Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: futurepotus
Puritanism was a regional influence.
3 posted on 10/29/2001 6:21:28 PM PST by Arkinsaw
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies ]


To: Arkinsaw
Puritanism was a regional influence.

Right you are my Southern friend! It was the religion of the first settlers of Jamestown that was truly the faith of America, with the exception of puritanical New England.

An excerpt from the best book ever written on the South, Richard Weaver's Southern Tradition at Bay says this on the subject -

"For while the south was heavily Protestant, its attitude toward religion was essentially the attitude of orthodoxy: it was a simple acceptance of a body of belief, an innocence of protest and heresy which left religion one of the unquestioned and unquestionable supports of the general settlement under which men live."

and while -

"New Englanders cultivated metaphisics and sharp speculation; Southerners generally, having saved their faith, as they thought, from the whole group of pryers, reformers, and troublesome messiahs, settled back and regarded it as a part of their inheritance which they did not propose to have disturbed."

It wasn't the Cotton Mathers of New England, but the Robert Dabneys and earlier men of Faith in the South that appealed to the live and let live attitude of the Celtic South.

13 posted on 10/29/2001 6:43:00 PM PST by Mahone
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson