Goodbye 2011--The Best of the American Church History Blog

In case you've not heard, the New Year comes in tonight.  December 31 marks the end of the first calendar year of this blog, although the first post didn't show up until May 4.  The average daily visitors has grown by about 400% since that first month.  That's not what's the most interesting point, however.  One of the things that I find interesting is the pages that have been viewed the most...

Here are the top 5 pages for this blog for all of 2011:

1. My Paper from the Northern Great Plains History Conference
2. Jan Hus--Pics from Bethlehem Chapel in Prague
3. Perry, Romney, and Mormonism
4. New England Execution Sermons
5. Olomouc, Czech Republic--Pics Included

From this quick perusal of the most popular posts, it appears that people like pictures of cool things from a foreign country.  That's no big surprise.  A couple of other topics that surprised me as to their popularity (as shown from search results) were Mormons and execution sermons.  The Mormons may be getting a bit more press this year because two of their number are running for president.  New England execution sermons, or some variation of this topic received quite a bit in the way of search traffic, which was very surprising.  Perhaps, people enjoy reading about morbid stuff.  I enjoyed the book Between Heaven and Earth, the subject of my post on the subject of Puritan execution sermons.

What topics did you find most interesting?  What topics would you like to see covered in the future?  I'm interested to know going forward. 

Oh, yeah, and have a great 2012--even if the Mayans were right.

Tim Tebow and Bill Maher

Tim Tebow sure is a lightning rod for many haters out there.  He also has many fans that follow his every move.  Tebow seems to be one of those sports figures that people either love or hate.  I recently submitted a post that discussed the uproar about the Tebowing controversy.  After that post, Tebow ran off quite a little winning streak.  The last two weeks have not been quite so kind.

Which brings us to the latest controversy related to Mr. Tebow--some comments by commedian Bill Maher.  Some comments that Maher made after Tebow's latest (less-than-stellar) game have produced quite the outrage.  Maher is an atheist and seems to rather enjoy bashing the religious.  What about Tebow does Maher find so offensive, other than his professed faith in Jesus Christ?  To anyone's knowledge, Tebow's not out carousing with loose women (a la Tiger Woods).  He's not out there getting in trouble for PEDs like the reigning NL MVP (Ryan Braun).  He's not been in trouble with the law like an number of sports stars.  He visits sick kids.  He's building a children's hospital in the Philippines.  He's the kind of guy that I'd like my daugthers to bring home to dad.  Why the hate?

Some people will no doubt argue that it's part of the left-wing conspiracy to remove all references to any deity (and especially Jesus) from any aspect of life.  I don't quite buy it.  I have several friends that lean to the left politically, yet are committed in their religious beliefs (in spite of the seeming equation of conservative politics with Christian orthodoxy).  I can talk religion with these folks, and while we may have disagreements, neither side is hateful with the other.  I can talk politics with these folks, and we may have disagreements there. 

Maher seems quite angry.  He's what I would consider an evangelical atheist.  These are the folks that get mad when evangelical Christians or other people of other religions try to spread their message.  Yet these atheists have no problem spreading their disdain for all things religions or telling the religious that they need to grow a brain and cast of such medieval superstitions.  Richard Dawkins comes to mind when discussing the evangelical atheist.  I would argue that this is simply a case of the pot calling the kettle black.  Many professed evangelical Christians deserve the criticism they get--certain televangelists who get caught up in various and sundry scandals come to mind.  However, it seems that Tebow is one of those guys who actually get persecuted for righteousness' sake (in the context of Matthew 5), rather than for their hypocritical attitude.  If/when Tebow falls, he'll deserve criticism.  Until then, people, including Bill Maher, should just leave him alone.  Maher's tweet insulted about 2 billion of the world's 7 billion directly, and those who hold religious faiths other than Christianity are also the butt of his jokes.  Jokes about religious beliefs tend not to go over terribly well.  Maher's market should suffer accordingly.

Christmas and the Franks

You may wonder why I've titled this post "Christmas and the Franks."  You may also wonder...who exactly are the Franks?  They have only a slight tie to American church history, but the Franks are important to church history as a whole.  The Franks were a Germanic tribe that in the early Middle Ages controlled much of western and central Europe.

Why is Christmas important to the Franks?  There are a couple of reasons.  First, in 496, the Frankish king Clovis "converted" to Christianity with about 3,000 of his closest friends (i.e. soldiers).  The conversion is quite iffy, but nonetheless a version of Christianity began to spread.

The second reason that Christmas was important to the Franks occurred in 800.  On this date Charles I of France/Charles I of Germany/Charles I of the Holy Roman Empire received the imperial crown from Pope Leo III.  This officially started the Holy Roman Empire, which Voltaire famously quipped was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.  There is historical debate as to whether Charlemagne actually knew that this was going to happen when he went to church that day.  This action was significant in European history, because it established the precedent of the pope offering the imperial crown as if it was the papacy's right to grant it.  This precedent of the pope as over secular rulers lasted for much of the medieval period, and the Roman see continued to assert this prerogative in English affairs up until Henry VIII's break with Rome in the 1530s.

This last point was important in the Protestant Reformation, which was quite important in the quest for America due to the rivalry between Catholic nations and Protestant nations.  England as a Protestant nation gained control of much of North America, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Short Synopsis of R. H. Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism

Fairly recently, I posted a review of Max Weber's classic work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.  A very similar work that gets lumped with Weber in the historiography of the Protestant Ethic is R. H. Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.  Tawney came from a slightly different standpoint as a British Christian socialist, but here is a short overview of his major argument, taken from my recent historiography on the Puritans:

British historian R. H. Tawney proposed a similar argument to Weber in his 1926 work Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.  However, he did not focus upon Calvinism in general, but rather the English Puritans as the progenitors of capitalism.  As a Christian socialist, Tawney actually bemoaned the individualism and loss of concern for the common good that he saw arising out of the Puritan movement.  Like Weber, he saw Luther tied more to the medieval understanding of business.  Unlike Weber, Tawney still viewed Calvin as more of a medievalist, although he allowed that Calvin gave a few concessions to the business class regarding the charging of interest.  He also distinguished between the Puritans who left for the New World and those who remained in England.  The former attempted to imitate Calvin’s Geneva with their concern for the commonwealth, while the latter became enamored with business and became a fairly sizable proportion of the wealthy merchant class in the mother country.  While he mentioned that the first Puritans who went to the New World were more communitarian in their dealings, he did not really discuss why they changed quite rapidly in their viewpoint toward business.[1]     

Tawney and Weber both dwelt on the relationship between religion and capitalism.  Many people still hold to this view today.  However, people at that time of the Puritans did not view what they were doing as overly Christian, because the use of interest and profiteering were major areas of conflict between churches and businessmen.  It is quite interesting how merchants came to be one of the more revered classes in the modern world, after spending the medieval era as a sort of necessary evil.  I wonder what people writing about Christians and business in the twenty-first century will write when looking back at our time. 

---

[1] R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (London: John Murray, 1926).

Christmas in American History

Different Christian groups throughout American history have celebrated Christmas in many different ways.  Some have totally ignored the holiday, others have been quite festive.  Christmas itself was not a national holiday until declared so by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1870.  That is not to say that many people totally ignored the holiday before this date. 

Just today, I read an article on Christmas in Revolutionary America by Thomas Kidd.  Apparently, some people at this time had a major problem with the revelry, especially from the lower sort.  Kidd points out some of the gifts that people gave (mostly wealthier individuals to relatively poorer people) and the signs that commercialism was becoming a characteristic of Christmas at that date.

The accounts that Kidd listed were based in New York, a cosmopolitan town even at this early date.  Other groups viewed Christmas as a pagan ritual that true Christians should avoid.  In New England, the early Puritan settlers had a legal ban on the celebration of Christmas.  Celebration of Christmas could apparently lead to fines of up to five shillings.  The ban on Christmas ended in 1680, but many people continued downplaying the holiday.  Schools in Boston scheduled classes on Christmas day until the 1870s and punished those who skipped out to celebrate.

Baptist groups tended to downplay Christmas until the late nineteenth century, as well.  A short article by Bruce Gourley on Baptist celebrations of Christmas indicated that early American Baptists continued their general day-to-day lives on Christmas.  The first Baptist educational endeavor in America, Isaac Eaton's Hopewell Academy, scheduled classes on Christmas in 1757.  Eaton refused to celebrate Christmas because Jesus was not born on that day.  Gourley's article points out some interesting changes in Baptist churches over the nineteenth century that tended to follow trends in American society. 

It would seem that the legitimization of Christmas by President Grant helped in removing some of the stigma associated with the holiday in some circles.  Even today, however, some groups claiming to be Christian refuse to celebrate the Christmas holiday.  I am not among these groups, and although I have a major problem with the commercial aspect of things, I still celebrate with friends and family at this time of year.  So, to those who read this, I would like to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

American Christianity and Communism during the Second Red Scare

Today, I read an interesting post on another blog regarding Conrad Hilton and anti-communism.  Most people think hotels or Paris Hilton's wealthy ancestor when they think of Conrad Hilton.  Most people do not recognize that he was an ardent Catholic who saw religion in general and Christianity in particular as a bulwark against communism.

In the post-World War II era, Christianity saw a huge boom, with perhaps more church members per capita than at any time in American history.  This was also the age of fervent anti-communism with Joseph McCarthy and his infamous lists and the HUAC hearings against anyone who happened to be even remotely related to communism.  If you even read Marx you were suspect and might lose your job.  Robin Hood even found itself on the anti-communist version of the Index of Prohibited Books because it advocated that communist idea of stealing from the rich to give to the poor.

The increase in religious sentiment in America during the 1940s and 1950s brings up an interesting question.  Was this Christianity more pro-Jesus or pro-America?  While Christianity and America are by no means mutually exclusive, some people seem to equate the mission of America and the mission of Christianity as one and the same.  I tend to view this as a danger, because America has at times been on the wrong side of issues (Indian policy and slavery are a couple of obvious examples far enough in the past not to engender a major political debate).  If Christians equate America's mission with that of Christianity, they are likely to unquestioningly stand by if something similar came across the radar in the future.  This subject is something that really interests me.  People have written quite a bit on the topic since the appearance of Robert Bellah's essay on American civil religion.  Harry Stout's Upon the Altar of the Nation traces this idea through the Civil War, showing how people came to kill based upon the idea that they were doing God's will (both sides had somewhat similar rhetoric).  This book really challenged my thinking, and I wholeheartedly recommend it.  The intro to Stout has a synopsis of Bellah's argument.

Is this viewpoint still as prevalent as it was in the 1940s and 1950s, or is America becoming so secularized that it does not matter?  Only time will tell.  I think both extremes can be dangerous.  Without a moral compass, people do bad things.  People can also think they are doing God's will and do bad things.  Neither is a good thing.

Significance of the Puritans Today

Those silly Puritans, with their funny hats and grim demeanor.  When people think of the Puritans, they tend to think of such things.  As I've mentioned before on this site, much of what you've read about the Puritans is probably not true or at least a caricature of what was true regarding these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious pilgrims (not to be confused with the actual Pilgrims of Plymouth).  As I've also mentioned on this site, I did a historiography of the Pilgrims this semester.  One question that needs asked is what is the significance of the Puritans today.  People such as Perry Miller, Christopher Hill, S. R. Gardiner, and R. H. Tawney wrote extensively regarding the Puritans.  They found them significant--often from the British side of the Atlantic.  What is their significance for American church history?  Here is one interpretation that I gleaned from my reading for this historiography paper:

While these works shed much light on the actual lives of Puritans and the ideas they held, laymen may still wonder about the importance of the Puritans to current life.  George McKenna attempted to answer this question in his 2007 work The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism.  McKenna’s work tied a thread throughout American history that went back into early days of the Puritan experiment in New England.  He used Miller’s errand into the wilderness to show that Americans still believe that they have a certain mission in the world, which is tied to the idea of Americanism.  McKenna argued:

The very definition of America is thus bound up with the biblical paradigm of a people, like the ancient Hebrews, given a holy mission in a new land.  It runs through the rhetoric of America’s presidents, and we can find it almost at random in their speeches, whether it was Lincoln depicting Americans as an “almost chosen people,” Franklin Roosevelt talking about an American generation’s “rendezvous with destiny,” Reagan calling America “a shining city on a hill,” or George W. Bush declaring that “America is a nation with a mission, and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs.”  We can trace this providentialism directly back to the Puritans of the seventeenth century.  They managed to envisage an America long before there was a United States of America.  America is a work of the imagination as much as it is a juridical entity, and it was their imagination that played the seminal role in creating it.  “The myth of America,” writes Sacvan Bercovitch, “is the creation of the New England Way.”

McKenna then went on to tie this thread together from New England through various reform movements or calls back to American values.  For example, when dealing with the Populists and Progressives, he pointed out that some of the reforms (like prohibition) that these groups encouraged are now considered conservative, while others (such as encouragement of labor reform) fall under the liberal rubric.  McKenna maintained that these reforms were a part of the social gospel, and that the same people supported these progressive reforms with a mainly religious purpose.[1]

McKenna did not only use examples from the Progressive Era.  He looked throughout American history and saw a Puritan thread throughout.  He saw Patriotism and the reform ethos of the Puritans as inextricably linked.  So, whether you agree with the Puritans from a religious standpoint or just think (erroneously) that they wore funny clothes and hated all manner of fun, their goal of a godly reformation has greatly impacted American history.

---

[1] George McKenna, The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 7, 218-221.

Another Semester under My Belt

This evening, I sent the final revision of my final paper of the semester after finishing up revisions and proofing in a hotel room in Danville, Illinois.  I am basically 1/2 of the way done with my program.  This semester, I had a 12-hour schedule, which is quite hefty for grad school.  All told, those four classes had final projects that came to nearly 100 pages of double-spaced, 12-point font, Times New Roman work that took up who knows how many hours.  It's a good thing I enjoy reading and writing. 

Now, it's time for a break between semesters, although I have a few projects I hope to complete in the interim (including writing the first several lectures for next semester's US to 1877 class).  Although I'm not sure of the actual grades that I'll be getting, it is always good to get done with so much.  Next semester involves comprehensive exams in 4 fields.  I won't lie and say I'm looking forward to them.  I also have two classes in the education department.  Those should be interesting, but they aren't history :(  Oh well...life goes on.  Until next time.

Southern Baptist Name Change?

Is a big change in the cards for the nation's largest Protestant denomination?  A couple of articles I've seen in the past few days indicates that it could be.  The Southern Baptist Convention, which is the largest non-Catholic denomination in the United States, is considering changing its name after a poll indicated that 40% of Americans would refuse to go to one of their churches.

In the era of the mega-church, we've seen the influence of marketing strategies and the equivalent of customer satisfaction surveys.  Is this just one more attempt to cater to the public at large?  Or is it actually, as Convention President Bryan Wright said, just an attempt to remove barriers that turn people away.  The association is apparently not removing Baptist from their name, so there will still be a tie to the historical "denomination" (some Baptists don't like being thought of as a denomination).

One of the reason for this consideration is a downward trend in memberships.  In the current market-driven environment, it is quite easy for people to just leave a congregation that they don't like and find another.  In the days before the Second Great Awakening, this was more difficult.  Historian Nathan Hatch emphasized the democratization of American Christianity that this event brought about.  With this democratization, and earlier moves to religious toleration, the power of state churches eroded immensely (the Congregational Church remained established in some New England States into the 19th century).  This brought the ability for people choose their congregations more easily.

There could be the question of whether this would change the theological and doctrinal stands to which Southern Baptists have traditionally held?  Church officials argue that it won't.  If so, they probably won't change people's opinion of them with a simple name change.  The question then becomes, if they truly hold these offensive beliefs dearly, why would they really want to change?

Please note that I'm not discussing issues related to nineteenth-century opinions about slavery or anything related to race.  I'm only concerned with doctrinal/theological issues.  Any thoughts or comments are appreciated.

What Happened in the Church with Blatant Racists?

As I've mentioned before on my last post, racism in American churches is one of my big pet peeves.  The link I've given refers to the attempts of a Kentucky church to ban interracial couples from their membership for no other reason than their interracial makeup. 

This afternoon, a new article indicated that the church's pastor will throw out the ruling, in spite of its being voted on by the membership.  While I'm not sure how the original vote came about since churches from a Baptist background have different constitutions that rule such things, I have to at least applaud the minister's choice to do this after having consulted his association.  However, it does beg the question of where the minister's opinion against the vote was when it was actually taken.  Of course, this could've been a church in which a few laymen control everything that goes on.  It will be interesting to see how long said pastor remains in his current position.

American Churches and Racism

Why are churches some of the most segregated places around in America today?  I've often wondered this, and I must say that it really, really bugs me.  Race is obviously a contentious issue in American history.  One need not look any farther than the relations between new seventeenth-century settlers and group that these Anglo-Americans drove out of their homeland (American Indians) and between the same Anglo-American settlers and a group (African slaves) that they brought across the Atlantic against their wills.  Some people would argue that racism is largely gone today.  Then a story like the following shows up in the news. Just recently, a Kentucky church voted to exclude interracial couples from membership.

Moves like this definitely show that racism is far from dead.  Would the interracial character of the relationship been a big deal to those that voted to exclude the couple if the non-white member had been a Christian from Turkey, Korea, or Brazil, rather than Africa?  The answer can't be known definitely, but it seems that black/white relationships seem to draw the biggest complaint.  Of course, this goes against Paul's writings about there being no distinctions in the body of Christ (see Galatians 3:28, which ironically, considering American history, put slaves and masters on the same level).

Racism and bigotry have been very common throughout American history.  A recent post on the Religion in American History blog talks about some of the recent directions in the historiography of the Ku Klux Klan.  This post was quite interesting.  I've also read a couple of interesting works lately on the topic of bigotry.  

One was Lynn Neal's article in the June 2009 issue of Church History, "Christianizing the Klan." This article showed how KKK sympathizers used images in their literature that depicted the Klan in Christian and 100% American terms against Catholics, Jews, unions, etc. A good recent work on anti-Catholic journalism in the Progressive Era is Justin Nordstrom's Danger on the Doorstep. The anti-Catholic publication, The Menace, had the second-highest subscription rate in America for a time. All of this tied to the idea of 100% Americanism, which the KKK endorsed. I was also doing some research recently on a totally unrelated subject, and a minister's autobiography (Albert F. Gray) told of a service that he attended (I believe it was Washington State) in which some men in robes came in, presented an American flag, and left. Although the book did not identify said men, I assume that it was some Klansmen given the time period and this practice. (I posted the previous paragraph as a comment on the American religion blog post noted above).

This 100% Americanism has shown up in much of my research on Grand Forks, North Dakota, religious history.  A Baptist church, which I've mentioned in a couple of conference papers that I've posted here, definitely believed in American exceptionalism and thought that the rest of the world should become English-speaking American-style democrats against WWI-era German autocrats.  A Lutheran church in town that I've studied transferred to English-speaking services around the same time that there were moves for 100% Americanism.  While I can see the desire for people to speak the same language as others, because it's difficult to communicate without speaking the same language, I don't think that a proper understanding of Christianity allows for the blatant racism that many in American history have fostered (and apparently continue to foster) in their churches.  I would personally argue that it makes the church as a whole look bad to society.  However, it's just a reflection of the view of people who vote this way in church meetings.

Happy Birthday C. S. Lewis

One hundred thirteen years ago today, Clive Staples Lewis entered the world in Belfast Ireland.  For much of his early life, Lewis was an atheist, so it would've appeared that his life would make little difference in church history.  Through a friendship with J. R. R. Tolkein (author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy), he converted to Christianity.

All Christians could learn something from reading C. S. Lewis.  An ignorant Christian he was not.  He served as a professor at both Oxford and Cambridge in the UK.  His writings appealed to both children and adults.  Recently, some of his series The Chronicles of Narnia appeared on the big screen and had some popularity.  His most famous work is probably Mere Christianity, which Christianity Today named the best book of the twentieth century.  Mere Christianity is an apologetic work that tries to strip Christianity to the bare essentials. 

Lewis was an orthodox Anglican, but he attempted to emphasize a bare bones Christian faith that all true Christians would agree with.  He is famous for the trilemma regarding Jesus.  Lewis argued that it is not enough to just view Jesus as a good teacher.  If he claimed to be God and he was not, that made him a horrible liar at worst, or a crazed lunatic at best, in the view of Lewis.  His conclusion was that Christ must be a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord he claimed to be.  While I would not necessarily endorse all of Lewis' views, He made a very logical argument for the Christian faith.

Today, some colleges and seminaries hold classes directly related to the writings of C. S. Lewis.  His writings cannot be ignored in the field of apologetics, and have influenced people on both sides of the Atlantic.  For that reason, I say, happy birthday, Mr. Lewis.

Top Book Suggestions for Christmas Gifts

It's now less than a month until Christmas.  While I'm not a huge fan of the all of the commercialism that is tied to the holiday, I confess I still celebrate with the family and give gifts (well, actually, my wife picks out all of the gifts, except for what I get her).  In light of this, here's a list of some of the most interesting books that I've read in the last year or so while in grad school.  Some are related to church history, some to some other field of history, and some to culture in general.  All can be purchased at Amazon.com through the wonderful link at the top of this blog.  

1. Emily Cockayne, Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England, 1600-1770.  This book is a bit gross, but it is probably still my favorite that I've read since starting my doctoral program--probably because it's gross.  It discusses the life of common folk in early modern England in a, well, sort of gross manner.  Not related to church history.

2. D.A. Carson, Christ and Culture Revisisted.  Carson critiques Richard Neibuhr's Christ and Culture and looks at the relationship between Christians and society.  He discusses postmodernism and church/state relations.  If you can get through the first chapter, the rest of the book is a much easier (less deep) read.  I've been reading it along with some professors who were nice enough to ask me to join their reading group.

3. Timothy Keller, Generous Justice.  Critique of the much of Christian society from an evangelical insider.  Causes some serious thinking regarding prevalent evangelical thought on society and economics.

4. Mark Valeri, Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America.  This book looks at the change in Puritan attitudes to merchants from the Great Migration of the 1630s to the Great Awakening.  They started out pseudo-socialists and basically ended up rabid capitalists.  Find out why.

5. Harry Stout, Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War. This book looks in some ways at religious and moral thought during the Civil War, but ties it to thoughts prior to the war.  This book influenced my own thinking, and I utilized some of the thinking (with credit given, of course) in some of my recent work.

These are just a few recommendations.  Even if you're not going to buy these, you can still utilize the link to Amazon to buy anything that they have for Christmas gifts or at any time of the year.

Happy Thanksgiving

Hello on this wonderful Thanksgiving Day.  Today is supposed to be beautiful in North Dakota.  Yesterday was a balmy 58 degrees and today is also supposed to be above 50, which is really, really warm for this time of year.  Last year we had snow all week and it was about 15-20 for a high temperature (it was that cold just last Saturday...made for a painful walk from the parking lot to the indoor football stadium).  Therefore, the weather today is definitely something to be thankful for.  I'm also very thankful for another year with my wife and daughters.

Here's a link to an article on the first Thanksgiving in 1621.  There was a feast, but there was no football game.  On another note, I don't think that the Pilgrims or the Indians camped out for days to be the first into the local Wal-Mart on Thanksgiving evening.  While I don't have a problem with people having the freedom to shop whenever they so desire, I do think that the ever shorter period of time taken for giving thanks and spending time with family indicate what is most important in our society.  Time for thanks gets pushed aside for commercialism tied to Christmas (which is another disconcerting sign of the times and American materialism, IMHO). 

To get some feedback on feelings toward the start of Black Thursday on Thanksgiving Eve, I am interested to see who will be going to any stores opening before midnight tonight (Thanksgiving).  You can either comment or fill out the poll on the sidebar.  God bless and have a great Thanksgiving regardless.

On This Date, the Pilgrims Reached America

It is very fitting, with Thanksgiving falling later this week, that the first settlers in colonial New England anchored just off the coast of Massachusetts.  The complete story of the Pilgrims often gets lost as the first Thanksgiving seems to dominate the popular understanding of the group.  The Pilgrims were a small group of Separatists from Scrooby, England.

Some people (including one so prominent as T. O. Lloyd, among the best historians of the British Empire) call the Separatists Puritans.  The Puritans were quite content to stay in the Church of England with certain reservations.  The Pilgrims, on the other hand, were not quite so complicit.  They decided to break with the church, which was quite the no-no in a very intolerant age in which the civil and religious hierarchies demanded strict conformity.  To escape persecution, these Separatists moved to the Dutch city of Leiden.  The Netherlands was the most tolerant religious nation in the seventeenth century.  However, the sinfulness of the Dutch (as well as their lack of Englishness, which influenced the Pilgrim children) led the Separatists from Scrooby to consider another option--Virginia.  The Pilgrims' stay in Leiden is commemorated in a museum, however.

In September 1620, after having returned to England, the Pilgrims began their journey.  Their journey was delayed a couple of times because one of the ships that was to bring them over had (apparently debatable) issues over seaworthiness.  All of the Pilgrims then crowded upon the Mayflower and embarked on their journey.  Leaving in September was not a good idea, as the journey took several weeks.  A storm blew the ship off-course, and the small group failed to reach Virginia.  Instead, they wound up outside the land that their charter defined, hence the famous Mayflower Compact.  They probably didn't land a Plymouth Rock itself, but they nevertheless reached the New World on November 21, 1620.  William Bradford was very important, and his diary provides important information on the Plymouth Colony, which lasted until the early 1690s, at which point Massachusetts absorbed Plymouth.

In spite of their popularity because of Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims are much less important than the Puritans who followed them in 1630.  The number of Pilgrims was nowhere near as large as that of the Puritans.  The Puritans would greatly impact the society of New England with their idea of the godly society, while they basically absorbed the Pilgrims.  Nonetheless, November 21, 1620, is a pretty important date in American history. I would argue, however, that it does not establish religious freedom in America.  Just because a group wanted freedom for itself does not mean it wants it for everyone else.  Hence, they left the libertarian Netherlands.  Their journey does indicate the importance of religious belief and how it can impact the decisions and behavior of people, and the beliefs of the Pilgrims and Puritans led them to leave home for their "City upon a Hill."

Winding up a Semester

Well...it seems as though my third semester as a doctoral student just started.  When it did, there were leaves on the trees and the daytime high temp was around 90.  Yesterday, we got our first measurable snow and the high temp today was somewhere in the mid-20s.  Even though the snow was only around an inch, its still around.  Only 4 weeks left in this semester. 

From time to time I submit a post to the Christian Blog Carnival.  This week's host is Harry Neufeld at Jevlir Caravansary.  My recent post on Weber's thesis on the Protestant work ethic was included.  Included on this was a post that questioned if there was room for Christian business leaders in today's cut-throat climte.  I found the article interesting in light of all of the complaints about poor ethics in business today.

Another academic blog that I look at frequently is the Religion in American History blog.  This blog recently had a three-part series by an academic who worked at a Christian company for the summer that tied in some ways to the Weber thesis.  Another writer on this collaborative blog included a response to the initial series.  These have been some of the more interesting non-school related things that I've seen lately.  I'm still plodding away on a Puritan historiography, research for an upcoming public history publication on a historic North Dakota church building, and independent readings on general world history. 

Where Did Americans Get Their Work Ethic?

Here is a section from a historiographical paper that I'm writing on the Puritans.  I'll probably post the entire paper here later if it doesn't get reamed terribly.  I reviewed the book referred to below last year for a class on the Anglo-Atlantic World.  While the so-called Weber thesis has its detractors, it is still quite popular in the popular consciousness of American society, even in a more pluralistic age.  I can remember some undergrad professors at West Virginia Tech in the mid-1990s talking about the "Judeo-Christian ethic" or the "Protestant ethic."  Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism greatly contributed to this belief.

Many writers have attempted to depict the Puritans as a sort of proto-capitalists.  Authors such as Max Weber and R. H. Tawney popularized this motif.  Weber, a nineteenth-century sociologist, attempted to explain the rise of capitalism.  He argued that a “Protestant ethic” was the impetus that allowed for the development of capitalism.  This opposed Karl Marx’s view that class struggle led to the rise of capitalism.  Weber defined the “spirit of capitalism” as “the earning of more and more money, combined with the avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life.” (53)   

According to Weber, the Protestant idea of a calling in life (to a certain occupation or station) was crucial to the development of modern capitalism.  He contrasted the worldview of European Catholics with that of Protestant ascetic sects, such as the Calvinists, Pietists, Methodists, and Baptists.  Weber argued that medieval and early modern Catholics worked to live.  They did enough to provide for themselves and the society in which they lived, with little concern for working harder.  He then looked at the Calvinists, with their emphasis on predestination and the corresponding concern for an assurance of their salvation.  While good works would not save them, the Calvinists believed that good works were a sign of one’s election and that they would bring the desired assurance of God’s favor.  The Calvinists and other ascetic groups worked hard because of their belief that God had called them to a certain occupation.  According to Weber, instead of working to live, the Calvinists lived to work so that they could obtain assurance of their salvation.  Work in itself was done for the glory of God, and to fail to do one’s best was viewed as a sign of reprobation.  

Since the earning of money was a side benefit of work, the earning of money could then be viewed as a noble goal if done for the glory of God, rather than being done simply for the enrichment of the worker.  Weber’s main point was that this ethic was responsible for the rise of capitalism.  This Calvinist work ethic definitely applied to the Puritans.  However, Weber’s thesis did not take into account the fact that Venice, Genoa, and other Italian city-states were the originators of much that makes up modern capitalism.  These early Italian merchants did not shy away from making money, and they were not Protestant, but Catholic.  In addition, Weber did not really address the use of colonial possessions and new technology in the rise of capitalism, so there is much room for debate on his famous thesis.

The Church in the Wildwood

This summer, I had the opportunity (quite by accident) to visit the Little Brown Church in the Vale.  This church was made famous by the song on the "Church in the Wildwood."  I happened to drive by it on my way back from a trip home with the family to West Virginia.  We decided to take the kids to the St. Louis Gateway Arch and driving through rural Iowa was the shortest route from St. Louis to North Dakota. 

The Little Brown Church in the Vale showed up on the map as a landmark of interest.  Being the church nut that I am, I had to stop and see the church since it was only a couple of miles off of the highway.  This Congregational church sits just outside of Nashua, Iowa, and dates to the 1860s.  It is easily accessible from US Highway 218.  While not an imposing structure like some of the churches in the Czech Republic that I've posted on this site, it was nonetheless pretty cool to see a historic country church.  The church is still in use, and hosts many weddings on an annualized basis.  The church also holds baptism on Sunday afternoons.  The church is memorialized by the song, and is a link to the pioneer days.  Often, one of the earliest structures built in new towns was a church (or churches).  Many of these churches no longer stand, but they were an important part of pioneer life.  It's impossible to tell the story of American history (or the history of just about any nation) without mentioning the history of religion.  In America, that religion is Christianity.  The early settlers had beliefs that influenced the way that they lived.  Below are photos of the the Little Brown Church in the Vale:

The Oldest English Church in North America

While looking at another blog today, I saw a link to an excavation that has been underway in Jamestown (Virginia, not North Dakota).  In 1607 the Virginia Company started the first permanent English colony in the New World at what became known as Jamestown (after King James I, the king who had the Bible translated).

This colony has often been described as unruly, individualist, communist, and all sorts of other things.  The religious sentiments of the settlers has often been downplayed by arguments that wealth was the only concern.  There cannot be any doubt that obtaining wealth was an important reason for the colony's founding in light of massive Spanish extraction of gold and silver from Central and South America.  I've read some conservatives slam the colony for their communistic tendencies because everyone expected to share in the food stock.  However, with everyone looking for gold, it seems a bit more greedy than a communist utopia.  The settlers did not really concern themselves with food or shelter because of this thirst for gold.  However, their religion was still a big deal to them.

The current excavation involves the Fort's church, which housed the wedding of John Rolfe and Pocahontas.  The church, according to the article, was built in 1608.  The outline of the structure that the archaeologists have uncovered was about 24 x 64, which would be a massive structure in comparison to the rest of the structures in the early fort.  This indicates the importance of the Christianity of these earliest English settlers.  As I've recently mentioned in a recent post on Perry Miller's Errand into the Wilderness, the Virginia settlers were not completely worldly-minded as many would have us think.  Of course, they weren't on the same level as Puritans in New England, either.

Backlash against Tebowing

Today, I read an online sports article that questioned why so many people hate Tim Tebow.  As of about 6 pm CDT today, there were over 60 pages of comments to this article, which was one of the bigger library of comments that I've seen for a sports post.  At ten posts per page, that's over 600 comments on this one post.

The author brought up a couple of good questions that are integrally related to the intersection of religion and American culture.  First, would those who mocked Tebow on the field last weekend by "Tebowing" have gotten a free pass if they had insulted someone of another faith?  It's a valid question.  Perhaps political correctness is only important when dealing with minority religious faiths? (I would argue that this is the case.) 

Secondly, why do people pick on Tebow specifically, when other Christian athletes have no problem showing their Christianity?  People seem to want this guy to fail miserably.  From all accounts Tebow is a nice guy.  Nice guys usually don't play well in pop culture.  Perhaps that has something to do with it.  He is not a top-ranked QB at this point and he may never get there, but there was a great deal of hype about him coming out of college as a first-round draft pick.

We live in a culture in which faith is supposed to be fenced off into the "personal", rather than the public arena.  Regardless, would people be allowed to get by with joking about someone's Buddhism in this manner?  I'm not really offended, but it sets a bit of a double standard, don't you think?

What I'm Reading--Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order

As I prepare to write my historiography on Puritans this semester, I've had to write four book reviews.  I've already posted a preliminary review of Perry Miller's influential work Errand into the Wilderness.  Here is a review of my reading of Margo Todd's Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (1987).  I must say that I found the book quite interesting, and the thesis quite intriguing.  While I had a couple of small questions, I think the author did a good job of proving a tie between thinkers like Erasmus and the Puritans.  Here is the review:

Todd, Margo. Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order. Cambridge and New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1987. x and 293 pages. Bibliography and Index.

            Margo Todd, currently Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order in 1987 while at Vanderbilt University.  One of Todd’s specialties is the culture of Reformed Protestantism in Britain and early America.  In addition to this book, she has also authored Reformation to Revolution: Politics and Religion in Early Modern England and The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland.  She is a previous winner of the Longman History-Today Prize and the Scottish History Book of the Year award, in addition to holding fellowships with the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the NEH, and the Royal Historical Society, among others.[1]

            When Todd wrote Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order, the historiographical debate centered on what impact the puritans had on the English Revolution, if they existed at all, as Michael Finlayson argued. (1)  Todd did not question the existence of Puritans, but questioned the assertion by Max Weber, R. H. Tawney, Christopher Hill, and Michael Walzer that “attributed to protestant religious zealots a degree of originality of thought rarely assigned to and almost never deserved by any intellectual movement.” (4) She believed that a move to place Puritans in the religious mainstream was a “step forward” in the historiography. (2)  In looking at the origins of Puritan thought, Todd looked back to the writings of Christian humanists, such as Desiderius Erasmus and Juan Luis Vives.

            Todd did not assert a conservative nature to Christian humanism.  She rightly pointed out that Erasmian ideas were largely a reaction against Thomist theology and philosophy.  The humanists, of whom Erasmus was the leading example, believed that much could be learned from the classical civilizations of the Greeks and Romans and emphasized such writings on civic virtue.  They encouraged the learning of classical languages and a critical approach to learning. 

This humanist social ethic which puritans would find so attractive was biblical in its apologetic, eclectic in its sources, mundane in its concerns but religious in its goals, practical in its methodology, and activist in its approach…The moral reconstruction of the social order was its ultimate objective—and its supreme attraction for protestant reformers. (22)

These Christian humanists, while Catholic themselves, questioned much of the medieval Catholic social order.

            Todd utilized many of the writings of Christian humanists and Protestant reformers.  She also relied on commonplace books from students at leading English universities to understand both the ideas being taught and the reactions of the students toward these ideas.  Christian humanist ideas passed to English Puritans largely through the universities, as these commonplace books and other notebooks show through their frequent citations of writers such as Erasmus and Vives and their use of Scholastic thinkers largely as punching bags. 

            After discussing a definition of Christian humanism and then pointing out how humanist ideas were transferred, Todd moved to the major areas of life that these new ideas impacted.  Contrary to medieval teaching on gender relations that viewed sex as a sort of necessary evil only meant to propagate the race, humanists and puritans both idealized the home as a miniature of the perfect society.  The ideal of celibacy came into question as a perfectly ordered home with children became the new goal. 

In addition to this questioning of domestic arrangements, humanists and Puritans started to question medieval ideas about economic issues.  Indiscriminate almsgiving came under scrutiny in this new environment.  Humanists encouraged state contributions and public employment (they believed most men willing to work) to alleviate the suffering of the poor so that alms would go to those who needed them, rather than to those who asked the loudest.  For a time, England actually attempted this system with some degree of success.  Many humanists also came to question the monastic system.  Those who were supposed to be poor through begging actually had access to great wealth through church property.  This did not sit well with Christian humanists.

One final major area of dispute that the humanists had with medieval thought related to the hierarchical “Great Chain of Being,” which held to a pyramidal view of power with God at the top, followed by the monarch (or pope), then nobility, then the masses.  This order was closely tied to heredity.  The Christian humanists decried heredity as a requirement for leadership.  They argued, to a degree, for a meritocracy as a better system, as the offspring of nobles were often lazy and at times incompetent. 

Todd’s final chapter, “The Conservative Reaction,” is not terribly surprising.  When those with power have their authority questioned, they often behave in a very reactionary manner.  The author argued that the Council of Trent and the Lambeth Conference embodied this reaction.  One result of Trent was the creation of the Index of Prohibited Books.  At first, only those books of Erasmus that questioned the established order found their way to the Index.  After giving the concept a second thought, however, all writings from such a subversive author received this treatment.  The new ideas for ameliorating the plight of the poor lost ground, and Trent argued that discriminate almsgiving threatened the souls of those who had lost the opportunity to give through indiscriminate charity, although this did not specifically affect Anglicans as much as it did continental Catholics. 

Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order did a good job of tying ideas about society from the Christian humanists to the English Puritans.  The use of commonplace books in the English universities provided an excellent opportunity to see exactly what ideas impacted the leading students of the age.  While this tie between humanists and Puritans was largely ignored prior to Todd’s work, there were some items that did not get as much weight as they possibly deserved.  Humanism in many ways had a much more tolerant view of the world, which does not agree with the actions of many of the stronger Puritans, especially the ones who migrated to North America in the 1630s.  Also, there was a major divergence between an Erasmian view of the world with an emphasis on the freedom of the will against a Calvinist understanding of affairs that was even more emphatic than Martin Luther’s view in On the Bondage of the Will, itself a critique of Erasmus.  Todd argued that “the Calvinist view of the elect as God’s instruments to implement his will in the world necessitates an activist stance on the part of the believer.” (17)  However, this still does not reconcile the generally positive view of man’s ability among humanists with the very negative belief held by Calvinists.  In spite of these questions, there is little doubt that the Christian humanists informed the ideas of the early Puritans.  In this, Todd succeeded in her efforts.

---

[1] “Margo Todd,” http://www.history.upenn.edu/faculty/todd.shtml (accessed November 1, 2011).