Something I've wanted to do for awhile
Hark the Sound of Christian Men's Voices: The Story of the Presbyterian Church of Carolina
The official logo of the Presbyterian Church of Carolina. The current slogan is Pro Deo et Confoederationis (For God and Confederation)
The Confederation of the Carolinas is home to many Christian Protestant denominations, everyone from Episcopalians to Fundamentalists. However, the nation has always been dominated by the Presbyterian Church, and there is yet to be a non-Presbyterian elected to any kind of state or Confederal office in Carolina. Presbyterianism has shaped Carolinian culture, and vice versa. With the rise of Fundamentalism in British controlled Northern Ireland and Scotland, Carolina is now home to the largest concentration of Presbyterians in the world, and the people who run the nation intend to keep it that way. No overview of the Carolinas can be complete until the Presbyterian Church in the nation is fully studied and understood.
Presbyterianism first arrived in Carolina with the wave of Ulster Scot (then known as Scotch-Irish) settlement in the Carolinas from 1710-1775. Thousands of these hardy people settled the frontiers, both to find prosperity and to escape the domination of the Anglican planter elite. They brought with them their hard-nosed dispositions, their tribalism, and most importantly to this story, their fiery and democratic Presbyterian faith. The Presbyterian faith has its origins in Scotland, being founded by the devout Calvinist John Knox in 1560, when he published several instrumental works including the
First Book of Discipline, which dictated doctrine and founded the Presbyterian form of church governance, where a board of elders is elected by the congregation. Aside from some minor modern adaptations, this book is still the bedrock upon which Cokie Presbyterianism rests. When the American Revolution broke out, Carolinian Presbyterians overwhelmingly sided with the Patriots. They both legitimately believed in the cause of Liberty and wanted a chance to undermine the Tory Anglican planter elite, and earn a place at the table of Carolinian politics. As the Old Republic deteriorated, so too did the grip of the Anglican planters, which culminated in the rise of backwoods strongman and devout Presbyterian Andrew Jackson as Chancellor of the Confederation in 1801, as the United States fell apart. Jackson was so beloved by the population that he could dictate almost anything, including the cultural and religious future of the nation. Seeing the writing on the wall, the planters swallowed their pride and converted en masse to the Presbyterian Church in the early years of the Confederation, as calls erupted to bar Anglicans from office. Jackson never barred any denomination from office but the message was clear: Carolina was Presbyterian land, and other denominations just lived on it.
During the Cuba War, Presbyterian churches across the country practically functioned as recruitment offices and propaganda outlets. Preachers gave thundering sermons that were practically hellfire and brimstone condemnations of Virginia, and encouraged young men to "
Take up the apostleship of sword and shot" as one Wilmington preacher put it. Pulpits and church exteriors were draped in flags as a show of support for Jackson's boys. When the war was lost, the Carolinian people were consumed with anguish and rage. This was reflected in the tone of the Church, which became much more focused on redeeming Carolina's "moral impurities" than it had in the past, with hard work and strict sexual moralizing practically becoming fetishes of the Presbyterian population. Another effect was a radicalizing of the Church's stance on slavery and Catholicism. Before the Cuba War, the Presbyterian Church was deafeningly silent on the issue of slavery. However, reeling from national defeat and bloody slave uprisings, the Presbyterian Church announced by unanimous vote at the General Presbytery of 1829 to canonize the so-called "Children of Ham Doctrine." This stated that "
the dusky peoples of the Earth, particularly those originating from the Dark Continent of Africa, are the modern Children of Ham, forever destined to be hewers of wood and drawers of water for their white Presbyterian masters." This doctrine passed in no small part thanks to the increasing power of the planter class over the Church. Anti-Catholicism sunk in later, but by 1853 the Presbytery canonized the "Whore from Rome Doctrine" which declared that "
The Catholic so-called Church and its false god-king the Pope is the Whore of Babylon based in Rome, and is the Mother of Abominations. Catholicism is the chosen doctrine of the French World Empire that desires total domination of the Protestant peoples of the world and the Irish hell hordes of the Virginian Satanic Dictatorship of Tyranny. We must smite the Whore's children whenever and wherever we can." This doctrine was an excellent foreshadowing of the Confederation-Union Pact signed a year later, and was only further ingrained by the warcrimes of General Thomas "Bloodbeard" Cleburne and his Irish soldiers during the Great American War.
After the GAW, the Church underwent a transformation. The Great Disturbance nearly ripped the Church in two with Robert Addison of Gainesville, West Carolina leading the pro-Redshirt Presbyterian Purity Movement. With the advent of the Office of Public Virtue in 1893 and the final crackdown, the pastors in the PPM were rounded up, and their congregants were forcefully re-integrated into the Church. In the General Presbytery of 1894, the church leadership unanimously passed the "Treason Doctrine," which stated simply "
Treason against the Confederation is Treason against God." In practice, any free political debate the Church once fostered was stamped out in favor of rallying behind Raleigh. In the following years, the Presbyterian Church began reflecting the influence of the Yankees on their nation, as some rather Fundamentalist style ideas took hold. In 1899, the Church formed the so-called Council of Doctrinal Research, the most formal organization created yet by the Church. Although they weren't a fully secret society, and there were no occult or totalitarian shenanigans, the CDR did behave somewhat similarly to the Council of Jehovah. They wielded outsized influence in the halls of power, set the agenda of the General Presbytery, and took the Church down a more Burr-like, jingoistic route. Of course, the biggest difference was that the members were known and celebrated as True Christian Cokies and were democratically elected by the Presbytery vs the more secretive and authoritarian AFC. In fact, many historians and political analysts believe that the democratic tradition of the Presbyterian Church preserved Cokie democracy (for Protestant whites) even as their allies deteriorated into total dictatorship.
The buildup to, and the aftermath of, the Great Patriotic War really saw the Presbyterian Church of Carolina start to resemble a Cokiefied AFC. In the aftermath of a devastating Beutelist bombing at the First Presbyterian Church of Durham, the CDR and the General Presbytery of 1905 announced the creation of the Christian Guards. The CG were analogous to the Zealots of the AFC, although they were less brainwashed and did not have legal authority beyond Presbyterian property. However, on church grounds they had the same power as the OPV or local law enforcement and could employ lethal force. The Christian Guards killed an estimated 750 people between 1905-1911 and thousands more afterward, most of them Africans in Jacksonland. As can be imagined, a great number of these killings were not what could be termed a "justifiable use of force" by civilized standards. When war broke out, the Church once again became a propaganda loudspeaker for Raleigh, with a common refrain being that "
Our boys are fighting to make the world safe for Presbyterianism." When Cokie involvement in the war ended in 1914 with the successful enlargement of Jacksonland and the annexation of East Carolina, the Church's politicization became even more blatant and apocalyptic. The General Presbytery of 1915 declared that "
The incredible success of our men at arms in the far flung corners of the world is proof that we are a Chosen Nation. Our forefathers gave us Israel names, and knew themselves a chosen people, like a Vine out of Egypt. Carolina truly is God's Country." This became known as the Chosen Nation Doctrine, and pulpits, theologians, and stained glass windows from Newport News to New Charlotte declared Presbyterian Cokie greatness in a similar manner to their Fascist counterparts, although the Cokies tended to be less aggressive about it. In 1916 the Church bowed to popular beliefs and declared that "
Angels, demons, and the spirits of the fallen live among us." However, the Church still maintained that attempts to contact or control these creatures was "
At best folly, at worst the most sordid kind of witchcraft." Nonetheless, even the admission of the existence of such spirits led to a boom in mediums and beliefs not too dissimilar to Spiritual Marxism cropping up in many places, although the Church, the OPV, and many other Cokies teamed up to arrest or harass these heretics.
In fact, many Presbyterian ministers were aware that they were starting to emulate parts of AFC doctrine, and the backlash to Spiritual Marxism was in part borne out of a desire to keep their religion independent of Yankee belief systems. However, the biggest rebuke of the Fundamentalists (aside from the treatment of black people) would be found in attitudes towards sex. In reaction to the revelation of HOST and Mr. Tobias's wild sex life, the General Presbytery of 1917 instituted the Doctrine of Purity, commanding that "
All true Presbyterians who wish to meet their creator on Judgement Day shall remain of pure body and mind, and will not degrade themselves by engaging in sodomy, adultery, premarital relations, onanism, or other unclean and impure acts relating to the flesh." Many churches started hosting so-called Purity Balls, where fathers and daughters would dance in formal wear before kneeling in front a cross draped in white cloth and signing a sacred pledge to work together to protect the young woman's "
virginal purity." On the male side of matters, the Church and the OPV produced literature and later short propaganda films on the "
moral and physical dangers of onanism, aka self-pleasure." This effort would culminate with the foundation of the Pro-Purity League in 1920, which encouraged "
the engagement of right-thinking Presbyterian Youth in wholesome activities to prevent a decay into debauchery and immorality among the nation's young people." This obsession with purity spread to anti-drug crusades as well, with Presbyterian mobs destroying large stocks of imported Yankee drugs as "
dangerous substances which encourage madness, decadence, and societal decay." Ironically, they weren't necessarily wrong about this, although the method they used to reach this conclusion was far from rational and fueled by the fact that George Washington Carver invented cocaine while daring to be black, thus making all Yankee drugs and foodstuffs suspicious. The final major theological development in the Presbyterian Church of Carolina we shall look at was the General Presbytery of 1918's declaration that "
Illuminism is Satanism, and the greatest threat to civilized life in human history. We must wage a holy war to cleanse the Earth of its stench." The Church made a wave of Cokie anti-Illuminist rage official doctrine, and Carolina would be known throughout the world for a level of anti-Illuminism that even some Yankees found disquieting, as many a Presbyterian pastor would foam at the mouth while decrying Illuminism as the ultimate evil in the universe.
In the end the Presbyterian Church of Carolina is both a window into the Cokie soul and a reflection of it. The Church, like the nation, is pugnaciously jingoistic, obsessed with the bodily purity of its daughters, violently racist, and belligerently anti-Catholic and anti-Illuminist. The Church will continue to dominate Carolina as long as Carolina exists, this much is certain.
Members of the First Presbyterian Church of Chester, South Carolina, rally in 1917 to support the troops in Europe
Three Christian Guards in uniform near the Holy Presbyterian Church of Raleigh (1903)
"Matrons" of the Girl's Wing of the Pro-Purity League on parade in Raleigh (1919)
