Do the American Ecumenes qualify to be a state?

THE AMERICAN ECUMENES


Despite the previous statement that “theocracy” does not mean theocracy, the first states to be covered will be the American theodemocracies. Ultimately none of the contenders of the American War survived into the modern era, with the notable exception of a redoubt of the old Sacramento Government clinging on in Cascadia. Instead, it would be social clubs and faith communities that would persist as the national and later regional governments crumbled, forming the basis of a new post-American society. The “Ecumenical Societies” are a result of this, nations which privilege the church, mosque, temple and so on as the fundamental unit of civil society and government. Likewise, the national mythos of these states draw both from the collapse era experience and the religious traditions of their peoples, with most states being named after places in scripture, which can be a somewhat confusing prospect when someone says “the Land of Galilee” and they mean the region around Lake Winnipeg. Together the Ecumenical Conference of North America stretches across much of former North America, excluding the great desert of course. 


Among the conference though there are eight Ecumenes which are the most prominent, and which are most likely to be referenced when one talks about North America. First there is the Land of Gilead, based out of the former Northeast Atlantic. Gilead is perhaps the closest to an old fashioned party-state and indeed its constitution even references the communists and Lenin in particular (alongside the old fascist jurist Schmitt) as their ideological forebears. To Gilead all governments instituted by men are dictatorships in the name of a particular interest, with old world democracies themselves being bourgeois dictatorships. Similarly, civil society is a sorting system by which dictatorship is established, friends and enemies are designated, and the basis upon which the dictatorship distributes rewards and punishments is rationalized. Gilead is unique in that while being dominated by Catholics (with a significant folk element by way of its absorption of former Baptists and Methodists from the Appalachia area), it accedes to the old Communist maxim that a Communist party, in representing the interests of the proletariat and peasantry, is by its nature democratic because it makes as its main interest the majority of the population. This is one of the reasons why the ruling party, the Party for Solidarity and Virtue, modeled itself off of them. Where it diverges however is that to the people of Gilead the main question of governance is not who is ruled but who is sovereign. To the Gilead Party by instead attributing their primary interest to the ultimate sovereign: God, as opposed to the ultimate subject: Humanity, their regime has fixed the errs of previous capitalist and communist empires. The mentality of the people of Gilead can be summed up with the line "the previous exercise of government concerned itself with the question of what man says man is and of what interest is man to himself. We concern ourselves however with what God says man is and of what interest man is to God." In terms of governance Gilead has been very successful, maintaining one of the more prosperous realms on the continent. This is helped by their monopoly on hydropower, not just the Niagara Falls Dam, but their recently successful megaproject of damming the James Bay as well.


South of Gilead is the Land of Bethel. A unique specimen among Post-American states, the people of Bethel trace their roots in large part to the work of the Collapse Era “Community Welfare Alliance” or “CWAA” and smaller episcopal and progressive church cliques in the region. Heavily leaned on for the restoration of order and civil society during the Boston Government’s short time holding the Atlantic Coast, the “chapter houses” that they established would seize control of the state apparatus during the pretender state’s eventual retreat from the area. Modern day Bethel is a great example of what is meant when 22nd century states are called “conservative”, that is to say they focus heavily on the maintenance of social order and continuity of norms across generations. Communities in the 22nd century from the local to national level engage in high levels of social policing, which says nothing to what the norms of said society are. Bethel on this front is known particularly for its only national level organ the “Bureau for the Prevention of Vice”, under which their national gendarmerie, descended from the old CWAA, is organized. Bethel is also an example of what are sometimes referred to as “post-queer” societies, which is to say societies which had normalized certain social relations for sexual and gender minorities prior to the Collapse Era or which otherwise had influential cliques representing their interests which were maintained into the 22nd century. Post-Queer societies are quite common, more a reflection of the collapse of a social movement globally (due to the collapse of the world in general) not necessitating a reversal of social changes in specific regions, but instead attempts to reorient them within the new baseline of a much “smaller” and more parochial world, mostly through the mimicry of or full integration into the new regimes of social policing performed by the rest of society. Bethel for instance is well known for its program of free at point of use hormonal therapy for gender minorities and streamlined system to accommodate Self Identification, alongside having the death penalty for distribution of pornography of any kind. These two positions are considered to naturally exist hand-in-hand in Bethel society, and locals would be confused were one to attempt to argue with them that these are not positions one needs to hold to maintain social harmony and personal flourishing.


Further south is the Land of Goshen. A descendant of the once great Internationalist Commune of Dixie, the people of Goshen still use a modified version of their ancestors' flag. The system of municipal communes and horse-trading which dominated Dixie politics and their erstwhile congress would eventually form the basis of the current system of elector councils. Goshen in large part is dominated by the “Southron Church”, formally an ecumenical board jointly held by the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the African National Baptist Convention, which rose in prominence with the spinning apart of the once dominant Southern Baptist Convention. Goshen is made up of elector districts, which are headed by either secular or religious councils depending on if the local voting authority is centered around the town hall or church board. The elector districts select members for the congress which is the supreme authority of the land. Elector councils often band together into larger administrative federations where they coordinate and draft fiscal policy and direct the operation of infrastructure manned by cooperatives or other socially owned enterprises that contain members from their respective districts. In some cases this manifests as unofficial “party” blocs, often along the lines of the old school commune era divisions of agrarians, romantics, and communists though as a formally non-partisan state they are not called such. Secular and religious electors are generally equal in number, but due to the near unanimous allegiance of religious electors to the Southron Church (and the semi-formalized process of the church sending notices of whom they want their electors to send to congress) the nation is in dominated by the church. Goshen, however, is also noteworthy for its parallel systems of law enforcement, with both a national militia (descended from the Southern People's Liberation Army) and a “knightly board”. Goshen prefers to leverage the services of independent knights and reiters, formerly sworn to the superpowers, for mediating disputes between councils and counties. This is a very attractive offer, especially for older knights who wish to enter a kind of “retirement”. Goshen’s independent knights often hail from UNICEF or the United Way due to the region being further away from their zones of control and firmly held under the Red Cross.


Speaking of crosses, Goshen is famous for its yearly Victory Day celebrations which commemorate the triumph of the old Dixie armies over the Black Cross in the American War. Celebrations typically consist of work battalions, dressed up in Collapse Era uniforms, dragging replica Black Cross flags through the mud, culminating in their public burning. Victory Day is also noteworthy for the flying of flags of those nations and foreign militias that aided Dixie in the conflict. As those states no longer exist today, a Goshen town or city on Victory Day is one of the last places on Earth one might see many 21st century flags still flown.


Back north one of the descendants of Old Exurbia, now known as the Land of Canaan, can be found. Still based around its old quasi-capital of Tecumseh (former Columbus). The history of Canaan is just as off kilter and curious as its predecessor. The Exurbians had always been a peculiar deviation away from the communalists they were inspired by, attempting a far more “pure” framework trending towards generalized anarchy alongside a kind of American cultural revolution. A people carried aloft as much by an affinity for witchcraft and new age syncretism as they were by their grungecore "i'm playing a riotgrrrl track in a blasted out shopping mall" war of extermination against fascism. As such it is only fitting that it met an equally punk end. Which is to say that one day the men came home from the frontier, turned their guns on everyone and declared they would be doing full anarchism now. 


All in all it’s been pretty successful actually. 


Canaan has maintained, for roughly 80 years now, more or less a vacuity of any form of government outside of the People’s Guard. Beyond that, among the other Ecumenes it is also noted for its relative lack of any hard religious structures. The “Hexurbian” witches of the olden days gave way to a kind of neo-neo-pentecostal campbellism, where much like everything else the existence of discrete denominations was dismantled by force. A form of highly charismatic primitive Christianity dominates in this area, influencing the social norms and sensibilities of the people, even those unaffiliated among them. In terms of foreign relations everything is carried out by the People’s Guard which maintains a rotating roster of diplomatic posts for its officers. Despite not being able to predict who you’re talking to when conducting relations with the Canaanites the neighboring states have maintained long lasing positive relations with the anti-state, in part a continuation of the unofficial détente that existed between Exurbia and the pretender governments from back in the Hayes era. 


Speaking of Hayes and the Chicago Government, while that particular pretender no longer exists, Chicago itself is a major power in the new North America. Influenced by the region’s overlapping periods of control under the Chicago Government, the Quasi-Islamic National Rejuvenation Government, and the Sabaothic Host of the Prophetess Daniela and her followers, what emerged from the wake of the collapse era was the Land of Shiloh. An experiment in confessionalism, Shiloh’s government reflects the diversity of its population. A form of power-sharing is the name of the game, with the Shiloh constitution having built in administrative carveouts for Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, Catholics, Muslims, Unitarians, Sabaothists, and the Baha'is.


Although Shiloh is a state dominated by the public interchange of and horse-trading between different religious communities, above all of them exists a sort of public quasi-cult dedicated to the image and mission of the former United States. This is in large part due to the significant influence that various pretender governments, from Chicago, to the PNRG, to the South Dakota state government of the old 130th Division, played in laying the groundwork for its founding. President Hayes in particular is considered a folk hero of immense renown, for both preventing the fall of the region to fascism and stopping a potential nuclear exchange in the 2040s that would have devastated the continent. 


A somewhat amusing cultural divergence in this region, though often unremarked upon, was the effect that the ration-passport system of the Chicago Government played in shaping demographics. The Hayes era system (and its carry-ons during the later collapse) unintentionally encouraged diverse cohabitation of houses and compounds and what were known as “breadline marriages” in order to maximize access to goods and dispenser regions through the ration system. In effect everyone sharing a house or living on a street became a “family”. Across the Midwest it becomes difficult to trace ancestry back beyond the 2030s. A person’s last name thus might be Mattox because their “ancestors” all lived in the same building on Mattox street a century and a half ago. A similar expression of this phenomena can also be found in the region once known as Colorado, though to a more muted degree. 


Among the former states of the Texan led provisional government now stands the Land of Samaria. Samaria is descended from the “ProvGov” as it was called, more specifically from a special agreement between the Texan and Mexican security and intelligence services that during the later collapse period formed the basis of a multinational program to respond to the regional collapse, desertification and devastation of the gulf coast, and ensuing refugee waves, a program that would survive both nations. The formal dissolution of the remaining American pretender government in Austin would come shortly after its last motion, to begin the movement of millions of people from Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Mexico to the region now known as Samaria. After everything America might die but her people would survive if the Texans had anything to say about it.  


The Promised Land of the Texan and Louisianan pinewoods and oak cut prairies would prove to be the perfect place to begin again, and in time even the abandoned cities of Dallas and Fort Worth would be repopulated and reforged to serve as the current capitol of Samaria. Surprisingly retaining many of the institutions of the collapse era, Samaria is a federal republic with a presidency and a unicameral congress, though operating under a church-county system similar to neighboring Goshen. The success of the resettlement program gave the people of Samaria a sense of good government and the belief that a state properly staffed by the competent (and most importantly the virtuous) will always prevail. This means that the Samaritan government tends to be staffed by competent and well oriented people promoted not due to personal ambition or typical mechanistic meritocratic means, but by being forced into ever higher positions of responsibility by the ever watchful community, often beginning with the chittering of elderly women at the front rows of one’s church or the murmuring of men at the local social club. As they like to say, no good Samaritan goes unpunished.


This has also led to the phenomenon in Samaria known as “Republican Nobility”, a kind of informal class position among the administrative upper crust of the state (and their immediate family) who due to the popular belief that their position was a result of their moral character are simply treated far better by all of society and are often encouraged to flaunt their status. A man who is rich because he owns property is considered an accident of history in Samarian culture and has no right to boast, whereas one who has served the people faithfully is believed to deserve to be rich and often made so.   


Far up north around Lake Winnipeg is the Land of Galilee. Along with its sisterland of Sidon to the west, Galilee is of importance less for any particular difference in its government, but due to its ruling myth and recent history. Like most of the ecumenical states in former Canada its origins can be traced back to the fall of the NATO regime in the country, and in the case of Galilee the beginning of it as well. Galilee stands at the crossroads of many mystical events in the recent history of the continent, having been the site of the Prophetess Daniela’s invasion of Canada which sparked the occupation in the first place. Galilee, like most Canadian states is known for a sizeable though not majority Sabaothic population, the religion having experienced a boost in the region after the fall of the faith’s own personal Babylon. 


What Galilee is more often known for however is the story of Terrance and the Miraculous Blade. In the latter half of the 21st century as the NATO regime and its local RCMP proxies increased in the intensity of their barbarism against the Canadian people, crackdowns would begin on all public gatherings in an attempt to break up hostile cells. Terrance Gauthier (otherwise known as St. Terrance) was a lay preacher, one of the many kinds of “wildflower” spokesmen that emerged at the time as an act of defiance following NATO’s retreat from Alberta. The wildflowers were a broad classification of dissident, including everything from religious preachers, to communists, to people who supported the return of democracy, to simply anyone the military government didn’t like. It is unknown if Terrance was originally a religious wildflower, but he eventually became one, leading to the local RCMP detachment to believe he was involved in or otherwise knew about the location of several dissident cells. He was not and did not.


Repeated failures to make any headway by surveilling Terrance caused his observers to become frustrated and spiteful, changing plans first to assaulting Terrance to get information out of him to eventually simply looking for an excuse to kill him outright. Everything from having his house seized to his church closed down and fellow parishioners arrested did not bring Terrance to violence. Finally, an attempt to encourage him to assault an officer by pulling him into the middle of the road and beating him backfired and resulted in him running away, leading to the Mounties chasing after him and shooting him in the leg. As Terrance began to bleed out in the middle of a clearing the Mounties surrounded him with their weapons raised. Terrance raised his hand into the air, which one interpreted as him having finally broken and offering to give him whatever information they believed he might have. Instead, Terrance told them that he would show them a miracle. Looking up to the sky he said:


“Lord, not that I might gain, or bargain for my life with your power, but that they who persecute me might be saved. That if you will that they might know you by my faith. For you are the author of life, and if it be your will then this air though it remain in sight and touch air will be in truth a blade that should I grab it would cut my hand.” Terrance would grasp the air above his head. His palm would be sliced open and start to bleed.


The Mounties would panic and shoot him seven times.


The final collapse of Canada would mean Terrance would have the last laugh, and indeed the story goes that at least a couple of those who witnessed the event would later switch sides, with their testimonies being why the story was popularized in the first place. So, he arguably obtained all his goals. He’s considered the national hero of modern-day Galilee and the saint-of-the-nation by the region’s Catholic and Lutheran believers. 


Finally there is the Land of Sidon. A recent arrival in the history of Post-American states, it is of great renown due to its ongoing rivalry with neighboring Cascadia. Formally “The United States of America”, Cascadia is what remains of the once great Sacramento Government and its ruling body COMPOR. Based around the former military regime in PNW and the Seattle Green Zone, the remnant state has succeeded in solidifying its rule, due to celebrate the 400th year anniversary of the USA soon! A unitary government despite the name, Cascadia can be best described as a “cop-ocracy” in service to the cartels and corporations which dominated the old government, now reforged into what are effectively a kind of ancien nobility, an anachronism wrapped in another anachronism. Sidon is dedicated to the destruction of what remains of the USA, or what it perceives to be a mockery of the world that was lost during the collapse.  


The cold war between Sidon and Cascadia is playing out primarily in the city of Vancouver, which remains for now outside the reach of either power. A cat and mouse game is afoot between both sides, constantly attempting to outmaneuver and undo the other’s inroads into the free city, which all sides know will fall to one side eventually. 


Among the ecumenes of North America a phenomenon has emerged in recent years, that of the “New Believers”, those individuals who come from secular or explicitly atheist families going back 3 or more generations that have at least outwardly converted to a local religion following the rise of the new system. To be clear there were seismic shifts and trends in religiosity in America during the collapse era, though a sizeable chunk of the population remained otherwise stable in previously held secularity as is to be expected, operating as normal under the new system as it gelled. However, trends have been noticed in recent years, especially by those who collect the stats, of segments of the population that did not shift over the past century, but which have now experienced seemingly spontaneous changes in outward religiosity after the new order became entrenched, often corresponding to areas or among those institutions where doing so would be more beneficial. The rise of New Believers is more pronounced in Shiloh for instance with its confessional appointment system, than in Goshen where there is a whole parallel secular state. In recent years these New Believers have experienced a degree of mistrust and wariness accorded to them by some segments of the population, though this has yet to escalate beyond the level of a kind of cultural background radiation. As a result it is not unheard of for New Believers to find themselves needing to express an even more intense religiosity and loyalty to compensate or otherwise “prove” themselves to their detractors. 


Outside of the ecumenes and Cascadia there is not much to note about the rest of the continent with two exceptions. The first is the Heartland Commonwealth, a state stretching from former Utah to Kansas which considers itself the legal and spiritual successor to the Chicago Government, though having dropped the pretenses of being the sole American state. Known for their massive solar powered fixed wing transport planes that lazily circuit the whole perimeter of their nation and the pilotless caravans that move across the plains, the Heartlanders are in an almost romantic recreation of an American ideal interested in little more than friendly neighbors and profitable trade. There is also the San Fran Commune, an quasi-outpost of the Seventh International on American shores. They, however, will have to be touched on later.

1. A Sovereign — A Supreme Authority, out-ranking every other position and institution in the land.

2. A Bureaucracy — Layers of the authority, delegated down from the Sovereign, managing discrete areas of a complex social administration.

3. A Hierarchy — Society itself is stratified into elites and commoners, commanders, and commanded.

4. An Identity — A unifying sense of belonging to the same team, one larger than those of village, tribe, and family.

5. Power —For the state's authority to man anything, it must wield sufficient power to coerce everyone — to force everyone within its land — to live under that authority.