How Religious Awakenings Presage Radical Reforms
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Tells the Facts and Names the Names Dec. 16-31, 2010 Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair vol. 17, no. 22 A Brief Word on Expect to be surprised, and expect it fairly soon: the several calamities of President G.W. Bush and the fum- the Awakenings bling of President Obama have opened the doors for a By Alexander Cockburn new alignment. added up in our intellectual backpacks, ideas that should How Religious Awakenings be explosive get damp and Wmoldy. Too often, we leftists slog along history’s highway with stale, uncombus- Presage Radical Reforms tible stuff. Heading into 2011 we give over By Mason Gaffney this issue of our newsletter to Mason Gaffney’s bracing excursion through efore there were a U.S.A. and a has been too easy to slip into an alliance America’s Great Awakenings. To many First Amendment, church and with landowners. on the left the topic of religion these days state were intertwined in Western Rome coopted successive new grass- is explored overwhelmingly in terms of BEurope, whence came most of our tradi- roots monastic orders into acting as quavering alarums about the Christian tions. Kings and cardinals vied for pri- Roman agents: Cluniacs, Cistercians, right. Gaffney challenges this patronizing macy, but joined in overawing and domi- Benedictines, Carthusians, Franciscans, perspective. nating others. Both royalists and clerics Dominicans, Jesuits, et al., went through Readers will note references to Henry were major landowners, at the tip of the somewhat parallel evolutions from their George, a leading thinker, writer, and po- geocracy. They worked together to ratio- ascetic, abnegant, pietistic origins in litical activist when Populism was new nalize and sanctify landownership based protest against clerical ritualism, hierar- and later, as it merged into Progressivism. on conquest, chicane, fraud, slavery, debt chy, luxury and wealth. Troubadours and He began as a muckraking San Francisco slavery, prison labor, male chauvinism, Minnesingers could distract and bypass journalist documenting the outrageous imprisonment, ethnic bias, genocide, censors with tales of romance and scan- railroad land-grant scandals. He moved murder by burning, drowning, torture dal and tragedy, arts that flourish today, to New York and rose to fame writing and other barbaric acts, witch-hunting, but fail to prepare the ground for practi- for The Irish World on land monopoly, primogeniture, entail, confiscation, exile, cal reforms. Jews, carriers of the parent rackrenting and political suppression in etc. Missionaries supported imperialists religion with its egalitarianism, wrapped Ireland. He taught himself classical eco- abroad, and shared in their power and in its own language and mysteries, made nomics and published his classic Progress wealth, even owning slaves. Centuries of a special and important case, too com- and Poverty. struggle against Islam shaped Christian plex to sum up fairly in a few words. The George held that we can right the fanaticism, especially in Spain, Austria Crusades bred Chivalric Orders, some of wrongs of the land-grant giveaways most and Russia, and less extremely in all the which went into banking and grew too simply and expeditiously and legally by Crusading states. rich and powerful for their own survival. levying heavier taxes based on the value At home, however, heretics were On the good side, churches tempered of land. He taught that in the absence of more dangerous than infidels. Ruling the harshness of class exploitation with such taxation the original unequal distri- geocrats feared and persecuted egalitar- charity, welfare and education. Cynically, bution of land would simply magnify it- ian heretics like Anabaptists, Diggers, however, one might see it as a good cop/ self, leading to the kinds of extreme class Levelers, Lollards, Hussites and bad cop act. The education inherently en- divisions that menace us today. Taborites, Albigensians, Waldensians tailed some self-enhancement. Churches History springs endless surprises. Jeff (Vaudois), Bogomils, Cathari, Donatists sought a monopoly of this, as the Vatican Halper suggested as much in this news- and Circumcellians, Humiliati, Poor did more recently under its 1933 concor- letter, two issues ago, apropos Israel and Men of Lyons, Calvinists, Puritans, et dat with Hitler. Currently in Alabama, Palestine. Now Gaffney challenges us to al. Calvinists in France evolved from an many conservative Southern Baptist think freshly about the intellectual and early alliance with laborers to a later al- Churches are at war with Christian tax religious motors of our history and fu- liance with merchants and probably in- reformer Susan Pace Hamill who would ture. On into 2011 with fresh stuff in our dustrialists. They recognized saving as make state taxes less regressive, in ways backpacks! CP a virtue worthy of reward. From there it that churches could not control and cap dec. 16-31, 2010 as they can their voluntary “charity.” A leading universities originated as semi- Jonathan Edwards was actually quite in- federal counterpart is former President naries), but the demand for preachers tellectual, but he excelled at playing on George H.W. Bush, with his “thousand exceeded the supply of educated ones, emotions. His “Sinners in the Hands of points of light” to displace Social Security so nearly anyone moved by the spirit, an Angry God” is a classic of hellfire and and other Federal welfare programs. or even by earthlier motives, could set damnation, with no hint of his scientific Again, on the good side, church texts up a church. So, naturally, there was an interests. If Edwards was just a tool of (to the extent laymen can and will read element of protest against established the eastern establishment, opiating the them) abound with egalitarian and dis- churches and the society they repre- masses, he did a very convincing job of it! tributive sentiments, as in Exodus and sented, and anti-intellectualism accom- The Awakening may have renewed Leviticus; as in The Prophets, especially panied protest, as did a growing sense interest in missionary work, but fron- Amos and Isaiah; and, as in the Gospels of American unity. Revivals transcended tier people were at the cutting edge of of Jesus. There have been dozens of uto- sectarian barriers. Traditional differences conflict with Indians, and bitter about pian colonies with some such religious waned; pluralism and tolerance waxed. it. Some eastern geocrats supported the basis, from the smallest sects up to re- Revivalism came out of many churches. Indians in order to close the frontier gional powers like Puritan New England, The colonies soon owned a common re- and keep cheap labor at home. As a re- Quaker Pennsylvania, and the Mormon ligious experience, one that prepared the sult, bigotry against the aborigines was State of Deseret. Religious blacks have way for the common identification nec- a dominant feeling, at odds with the so- likened themselves to Hebrew slaves essary for a successful revolution. phisticated tolerance more fashionable fleeing Pharaoh. There were, of course, Democracy was another byproduct of on the eastern seaboard. currents and countercurrents, rebellions this ferment. The Awakening elevated The Great Awakening played a main and repressions, reforms and reactions, the common man and woman. Religion role leading to success in the American filling many tomes. Struggles inside and now extended far beyond the wealthy, Revolution. Britannia ruled the waves among churches mirrored class struggles as in Virginia, or the church member, and occupied our eastern port cities, in politics, a series of long and fascinat- as in New England. All persons, regard- but never the hinterlands, where they ing stories. less of wealth, status or education, could lost many battles and skirmishes. After The First Great Awakening find religion. Sinners could put the past losses down south at Cowpens and behind them, in an instant of conversion. Kings Mountain and Eutaw Springs, they We begin our story here, in the English The revival made experience the defini- had to retreat, ultimately to the trap at colonies of North America, with the tive factor in faith, the self-authenticating Yorktown. Frontiersmen completed their Great Awakening in the frontiers and religious “experience” of being “saved,” or victory in the Jeffersonian revolution backwoods, from about 1740. These “born again,” or baptized, “washed in the that unleashed westward expansion from regions were relatively unchurched. blood of the lamb.” Evangelicals sought Hamiltonian constraints. Established eastern churches monopo- and welcomed newcomers and gave them Jefferson was a Piedmont geocrat him- lized seminary training (many of today’s status: all souls were equal in the sight of self, positioned to link East and West, God. Anyone could be pious and spiri- North and South. Religiously he was a tual, and judged by that merit. Piety did Deist, an intellectual. But as author of the not necessarily entail being abstemious Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, EDITORS or humanitarian. Tobacco and whiskey and then the First Amendment, he con- Alexander Cockburn and pelts were major frontier products. firmed the autonomy and legitimized the Jeffrey St. Clair Hunting, fishing, and Indian-fighting preaching of frontier primitives – at that ASSISTANT EDITOR were basic activities. As to personal hab- time meaning Baptists and Methodists, Alevtina Rea its, the frontier produced and reveled in in large part. He started the seculariza- tobacco and whiskey. tion of higher education by founding the BUSINESS The Awakening also fostered the idea University of Virginia and West Point. Becky Grant of separating church and state. Emphasis History has its ironies. Jefferson and Deva Wheeler on a personal conversion meant indi- his First Amendment liberated Baptists DESIGN viduals could find salvation. A specific from old mainline churches and es- Tiffany Wardle church- or state-recognized corporate tablished the separation of church and body was dispensable. Theologically, state. It was a new concept then, being COUNSELOR the Awakening led to an emphasis on vigorously contested today by Southern Ben Sonnenberg the subjective, the personal conversion, Baptists.