Among the
contributions to I'll Take My Stand, Allen Tate's "Remarks on the
Southern Religion" is usually interpreted as the most acerbic, immoderate,
and unusual essay in the collection. All
too often the essay is read as an apologia for violence or an eccentric
defense of tradition. In fact,
Tate--like his fellow Agrarians--was seeking to remind his readers of the
religious and political society that was once the South. More importantly, Tate's essay is a plea for
a recovery of what has been lost: a humane social order.
Nourished
by daily labors in the fields, it was the properly ordered agrarian community
that produced a more stable and wholesome environment for families and workers than
industrialism could offer. According to
Tate, an agrarian environment encouraged a life more conducive to religious and
ethical living as well. In regard to
farming, the experience of tilling the soil and harvesting crops embodied a
sense of self-sacrifice and an attachment to a shared community. Farming was by its very nature a communal,
rather than a solitary act. The primary
aesthetic and spiritual needs of humankind were best fulfilled by the structure
and corporate nature of an agrarian society.
Tate's close friend and fellow Agrarian, Andrew Lytle, convincingly
reaffirmed this sentiment years later: "Agriculture is a limited
term. A better one is farming. It is inclusive. Unlike any other occupation, farming is, or
should be, a way of life."
Genuine
cultural renewal could not take place without appreciating the agrarian
worldview--grounded in a connection to the soil and love for the Creator that
was increasingly less palpable to Tate's generation, and at the end of 20th
century even the memory of such an existence is quickly fading.
The root of
the problem for Tate was simple: The significance of New England, and more
specifically the Massachusetts Bay settlement and subsequent religious and
political developments in American life had crowded out the agrarian
alternative from public discourse. For
the Agrarians, the "American" political, religious and social
experience, as well as the resulting vision for politics, was usually
attributed to Puritan New England. The
late Sydney Ahlstrom argued that the "Puritan Ethic" of legalistic
moral strictures, and a doctrine of labor as serving and pleasing God, became
the American ethic. And in the hands of
the Puritan divines the "ethic" became incorporated into their
understanding of politics, nourishing New England religious and political
thought and influencing the Founding generation by providing a way of
understanding the unique nature of the American political experience.
The
consummation of the New England ethic was the development of a civil theology
based upon the special status of the American regime. America was regarded as the "New
Israel," expressing similarity with the Biblical and historical narrative
modes of expression. America's situation
in the pantheon of world religious and political history was understood as
unequaled. The regime was special, a
providential gift offered to the world, a city on a hill, a light amidst the
darkness of political despotism. The
transcendent aspects of American civil theology served a rememorative purpose,
providing a basis for appreciating the generosity of the Divine while also
looking to the future.
As Tate
noted, this was only half, and the least important half of the story. Commencing with the earliest movement of
American religious and political thought an important bifurcation in the
conceptualization of a humane social order can be observed and is of great
importance to the transmittal of an appreciation of the good life.
While not as
explicit as one would have preferred for him to be, Tate proclaimed that
alongside the development of New England, there arose a less dogmatic and more
explicitly pastoral presentation--and we should associate this with the other
great colonial settlement, Jamestown.
The Virginia colony, nearly simultaneous in date of origin with the
Puritan Massachusetts Bay colony, shared a related history and many aspects of
its political development, while also exhibiting a distinctiveness.
The
Southern and agrarian tradition in America produced a very different
understanding of what was really most important. Against the tendency to endorse a theocratic
and unitary form of life, this experience accommodated divergent theological
and political understandings of order and sought to nurture an ecumenism
grounded in the acceptance of dissent and a diffusion of political power.
Liberty was conceived in terms of
its corporateness, a societas, combining the family and larger units of
an interconnected citizenry with each other to form associations. Instead of the rigorous moral codes found in
New England, the Southern colonies were more dependent upon the English model
of ecclesiastic and civil subsidiarity, relying on representatives nearest the
situation to provide order and preside over the deliberation of disputes. In essence, the religious and political
developments within the South were founded upon a spirit of localism in theory
and practice. The movement towards
"establishing" state-sponsored churches met, for example, with great
success in New England, while in the South a decentralized theory of control
and the habit of localism in matters of church and state insured a greater
autonomy and forbearance among the associations of the faithful and governing
authorities.
As Mel
Bradford posits, the Southern "spirit" looked to Eden after the Fall
as a model, with "the best of the gifts of this life," and
anticipated that a fruitful social and political existence was possible only
when "pursued with prudence, energy, honor, and regard for a wise
prescription." The implantation of
the "garden" as a metaphor for explaining how the Southern
understanding differed from the New England version deserves our attention. Contrary to the New England understanding of
precision in all religious and political arrangements, the Southern and
agrarian worldview identified the ancient imperfections of a civilization with
the need for an enduring pattern of improvement and refinement within human
nature. A society grounded upon the rock
of such a prescriptive development of religious and political thinking was less
likely to be consumed by ideological deformations of their understanding;
conversely, it was also more reluctant to submit to a reformation of defects in
the pre-existing worldview inherited from previous generations. The distant and overbearing sources of
ecclesial and political authority were not easily accepted and were viewed with
skepticism. In the long struggle within
the development of an agrarian worldview, a distinct version of the regime was
articulated, incompatible with the New England presentation, while sharing its
original design for the diffusion of political authority. From the colonial period we can witness the
beginning of two divergent understandings of the reality of religion and
politics, prompting the historian Nathan Hatch to suggest that at some point in
the development the two great regions one "could draw upon precious few
common traditions in defining their Americanness." John Randolph, cousin of Thomas Jefferson and
an influential model of statesmanship for the Agrarians, could defend the
extraordinary position of an inherited Southern worldview in response to a
confidant's query about his attendance at a religious gathering:
I
was born and baptized in the Church of England.
If I attend the Convention at Charlottesville, which I rather doubt, I
shall oppose myself then and always at every attempt at encroachment on the
part of the church, the clergy especially, on the rights of conscience. I attribute, in a very great degree, my long
estrangement from God to my abhorrence of prelatical pride and puritanical
preciseness; to ecclesiastical tyranny....
Should I fail to attend, it will arise from a repugnance to submit the
religion, or church, any more than the liberty of my country, to foreign
influence. When I speak of my country, I
mean the Commonwealth of Virginia. I was
born in allegiance to George III; the bishop of London (Terrick!) was my
diocesan. My ancestors threw off the
oppressive yoke of the mother country, but they never made me subject to New
England in matters spiritual or temporal; neither do I mean to become so,
voluntarily.[1]
Within the South Atlantic region even as eccentric (and
brilliant) a representative as Randolph could be appreciated as the defender of
the verities of a mode of understanding that relied upon the reclaiming of a
pre-existing order while recognizing the need for imparting this understanding
with particular attention to a rapidly expanding republic.
Randolph affirmed,
as Tate and the other Agrarians would concur more elaborately a century later,
the vision of a moral regime focused upon the idea of subsidiarity (or
localism) in political and religious concerns.
Subsidiarity as a means of dividing public authority and political power
and perpetuating the republic was dependent on the virtue of the citizenry
within the states. Contrary to
criticisms offered regarding the philosophical progenitors of Agrarians
(especially those of an Antifederalist and Calhounian cast), virtue was of
great importance to their understanding of religious and political order. The inculcation of virtue required a
sustained effort to allow each generation to hear the "voice of tradition,"
Patrick Henry urged. If the witnesses
expired without fulfilling the need to "inform posterity," social and
political life might suffer the consequences of such a collective loss of
memory and purpose.
Tate and
the Agrarians also urged a spirit of inhibition or prudence towards accepting
any radical innovation too quickly that deserves comparison with the paladins
of industry’s plea for immediate action to maintain the regime during every
period of unrest. The Agrarians were
neither a monolithic response against the prospects for confronting the modern
world, nor a remnant of irredentist elements from the War of Northern
Aggression. Instead, the Agrarians
accepted the imperfections of the American society concerning the decline of a
true religiosity and the dangerous growth of governmental authority while
advocating many impediments to the problems resulting from what George Mason
decried as "the natural lust of power so inherent in man."
Even though the Agrarians were an assortment of
representatives with many theoretical and geographical differences, they were
united by an unwillingness to accept consolidationist measures, regardless of
the form, and insistent upon protecting a decentralized, group-oriented
society, as defined in a variety of ways.
But the Agrarians cannot be adequately fathomed by simply noting their
negative response to particular issues; on the contrary, the Agrarians were
part of a clear republican understanding of the nature of the American regime
and religious experience.
For Tate
and his fellow Agrarians the overwhelming practical and theoretical inheritance
was established upon an appreciation of the necessary limitations of social and
political life. Primary among the means
of limitation was the need for societal and personal restraint when faced with
the possibility of radical transformation.
While change and social mobility were not the most commonly acknowledged
aspects of Southern society, neither were such considerations beyond the pale
of possibility. As articulate
representatives of agrarian republicanism during the 20th century, Tate could present
an Aristotelian mean as the basis for installing an element of restraint in the
operation of government. If government
could not be restricted and faith encouraged, the regime would necessarily lose
a sense of liberty.
Living within a society aware of
its constraints, Tate also appreciated the limits of human experience,
acknowledging the shortcomings of his own perspectives and holding utopian
schemes in disdain. The South had lost
its heroic struggle due in part to a separation of its religion from its
politics. In fact, Tate’s essay rightly
noted that tradition alone, devoid of the impact of religion, tends to be a
tradition of violence rather than of spiritual empowerment. And in terms of the conundrum of political
and spiritual confusion, Tate’s own life bears witness to his inability to
overcome just such a struggle.
Today, the centrality of the
Agrarian's devotion to the preservation of an inherited worldview and way of
life and its explication for a new generation of Americans must serve as the
hallmarks of their thought, and as a remarkable testimony for the rising
generation. At a time when efforts to
“create” or force a false and destructive sense of community upon us are
widespread, it is time to revisit the Agrarian defense of an older, organic
social order. And to appreciate the
Agrarian fatum, we must remember their love of the Creator and his
creation, amidst our current confusion.
[1]
"September 25, 1818," in Collected Letters of John Randolph to Dr.
John Brockenbrough, 1812-1833, ed. Kenneth Shorey (New Brunswick:
Transaction Books, 1988), p. 21.
