Enjoying our anomaly.

20231218

Yesterday I wrote:

I liked to entertain in Washington, D.C., but found myself more and more cancelled even before the turn of the century. Most of those whom I called friends twenty and thirty years ago don’t return my calls. Some are openly hostile on account of my skeptical views on most modern mantras.

I’m very much the same man that I was 60 years ago, but the times have changed. If I have any fault, it is that I was resolute about not changing with them.

Reflecting on Albion’s Seed is clear that this is a repeating pattern throughout history. The first waves of people to come to America were mostly fleeing oppression and seeking liberty. The Puritans (to 1640) wanted religious freedom, especially from the Anglican majority. These Calvinists established their own orthodoxies – witch burnings in such – to discourage dissent within their ranks. They did not tolerate other dissident groups such as the Quakers very well.

The second wave, of Anglicans to the Tidewater (to 1675), imported their own established systems of oppression. Virginia was a highly stratified society in which the lower classes were expected to be subservient and to comply with the dominant religion.  Quakers and other sects were not welcome.

The third wave, to 1725, consisting at first of Quakers to the Delaware Valley but sweeping with them my German ancestors, was the most tolerant of religions. Quakerism had little in the way of dogma and official tracts. No clergy, and a distrust of book learning.   Fischer says that simplicity was its downfall. The Quakers were so nice and tolerant that they allowed other peoples and sects to overrun them. He writes that whereas in the middle of the great Quaker migration they were outgoing and rather evangelical, by the end they had turned inward and sought only to be left alone. The Quakers were shunned and oppressed by the Anglicans where they came in contact.

Only the Scots Irish fourth wave, 1717-75, according to Fischer, was driven primarily by economic considerations. The border people were desperately poor and suffered from endemic fighting and famine. They had their prejudices, to be sure, but mostly they just wanted their own land. Theirs was the most numerous and at 58 years longest wave of English immigration. The southern highlands of the American interior were far and away the most extensive of the destination geographies. Sectarian differences within this group could be resolved by simply moving apart.

At the end of the day, the Church of England was the most oppressive of the religions. It held the power in the mother country. Anglicans, as much as anything, were the force that drove the Puritans and the Quakers to leave the mother country.

I joined the Anglicans, otherwise known as the Episcopal Church, when I lived in Frankfurt in the mid-70s. I liked the structure of the service and the music, and it looks like a likely place to meet a wife.

Our priest, Father Sacquety, was a kind and wise man. His manner suggested he was gay, but he didn’t make a big deal of it, and he did a competent job of managing the parish. As a San Franciscan I had been around gays all my life and took it in stride. When I returned to Washington DC, I started to attend St. Alban’s Parish, on the National Cathedral grounds, which had a fairly extensive gay membership.

After marrying in the Washington Cathedral, my second wife and I joined St. Patrick’s, a parish church in our own neighborhood. Once again there were a couple of gay parishioners, but the congregation was mostly made up of families who lived in Northwest Washington.

Things got weird. The priest got divorced and slowly came out of the closet. He invited gays to join the congregation and had affairs with a few of them. The tone changed. Rather than merely accept, we were supposed to fête gays, celebrate them, venerate them. And God help you if you said anything against them. I, as the church treasurer, was called a homophobe for noticing some financial irregularities.

And so it has gone throughout the Anglican world.  The gay faction now runs the Episcopal church.  Church schools teach the normalcy of the gay and trans lifestyles.  One must not even ask if differences in outcomes among the races are due to any factor other than racism.  Just as in the seventeenth century, the Anglicans are telling us what to believe.  The substance is totally different that what they forced on believers then, but the fervor is the same. 

H. L. Mencken wrote that “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”  He fell short in only one particular.  Over the course of time, people have held with equal tenacity a vast number of wrong solutions.  They never seem to notice the contradictions among them, and that none of their solutions have worked.

At any rate the bien pensants of Bethesda pillory me for writing that I am happy to live in a society that easily tolerates its relatively few sexual and racial minorities.  A society without smash-and-grab robberies, carjackings, obstreperous pederasts in politics, or bums and addicts on the streets.  They are not content to let me lead my own life and hold my own opinions – which opinions have nothing to do with how I live my life here.

To return to the theme of Albion’s Seed, the desire to tell other people how to live runs deep in the human soul.  I’m fortunate to have sprung from groups that had the restraint not to – most of the time.  It is comfortable to live among tolerant people.  I would observe, however, that the intolerant have the upper hand in an evolutionary sense.  Today that is the Africans and Muslims.  Russians and Progressives would qualify with regard to intolerance but not evolution.  They don’t have kids. 

There is no place on earth where a white guy can raise a family in a healthy, growing society of people like himself, where his children and grandchildren will find acceptance and be assured of being able to support their own families.  The America that offered such promise appears to have been a historical anomaly.  In any case, fully recognizing its shortcomings, I’m sticking with Ukraine as the best of bad alternatives.

Graham