Posted on 05/09/2004 6:38:43 PM PDT by quidnunc
America 2004? Actually, no. This was the lamentable state of affairs in mid-17th century England, as it teetered on the brink of civil war. But there certainly is something disturbingly familiar about this description of a body politic dividing into two unbreachable camps.
Like England under Charles I, when the Cavaliers — the royalist supporters of the king — and the Roundheads — Puritan upstarts led by Oliver Cromwell — went at it for seven years of war, the United States today is becoming two nations. This is not merely the age-old split between income groups, as Sen. John Edwards kept suggesting in his unsuccessful campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, but something even more fundamental — a struggle between contrasting and utterly incompatible worldviews.
Some describe the conflict as one between the "red" and the "blue" states, the right and the left, conservatives and liberals. But even though no one is about to behead our ruler and overthrow the government, as Cromwell's forces did when they captured Parliament in 1649, I find the parallel of the Cavaliers and the Roundheads to be the most apt. They grew to hate each other so much that they could no longer accommodate a common national vision. "I have heard foul language and desperate quarrelings even between old and entire friends," wrote one Englishman on the eve of conflict, and much the same could be said of us today.
The questions in our own uncivil war are: Is anyone winning? Which America most likely represents the future of our country?
The political division has grown wider in recent years. Now a clear geographic and cultural divide is emerging as well. Demographic studies show that Republicans and Democrats are less likely to live next door to each other, attend the same churches or subscribe to the same media.
America's Roundheads cluster in the South, the Plains and various parts of the West, while the Cavaliers inhabit the coasts, particularly the large metropolitan centers of the Northeast and Pacific Northwest. Each side has its own views, confirmed by its favored media. Fox TV, most of talk radio, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Sean Hannity speak for the Roundheads, supporting President Bush and America's global mission. The mainstream media, the universities and the cultural establishment, including most of Hollywood, are the voices of the Cavaliers, whose elites, like many of England's Cavaliers and Charles I's French wife before them, are most concerned with winning over continental opinion and mimicking the European way of life.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at seattletimes.nwsource.com ...
Why should I? All you've proven is that the unitarian heirs of puritanism diverged from the congregationalist heirs of puritanism about a half century after the unitarian doctrine showed its ugly head within the remnants of the puritan church. The bottom line is you simply don't like the fact that unitarianism is the lineal heir to your beloved puritans so now you grasp at any and every straw possible to obscure the relationship.
"Unitarianism was brought to America with the Pilgrims and the Puritans. Its origins are not to be found in the religious indifference and torpidity of the eighteenth century, but in the individualism and the rational temper of the men who settled Plymouth, Salem, and Boston. Its development is coextensive with the origin and growth of Congregationalism, even with that of Protestantism itself. So long as New England has been in existence, so long, at least, Unitarianism, in its motives and in its spirit, has been at work in the name of toleration, liberty, and free inquiry."
What a minor sect does or believes does not alter the original statement. Since you cannot say the same thing about immeasurably larger mainstream baptists in the south, you are demonstrating the rule by its exception.
but the Puritans who became unitarians did so because they rejected the orthodoxy of their ancestors.
They maintained the orthodoxy of methods and, most of all, the puritan culture. You are correct only in that they drifted away from biblical literalism, which was a natural and inevitable evolution of the flawed theological doctrines that puritanism was originally built upon.
You are also forgetting something else. The South is the home of a unitarianism of its own, the so-called "oneness Pentecostals" who reject the "tr*inity" and insist that Heaven was vacant for 33 years.
You are confusing small-U unitarian concepts of divine being with Unitarianism proper. The formal Unitarian (or now Unitarian-Universalist) church is the subject of my posts when I state that Unitarianism evolved directly and theologically from the Puritans.
These people are the "holy rollers" and "snake handlers" of the Appalachian highlands, which, need I remind you, adhered to the Union during the Civil War.
Though there were definately pockets of it including one very large one in eastern tennessee, appalachian unionism is frequently overstated and in many areas is nothing more than myth.
Kentucky never seceded
Kentucky had sizable secessionists elements. It's failure to secede had immeasurably more to do with the fact that it was a border state than with any appalachian element. Geographically Kentucky found itself in the same situation as Missouri and Maryland. Politically, it found itself under the heavy arm of the union government early on in the war explicitly to prevent it from seceding.
West Virginia seceded from Confederate Virginia and rejoined the Union
Partially incorrect. West Virginia was the product of a strong though geographically isolated pocket of unionists in the extreme northwestern counties of old Virginia near the Ohio River and centered around Wheeling. Those counties had always been geographically isolated from the rest of Virginia and had the curious distinction of being the only part of the Old South proper to extend north of the Mason Dixon line. They were culturally and politically closer to Pennsylvania and Ohio than to Virginia, which is why they opposed Virginia's secession from the get go. Appalachia had very little to do with it. The trick of the West Virginia secession is found in the fact that when those northwestern Wheeling-area counties split away from Virginia they also claimed about 30 counties to their south as their own with virtually no consent from those counties or their residents. In fact, at least half of the southern West Virginia counties voted in favor of secession in the 1861 referendum (the actual number is probably even more than that because the countywide referendum records from 5-10 additional rural counties in that region have been lost). Many had absolutely no representative in the Wheeling Conventions that voted to split. Others had "representatives" who were nothing more than SELF APPOINTED ne'er-do-wells who showed up, claimed to represent one or more of these southern counties, and were seated by the overzealous unionists in Wheeling. Even the vote to split was suspect: Wheeling held a "referendum" on the matter that was in reality one of those Saddam Hussein style "elections" where 99% of the vote was "yes" and where soldiers at the "polls" in the south kept anybody who would've voted no away.
East Tennessee might have done the same had it not been for the presence of a Confederate army, and western North Carolina and northern Georgia were also home to Union sentiment.
Of those regions, the only sizable one was eastern Tennessee and that can be measured by the number of troops east Tenn. provided to the yankees (about 30,000). Appalachian North Carolina, by contrast, provided only 3,000 yankee troops. Georgia's records are incomplete but it is estimated that the entire state provided less than 500 troops to the yankees based upon the known casualty figures, which state only 15 Georgians died or were wounded on the yankee side.
There is nothing conservative about populism.
Sure there is. You are again confusing capital-P Populism of the late 19th century - a left wing political movement - with the lowercase-p concept of populism, meaning little more than that which draws support to its message by appeal to the people or the masses. One can accordingly be religiously populist and politically conservative without any contradiction.
As for agrarianism, for most of its history the entire United States was an agrarian society. The Midwest, though in lifestyle closer to the South, certainly joined New England in the War.
That they did, though more so for economic rather than ideological reasons. The midwest was becoming a railroad mecca at the time and railroads were intimately connected to the north's economic agenda. You will also note that the midwest was the hotbed of the copperhead movement during the war, which sought to make peace with the south.
Until relatively recently, New England always had its share of yeoman farmers.
Which have tended to till small, isolated, and climate-restrained farm plots. The Northeast has always trended towards the cities, which for most of its history have grown to overshadow the farms. It was the first region of the nation to build big urban centers, especially so after the New England culture extended southwest to encompass New York City.
And for most of the "19th" and "20"th Centuries New England was very conservative.
Not in the political sense. The Puritan culture has always tilted toward revolutionary actions (that is to say they constantly agitate to supplant existing social orders with a new one of their own making and control). It's history is in fact dominated by this tendency and appears both in Britain and New England, sometimes for the better but more often for the worse. The English Civil War, the American Revolution, the 1803 Canadian schemes, the War of 1812 Hartford Convention, the New England abolitionist movement, and the American Civil War are all prime examples where New Englanders have agitated in a revolutionary direction.
Do you not remember that in 1936 it was only Maine and Vermont, not the South, that voted against FDR? Huh? Do yuh?
Yeah, and I also remember that the 1936 election was not an ideological turning point by any means or measure. The choice was socialist FDR against the "me too" Republicans who at best advocated a Hooveresque Reconstruction Finance Corporation toned down alternative to Roosevelt's interventionist marxism. Maine and Vermont went Republican in that year out of historical party loyalties rather than any overriding ideological consideration. Contrast that with a true ideological election such as 1964 - every single state in the nation voted for LBJ in a landslide save five states, every single one of them a former state or territory of the CSA.
And of course the income tax (now the bane of "populists") began as a populist measure aimed against "money grubbing yankees" and was supported by the South and opposed by the Northeast.
Actually the income tax began in the civil war, at which point the entire congress was from the north save two west coast states and a couple rural ones.
And of course there is the uncomfortable fact that "radical" New England and its "unitarian" clergymen were the ones who opposed revolutionary France and saw Jacobins behind every bush in the "1790's" while the "conservative" South and its aristocrats (such as Thomas Jefferson) supported the Jacobins.
If you have to turn to sectional preference on foreign affairs taking place an ocean away at a time when the Americans could not have practically or logistically intervened to any substantial degree in either direction to make your case, you truly are grasping at straws.
No thank you. That's been done one time too many
And that's just one many distortions to be found in this highly tendentious and risible article.
Just as the evangelical heirs of Puritanism diverged. Except that the evangelicals, even Arminian ones, have always been theologically closer to Puritanism. Yet you continue to insist that Unitarians are the "real" heirs and evangelicals aren't. I have now demonstrated that the ONLY reason you can give to exclude evangelicals as "lineal descendants" of Puritans applies equally to Unitarians. Yet you persist.
Your later quotation from the same source demonstrates nothing other than Unitarians' desire to hijack what they themselves rejected (this is obvious). And it certainly doesn't help the fact that the basis of your case has been conclusively shown to be false.
It's now evident that your problem is not ignorance but malice. As of #137, you lost. Anything further from you is just digging deeper in the hole you made for yourself.
When you condemn "Puritan theology" what are you condemning? Protestantism? Radical rather than classical Protestantism? Creationism? The rejection of the church calendar and traditions? Puritanism got its name from its desire to "purify" the Church of England from non-Biblical accretions (not from any sexual hang-ups as is generally assumed). If calendars, feasts, and rituals are so important, there will always be those who will prefer the Biblical (ie, Jewish) ones and insist that if these have been abolished (G-d forbid!) that no new ones derived largely from paganism have ever been authorized. If you regard Biblical sentimentalism or "Bibliolatry" as the basic Puritan heresy then you are indeed a Cavalier and there is no need in continuing our dialogue.
I note that you list the American Revolution among New England's radical movements (though Virginia was also a large contributor to the movement). It is unusual to find an American conservative who will criticize the American Revolution as the relativistic element of rightism demands that the local national origin/myth/heroes/governmental traditions be sanctified (with the Revolution and Constution being the American equivalents of "throne and altar" elsewhere). I myself question the American Revolution, as did apparently the Federalists. It was the Federalists of the North who afterwards backtracked and wanted a government very much like that of Great Britain from which they had rebelled. Perhaps they realized that they had been manipulated by sinister elements? It was Jefferson and the Southern aristocrats who wanted a radical break with the past in the form of a small coastal agrarian Republic (as even Pat Buchanan has pointed out). The most prominent of the Federalists was not a New Englander but Alexander Hamilton of New York. After the war he defended many accused tories as a lawyer and he is accused of trying to impose a British-style monarchy on the new Union. Is this not conservatism? He is the one who wanted to continue with pretty much what they had always known.
I find it strange that you would indict the Essex Junto and Hartford Convention. I thought pro-Confederates liked to invoke them to prove that the South is not the only place that believed in the right to secede. For me, it merely proves that ideology is often merely self-interest rationalized, which explains why "our" secession is good while "theirs" is bad.
Do you really believe that John Adams, John Quincy Adams (Sam Adams was a Jeffersonian), Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924), and Calvin Coolidge were radicals? Really??? And that the radical Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democrats were "conservatives?" And do you really believe that the in the culture war between William McKinley and his old moneyed Northeast supporters and Bryan (my hero at Dayton) that the former were the radicals and the latter the conservatives?
There were three attempts to impose an income tax on the country. The first was during the Civil War (which was temporary) and the second was during the 1880's/90's (which was passed but ruled unconstitutional). The third attempt was spearheaded by Southern and Western populists against the same Northeastern financial establishment that today's Right accuses of being "secretly behind Communism."
Whatever you may say, Southern Unionism was as real as Northern Copperheadism. All four branches of my family were Southern Unionists. East Tennessee is Republican to this day and often called the "Union" part of the State (and there were Union/Republican outposts even in the Middle and West). Unless you are suggesting that my entire family history is a myth (hard to maintain when you consider that we have never had any Democrats among us) then however much you may explain away West Virginia, you cannot deny Southern Unionism. And btw, the notoriously "liberal" New York City was a hotbed of Copperheads.
It is distressing to me that while you chose to respond in great detail to some parts of my previous posts you have chosen to completely ignore others (my questions about John Brown's fundamentalist Calvinism, Coolidge, H. L. Mencken, etc.). And I am sorry that you think Southern planter support of the Jacobin Revolution in France at a time when the cooler heads of the Northeast prevailed (and conducted America's first "red scare") is so unimportant that you feel you can dismiss it with a sniff. History cannot be changed, and the support of Jacobinism by the "aristocratic Southern democrats" is an historical fact that cannot be made to go away by dismissing it.
You actually don't like Primitive Baptists, do you? I can imagine what you must think of Bob Jones University and its affinity for Protestant Unionism in Ulster. (Yeah, I know, Jones isn't "Primitive" . . . but it's sure a lot closer to Cromwell than it is to the Stewarts! Are they perhaps "yankees who don't know it???")
No. They got up and left. Thus they are not lineal heirs in the same sense as unitarians are.
Except that the evangelicals, even Arminian ones, have always been theologically closer to Puritanism.
No they aren't. They share only in biblical literalism of the very loosest sense. In application of that theology, in worship services, and in their religious culture the two are virtually nothing alike.
I have now demonstrated that the ONLY reason you can give to exclude evangelicals as "lineal descendants" of Puritans applies equally to Unitarians.
No you haven't. You've simply made the gratuitous claim that evangelicals are closer to Puritans than Unitarians and provided a link to a unitarian text that, apparently unbeknownst to you, supports exactly what I said. Go look around the thread, AJ. You are the ONLY one here who denies that unitarianism is the direct lineal heir of puritanism. It's a common fact and a commonly known fact, yet you deny it. That leads me to believe that you are embarrassed of this association for other unstated reasons and therefore desire to hide it.
As of #137, you lost.
Curious. The contender decides to make himself the referee as well the moment his own chosen source material is shown to contradict what he's been obnoxiously yelling about since the moment he arrived here.
I'm actually a protestant myself who believes in a form of creationism, though not the scientifically silly assertion that the world was created only 5,000 years ago or whatever it is that some protestants subscribe to. When I condemn puritan theology I condemn its theological elitism, its gravitation towards the heretical idea that a kingdom of God may be established by man on this earth, and its insistence upon putting itself up as a model of purity for the lesser beings of the world to look up upon (the "city on the hill" notion). I actually have little problem with mainstream evangelical beliefs so long as their believers permit others to differ from those beliefs and do not assert self-righteous claims over others (e.g. some of the more extreme evangelicals subscribe to beliefs that Catholics are not Christian and/or that Jews are not the true people of Israel - both are offensive forms of bigotry). Extreme Puritan self-righteousness is theologically problematic as well because it takes the sacred scriptures and corrupts them through singular interpretation. This tendency is something I prefer to call "Hotline to Jesus" syndrome - its adherents come to act as if they have a hotline to Jesus, that they alone know and control the true meaning of scripture and thus all that relates from it (meaning, truth, salvation). They come to believe that they, in possession of this knowledge, can do no other service than the Lord's when in fact they are as susceptible to the corruption and evil of original sin and its successors as anybody else. In its modern forms this tendency has been secularized, especially by the unitarians, into a worldly philosophy of leftist elitism ("we know what's best for you since we're so smart so you better let us run the government and you better listen to what we tell you to do even if we don't do it ourselves.")
Puritanism got its name from its desire to "purify" the Church of England from non-Biblical accretions
The great problem with that is their attempted purge of practically anything and everything of previously existing institutionalized Christianity in the process. People who burn down centuries-old churches, smash stained glass windows, desecrate tombs, and dismantle Christianity's holy sites across Britain are doing much more than "purification." Wanton destruction combined with the coercive enforcement of ones elitist theological will upon those who do not consent to it are more apt descriptions.
I note that you list the American Revolution among New England's radical movements (though Virginia was also a large contributor to the movement).
I never denied Virginia's role, nor do I anywhere condemn the American revolution. As you may have noticed, I did not say anywhere that all of those revolutionary activities were necessarily bad - only that they were common in their revolutionary aspect. New England joined up with the American Revolution and in it other revolutionaries who were pursuing other ideas and who came from different backgrounds yet who all had a common enemy.
I find it strange that you would indict the Essex Junto and Hartford Convention.
Once again, note that I did not condemn all revolutionary acts. I chose my words carefully (note my use of phrase that revolutions are "sometimes for the better") for a reason, for my purpose was only to show that Puritanism has a recurrent tendency towards revolutionary agitation.
Do you really believe that John Adams, John Quincy Adams (Sam Adams was a Jeffersonian), Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924), and Calvin Coolidge were radicals?
Adams I personally led a revolution, and that makes him a revolutionary. I don't believe I used the term "radical" nor did I ever say a thing one way or the other on Adams II, Lodge, or Coolide.
Whatever you may say, Southern Unionism was as real as Northern Copperheadism. All four branches of my family were Southern Unionists.
And so they may have been. That does not change the fact though that southern unionism has been severely overstated (and with malice at that) in many modern history books. West Virginia "unionism" was in fact an in isolated portion of that present state's northwestern extremity - the counties to the south voted for secession and got dragged along against their will.
Unless you are suggesting that my entire family history is a myth
Did I ever suggest it was a myth? No. In fact I explicitly admitted and repeatedly stated that eastern Tennessee was a genuine unionist hotbed in the CSA. Those other regions you claimed were not in the degree they are often presented though. And btw, the notoriously "liberal" New York City was a hotbed of Copperheads.
They were copperheads because the NYC population at the time consisted of a huge Irish immigrant community. Those Irish immigrants were being drafted and used as cannon fodder by the yankee government whereas the city's wealthy classes and the old guard puritan families could buy their ways out of the draft. So they had every reason in the world to oppose the yankee war effort.
It is distressing to me that while you chose to respond in great detail to some parts of my previous posts you have chosen to completely ignore others
Why should I take the time to respond to comments you made about Coolidge when Coolidge is not and never has been a matter of debate, dispute, or contention for me, much less a topic of this particular discussion? Nor have I ever expressed any views on this thread about Mencken etc, though you do seem to exhibit an abnormal distaste for him. You might as well start posting frivolous comments about Neil Armstrong and lamenting the fact that I will not respond to them either. State something material to this discussion and pertinent to my argument and I will respond. Drift off into your personal ticks and I will leave you there to pout over them alone.
!!!
Here's a clue. Puritans: Trinitarian. Evangelicals: Trinitarian. Unitarians: not Trinitarian. This is SIMPLE. If you don't grasp this you have no business pretending to tell us about anything related to, well, any form of Christianity at all.
You've simply made the gratuitous claim that evangelicals are closer to Puritans than Unitarians and provided a link to a unitarian text that, apparently unbeknownst to you, supports exactly what I said.
I quoted it for the specific purpose of refuting your false claim that "the" lineal descendants of Puritanism are Unitarians. Which it did, conclusively. That issue is over. Now, you think it "supports" you because the guy that wrote it equated Unitarianism with individualism, rationality, and probably apple pie and motherhood (all of which the Puritans had). If you wish to accept that equation, fine, just be aware that you would logically have to either embrace Unitarianism or reject rationality and individualism.
The contender decides to make himself the referee as well the moment his own chosen source material is shown to contradict what he's been obnoxiously yelling about since the moment he arrived here.
Here, you complain about me supposedly making myself referee, while arrogantly asserting that you have "shown" the source contradicts me. No it doesn't. As I said above, it was for the specific purpose of showing the Unitarians split with the Congregationalists. They did. You can try to evade it, but it's still there. Now, the source does attempt to prove the Puritans were "really" Unitarians all along because... they weren't irrational, and weren't collectivists. And you pretend to take this seriously.
It doesn't take any presumption to declare you the loser. You've become tedious. Now, let me summarize your real argument: "The Puritans are EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL, therefore anything bad said about them is true. I said they 'logically' became Unitarians, I said Unitarians were 'the' lineal descendants of Puritanism. This is bad. Therefore it must be true."
Yeah, you know why the unitarians are not trinitarian despite their strong puritan heritage? Cause religious institutions change and evolve! Does that change the fact that a present denomination is the lineal heir to a previous one in a previous period of time? Absolutely not! Nor does it mean that some other modern denomination, but simple virtue of sharing a single common tenet among literally hundreds of defining theological characteristics with the historical one, is somehow closer to that historical one than its direct heir. The trinitarian idea has been present in Christianity for practically as long as the religion itself has existed and has been variously subscribed to and rejected by all sorts of sects, denominations, and competing theologies, including hundreds of tiny and ancient factions,t of which most are now defunct. It's also believed by several of the big ones that have been around through the test of time (i.e. Catholicism). Does that mean that every single tiny fringe cult that also happens to be trinitarian is theologically identical or even remotely similar to Catholicism? Absolutely not. In fact, one major denomination that, though trinitarian, differs substantially in its notion of the trinity per the famed and disputed filioque clause is probably CLOSER theologically to Roman Catholicism than a large number of protestant denominations who share a near identical notion of the trinity with catholics.
I quoted it for the specific purpose of refuting your false claim that "the" lineal descendants of Puritanism are Unitarians. Which it did, conclusively.
No it didn't. Your passage ONLY stated that unitarianism diverged from congregationalism, another related heir of the old puritan religion, and did so sometime in the early 19th century, thus already being well removed from the puritan age itself.
That issue is over.
You keep telling yourself that if it makes you feel better. The fact remains though that you are the ONLY person on this thread who seems to have any substantial problem with admitting unitarianism's direct lineal descendency from the puritans. That is because it's a well know and common fact - one which you desire to deny for reasons known only to yourself.
Now, you think it "supports" you because the guy that wrote it equated Unitarianism with individualism, rationality, and probably apple pie and motherhood (all of which the Puritans had).
No - it supports me because the guy flat out said that American Unitarianism started with the puritans! Read it again, AJ. You would have to be either blind or willfully ignorant to miss it:
"Unitarianism was brought to America with the Pilgrims and the Puritans."
From that the entire thesis of that page's section on puritanism is that unitarianism is what puritanism evolved into once the english government removed the state from church authorities.
I see you are skilled at the art of scarecrow construction. Tell me - do they joust back when you charge at them?
They were called state militias back then and they did indeed report to their state's legislatures and governors.
Actually most state militias, being just that, took oaths to their state and governor. On operations within the state boundaries itself militias acted on orders from the governor or an appointed commander of the state legislature.
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