remains, however, throughout much of America's heartland.

This worldview is embattled in Indiana, as it is elsewhere, by the dual forces of scientific discovery and modernism.  Scientific discovery, with its emerging portrait of an Earth randomly positioned in the Universe which is billions of years old, apparently contradicts the vision of a recent creation of mankind.  Modernists feign an alliance with science, but it is an uneasy one at best, since research threatens to topple their own idols of human interchangeability, environmental determinism, racial nihilism, Keynesian economics, and Freudo-Marxist Utopianism as surely as it threatens a literal seven day interpretation of Genesis.

Progress depends on our steadily working to reconcile our faith with our knowledge.  This does not necessarily imply compromise and does not necessarily imply capitulation to a godless and reductionist worldview.  It certainly does not, as the cosmopolitans confidently declare, imply a rejection of God in favor of their barren humanist platitudes.  If anything, research shows that the most traditional and faithful populations are the most sustainable and content.

While a casual stroll through a nursing home followed by a visit to a high school cafeteria shows a seismic shift in Indiana's people from traditional folks to "citizens of the world", Indiana's transformation has been slower than most states.  Behind the superficial facade of chain restaurants, strip malls, and ranch homes smolder the warm embers of the once-vibrant core of Jacksonian democracy, of a unique and distinct Anglo-American ethnonational spirit.

Biographer William Manchester borrows from David Riesman in defining three general types of people in "American Caesar", a biography of General MacArthur...

The world may be explained in sociological terms. David Riesman describes three basic social personalities in The Lonely Crowd. 'Other-directed' people pattern their behavior on what their peers expect of them. Suburban America's men in gray-flannel suits are other-directed. 'Inner-directed' people are guided by what they have been trained to expect of themselves. [General Douglas] MacArthur was inner-directed. The third type, the 'tradition-directed,' has not been seen in the West since the Middle Ages. Tradition-directed people hardly think of themselves as individuals; their conduct is determined by folk rituals handed down from the past.

While Riesman is generally accurate about the decline of the tradition-directed type in Western Civilization, he fails to recognize that specimens of this category remained in the rural periphery of Europe, particularly among the Scotch-Irish highlanders, into contemporary times.  Their disappearance from the record is merely an artefact of their invisibility to the city dwellers who document these matters.

In their "Appalachian granny magic", their folk rituals, folk remedies, and folk tales, these last practitioners of European tradition survived throughout Appalachia and the Southern Midwest up until very recently.  Luckily, much of this has been recorded in the popular and informative Foxfire series of books, books which explain how to hand-craft a mountain dulcimer, how to plant by the signs, and how to live a traditional life with the plentiful resources available in America's rich wilderness.  Interviews with faith healers and other mystics dwelling in the hills and hollers of the forest provide an insight into a worldview which has gone from ubiquity to near extinction within a couple generations.

Our world is now one in which man looks outward to his fellow man when seeking to improve his condition and downward toward material progress when seeking hope and faith.  We were once a truly Christian nation, one which looked inward toward our own sinful nature when seeking to improve our condition and upward toward the heavens in matters of hope and faith.  Christianity as we know it is unlikely to survive in this spiritual vacuum, replaced by a humiliating spectacle of youth pastors beat-boxing for Jesus and “Christian Zionist” warmongers invoking God and scripture to lend gravitas to their bloodthirsty campaigns of imperial aggression.

Returning back to our traditional and religious roots will likely require turning our backs on our contemporary religious institutions.  To the extent that they read into scripture dangerous notions of globalism, humanism, and imperial warfare, they are hostile to our Christian republic and its foundations.  Many of them, converted to a monetary worldview, fight obsessively to end financial poverty in the far corners of the globe while turning a blind eye toward the moral bankruptcy festering in their pews.  It would be great if they would serve as uncompromising sanctuaries for their congregation instead of sanctuaries for hostile foreigners for a change.

This question of faith and worldview is not merely an academic or sentimental one.  America's military strength lied in its vanguard of Scotch-Irish warriors whose traditional worldview and religious conviction propelled them into battle.  America's economic strength lied in its Protestant work ethic and its Christian aversion to wastefulness, usury, and debt.  America's diplomatic strength lied in its status as a light unto the other nations.  Perhaps even God's favor, which appears to have granted us two centuries of blessings and safety, may be withdrawn as our government and its minions turn their backs on him.