A while back, Dr. Michael Hill, President of the League of the South issued a call for all Southerners concerned with their heritage to practice what he labeled as 'cultural secession.' By that he meant that we should strive to secede from the wordly Yankee culture that constantly bombards us with its rank cosumerism and collectivism. He urged people to turn off the television and read good books, by good Southern authors when you could get them. He urged people to discontinue listening to the pop music of the day, to start their own businesses where possible, and to educatate their children at home rather than sending them to those government indoctrination centers we charitably refer to as public schools. He mentioned other things, too, but these were among the most important.

I agree with and support Dr. Hill's concept, especially for Christian folks - this is the type of thing we should be doing anyway, as Scripture commands us to be in the world but "not of the world." Please don't misunderstand what this means. It does not mean withdrawing into some corner somewhere and letting the evil world slide on by while waiting for the Lord to come back and take you out of this mess. Cultural secession means that you do whatever you are able to do to influence this culture we live in toward its proper perspective. You should seek to influence it rather than to be influenced by it. Christians gave America, for all its faults, a culture to be thankful for. That is mostly gone today. Remnants remain in the South and in a couple other places, but for the most part it's gone and the liberals and apostates in positions of influence in this country would like to stamp it out completely, as they have an abiding hatred for anything even remotely Christian. However they will not succeed.

Many will be tempted to say 'the culture around us is so pervasive, what can we do to fight it?' One thing you can do is to begin to educate your children at home so that you, and not the government schools, teach them their history, culture, and morals. My wife and I did it and we have no teaching diplomas. We both only graducated from high school. Now our daughter is homeschooling our four granddaughters. She was taught her history and heritage either in Christian schools or at home and we have made sure she is well supplied with decent history material so that she can pass what she has learned along to our granddaughters. You see, we will not recapture our culture with political action, although that can be one tool we use when possible. We will recapture it through families, each generation teaching the next what they need to do to preserve those things that remain and to influence the culture in the future.

We recently got a letter from my daughter, telling us what their family is doing. They are working at practicing cultural secession, although they don't call it by that name. My daughter wrote us about how their family and how her husband used to enjoy going to glitzy restaurants. Now he would rather stay home - he enjoys real home cooking better that restaurant food. And she wrote about how our oldest granddaughter "has discovered the joys of long flowing dresses to cover her ankles, and has turned her back on much of what is trendy and popular!" In fact, all four granddaughters now prefer long dresses to pants and shorts, and these girls play in their long dresses - just as girls 150 years ago did. And all the girls now enjoy wearing their hair long.

You may be tempted to say this is too old fashioned, but it did not happen overnight. Our daughter's family had time to reflect and has decided they really do not desire most of what the present culture has to offer and so they have chosen something better - the inner contentment of daring to be different - something that really goes against the grain of political correctness, where we are all supposed to be the same, think the same, act the same, and make sure we vote for politically correct and 'sensitive' candidates. And, horror of horrors, both my daughter and her husband are supporters of the Second Amendment and they know enough history that they also understand the intent of the Tenth Amendment, and God willing, all this will be passed on to their children, and from them to their children, and so on down the line.

Taking back our Christian culture will be a multi-generational work. It will not be accomplished in our lifetime or in our childrens' lifetime, but by God's grace it will be accomplished one day if we all act to do our part now. We can, through homeschooling and solid churches, prepare our children to wage war against the apostate culture around them rather than just running away from it. Just a little something for us to think about-and then ask the Lord how He would have us proceed for the furtherance of His kingdom.

Copyright ©, 2003 Al Benson Jr.