American Nations

One of the first resources we came across is the book American Nations by Colin Woodard (Wikipedia Summary, Summary Article 1, Summary Article 2). This was actually kind of a God thing: it just started popping up in my Facebook feed spontaneously and I believe God told me over and over again to read it. In this book, Woodard proposes that there are eleven nations (which he defines as regions of consistent outlook and values) in the north american continent and he traces the history of the founding and subsequent development of these eleven nations. 

Here is the summary of each of these given in the Wikipedia article:

• Yankeedom began with the Puritans (Calvinist English settlers) in New England and spread across upper New York, the northern parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, into the eastern Dakotas, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Canadian Maritime. The area values education, communal decision-making and aims at creating a religious utopian communal society to be spread over other regions.
• Deep South was settled by former Anglo-American West Indies plantation owners in Charleston, and spread to encompass South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana, western Tennessee, and the southeastern parts of North Carolina, Arkansas, and Texas. It values old Greco-Roman enlightened, civilized, idle slave society, free-markets and individual freedoms. It has fought centuries with Yankeedom over the dominance of North America, such as in the Civil War and the "culture wars" started by the civil rights movement since the 1960s.
• New Netherland, established by Dutch colonists in the 17th century, is now Greater New York City, as well as the lower Hudson Valley, northern New Jersey, western Long Island, and southwestern Connecticut. The area promotes liberal, multicultural values, capitalism and the freedom of the press.‍
• Tidewater was founded by Cavaliers (Royalists during the era of the English Civil War and Stuart Restoration), and consists of Virginia, Maryland, southern Delaware, and northeastern North Carolina. Has cooperated often with Deep South and Greater Appalachia. Together with George Washington, many of the Founding Fathers came from here. Appalachian mountains cut its expansion westwards, and the region is now being overrun by the Midlands.‍
• Greater Appalachia was populated by waves of immigrants that Woodard calls Borderlanders, from the borders of Northern Ireland, northern England, and the Scottish lowlands. Greater Appalachia covers the highlands in the south United States, the southern parts of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, the Ozarks of Arkansas and Missouri, eastern Oklahoma, and Texas Hill Country. Its fighting spirit is embodied by figures such as Davy Crockett, Andrew Johnson and Douglas MacArthur.‍
• Midlands, founded by English Quakers followed by the Pennsylvania Dutch, consists of southeast Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, northern Delaware and Maryland, central Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, northern Missouri, most of Iowa, and the eastern halves of South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas, as well has southern Ontario. The border city of Chicago is shared with Yankeedom and St. Louis with Greater Appalachia. Midlands promotes peaceful values and has often been in several elections the great swing-region between Yankeedom and the Southern Nations. According to Woodard it is culturally the most "American" of the nations.‍
• New France began in 1604 with an expedition from France led by Pierre Dugua. It grew to encompass the lower third of Quebec, north and northeast New Brunswick, and southern Louisiana.‍
• El Norte is where the oldest European subculture in the United States is found, from the early Catholic Spanish settlers in the 16th century. Later augmented by Anglo-Americans from Deep South and Greater Appalachia, it includes south and west Texas, southern California and its Imperial Valley, southern Arizona, New Mexico, parts of Colorado, and the Mexican states of Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Coahuila, Chihuahua, Sonora, and Baja California.‍
• Far West is the interior of the United States and Canada west of the 100th meridian west between El Norte and First Nation. It includes the interiors of California, Oregon, and Washington, much of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Alaska, part of Yukon and Northwest Territories, the west halves of the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas, as well as Idaho, Montana, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada. The region has been "imperialized" by other nations, such as Yankeedom and Deep South with large mining and infrastructure projects. The Mormon Enclave has been its politically most influential group.‍
• Left Coast was predominantly settled by Yankees from New England, with a huge influx from Greater Appalachia and countries around the world when gold was discovered. It encompasses the land between the Pacific Ocean and the Pacific Coast Ranges from Monterey, California to Juneau, Alaska, containing parts of California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska. It is an ideological ally with Yankeedom and El Norte.‍
• First Nation, founded by the predominant indigenous peoples in Canada south of the Arctic Circle, consists of much of Yukon, Northwest Territories, Labrador, Nunavut, Greenland, the northern tier of Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, northwestern British Columbia, and the northern two-thirds of Quebec. It has preserved much better its culture and customs than the Native Americans in the United States.
  

In the last few hundred years, some of these nations have positioned themselves in a consistent pattern politically:

The northern alliance (Yankeedom, New Netherland, The Left Coast): Value collective action over individual priorities. Working to create a “utopia society” often defined by government intervention and liberal politics.

The southern alliance (Tidewater, Greater Appalachia, Deep South): Prioritize individual action and a hierarchical pattern of society. Resist social engineering, embrace large power distance in leadership.

Unallied (The Midlands, El Norte, New France, Far West): Don’t consistently follow either alliance and tend to land in different places depending on the issue.

Taking it a step further, both the northern and southern alliances have actually mobilized a version of Christianity that lives out their political vision (Woodard actually discusses this briefly in the book).

• Northern Alliance Christianity: Prioritizes love and community involvement. Social justice is the focus and often buddies up to liberal politics.
• Southern Alliance Christianity: Rejects the “social gospel” and makes Christianity about sin and repentance before God. Churches are led by powerful “men of God” which live out the strong power distance dynamics.

As I read all of this, my first conclusion was that I don’t think it would be wise to get caught in the middle of the northern-vs-southern-alliance if we can avoid it. It’s been happening since the days of the founding fathers, and it really hasn’t moved much in the last 250 years. The fact that there are versions of Christianity that are locked in place by these political dynamics means that inventing something as new as we hope to will be a constant uphill battle. Phrased in the language used earlier, these are places where there isn’t a blank slate, and there is likely not much openness.

In my opinion, this is likely more than an incidental point. What we are trying to do is already very difficult to do. The type of exploration that will be required is going to be difficult enough on its own; what we certainly do not need is a strongly defined map that we're constantly pushing against. If we go do one of the northern alliance nations and talk about the interdependent church, it will be immediately placed in the box of the progressivist utopia vision that defines these American nations. Breaking out of that box and doing something different is going to be a consistent battle. If we go to one of the southern nations, we'll have the same problem the other way around: we will seen as "trying to do that northern alliance thing" and constantly need to be defending our vision as something different to what they assume. Having a blank slate is a critical ingredient for what seems to be already somewhat of an outside venture to have a chance to work.

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Four Other Nations...

What about the four nations? (Incidentally, the idea that there are parts of America that aren’t defined by the left-vs-right political war sound so much more appealing, don’t they?)

• New France is extraordinarily liberal, fairly hedonistic, and not really influential in terms of the national scene. It’s a curious place, but not likely to be a place I would enjoy living, and not likely to be strategically important.
• The Midlands have the problem of the lack of trajectory and openness. The Midlands aren’t defined by what they are for, so much as they are the Switzerland of the American Nations: they are about not taking a side. Nothing wrong with that, per se, but it doesn’t generate any direction, and it’s certainly not about new ideas and new directions. The Midlands would probably feel like constantly tugging people to try and go somewhere, because the default culture would have people continue to do whatever they’re used to.
• The Far West is interesting and would probably be the option I would recommend as second most likely. It is by and large a very barren place, and one that hasn’t been very developed. There is potential to develop the new here, but the challenge is that this culture is generally independent to the point of being libertarian. Getting Far West people to become interdependent sounds like it may be a challenge.
• El Norte is the area where United States and Mexico’s predominant cultures begin to bleed together. It values hard work and self-sufficiency, but also retains a more relational focus because of the Hispanic influence. It is also poised to be growing rapidly in political influence among the eleven nations over the next decades as a result of continued population growth. This may be the area of the country that is really developing and moving forward the most right now.

Surveying these different options, I came to the conclusion that El Norte seemed to be the most fertile soil that exists for exploring Church Next. (And Phoenix is in El Norte, although it is near the El Norte - Far West border). In American Nations on page 11, Woodard quotes Mexican Writer Carlos Fuentes’ prediction on this area: “Fuentes has predicted the borderlands will become an amalgamated, interdependent culture in the twenty-first century, so long as tolerance prevails.”

El Norte is ideal because:

• It is not caught in the north-vs-south alliance war: there will be more openness and more blank slate.
• It is growing and developing as an american nation: good trajectory
• It has seeded values that may be helpful towards interdependence: it values independence, but it also values relationships. It takes both of those to build interdependence.

There are many places within El Norte - Phoenix is just one of them. Let's keep looking at other factors.