Life is Better with the Southern Agrarian Writers (Read every word)

Tim Manning

I am often asked questions like this one from a FaceBook friend, “Tim…who are your top 3 favs Agrarian writers/titles? Thx.” They are:

1. Richard M. Weaver,

2. Andrew Nelson Lytle,

3. Donald Davidson,

4. M. E. Bradford,

5. Tom Landess,

6. Cleaneth Brooks, and

7. Marion Montgomery

Sorry, but I could not get it down to three. They are all the older and deceased writers. Among the living are:

1. Clyde N. Wilson,

2. James Kibler,

3. Wendell Berry,

4. Fred Chappell, and

5. Bill Wilson

I will list the titles a little later. It is especially sad to me that even after receiving a college degree from a small Christian college in Tennessee and a graduate degree from their university in Michigan I was not taught anything about Southern Agrarianism. I was even more saddened by the teaching of Marxism in their grad school. Now Marxist teachings are in all of their American colleges and universities. This is a measure of just how successful the indoctrination into The New Statist/Totalitarian Lincoln World Order has become. The Marxist rule in the USA today could only be established through the strong centralization and secularization begun by Abraham Lincoln.

I also like Lyle H. Lanier, Frank Lawrence Owsley, Robert Penn Warren, John Gould Fletcher and Allen Tate. It is the agrarian writers that turned me on to the Southern culture and heritage, because they gave me a sound perspective for my Christian faith in the time and world that I live in. This is an aspect of understanding missing in most churches today.

Now, Christians are waking-up and thinking that the USA may be moving into Marxism and they think that is a great insight. Most of them do not have a clue about what Marxism is and how it works. Our society, especially the political and academic world, was fully Marxist when I was born in 1945. Now we are quickly becoming a global communist empire. The word society no longer applies. We have lived in a period best described as the “death of western civilization”, meaning a society where Christian beliefs and ethical practices were the norm.

Every college student should have to take at least two 4-hour semesters of Southern agrarian thought and practies to obtain a college degree. Much of this had remained in the core college studies through the mid 1930's. These writers lend an up to date application of the morals and practices so carefully defined in the Old and New Testiments of the Holy Bible. Instead, our children are forced to read trashy New England writers (yep, a host of nasty northern agnostic writers) that no one of faith would be reading if it were not a requirement of their school and this was in a Southern University, much to their great shame.

Many Southern institutes, organizations, and societies will not tolerate their members being Southern agrarian in their perspectives. Some Southern churches will not place Christian agrarians in positions of leadership and real spiritual influence. This had become a measure of their apostasy from Biblical truths.

Worse I had to pay money to study those unskilled trashy writers at a Christian University, because my church was too liberal (affected by agnostic and socialist cultural engineering) to know that these great folks even existed !!! (Insert anger and amazement for the stupid here!) The modern application of my Christian faith grew more in reading their works than in the tainted classes I took at their "Christian" college, Seminary and grad school.

Not having read this wonderful agrarian literature is why so many Southern people no longer understand the great truths of why the South was right. Most reconstructed Southerners cannot imagine how recontructed they are without becoming thoroughly acquainted with traditional Southern Agrarian thought and practices. Many have too narrow a focus on the legal issues which are good and in our favour, but if they are not acquainted with these literary giants it is likely that “you ain’t got no book learnin’”, and that is that ! Studying the battles and the great heroes is wonderful and uplifting, but it just does not have the spiritual influence of studying these insightful works which is why there is not a unified Southern movement today.

Organizations like the UDC, the SCV and the MOS&B largely accept statist anti-Southern and anti-agrarian views while rattling-on about "Southern Heritage." They are encouraged through the study of a more factual history than government schools will permit, BUT that more factual history CANNOT be understood without a moral perspective that is absolute and a current measure of our practices today. Their rejection of Southern heritage should be obvious to anyone who witnesses their members place their hands over their hearts and pledge their souls allegiance to the current secular form of Lincoln's New World Order which grows only more secular and violent by the year as they proudly fly that USA flag at their national Reunion's and in many of their camp meetings. Some progress is seen, however, in the many camps who no longer fly the USA flag and no longer monthly repeat the USA Pledge of Allegiance.

If you are Southern and spending tens of thousands of dollars sending your children to today’s Marxist public American universities or the semi-Marxism Christian universities, you should make the added investment to build their spiritual understanding by having them read the agrarian writers and attend the above institutes to counteract the poison of modernity. Their lives will be spiritually enriched and will never be the same.