Postliberal Dispatch from Maine

Without community, tradition, language, and faith, what exactly is it that defines a town, county, state, or nation?

Tail Gunner Joe is the pseudonym of a former Publius Fellow and writer based in the Washington, D.C., area.

There were still three and a half hours until the sun came up, but I was up and awake. Getting up at 2:30am to drive a little over an hour to Madawaska, Maine may not be as appealing as a tropical vacation, but a journey through the St. John Valley showcases the unique Acadian culture that too few Americans know exists in Maine’s Aroostook County, or simply known as “The County.”

The County contains the pristine Maine wilderness and its residents showcase a work ethic and humility that is more reminiscent of the Old West than twenty-first century America. Madawaska, a town where the majority of the population speaks French and life revolves around the shift changes at Twin Rivers Paper Company. In many ways, Aroostook County epitomizes Maine’s state motto, “the way life should be.” However, the decline of Aroostook also foreshadows the eventual extinction of Christianity within Maine and the loss of the Franco-American culture that at one time built the state into an industrial powerhouse.

Maine is the only state in New England with a substantial Catholic history during the colonial era. The first Mass was celebrated in 1605 on what is today Dochet’s Island near Calais, Maine. The eclectic mix of Jesuits, Franciscans, Capuchins, and priests from Quebec City poured into northern and western Maine as trappers and traders established towns and camps that predated the now abundant potato farms and lumber mills that dot the area.

The Franco-American Catholics that spread throughout Maine and founded towns like St. Stephen, Dennistown, Lyman and went to work in the large mills in cities like Lewiston, where they established their own French-speaking enclaves. By 1930, nearly one million French Canadians had entered Maine and New England, among them my grandfather’s family.

These new workers made up 44% of the workforce in New England’s mills. Crucially, these Franco-Americans carried with them Quebecois tenacity for cultural survival constructing churches, meeting houses, and neighborhoods to ensure that the French language and traditions were passed down to the next generation. The 2,200 seats in the Basilica of St. Peter & Paul in Lewiston exemplifies that dedication. 

That dedication to cultural survival is the reason you can still get a glimpse of any sort of religion in Maine today. As the mills shut down across New England, many of these Franco-Americans dispersed to greener pastures. Much like the decline of these mill towns, Maine’s overall religiosity also followed suit. Today, Maine, alongside New Hampshire and Massachusetts, rank as one of the least religious states in the nation.

The loss of devout French Catholics means that many of the historic wooden churches in St. John Valley, like the Notre Dame du Mont Carmel Catholic Church in Lille, Maine (population 450), is now used as a museum. Another former church built in 1892 in Madison, Maine, is now used as an event space. While the communities are to be commended for helping keep these buildings intact, the loss of the village Church, much like the loss of the town mill, robs residents of the central place where the actual community is formed.

More explicit erasures of Franco-American religious heritage have come from our nation’s new secular religion of diversity and acceptance. The renaming of the Franco-American Heritage Center in Lewiston to the Riverfront Arts Performing Center was done so to “make us [the center] more inclusive.” The Consulate General of France down in Boston, along with the local Franco-American community disagreed.

Other efforts to preserve the Franco-American Catholic heritage of Maine has run up against a challenge that many communities in rural America are facing: an aging and declining population. The heartland of Maine’s Franco-American culture, Aroostook County, has seen a 6.6% decline in population in the last decade and a 10% decline in the last twenty years.

That population loss affects both church attendance and local school budgets, both of which have seen congregations dwindle and French culture dry up as new students do not pick up French as their primary or even secondary language. In 2019, only 3% of Mainers spoke French at home. Despite these decades of decline, current state policies do not even come close to promoting a revival of the forest product and potato industries that anchor Aroostook County and provide incentives for young people to stay.

Optimists for Maine’s Franco-American heritage enduring long into the future point to Maine’s practice of resettling immigrants from West Africa, many of whom speak French, in cities like Lewiston. Yet, mass immigration is never the answer. While importing more French speakers may increase the number of people who speak French at home, it will not preserve Maine’s Franco-American history and culture.

That is because the Catholic Church has historically served as the institution that incubated early Acadian culture in northern Maine and helped an explicitly Franco-American culture develop throughout the rest of the state and region. Due to Maine’s 1919 law that banned instruction in French in Maine schools, the Catholic Church became the only place where an Acadian or Franco-American Mainer could speak their native language and worship. Importing West Africans, the vast majority of whom are Muslim, preserves the language without the culture. 

The motto of the Catholic Churches throughout Maine when French speakers were driven underground was “qui perd sa langue perd sa foi’, which translates to “if you lose your language, you lose your faith.” These French communities oozed Catholicism: Mass was spoken in French, schools run by nuns instructed the next generation of Franco-Mainers in French, and small businesses all conducted their days in French.

These communities made a conscious decision to not lose the key parts of their culture within their language and in their religious traditions. With the collapse of the mills and other large manufacturing anchors for many of these Maine towns, Franco-Mainers were forced to scatter to find jobs. That in turn affected the ability of the Catholic Church to sustain itself. Without a vibrant religious life to sustain French speakers, Franco-Americans, and especially Acadian Mainers will not be able to revive their communities, much less their language and heritage. 

The decline of Franco-American culture and Maine’s Acadian culture was facilitated by a collapse of industry, which in turn undermined the ability of the local Catholic Church to support itself due to towns losing population. And so, Maine’s Acadian culture is more diluted, aged, and sparse than it has ever been, alongside the region’s and national manufacturing.

For the United States more broadly, the link between cultural tradition, community formation, and religious devotion cannot be overstated. The cultural lessons in Maine are a warning for the rest of the country. If we let our own traditions, language, and industries go by, we will no longer be a nation. Each leg of this stool reinforces one another. In Aroostook‘s case, the point is not to say that cultural enclaves are the ideal, but to recognize that the destruction of Franco-American culture by the forces of liberalism and deindustrialization is no positive.

The same can be said of America as a whole. Without community, tradition, language, and faith, what exactly is it that defines a town, county, state, or nation? I learned in my trips to Madawaska that The County is a microcosm of what America could look like in our lifetimes if we let it happen.

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