GUEST ESSAY (Corrected): Where union is religion, secession is sin

I’ve learned America thrives not through purity but through connection

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a corrected version of the earlier essay. It was missing a key paragraph.

By Aaron Woolf

There was perhaps no word more fraught, more weighted with negativity in my childhood home than secession. It wasn’t just another historical concept — its very intonation felt forbidden, nearly profane.

We were short on religion, but we had something else to worship: the United States. The red, white, and blue was everywhere — our halls decorated with posters from the world wars, our evenings filled with songs from the patriotic canon, songs I still know today - like Columbia the Gem of the Ocean. We even had a kind of scripture: the Constitution. My mother had us memorize amendments around the dinner table. My father carried his faith into war, earning a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts in the Pacific, fighting to defend that Constitution’s promise.

I’ve sometimes wondered if my patriotism was furthered by the thought that my very existence was the product of improbable union. My mother’s family was old Mississippi Delta stock, “the most Southern place on earth.” My father was born in New York to Eastern European immigrants just months after they arrived. His uncles organized laborers and taught him union ballads in multiple languages; her people were conservative lawyers and planters with ties to the Alamo. They could not have come from more different worlds — and yet they met, married, and made a family. Where else but America?

Beneath that union, though, ran an old fault line: the Civil War and its aftermath. Family lore told of my great-great-great grandfather, Benjamin Grubb Humphreys, governor of Mississippi during Reconstruction, removed at gunpoint from the governor’s mansion by Union troops. The historical record is murkier, but the story endured — proof that the rupture of secession left wounds that never fully healed. No one I know would defend Humphreys’s defiance of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, but still the story persists, heavy with grievance.

And here I sit, descended both from Humphreys and from immigrant unionists. My family’s story is both a reminder of how deep those ruptures run and evidence of the improbable unions that somehow followed.

But that old word - secession-once the stuff of high school history class and our old family narratives, has returned in headlines and hashtags. Behind it is anger, yes — but more than anger, outrage, a kind of visceral outrage I understand all too well.

Outrage that some states pay more into federal coffers than they get back. Outrage that Pacific states, after decades of building environmental and health standards, see their work undone by edicts from Washington — even now forming a coalition on vaccine guidance, with California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii rejecting recent federal pullbacks for children and pregnant women. Resentment that regions invested in a greener future feel bound to others determined to drag them backward.

Calls for “Texit” and “Calexit” have become familiar. In Oregon, counties vote to join Idaho. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene posts casually that “we need a national divorce … between red states and blue states.” Conservative pundits like Ben Shapiro muse that “secession may be the best hope for conservatives,” while Glenn Beck warns that “a national divorce is coming one way or another.” On the left, Sarah Silverman half-joked on her podcast about breaking up into “USA1 and USA2 (and maybe USA3),” and California secessionists insist that “California values are completely different from American values.”What was once unthinkable is now provocative, a half-step from normalization.

History shows what happens when nations convince themselves that sorting into homogenous enclaves will bring peace. The breakup of the Ottoman Empire left the Balkans splintered into hostile states, giving us the very word “Balkanization.” The partition of British India forced 15 million people to migrate across new borders. More than a million died in the violence. These were not clean separations. They were convulsions in which the pursuit of purity brought catastrophe.

The temptation of secession lies in its apparent simplicity — the promise of peace through separation. But borders rarely quiet division; they harden it. Living alongside those unlike us — neighbors who pray differently, vote differently, irritate us and challenge us — is what teaches us democracy’s radical lesson of equality. Secession removes the friction by removing the neighbor. But that friction is democracy itself.

It’s hard not to think of my own backyard in the Adirondacks. Decisions about our communities often feel made in distant capitals, and the relationship between upstate and downstate New York is full of contradictions. Money flows north through state budgets and programs that help keep many rural towns afloat. But water and wilderness flow south, keeping the city alive. So does political influence: Adirondack legislators — from Betty Little and Janet Duprey to Billy Jones and Matt Simpson today — have often punched above their weight in Albany, persuading downstate leaders that broadband, healthcare, and infrastructure here are not regional luxuries but statewide necessities. Every decade or so, as North Country Public Radio put it in 2019, “someone proposes splitting New York into two or three states. But political scientists say it’s more protest than program, a way for upstaters to vent their frustration with Albany.”

Political scientist Ryan Griffiths warns that any actual American secession would require what he calls a “dangerous unmixing of the population.” We are far too entangled — in families, economies, and communities — to divide cleanly without tearing ourselves apart. He has noted that many of today’s secessionist gestures are less serious blueprints than performances — “virtue signaling, or maybe identity signaling.” Perhaps so. But performance matters. To rehearse secession, even symbolically, is to risk making rupture thinkable. The harder and holier work is not to signal escape, but to endure one another — and in that endurance, to discover a measure of equality.

Perhaps it is fitting that I was born in Maryland, a border state where the fractures of North and South were once most visible. In our house, Henry Clay — the Great Compromiser from the border state of Kentucky — was often invoked as a symbol of holding the Union together. His bargains over slavery look far shakier now, but his belief in investing for the long term — in roads, canals, and the national project of knitting a country together — may be his most durable legacy. Lincoln called him his “beau ideal of a statesman,” honoring Clay’s vision of a Union built not on purity but on compromise, infrastructure, and connection across divides.

I am not giving up on the very entity that made me possible — the United States, the improbable marriage of North and South, immigrant and planter, union song and plantation hymn. To walk away from that would be to walk away from myself. And yet, I can’t deny it: that word, secession — the word once as forbidden as any curse in my childhood home — makes a troubling kind of sense today that it never should. But the lesson of history, and of my own life, is that living with difference is not democracy’s failure. It is democracy. And it is the one thing we cannot afford to secede from.

Aaron Woolf is a filmmaker and community developer based in Elizabethtown, New York. Best known for directing the Peabody Award–winning documentary King Corn, he has also been deeply involved in local projects that strengthen Adirondack communities. His work includes reopening the historic Deer’s Head Inn, serving on the town planning board, helping to found the Adirondack Community Recreation Alliance, and leading the redevelopment of Elizabethtown’s historic pharmacy building into a multi-use center promoting small businesses and community life.