The identity of America is in a moment of crisis. We will not put forth an argument proving that this is the case. All who have lived through the last decade of disruptive political and cultural events understand this on some level or another.

The crux of this crisis lies in our apparent inability to answer one fundamental question: What does it mean to be an American?

The reason for this problem is simple. It is the logical conclusion of the “propositional” nature of American identity that has been promulgated by American neoliberalism.

If American identity does not rest on the grounds of a shared race, religion, or heritage; If America is simply an economic zone where anyone, anywhere can come to get rich quick; If everyone in the world is effectively an “undocumented American”; If America is merely an administrative unit overseeing a hodgepodge of entrepreneurs and laborers; then Americans are merely interchangeable economic units and American citizenship is simply a formality — nothing more than a piece of legal paperwork. The American nation is not truly a nation but only an American government.

But Americans are not merely interchangeable economic units. Americans are people. And every person has a distinct identity: a distinct sex, a distinct race, a distinct culture, a distinct religious heritage. It is these immutable qualities (which we did not consent to or freely choose, but which were given to us by God) that make up the true essence of a person. American capitalism is simply the other side of the same materialist coin as the Soviet communism that preceded it in the last century. Both ideologies strip away the identity of the individual and conceive of each person only in terms of their material conditions. People are not made in the image of God and have no inherent human dignity. Instead, they are atoms, moving chaotically through the bowels of an impersonal, bureaucratic, economic machine.

It is for this reason that, as Christians, we must reject the antichrist ideology of American capitalism with the same fervor as Soviet communism. Both do violence against the dignity of the human person and are thus immoral.1

With this rejection necessarily follows the rejection of the propositional nature of American identity. The American identity must be rooted in the immutable, intrinsic qualities of Americans as a collective people.

All of the ills of modern American society: the alienation, the widespread homelessness, the lack of a sense of belonging, the inability to form families, the lack of decorum in public life, the decline in the sanitation of public spaces, the widespread addiction to drugs and pornography, the lack of beauty in public architecture and art, the lack of a commons, the exploitation of the American worker, the hustlers and the scams so prevalent in our society — all are simply the consequences of the application of a false conception of Man as Economic Unit and no more.

The Final Aim

It is thus the Final Aim of the Hesperian Society to promote an American identity on the basis of the Christian Faith.

It is Our aim to utterly transform the current American nation into a nation of Christian zealots2.

It is Our aim to eclipse all previous religious great awakenings that have preceded it in its scope and magnitude.

It is Our aim to unite the American people under one homogenous identity, built upon the Rock of Christ.

The Nation of Profiteers

When America was founded, it was primarily by two groups: Profiteers and Pilgrims.

Much is made of the first group. America is often lauded as a nation of entrepreneurs, who settle here from around the world to follow their dreams — dreams that are solely occupational in nature. America is often lauded as a “free nation” — a freedom that does not entail the autonomy to pursue one’s own moral code, but rather the freedom to enslave oneself to whatever hedonistic amusements they so choose.

It was this group of Profiteers that from the nation’s very inception stained its spiritual character and permanently spread the seeds for all of its subsequent identity-related conflicts. That is because it was through this first group that slavery entered America. These slaves were brought here in order to create the cash crops that America needed to compete in the world economy and raise the GDP, while the plantation owners lived lives of unproductive leisure.

This was the conception of the American as a mere economic unit in its purest form. As Christians, we do not condemn this evil practice on strictly Leftist “social justice” terms, in which a particular race is held responsible for a sinful institution that was practiced at one time or another by all of sinful mankind. Rather we condemn — and have always condemned3 — slavery in whatever form it presents itself, because it deprives the human person of their inherent dignity as sons of God.

Yet since the abolition of this barbaric practice, the Profiteers of America have sought to recreate it in various forms, through exploiting the American worker in such a way as to reduce him to “wage slavery,” and through seeking cheap labor from foreign lands.

America’s original sin muddied the waters of American identity and created permanent racial discord in the nation. In fact, it even deprived it of its ability to be a nation in a truly strict sense.

The word “nation” stems from the same root as the word “natal.” It indicates a connection by birth. The very concept of a “nation” is a state that is united by the shared ancestry of its members. “Nationalism” is thus opposed to the multi-ethnic empire. It is the idea that a people united by blood should also be united in political representation by means of their own sovereign government. Thus, defining the word “nationalism” in a literal sense, “ethno-nationalism” becomes redundant. All nations are “ethno-states,” strictly speaking.

Due to the original sin of slavery, America was cursed to be forever deprived of true nationhood. America could never be, from its very inception, a state united by blood.

Nevertheless, the question of true nationhood would be delayed until the middle of the 19th century. This is because the African slaves, as slaves, were deprived of their citizenship. Thus, while Americans as men were not united by blood, Americans as citizens were. This is how John Jay, in arguing for the adoption of the Constitution, could argue in The Federalist Paper No. 2:

Yet America was only to be a “band of brethren” for as long as the African American slaves in their midst were denied the dignity of their personhood. From the time that they (fortunately) became equal citizens, the band of brethren was indeed split in two.

From then on, the blood of the country continued to split into trickling tributaries. Waves of immigrants continued to dilute the ancestral blood — first into one of a broadly European heritage in the 20th century4, before finally disintegrating any remaining ancestral ties whatsoever by the beginning of the 21st.

This fate was the product of the Profiteers. It is they who even to this very day — seeking the cheap labor of aliens whose dignity they can neglect, rather than the pricey labor of their fellow citizens whose dignity is protected by their rights as citizens — support “stapling green cards to the backs of diplomas” and expanding H1-B visa programs.

At this point, no matter what one may desire, even an immigration moratorium and mass deportations of illegal aliens cannot restore this country’s demographics to what they were during the time of John Jay. It seems that America is destined to become a majority-minority state in the near future and beyond.

Thus, it is impossible to create an American identity that is based on a nationhood of blood ties.

If we are to seek a true American identity based on our shared personal characteristics, we must search elsewhere.

The Nation of Pilgrims

Before the “nation of immigrants” was founded through Ellis Island, before John Jay and the Constitution, before the American government became an independent entity, America was a nation of Pilgrims.

America was founded by religious fanatics and extremists. A nation of Puritans and Quakers. They sought to make America into a new Holy Land. A new nation whose very society would have God at its focal point, as He always deserved to be. Just as the Temple was at the center of the nation of Israel, so too would the Son of David be enthroned at the center of American society.

While we may disagree with some of their theological positions, we should aspire to the extreme piety and reverence of these Pilgrims.

It is this American identity as a Nation of Pilgrims that the Hesperian Society seeks to re-assert. It is the only viable alternative to the slave society of mere economic units promulgated by the Profiteers.

Our vision is not based purely on practical cultural or political concerns. We all believe earnestly in the Truth of the Gospel. Nevertheless, there are also practical considerations that make this the only viable solution to America’s crisis of identity.

1. We have the Truth on our side. The Enemy has already infiltrated most of America’s institutions. We cannot match them in pure materialist terms of wealth and power. Thus, our sole advantage lies in our possession of the Truth and the immeasurable power bestowed upon us by this fact.

2. Christianity is the sole consistent aspect of American identity. Identity by its very nature is an immutable attribute that cannot be manufactured or mimicked. Other aspects of American identity, such as race, have developed over time. Our constitutional government, while consistent, is impersonal. However, our nation since its very inception has had a particularly Christian character. It is a living shared identity that does not have to be invented or inorganically parodied.

3. Christianity is a universal faith. Christianity believes that all people are equal under God. Whatever their racial, cultural, social, political, etc. background, no matter what their other aptitudes, all share in a common human dignity based on our creation in the image of God. Thus, Christianity alone can unite all of the many diverse people of America under a single identity.

4. Christianity defends human dignity against the excesses of capitalism. The abuses of the Profiteers have always been counter-acted by the activities of the Pilgrims. It was the Quakers and other Christian abolitionists who freed the slaves on explicitly Christian grounds. The Profiteers, for all their evils, are nonetheless responsible for America’s great material wealth. If the generation of this material wealth can be circumscribed by Christian virtue, then we can continue to enjoy its benefits without incurring the just reprimands caused by its excesses.

5. Christianity transcends politics. Aside from (or perhaps downstream from) America’s crisis of identity is America’s so-called “political division.” Christianity transcends this division between “Left” and “Right,” while counteracting the shortcomings of both.

   The Leftist shares the Christian ideals of compassion for the poor and the marginalized, and in its critiques of the excesses of capitalism. However, Leftism creates a lawless environment of utter permissiveness where all of the worst sins of mankind’s fallen nature are either tolerated or outright encouraged.

   The Rightest creates a productive society of law and order. However, they lack the compassion of the Leftist. They create a Darwinian society in which there is no recourse for the poor and marginalized.

   Only Christianity can provide the Left with order and the Right with compassion.

FIDES: The Five General Principles

The Hesperian Society acknowledges that man is not a mechanical animal, but an organic creature. Any attempt to engineer human behavior from the top down, when taken to its greatest extreme, will result in the same dehumanization that we seek to avoid.

Human organization works best when it self-organizes around a particular set of shared principles. Therefore, to accomplish the Final Aim of the Hesperian Society, the Hesperian Society should focus its activities on Five General Principles, or FIDES:

1. Freeing ourselves and others from the bonds of capitalism, insofar as it does violence to the dignity of man. This includes holding material goods in common as far as this is possible, advocating for the rights of laborers, abstaining from unvirtuous or unproductive forms of labor, serving and educating the poor, supporting Christian-owned businesses, and materially supporting Christian families or those who wish to have them but are prevented from doing so due to material concerns.

2. Imitating pious Christians of the past and applying their character, teachings, and behaviors to the present moment. These include the Christians of the Apostolic Age, the Pilgrims, the 19th-century Christian reformers, and of course the Saints. We seek not only to mimic but to develop an authentic living Christian tradition by adapting it to a new age.

3. Developing Christian culture. The arts are dominated by neoliberal ideology. Art has become a consumerist product, rather than a way to glorify God, the Creator of all beauty.

   Public art and architecture, with its godless, post-modern aesthetic, deprive our citizens — especially the poor — of beauty, and instead poisons their souls with ugliness. Thus, we shall become patrons of Christian art — whether visual art, film, music, architecture, or digital mediums. The greatest art of Western civilization such as the paintings of the Sistine Chapel, the architecture of the Cathedral of Notre Dame or St. Vitus Cathedral, and the music of Bach and Mozart, were all created by Christians. It is a disgrace that secular art has eclipsed Christian art in the popular consciousness.

   Our artists shall balance the traditional with the contemporary, the popular with the sophisticated, in order to glorify God by sharing in His creative energies. We shall once again give material aid to the greatest artists of Western Civilization until the art of the Church once again dominates our society.

4. Educating ourselves and others. We are to re-learn our neglected Western traditions and pass them down. We are to become experts in theology, philosophy, and history. We are to develop a new “Traditional Canon” for the humanities — an academic curriculum that presents history and the social sciences through an explicitly pro-Christian, pro-Western, and pro-tradition lens. We are to promulgate the Traditional Canon to students across the West.

   We are to offer free education to all, especially the poor and those unable to pursue higher education. We are to teach them the Traditional Canon, moral virtues, Christian doctrine, and practical skills for the betterment of themselves and those around them.

5. Sanctifying our own lives and our society.

   Above all, we are to live pious and reverent lives.

   We are to abstain from all sexual immorality.

   We are to study and cultivate the virtues.

   We are to pray at a minimum twice daily, in the mornings and evenings.

   We are to study Sacred Scripture and other religious texts at a minimum once a week.

   We are to hold a strict fast on Wednesdays, Fridays, during Advent, and during Lent which shall include abstaining from all animal products, oil, and alcohol.

   We are to attend the most reverent religious services we can find in the immediate area every Sunday and day of obligation.

   We are to wear at least one object professing our faith, such as a crucifix, at all times in public.

   Most importantly, we are to break down all barriers between our sacred and secular life, until our every action aims to directly serve Christ the King. We are to hold all other members of the Society accountable for living a Sanctifying life, but first and foremost ourselves.

The Hesperian Society was founded in the year of Our Lord, 2024, to bring about a restoration – not to return to some point in the past, as some would like to do, nor to embrace the course of destruction that secular modernity has taken the western world down, as most have, but to take up again our inheritance which has been betrayed, and to take up the traditions handed down to us by our dead generations and defend them from the onslaught of this age, that we may hand them down to our children.

Hesperians are young people, from a generation under siege, who have resolved that the hopelessness of modernity must end with us; so help us God. The Society throws itself forward as a wall of defense standing between the innocent and all weapons raised against innocence.

Firstly, we are a cultural organization, committed to teaching the youth the way of life of the Old World, that is, the world as it was before the hegemony of western secularism. We are committed also to giving our members a strong community, a movement to belong to that is active in the real world and united not just by shared ideals but by visible brotherhood and action. The fundamental point of our Society is to give people a way to gain spiritual and economic independence from the state of vanity and corruption of the world around us, what we consider the ‘culture of death’ that is so harmful to the human spirit; and using the existing infrastructure, to build a true, living, beautiful culture out of the one that is dying.

We wish to see extinguished from this land all those things that destroy the human spirit and bring to a halt the natural pattern of life – unchecked capitalism, consumerism, immorality, nihilism…

We will stand in defense even if our immediate chances of victory are none. We don’t weigh and calculate, we trust only in God. We don’t make political guarantees, but this we can ensure; that at the very least our generation’s final act may be an incursion against all those forces that have for so long poisoned and used us and those before us. We don’t know if the victory we envision will be ours or our children’s, but we will fight to the end of our souls’ capability to make sure that the sun will soon set on the culture of death that has been inflicted on us.

We aren’t a political group. Because truly, what is taking place in our nation has no political solution. The culture of death must be fought, disrupted, and replaced by a culture separate from it, a culture of light. The days we live in ask us to tolerate evil and to affirm its privileges; that is something that can’t be asked of those who truly believe in goodness; for good has no communion with evil, and light has no communion with darkness. A right is something that is owed; we owe nothing to evil, to the “father of lies”. But we owe it to the Thrice-Holy God to renounce the devil and all his works.

Our resistance to consumerism isn’t radical in itself; there is practically nobody that speaks positively about it. But we are not only criticizing consumerism – we are giving people a tangible way of bringing it to an end. We don’t deem it enough to simply withdraw ourselves on an individual scale from consumerist society. We don’t want to just free ourselves, but to free all people who crave freedom, and to give the consumerist culture its anticipated execution. This force that has done so much damage to so many souls, that has wrought so much misery on us, does not need to just be fled from; it needs to be made into a ruin, a page in history.

How will we do it?

With extreme ingenuity.

The mercantile pop culture, as we call it, depends on people remaining participants in it. It is not a ‘culture’ in the same sense of the word as a culture that arises naturally from heritage and customs; instead, it is a social and economic phenomenon that tends towards the destruction of authentic, local cultures in favor of an international market culture. It depends not on the spiritual life of a people, as authentic cultures do, but on markets. On money.

The Hesperian Society offers people a way out of this. This isn’t as hard as people imagine; and it doesn’t require moving to the woods or a farm and learning to live without electricity. That’s an option, of course, but we believe that in these times what is really needed is a way to build a culture which is spiritually independent from the mainstream one without having to retreat from it.

To do this takes an organized effort; more organized than one person deciding to leave everything behind, move to the forest and build a cabin, as the oft-repeated aspiration of our times goes. Someone who could actually follow through with this – after getting around the barrier of buying useful land – may come to find that physically separating from society didn’t bring them the peace they were hoping for. After spending years engulfed in the noise of the world, going into the forest didn’t make it go away. The work of restoring the peace of the spirit is a work that must be done in community, by intention, and most of all by a return to the Faith.

The long-term goal of the Hesperian Society is to establish a community, or communities, within existing towns or cities in which people practice a more self-sufficient and communal way of life, similar to that of the early Christians as described in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 2:42-47). Even if this were done on a small scale, it would allow people of our generation to escape an almost certain fate of endless debt, loneliness, and unfulfilling labor, and most importantly to show that it is possible to do so. The model we propose would offer our generation a higher quality of life and a higher degree of freedom than what we are currently offered by the normal means, where even those who secure a stable career are still dependent on an economy that because of its reliance on finance capitalism is acting like a rigged slot machine that breaks down every ten years; and if you’re lucky you can spend a little less than half your lifetime paying off your mortgage.

Consumerism can only survive among a people who are losing, or have lost, a sense of cultural and religious identity, of tradition, of having a place within eternity. When an imperial power colonizes a nation, it always strengthens its rule by repressing the conquered nation’s culture; especially their practice of their faith, their language, their customs, and their education. That is because imperialists understand that these things, above all, are the source of a people’s strength, especially for those who do not have many earthly riches. If the people have no sense of unity and identity, then they have no energy to fight, nor do they understand what it is that is being taken away from them. The mercantile pop culture is acting exactly like this type of imperial oppressor in every nation in which it appears, razing the traditional way of life in exchange for profitable modern individualism, and this is perhaps most clearly the case in our poor America.

Are we communists?

Never. Many have rightfully identified capitalism for the unquestionable role it has played in creating the misery of modernity, but have come to a false conclusion that to end the suffering it has brought it should be replaced with yet another faithless, materialist ideology; communism.

This conclusion has been wholeheartedly embraced by vast portions of the population and many of our own generation, the youth.

The problem is, both capitalism and communism see reality as a mere sum of changing material conditions. Capitalism values efficiency and abundance above all, and therefore thrives on ever increasing amounts of production of unnecessary goods, regardless of the consequences. The exploitation required to meet the demands of this vicious system slowly creates a wider disparity between the classes, meanwhile encouraging wealthy nations to move their industry to foreign countries to exploit the people there too.

Communism is a shallow reaction against capitalism that sees all of human history as the history of class warfare. Therefore, says communism, all hierarchy must be destroyed. Religion, for acknowledging the hierarchy of the divine world above the mortal one, must disappear from people’s hearts so that they have hope in nothing but this passing life. The traditional arrangement of marriage and family, Marx argues in the Communist Manifesto, are just more forms of bourgeois exploitation.

Later Marxist thinkers would put forth the idea of totally destroying the existing social norms of family life – they detested the oppression and supposed patriarchy of marriage, monogamy, the raising of children by their parents as opposed to some communal model, the traditional roles of fatherhood and motherhood, and so on. If it isn’t obvious by now, this way of thinking unfortunately became quite influential in the West, and remains so up to this day. Everything that these Marxist intellectuals could wish to see happen to society’s sense of morals has been fully accomplished; and yet, our communist fairytale world never came, and capitalism is as strong as ever.

But as for us, we do not adhere to any of these earthly ideologies, but to the tradition of Οδός (the Way), the Christian Faith. This Faith is not an ideology, because it is simply authentic existence. It is the way of concord, of peace between the body and the soul, between this world and the world to come, between the temporal and the eternal. It is a holistic view of life that cannot be separated from its lived experience.

The ideologies of modernity are not organic progressions of society, and so cannot be called “progress” at all.

“We are too fond of clapping ourselves upon the back because we live in modern times, and we preen ourselves quite ridiculously (and unnecessarily) on our modern progress… Modern speculation is often a mere groping where ancient men saw clearly… There have been States in which the rich did not grind the poor, although there are no such States now; there have been free self-governing democracies, although there are few such democracies now; there have been rich and beautiful social organisations, with an art and a culture and a religion in every man’s house, though for such a thing to-day we have to search out some sequestered people living by a desolate sea-shore or in a high forgotten valley among lonely hills…”

-Padraig Pearse, The Murder Machine

Tradition embraces the romantic, intuitive impression of life that combines idealism with action, the mystical with the mundane. Because it is not dependent on trends and fashions, tradition is ever youthful and always new, while progressivism is always growing old.

Starting from the 1920s you see this pattern take shape, with some breaks in between, where the previous generation’s resistance against established morality becomes dull in the eyes of their children, and so the children resist in an even greater excess against an already weakened morality, and so on until you reach the present day, where it’s hard to say what there is even left for us to resist against, what morals there are left to be destroyed. And of course, one thing has stayed true from generation to generation, which is that these trends against morality, disastrous for the psychological and spiritual health of the people, have opened the doors to making immeasurable amounts of money for those who benefit from exploiting the culture this way.

Our Appeal

The Hesperian Society, as stated in our member’s Club Manual, “is an organization founded for the purpose of bringing about a resurrection of spiritual identity, with its single orientation being the salvation of souls. We desire for the reign of Christ to be acknowledged in this land. For this to happen, the divine law of the apostolic Christian faith must become, as it was in the more dignified and august moments of history, the principle behind social and public life. All the activities of the nation, whether they are economic, educational, political, and so on, must all be directed to one and the same end; not to mere economic efficiency, nor to the enforcement of modernity and internationalism on the people of this world, but to the spiritual health and wellbeing of the nation’s people.”

We are unlike any other current effort at a movement like this in that we have nothing to do with politics. We are concerned only with a spiritual rejuvenation, with the awakening of conscience, with a total reorientation of society towards true peace and holiness and love. While immorality and militant unbelief reigns, there is no true peace and no true freedom, ever.

We respond to the lasting, primeval cry of humanity, the one that has haunted all of history, the unutterable cry for freedom. The communists and modernists shout for freedom, but with a voice that is hollow, empty of the truest longing of the human heart — and which has in it something of the voice of the Deceiver, the Accuser who in Eden lied to make us renounce heaven.

We, too, call for freedom, but with a voice of conviction, a voice in which there is no tone of robbery or betrayal. It is quiet, for it is the sighs of the penitent, and of hearts broken and humbled, of children crying out “Abba, Father!”

Humanity, in its aching for freedom, has ofttimes gone far from the path and reached for what curses and poisons us. We have strayed from the embrace of the Anointed One, the Christ.

Where else, O Lord, is our freedom?

Where else, our God, but in You, will we find our blissful repose?

How long shall we stay in this valley of tears, despising our inheritance and forsaking our forgiveness? How long will this time of hatred endure, while our world becomes rich in its outrages against You? Modernity has tried to take our Faith away from us; look now upon its failure. Never will we submit to the prince of this world, for “you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” (John viii 32)

The apokatastasis, the Restoration, must come before the final darkness which will shroud the end of this age. Peace will reign when people finally return to God who alone is the Lover of Mankind. What justification do we have to say that this generation, facing such a dark hour of history as this is, couldn’t be the one to do something so unexpected, so shocking, sweeping aside all convention and resolving to go against such staggering odds, doing the last thing we are wanted or expected to do according to the doctrine of “eternal progress”?

On our own, as scattered individuals, our potential is crushed under the weight of those combined forces of the world which seek only to hurt us. But coming together in absolute determination, our potential is endless.

There has seldom been moments as decisive as this, and we have fatefully been chosen to live through it all; either to yield to the way of death, or to take up vigilantly our course on the way of life. It is up to you; and I must tell you that it is the inevitable outcome made known to us by the immortal mythos of mankind that the way of life will prevail. That is the drama of existence; that what is innocent and peaceful must be besieged by darkness, that innocence may gloriously triumph over the vainglory of sin.

“We seem to have lost; but we have not lost. 
To refuse to fight would have been to lose; to fight is to win. 
We have kept faith with the past, 
and handed on its tradition to the future.”
-Pádraig Pearse