Faith, Ethnicity, & Nationality

The American experiment and expatriating from European nations in particular opens a difficult dilemma for European peoples in terms of their hierarchies of loyalty.

For some, this is very simple. A Russian Orthodox man who is of Russian blood living in Russia certainly knows his place in life. It is clear, and in this, there is peace.

The age of exploration created a host of subcultures that find themselves in lighter cases, existential crises and in harsher cases, legitimate peril.

The Boers in particular are under threat of violence and extermination in a South African state that is increasingly anti-white, and yet some of this general “post-liberal/reactionary” sphere’s most zealous and clear-headed individuals are Boers who have no plans of leaving the Transvaal, Cape Town, and all other provinces of South Africa despite this ongoing threat. There are no plans for a return to the Netherlands.

The Latin American population is a mixed bag in terms of genetic makeup, as there was a far less divisive breeding policy from Iberian colonies compared to British colonies. We have states like Bolivia and Peru that are predominantly made of indigenous South American blood, and there are nearly pure European ethno-states like Argentina and Uruguay with communities of Iberian, Italian, English, and German expatriate communities as well as a new pan-European ethnogenesis forming there. In the middle, are the likes of Brazil and Colombia who have sections of their nation that are either predominately Mestizo or predominately European with some sections of African diaspora that became culturally or even ethnically, “Afro-Latino.” Despite these ethnic differences, the uniting factor is an either inherited or assimilated Iberian and Catholic culture and language that doesn’t appear to be going anywhere.

And then there is the United States, the country I was born in and a country that is currently in flux. The United States is historically twofold: an Anglo-Saxon, Protestant nation that also internalized enlightenment ideals since its inception. These two forces have struggled for the soul of America, with the latter seemingly winning in the post-Nuremberg truth that plagues the nation from sea to shining sea. What has further complicated the United States was its importation of non-Anglo European immigrants who were predominantly Catholic from places like Germany, Italy, Ireland, and Poland. While the German population that predominantly settled in the Midwest and Great Plains regions also had a sizable Lutheran population and a similar Germanic origin to the Anglo-Saxon ruling class, their dwarfing the Anglo population 2:1 was not initially received well. At one point, it was illegal to speak German in multiple states, and there was a mirror of Anglo-German hostilities to those occurring in Europe through the Gilded Age.

These hostilities were seemingly put to rest in the 1924 Immigration Act that put caps on immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe with a higher quota allotted to Germans immigrants by a wide margin. One would then argue a genesis of an American race would be that of Anglo-Saxon, Scotch-Irish, and German components, and this was certainly the case for where the United States was headed until the 1960s. This was a time when outlawing “hyphen Americans” in the speech patterns of American citizens was sensical. The only exceptions to this would be the strongholds of Italians and Slavs in the cities of the East Coast Coast and Great Lakes as well as the old stock Frenchmen, Dutchmen, and Spaniards from the age of exploration littered throughout the country that settled on the continent before the Declaration of Independence and Battle of Yorktown.

The only issue with this consensus was the question between Catholic and Protestant. This question never went away, but it was further diluted by an acceleration of leaning into Enlightenment ideals that has plunged America increasingly into degeneracy with each passing decade until the Covid-19 debacle.

Generation Z were already drastically more church-going than Millennials, but in a time of crisis, the average American citizen looked for the transcendent and did not find it very often in Protestantism but found it in traditional Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy the latter of which saw an American population boom from 600,000 to 6 million from 2020 to 2024. This increase in liturgical Christianity membership is typically attributed to a lower rate of compliance with the draconian restrictions from Covid-19 policy, but it is also due to their resistance to the infiltration of enlightenment ideals that has plagued their Protestant counterparts. There are of course, exceptions to this rule, with many evangelical churches turning increasingly political and gripping onto scripture to navigate the storm, which is a valiant effort from any Christian’s perspective.

This increase in Liturgical churchgoing has opened a series of questions for average Americans in tandem with questions of national stability as well as ethnic belonging. These questions are easy to answer if you’re old stock Anglo or Scotch-Irish Protestants living in places your family has lived in since America’s founding. In this case, your place is clear, and may God bless you in your home. But for the Dixie Catholics, there is a harder existence that lacks unison much like a Protestant in Catholic sections of America.

I cannot speak for Catholics and Protestants of America, but what I can say is that determining the answer to a universal question of salvation by blood or geography is to bankrupt one’s own argument for such matters. Transcendence and Salvation are the highest notch on the hierarchy compared to that of blood and nationality that often fight for the second notch. Wherever you are, and whatever Christian Faith you profess, your predicament of minority or majority is between you and God. Do not abandon Salvation for worldly crowd comforts. And one of the three form of Christianity will be found to be correct on Judgment Day. That being said, we are not all called to monasticism, but most of us are called to leave a world that is better for our children which requires a certain level of political understanding and generational logistical capacity. Much of this in truth, is undoing the boomer nomadism that atomized a sizable percentage of American citizens.

In regards to Orthodoxy in America, Orthodoxy is no longer isolated in stronghold cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. The low church culture of the South and Appalachia has fit like a glove for its citizens converting to Orthodoxy, leaning more into Orthodoxy’s decentralized structure as opposed to its high church essence at least in initial adoption. This is most notable in the Holy Cross Monastery creating Orthodox American chants that will be instrumental in creating an American Orthodox culture for the remainder of this century and beyond. These chants are in English, and this unifying culture is Anglo due to it being the ancestor culture of America’s founding giving other ethnic Europeans a near equal “buy in” by way of nationality. This is the only way forward for American Orthodoxy despite the fact that the United States resembles more of a frontier beyond the West as opposed to being a true part of the West itself.

In my case, I seem to have three existences at odds with each other. My blood is generally Iberian and Italian with Basque blood on both sides of the family that I can only attribute to general Iberian blood at this stage in my life. All of these peoples are Catholic historically, but I have now been Catholic, Protestant, and finally Orthodox which I will remain for the rest of my life. I am the first in my family to be Orthodox, and this comes with its own initial pressures.

Regarding these United States, I love them with all my heart, but there are places in this country where I can only feel alien in due to America now resembling more of an empire than a country. I’ve walked into an Antiochian Orthodox Church in Nashville full of Old Stock Anglos who have visibly internalized Orthodoxy with the same fervor as they once professed Southern Baptist Christianity. It was a sight I remarked with awe and joy at the United States becoming rapidly Orthodox with no end in sight.

Yet I could never settle in this place without feeling like a fish out of water and like a fraud in attempting to internalize this culture that is historically and completely Anglo-Saxon in nature. The only state of the South I could ever authentically inhabit from a visceral standpoint is that of Texas, a state that is not only Southern and Anglo in origin but Western and Spanish in origin as well.

Ideally, the place for me would be my home, San Francisco, for better or for worse. It is a city founded by Spaniards, inhabited by Basques and Italians for over 100 years, and the birthplace of American Orthodoxy in the Lower 48. It is a place I was forced out of, and it is a place I hope to return to if God allows it. In truth, I feel that I am in exile from my home, that on paper, is the most hostile to its citizens out of any city and state in the entirety of the United States.

My only alternatives are to attempt to live in a place like San Sebastián, Spain or Torino, Italy, these places of my blood or to live in an Orthodox country that I have no historical tie to. This is increasingly difficult now that I am married to my wife who is purely Polish from Polish Chicago who was baptized Orthodox in 2022. She is thankfully only one deviation away from the standard expectation of Catholic, Polish, and in Poland or Chicago. Our options now are San Francisco, Chicago, Poland, Spain, Italy, or an Orthodox country that would grant us citizenship.

Neither of us have a stake in an Orthodox country for that to be viable, and Italy and Spain are scarcely Orthodox. Poland is historically at least 1/3 Orthodox with a concentration in its Eastern third, where my wife has family for a legitimate tie. This leaves us with a decision of San Francisco, Chicago, or Poland. This in truth, is a decision of the United States or Poland and therefore a question of what it is that America stands for and represents at this time.

Very few people could answer that question at this point, and speaking for European peoples, it is a question of whether or not we love our home enough to fight for it in potentially kinetic terms and fight the culture war of building social capital and alternative networks while the answer to this question remains unclear.

This is not a time for infighting between Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant or between Southern, Eastern, and Northern European. Extra-European, Non-Christian forces are working toward our demise in unison, and it is suicidal to fight amongst ourselves. Our only hope is defeating the so called enlightenment with Christian zeal.

The “buy in” at this point is the willingness to stay for better or for worse, and within this staying is no “perfect place” when it comes to safety and metrics. There is only the will of God and clarity of His will in one’s prayers as well as the visceral, gut feeling of where it is one is supposed to be to dig his heels in and fight for better or for worse.

For most of you reading this, this happens to be in suburban and rural communities. For the rest of you, you are like myself: city people. And to think you will outrun the demography war by relocating is now refuted with the recent strategy of flooding rural America with hostile immigrant populations backed by government subsidy.

This “buy in” is not only national but local. You must find a place that you would viscerally respond to peril with the temperament and actions of a willingness to fight to the death and for it as well as live for the rest of your life in it. A willingness to die is not enough. A willingness to live is not enough either. It is only in a willingness to do both that fortifies a man’s soul in this epoch. This age of rationalism is fading, and it is only through conviction and zeal that one can prevail.

Some of you may be in a predicament where you are financially or otherwise prevented from returning to this place to fortify. No matter. Organize elsewhere accordingly, and make that move to settle on God’s timing manifested through your prayers and actions. God will provide.

For some of you this is in rural Nebraska, and for some of you this is in Manhattan. For others it is out of the country. If it is the third option, all the best to you. If it is option one or option two, you are not only contributing to the preservation of your locale but the preservation of your country.

For myself, this is can only end in one of two places: San Francisco or Chicago. The home of my origins in all three categories or those of my wife’s. I am organizing myself accordingly residing in Poland before making our return to Chicago before either staying there or making our way to San Francisco for a homecoming I see in my dreams both asleep and awake.

To live in perpetual nomadism is no way to live.

Find where you belong, and fight for it.