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But I think Horne is correct that the PCA will soon become “truly national and international and the archaic regionalisms [will] simply wither and dieā€¦” When that happens, we “racists” will want nothing to do with the PCA, and this will delight Mark Horne and many others.

No, it will delight just about everyone. And if anyone needed a reason to hope and pray and work for the PCA to grow into a more cosmopolitan and multicultural witness to the truth, if the Bible’s Great Commisssion is not imperative enough, perhaps this promised cleansing will give it to you.

By the way, apart from the obvious vileness here, has anyone thought of how inherently suicidal it is to identify oneself with a stop in history that is always receding in the rear view mirror on a one way street? Does anyone really think they could go back and fit in a Southern Presbyterian Church in 1845? Does anyone think “the South” really exists?

Of course it exists, Mark. Everyone knows that the culture in Alabama is different than the culture in Massachussetts.

Sure it is. And the history of these places going back to the antebellum period has a great deal to do with this difference.

But people think more than that. They think that “the South” now is the same thing that was there in 1845. But you can’t step in the same river twice, especially when it is now running in new courses with new feeder streams. Who is to say that the difference between present-day Alabama and present-day Massachussetts are more significant than the differences between present-day Alabama and 1845 Alabama?

What sort of continuity can Southern-partisans really claim? Agreeing with words that survived from writers of the period? Perhaps buying a couple of artifacts on Ebay? Dressing at costume parties? All that could just as easily be done with classical Greece. Ancestry and heritage are illusionary connections. It is all nothing more than a different sort of Society for Creative Anachronism, except the SCA is openly acknowledge as a hobby rather than a heritage. Do we really want the history of the Church driven by schisms that are nothing more than hobbies?

Regions shift all the time. Peoples appear and disappear with the vissicitudes of time and place, conflict and peace, immigration and emigration. To try to dig up some regional entity from the past and try to reanimate it is doomed to failure. The most you will get is a zombie.

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