In which we discuss the cultural acceptability of the South, re: Orthodoxy

[sestir]

Thanks!
So, they mean groups of people, or organizations in some areas apply group pressure to make individuals do things that other groups or organizations identify as bad and caused by prejudice. But they don't want to blame organizations so they blame the geographical area.
As an encouragement I wish to suggest only that you may be more likely to find working solutions in Christian tradition than in contemporary social theories.

 

[Stinky]

Thanks!
So, they mean groups of people, or organizations in some areas apply group pressure to make individuals do things that other groups or organizations identify as bad and caused by prejudice. But they don't want to blame organizations so they blame the geographical area.
As an encouragement I wish to suggest only that you may be more likely to find working solutions in Christian tradition than in contemporary social theories.

"Working solution in Christ"
Of course. We agree. Christ is the answer to all questions and struggles and for all.

And " blame" falls on our human heart individually joined together with groups or countries, states, or regions, while we actively participate or silently watch in the shadows.

 

[Stinky]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/28/the-most-racist-places-in-america-according-to-google/

View attachment 20800

 

[Stinky]

"Other hotbeds of racist searches appear in areas of the Gulf Coast, Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and a large portion of Ohio." So much for Upper Peninsula Michigan.

 

[bwallace23350]

I am in a highly rural part of south Alabama. I have never heard of or seen anything like that described Even our segregation school is now integrated and has black football coaches, and that is a big deal down here. Intermarriage is very common.

 

[Gloria Tibi Trinitas]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/28/the-most-racist-places-in-america-according-to-google/

View attachment 20800View attachment 20801

Would you look at that, NY is more racist than Texas...

 

[Christos3]

I did not bother to watch the documentary as I find the premise hard to believe. The first Greek Orthodox Church in the USA was established in 1867, slavery ended in 1865. Reading the history of the first church in New Orleans, it sounds like most of the immigrants would not have had the funds, land, etc. to own slaves.

http://www.holytrinitycathedral.org/history.html

https://orthodoxhistory.org/2020/06/05/greek-orthodox-opposition-to-slavery-in-1862/

 

[Stinky]

I did not bother to watch the documentary as I find the premise hard to believe. The first Greek Orthodox Church in the USA was established in 1867, slavery ended in 1865. Reading the history of the first church in New Orleans, it sounds like most of the immigrants would not have had the funds, land, etc. to own slaves.

http://www.holytrinitycathedral.org/history.html

https://orthodoxhistory.org/2020/06/05/greek-orthodox-opposition-to-slavery-in-1862/

View attachment 20805

Holy Trinity Cathedral reports:
"Documentation attests to the presence of Greeks in New Orleans from the mid-1700s.
this first Greek family’s children and grandchildren who became prominent community leaders in publishing, military, politics, education, and business.
Orthodox Christian owners of coffee shops, fish stores, liquor stores and fruit stands. Other Orthodox immigrants worked in the seafood industry in St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes. Cotton and sugar merchants, real estate developers as well as insurance brokers were part of the Greek community in the 1800s."
So yeah, slaves.

 

[Ainnir]

Is the assumption that anyone who owned any business in that era had slaves vs. paid employees?

Also, is the premise that a region or culture can be, due to either its historic or current milieu (in whole or in part), be considered objectively unworthy of an Orthodox presence?

 

[Stinky]

Is the assumption that anyone who owned any business in that era had slaves vs. paid employees?

Also, is the premise that a region or culture can be, due to either its historic or current milieu (in whole or in part), be considered objectively unworthy of an Orthodox presence?

Assuming there was no slave ownership is a big jump in the imagination in reading the article provided.
All regions and all sinners need the Gospel. The Orthodox Church needs to go everywhere all over the world. Start new missions everywhere. The South may welcome the Orthodox Church as well as it has since the 1700's. We see through this article that the Orthodox Church had already found a way in the past, we see missions and churches established throughout the South. Seems this is already a thing.

 

[Stinky]

I did not bother to watch the documentary as I find the premise hard to believe. The first Greek Orthodox Church in the USA was established in 1867, slavery ended in 1865. Reading the history of the first church in New Orleans, it sounds like most of the immigrants would not have had the funds, land, etc. to own slaves.

http://www.holytrinitycathedral.org/history.html

https://orthodoxhistory.org/2020/06/05/greek-orthodox-opposition-to-slavery-in-1862/

View attachment 20805

Remembering Selma 50 Years Later: Archbishop Iakovos and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King - What's New on Goarch - Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America

A comprehensive listing of the latest news, articles, video, and other content on the official website of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America

www.goarch.org

Thank you for this LIFE Magazine cover photo. What an amazing testimony, life work, and legacy Archbishop Iakovos has, memory eternal! What courage in times of conflict!

 

[Ainnir]

I am in a highly rural part of south Alabama. I have never heard of or seen anything like that described Even our segregation school is now integrated and has black football coaches, and that is a big deal down here. Intermarriage is very common.

I've never seen that level, either. But I have definitely run into a few individuals that would approve. I've run into the "what problem?" people more often. I am not saying a problem doesn't exist, just that to constantly dredge up the past as if it's the present is inaccurate, and to denigrate this particular region as if it were uniquely guilty (seemingly in all the world) is also inaccurate. It's scapegoating, and hitting a lot of innocent people of many different backgrounds in the process.

Assuming there was no slave ownership is a big jump in the imagination in reading the article provided.
All regions and all sinners need the Gospel. The Orthodox Church needs to go everywhere all over the world. Start new missions everywhere. The South may welcome the Orthodox Church as well as it has since the 1700's. We see through this article that the Orthodox Church had already found a way in the past, we see missions and churches established throughout the South. Seems this is already a thing.

That's fair. I don't know one way or the other; it seems the best course would be to see if there's any evidence one way or the other to
It is a slowly growing thing, though there have been Orthodox communities here for a long time. Any pushback will be from people who are anti-Catholic, and most will be "polite" about it. I don't think any community would mount a campaign against planting a parish, for example. It would more likely be interpersonal and might make potential visitors a trickle instead of a steady stream.

 

[Stinky]

Inside The Little-Known History Of America's Sundown Towns — Which Banned Black People After Dark

While few of these former sundown towns would describe themselves as such today, they remain largely white.

allthatsinteresting.com

I live in a sundown town in Illinois. It's still a current tradition for the locals. These are The Children of the Klan. The law turns their eyes away and dismisses cases of abuse towards blacks here. It may have gotten less scary after dark for non whites but not really. We have an orthodox mission 20 miles noth of us. So, let's see how this works. Blacks can be out after dark 20 minutes north of here so they could go to vespers there. It's a real thing. There's no African Americans at the mission.

"In Duluth, Minnesota, three Black circus performers were kidnapped from a local jail by a white mob, beaten on the street, and hanged from a telephone pole in 1920. A few decades later in Vienna, Illinois, a white mob took to the streets after a Black man escaped from prison — and set fire to nearly all of the African American homes, forcing nearly all the Black residents to flee."
It's not just a Southern thing. The Google map of racist searches shows that. And its not in the past. This is today. This generation too. My friend witnessed the burning of "N***" Hill Vienna, Il.

 

[Stinky]

The Church has the answer to all this pride, hate, fear.

 

[biro]

It does?
You should come to my parish sometimes.

 

[rakovsky]

It does?
You should come to my parish sometimes.

I forget, which region are you in?

 

[rakovsky]

I did not bother to watch the documentary as I find the premise hard to believe. The first Greek Orthodox Church in the USA was established in 1867, slavery ended in 1865. Reading the history of the first church in New Orleans, it sounds like most of the immigrants would not have had the funds, land, etc. to own slaves.

The New Orleans Benachi House website says that Benachi was a slave trader and founder of the first Greek Orthodox Church in the US, and that liturgical services were in his mansion during the Civil War:

He was Consul of Greece in New Orleans, a speculator in real estate and slaves, a hunter, horseman and founder of the first Greek Orthodox Church in the Western Hemisphere.

History of a classic New Orleans Venue - Benachi House

The house retains its original exterior configuration (including the rear projecting wing on the right), floor plan and most details

www.benachihouse.com

In 1860, Mr. Nicholas Benachi, a businessman and Consul of the Royal Government of Greece, spearheaded an effort to secure a site for the construction of the Church, which was also unsuccessful. Finally, in 1864, Mr. Benachi offered his personal property for a temporary location for worship, at which time he and a few cotton merchants the Church. Until 1866, services where held there as well as other locations, with the Very Reverend Agapios Honcharenko serving as the first priest of the Community. During that year, Mr. Benachi sold a parcel of property to the Community (for $1,200) on 1222 North Dorgenois Street and, with the assistance of generous donations by Mr. Benachi, Mr. Demetrios Botassis and Mr. John Botassis, Holy Trinity Church was erected.

What was the first Orthodox parish in America? - Orthodox History

The question, “What was the first Orthodox parish in America?” is surprisingly difficult to answer. A big part of the problem comes from that word, “parish.” What is a parish? When does a collection of Orthodox people become a “parish”? It’s a matter of interpretation, and particularly in the...

orthodoxhistory.org

Nicholas Benachi was one of the many Benachi scions established in key commercial ports. A native of Chios (under Ottoman rule until 1912), Nicholas Benachi first arrived in New Orleans in 1850 and quickly established himself in the cotton business. Like many merchants, he leveraged the opportunities and prestige of diplomatic representation, becoming Consul of Greece in 1854.

New Orleans: America's First Greek Community

The first Orthodox Church in the US was established in New Orleans in 1864, built in 1866, by Greek merchants.

greekreporter.com

 

[Stinky]

Slave labor was legal and the norm in that day. The issue of having slaves at that time doesn't surprise me. How one treated their slaves is another story. There were good and harsh masters. Today we buy items mass produced in other countries by children who work for pennies a day from factories with poor conditions; are we not responsible for the same sin, though out of sight? When we set up our American factories in Mexico are we not guilty of this same sin? Who is my neighbor Lord? I am guilty.

I forget, which region are you in?

Lol. Why? Would it be a prejudice area?

 

[rakovsky]

In 1861, the Greeks living in New Orleans organized their own volunteer militia regiment to fight on the Confederate side in the Civil War. From Fr. Alexander Doumouras, in the 1975 book Orthodox America: 1794-1976:
((Government records show an unofficial memorandum mentioning “Greek Company A,” Louisiana Militia, 1861. The company included a captain, three lieutenants, eight non-commissioned officers and twenty privates. Although it was called “Greek,” the list included other Orthodox people residing in New Orleans after 1860.))

Within only a few days, there was trouble. And, in a precursor to the next 150 years of American Orthodox history, this dispute was all about nationality. From the Daily True Delta on June 1:

((The Greek company recently formed, for lack of other employment, has become split into parties, and the excitement of internal feuds supplies the place of more legitimate hostilities. One party strenuously opposes the entrance into the company of any but [illegible] Pure Greeks, while the other favors the admission of men of all nationalities. An embittered contest of factions led to personal collisions, in which the sharp logic of steel was used by the opposing parties, as the only argument which would convince obstinate doubters on either side. Chartres street, near Madison, was this morning the scene of the last animated debate between the opponents. Three or four of the contenstants were considerably worried by “gentlemen on the other side,” one of whom was sent to the hospital, one is lying at the company’s armory and two were conducted to the Second district lock-up.[3]))

Just a few days after that incident, another member of the Greek regiment, Alexandro Philipuso,
((“was attacked and severly wounded with knives, by some persons […] who from their language are supposed to have been Sicilians.”[4]))

Confederate Orthodox soldiers in the Civil War - Orthodox History

In 1861, the Greeks living in New Orleans organized their own volunteer militia regiment to fight on the Confederate side in the Civil War. From Fr. Alexander Doumouras, in the 1975 book Orthodox America: 1794-1976: Government records show an unofficial memorandum mentioning “Greek Company A,”...

orthodoxhistory.org

 

[Stinky]

Confederate Orthodox soldiers in the Civil War - Orthodox History

In 1861, the Greeks living in New Orleans organized their own volunteer militia regiment to fight on the Confederate side in the Civil War. From Fr. Alexander Doumouras, in the 1975 book Orthodox America: 1794-1976: Government records show an unofficial memorandum mentioning “Greek Company A,”...

orthodoxhistory.org

"Within only a few days, there was trouble. And, in a precursor to the next 150 years of American Orthodox history, this dispute was all about nationality. From the Daily True Delta on June 1:

((The Greek company recently formed, for lack of other employment, has become split into parties, and the excitement of internal feuds supplies the place of more legitimate hostilities. One party strenuously opposes the entrance into the company of any but [illegible] Pure Greeks, "
Wow.

 

[Opus118]

I forget, which region are you in?

The Southern-most state, excluding Hawaii.

 

[FULK NERA]

The New Smyrna colony in Florida was a bit like slavery, but with Greeks under the Pope instead of blacks. The colony went bad and collapsed, and there was a failed revolt. The only real Orthodox community before the Civil War in the South was the Greek one in Louisiana.

The Ludwell Society page says,

So basically there is no serious real connection between Ludwell's Orthodoxy and Southern Tradition. There are only analogies and very indirect connections, like Ludwell was a Southerner and Orthodoxy has Tradition, and the South is "traditional."

The Ludwell myth is one more typical Southron spinning of yarns to legitimize themselves (in their own minds at least) in terms they valorize, e.g., tradition, patrimony and heritage. It‘s fictive and rose-tinted, like the Lost Cause up there in the noösphere with Kosova Polye, The Last Tsar, the Celtic Twilight, and fallen Constantinople. I don’t think changing religion is going to cure the denial of reality among such dreamers; in fact changing religions frequently is a typical feature of Southron religiosity.

 

[Ainnir]

The Ludwell myth is one more typical Southron spinning of yarns to legitimize themselves (in their own minds at least) in terms they valorize, e.g., tradition, patrimony and heritage. It‘s fictive and rose-tinted, like the Lost Cause up there in the noösphere with Kosova Polye, The Last Tsar, the Celtic Twilight, and fallen Constantinople. I don’t think changing religion is going to cure the denial of reality among such dreamers; in fact changing religions frequently is a typical feature of Southron religiosity.

Before I get irritated, explain "Southron." I don't do social media fads, and the history of the word isn't applicable. Who qualifies as a "Soutron"?

 

[Katechon]

The Ludwell myth is one more typical Southron spinning of yarns to legitimize themselves (in their own minds at least) in terms they valorize, e.g., tradition, patrimony and heritage. It‘s fictive and rose-tinted, like the Lost Cause up there in the noösphere with Kosova Polye, The Last Tsar, the Celtic Twilight, and fallen Constantinople. I don’t think changing religion is going to cure the denial of reality among such dreamers; in fact changing religions frequently is a typical feature of Southron religiosity.

Equivocating Lost Cause with the Fall of Constantinople might do a huge disservice to the point you are trying to make.

 

[rakovsky]

Before I get irritated, explain "Southron." I don't do social media fads, and the history of the word isn't applicable. Who qualifies as a "Soutron"?

He is referring to Southron in the "Philip Ludwell Southron Orthodox Society" (southernorthodox.org). Look at the rotating picture banner on that website, with its mix of Orthodox pictures together with pictures of the Confederacy, and particularly Evangelical or Pentecostal Protestant pictures.

"Like Ludwell, our Southron brothers and sisters have a nonconformist strength, which will benefit us in defending the ancient faith in our post-Christian world... This is why the Southern identity can be used as a tool to sow the seeds of Orthodox Christian identity, while Orthodoxy can help to protect our hospitable and historic homeland. These are not mutually exclusive identities at all, for they can work in concert – a symbiosis uniting the divine and universal with the Southron spirit."
dissidentmama.net/the-ludwell-orthodox-fellowship-our-mission

 

[rakovsky]

The "Philip Ludwell Southron Orthodox" society is using an arcane, seemingly racist term that can refer to "a distinct southern race endowed with Norman English blood". Sir Walter Scott used the term, so it would be helpful to see how he used it. The term comes up in Confederate songs, where it distinguishes the Southerners from "yonder race" and is used in the term "Southron blood".

Ritchie Watson, Jr explains in NORMANS AND SAXONS: SOUTHERN RACE MYTHOLOGY AND THE INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR:

If most southern writers were content to identify themselves with the nation’s Manifest Destiny in the 1840s, by the 1850s a significant transformation was taking place within the region’s psyche. Responding to ever more bitter political conflicts and to increasingly virulent attacks from northern abolitionists, southerners began to imagine themselves not as members of a common white American race but as members of a distinct southern race endowed with Norman English blood.

A Southern Quarterly Review article on the “Mines of California,” published in 1850, is a particularly telling commentary on this sudden shift in racial perspective. The essay views America’s movement into California as a victory over a “degenerated” Spanish people. The writer concludes by expressing his thankfulness that “the Anglo-Normans . . . are the dominant race of this continent; and under Providence, may attain to universal moral dominion, at least.”63 Anglo-Saxon, the term hitherto preferred by the Southern Quarterly Review’s writers, was now eschewed in favor of Anglo-Norman. The writer celebrates America’s Manifest Destiny, but the victory of a dominant American race is described in the same terms that would soon be used by the Southern Quarterly Review and by other southern periodicals to articulate a divisive regional racial mythology. Dixie’s concoction of a Norman-descended “southron” race was the inevitable product of bitter and dangerous sectional tensions.

Watson explains the relationship of Sir Walter Scott to this phenomenon and Scott's phrase:

In his groundbreaking study of the antebellum South’s cult of medievalism, Osterweis also argues convincingly that no writer was more fully or more enthusiastically incorporated into antebellum southern romanticism than Sir Walter Scott. ... In southern eyes, Scott’s courageous and honorable feudal lords and Scottish chiefs had been reborn in the nineteenth century in the form of the plantation aristocrat. The planter’s slaves, like the medieval lord’s serfs, were necessary to nurture the flowering of the region’s aristocratic society. So pervasive was Scott’s influence on the southern imagination that many of the region’s writers sought determinedly, if rather bizarrely, to incorporate his word coinages into their vocabulary. Thus, in many formal essays, “the Chivalry” came to stand for the southern planter, and Yankees became barbarous “Saxons” and “Goths.” By the 1850s Scott’s “southron” had become, according to Osterweis, “a borrowed badge of nationality.”
...
In his Life on the Mississippi Twain provided the most entertaining and humorous, if not the most accurate, estimate of Scott’s influence on the southerner’s self-image—an influence he believed to have been both profound and catastrophic. “But for the Sir Walter disease,” he opined, “the character of the Southerner—or Southron, according to Sir Walter’s starchier way of phrasing it—would be wholly modern, in place of modern and medieval mixed, and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than it is.”

SOURCE: https://epdf.pub/normans-and-saxons...gy-and-the-intellectual-history-of-the-a.html

Watson points out how the Southern Literary Messenger distinguished the Northerners' Calvinist origins from the Southerners' origins as supposed "Cavaliers", sons of "the fine old English gentleman":

In defining their region’s demographic origins, most southern polemicists appealed to the myth, well established by the mid-nineteenth century in America, that northerners were largely descendants of Puritan or Calvinist ancestors while southerners were primarily descended from Cavalier forebears. A writer for the Southern Literary Messenger provided a detailed description of this distinctively aristocratic “southron” race:

• “The convulsions of Europe which drove the English Puritan, the Scottish Covenanter and the trading Hollander to the Northern Provinces, sent to these Southern shores the plundered Cavalier, the younger son of ‘the fine Old English gentleman,’ the Jacobite, honorable for his steadfast though misplaced loyalty, the Huguenot exiled from his beautiful France; and to Maryland the British or Irish Catholic, whom we must also honour for his sincere though misguided faith.”

Watson cites the “‘Southrons On!’—Southern Battle Chorus”:

Those who hailed from the Old Dominion may have considered themselves a bit more refined than their fellow Confederates, but in truth most white southerners from the banks of the Potomac to the Rio Grande seem to have believed that they were members of a race distinguished for its aristocratic refinement and chivalric instincts. Armed with such chivalry, as the author of a “Southern Battle Chorus” contended, how could southerners not prevail against a “hireling ruffian throng” of Yankee soldiers?

• Southrons on! No stain e’er rested On our proud, chivalric name— Scoff of yonder race detested— On! For vengeance, home and fame! On! Our flag waves gladly o’er us, Flashing swords our way shall clear, God is with us, they quail before us— Strike! For all we hold most dear.

Citation: “‘Southrons On!’—Southern Battle Chorus,” in Cheves Papers, Civil War Clippings, 12/104/10, South Carolina Historical Society.

Watson cites "The Southern Marsellaise" too:

They were, in the typically overcharged verse of A. E. Blackmar’s “The Southern Marseillaise,” demons thirsting for southern blood:

• Shall fiends who basely plot our ruin, Unchecked, advance with guilty stride To spread destruction far and wide, With southron’s blood their hands embruing?

Such a monstrous and conscienceless enemy could be met and mastered only by the absolute resolve and courage of southern warriors through whose veins coursed the noble “southron” blood of Norman ancestors.

 

[rakovsky]

"This is why the Southern identity can be used as a tool to sow the seeds of Orthodox Christian identity, while Orthodoxy can help to protect our hospitable and historic homeland. These are not mutually exclusive identities at all, for they can work in concert – a symbiosis uniting the divine and universal with the Southron spirit."
dissidentmama.net/the-ludwell-orthodox-fellowship-our-mission

This "Southron Orthodox Society" might just be using the term "Southron" to refer to "Southern identity," and not the concept that white Southerners are a separate ethnicity or race.

It is not realistic in anthropological terms to imagine that pre-Civil-War Northern US English and Scots were ethnically/racially separate from Southern US ones.

For more use of the term "Southron", see:
Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction
ebin.pub/neo-confederacy-a-critical-introduction-0292718373-9780292718371.html

The South in the Building of the Nation

http://www.survivorlibrary.com/library/the_south_in_the_building_of_the_nation_vol_10_1909.pdf

Race War, Not Civil War

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/places/towns/HarpersFerryVA.pdf

 

[Stinky]

So, the Greek Orthodox church established itself well in the American South long ago and fits in quite nicely today?

 

[Fr. George]

Greek Americans in Louisiana had an EO parish, slaves and fought for the Confederacy.

And were later targeted by the KKK. There's no part of this that is neat and tidy - when Abp. Iakovos marched with Dr. King, he got hate mail from his own parishioners in the South, despite the fact that Greeks in the South had been targets of segregation and racist backlash for decades. To some we are "other" and to others we are "mainstream."

 

[rakovsky]

So, the Greek Orthodox church established itself well in the American South long ago and fits in quite nicely today?

Greek American ethnicity doesn't fit in well as part of the alleged "Southron" English Gentleman Norman cavalier identity.

The Orthodox Dixie clip I linked to earlier was made by ROCOR, not the GOARCH.

 

[Stinky]

Greek American ethnicity doesn't fit in well as part of the alleged "Southron" English Gentleman Norman cavalier identity.

The Orthodox Dixie clip I linked to earlier was made by ROCOR, not the GOARCH.

Is this common in ROCOR?

 

[rakovsky]

Is this common in ROCOR?

For technical reasons, it can't be common for ROCOR.
One reason is that ROCOR's presence in "The South" (former Confederacy) is minimal. So even if it were common for ROCOR in the South, it would not be for ROCOR nationally, nor worldwide.
A second reason is that ROCOR has a mix of ex-OCA/ex-Metropolia parishes, and Russian "White" (eg. Tsarist) emigres, and they immigrated to the US decades after the US Civil War. So it can't be some kind of "inherent" part of ROCOR.
A third reason is that race-based slave ownership, characteristic of the "South" and Confederacy, is not part of the Russian heritage. Russia had serfdom, which in some major ways resembles slavery, but it was not race-based. It had nationalism or "Great Russian Chauvinism," but this was also not race-based nor part of its Serfdom.

At most, it can be said that white racist anti-multicultural "conservative" "Southerners" could tend to be more attracted to ROCOR than to other jurisdictions because ROCOR is more "conservative" in some vague political sense, and because Greeks are darker colored and focused on being specifically Greek, which works best in a multicultural context (eg. as in the Greek American history in the multi-cultural French-American New Orleans' community).

 

[FULK NERA]

Equivocating Lost Cause with the Fall of Constantinople might do a huge disservice to the point you are trying to make.

I mean exactly the nostalgia that persists. Totally dysfunctional.

 

[FULK NERA]

Before I get irritated, explain "Southron." I don't do social media fads, and the history of the word isn't applicable. Who qualifies as a "Soutron"?

Southron is the way self-consciously proud southerners describe themselves. It’s not a social media fad.

 

[Stinky]

For technical reasons, it can't be common for ROCOR.
One reason is that ROCOR's presence in "The South" (former Confederacy) is minimal. So even if it were common for ROCOR in the South, it would not be for ROCOR nationally, nor worldwide.
A second reason is that ROCOR has a mix of ex-OCA/ex-Metropolia parishes, and Russian "White" (eg. Tsarist) emigres, and they immigrated to the US decades after the US Civil War. So it can't be some kind of "inherent" part of ROCOR.
A third reason is that race-based slave ownership, characteristic of the "South" and Confederacy, is not part of the Russian heritage. Russia had serfdom, which in some major ways resembles slavery, but it was not race-based. It had nationalism or "Great Russian Chauvinism," but this was also not race-based nor part of its Serfdom.

At most, it can be said that white racist anti-multicultural "conservative" "Southerners" could tend to be more attracted to ROCOR than to other jurisdictions because ROCOR is more "conservative" in some vague political sense, and because Greeks are darker colored and focused on being specifically Greek, which works best in a multicultural context (eg. as in the Greek American history in the multi-cultural French-American New Orleans' community).

Thank you very much for explaining this in simple terms so that I could understand. I see what you are saying now. Yes, the Greek Orthodox in New Orleans found a way in a culturally fluid environment. Now I get it. Some places are more culturally flavorful.

 

[Ainnir]

Southron is the way self-consciously proud southerners describe themselves. It’s not a social media fad.

Well that's news to me.

 

[Ainnir]

Why does that make you sad, rakovsky?

 

[Ainnir]

Why does that make you sad, rakovsky?

Sorry, I’m slow and unclear these days. I meant it was news to me in the sense that until it was brought up here, I’d never heard the term before. I do appreciate all the info you pulled up.

 

[FULK NERA]

Well that's news to me.

I know people that use the term proudly. That’s the thing about them, they are so proud to be from some place, amd they live there still. Only way I feel such pride is defensively, like when people (such as Southrons) talk scheise about my homeland California. So I assume they are defensive even at home because it’s otherwise a dysfunctional emotional stance. But then there is this historical dysfunction which is so glaring to anyone who looks at Southron culture and society.

 

[Ainnir]

I know people that use the term proudly. That’s the thing about them, they are so proud to be from some place, amd they live there still. Only way I feel such pride is defensively, like when people (such as Southrons) talk scheise about my homeland California. So I assume they are defensive even at home because it’s otherwise a dysfunctional emotional stance. But then there is this historical dysfunction which is so glaring to anyone who looks at Southron culture and society.

So you're saying that they're proud of the mere fact that they're generationally Southern? Or is the way they're proud?
I grew up here and have never heard of it. Maybe I knew people who hid it, or I grew up too much in the suburbs, or I only by chanced ever associated with non-Southron Southerners. What I can't tell is if you're trying to characterize the entire region based on this group of people or if you're simply bothered there's an Orthodox society focused on this particular heritage and are afraid the mindset will spread to all parishes in the South.