American North
This is the key to understanding why the United States has been transformed into BRA and is now on its deathbed:
“Like the early Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century, abolitionists were confident they had discovered and uncovered the fatal flaws of the entire social system; they were determined to clarify and reanimate an altogether different approach to self-fulfillment. It is significant that the main targets of radical reformers were precisely those forces that stunted or impeded the full development of an individual’s moral capacities, as defined by the religious revivals: the violence and aggression of dueling and war; capital punishment and retributive punishment in general, which brings out the lowest, most un-Christian and bestial impulses of human nature; alcohol, which dulls or extinguishes a sense of social responsibility while simulating aggression, self-assertion, and “animal passions”; laws and institutions that discriminate against women, depriving them of self-respect and subjecting them to male violence and sexual exploitation and degradation; above all, black slavery, the very epitome of institutionalized violence and debasement of the human spirit, treating humans as objects or animals, subject to unlimited coercion and manipulation.”
“The Great National Sin” in Yankeeland has been different things at different times. From 1830 to 1860, it ranged from dueling to war to alcohol to the denial of “women’s rights” to Indian Removal before finally zeroing in on slavery, represented by the demonic Southern cotton planter and the “Slave Power” conspiracy which sought to control the federal government.
After the abolition of slavery in 1865, “The Great National Sin” shifted immediately to the new crusades of “civil rights” and civil service reform, as well as traditional staples of the reform movement such as temperance, world peace, and women’s suffrage, which climaxed in Prohibition, the League of Nations, and the Nineteenth Amendment.
“A common theme in these related reform movements, which were religious in inspiration but too radical to be accepted by existing churches, was the removal of obstacles to human perfectibility. All the same, as Wendell Phillips suggested, participation allowed the reformer to escape from a purely competitive or acquisitive life as he or she joined an ennobling yet deeply unpopular cause. As the letters of Weld and Stuart suggest, individual abolitionists enjoyed a profound love, conviviality, and fellowship within transatlantic reform groups as they redefined their own identity and faced common persecution, at least in America. Abolitionists acquired a shared a language and outlook as they differentiated themselves from former friends and often even from family members.”
Human perfectibility.
This is the theological wellspring of the Left: human beings are basically good, but are degraded by social institutions and traditions, which must be demolished and overthrown for free and equal human beings can develop their full moral capacities.
Of course, as we have seen time and again, the effective result of the removal of such obstacles to the development of the negro’s “full” moral capacities – whether they be racism, slavery, white supremacy, or imperialism – often turns out to be the decline and/or collapse of civilization into places like Haiti or Detroit or Zimbabwe or Clayton County, GA.
In the twentieth century, the “Great National Sin” took turns being things like poverty, the patriarchy, and “racism.” Now the “Great National Sin” of America is the lack of gay marriage and opposition to Sandra Fluke’s subsidized birth control. The first state in America to legalize gay marriage was Vermont which was also the first state to abolish slavery.
“As spectacular religious revivals established enclaves of piety in the midst of a so-called unregenerate society, the question arose how to translate an individual’s momentary repentance and religious commitment into a just and righteous society. While this “Second Great Awakening” was partly a reaction to the dramatic and unsettling economic and social changes of the 1820s, the evangelical churches and revivalists were also addressing fundamental questions about the meaning of human life, justice, and the human ability to rise above sin.
The last issue of overcoming the inclination to sin acquired special urgency by 1830 because of a new American Protestant emphasis on human ability and freedom. For many Congregationalists, Baptists, and Methodists, it was not only within the power of the individual to achieve sanctification, that is, a total transformation of moral character, but it was within the power of the American nation to establish a new golden age, a new Eden or New Jerusalem on earth. Here we see a striking amalgamation of secular and spiritual aspirations – a sacralization of time and of ethical questions like alcohol abuse and slaveholding. The extremely high expectations of superstar revivalists like Charles Grandison Finney generated a new sensitivity to the fatal discrepancies between American ideals and American practice.”
This nonsense was spread across the Deep North during the Second Great Awakening in the 1820s and 1830s. We briefly discussed this last year in Northern Perfectionism:
““It was through these early influences that Garrison beheld and tried to make sense of the major trends of his day – the concomitant rise, in the North, of economic modernization and of religious revivalism. Everywhere that the hallmarks of modernization were to be found – in proliferating cities and towns, with their “new”middle class of urban professionals and capitalists; in stunningly efficient factories, staffed by working-class wage earners, churning out goods such as textiles; along the networks of canals and railroads that transported such mass-produced goods to distant markets – so too did one find eager audiences for a new kind of evangelicalism. Popularized by itinerants like the charismatic Charles Finney, this religion was calculated to comfort and guide Northerners caught in a whirlwind of change.
Finney’s message was “perfectionism”: Individuals could and should seek to be as perfect as God, and thus seize control of their own destinies and fortunes. Perfectionism found expression in a wide array of charitable (or “benevolent”) causes embraced by antebellum Northerners, including campaigns to eradicate drunkenness and prostitution, to extend aid to impoverished orphans and widows, and to distribute religious tracts to the poor. Garrison and his circle of immediatists he gathered around him were caught up in this spirit of reform and drew out its most radical and egalitarian implications. They sought “moral revolution” not “moral renovation,” James Brewer Stewart explains, and “shattered religious orthodoxies time and again by improvising still more expansive ways of enacting God’s will in everyday life.” If the new “free labor” economy produced such wealth and opportunity, they asked, why shouldn’t its benefits extend to blacks and to the South itself? If reformers could promote moral perfection, why shouldn’t they seek to eradicate America’s worst sin, that of slaveholding? These questions formed the backdrop for the Liberator.”
To our eternal misfortune, we ended up in the Union with these self-righteous, hypocritical, “morally perfected” Yankees like William Lloyd Garrison and his followers, who by the 1840s had sparked such a backlash in the South that animosity toward them germinated into Southern nationalism, which brought about disunion and the Confederacy in 1861.
Clyde Wilson first turned me on to this years ago:
“If this were true, then anything that stood in the way of American perfection must be eradicated. The threatening evil at various times was liquor, tobacco, the Catholic Church, the Masonic order, meat-eating, marriage. Within the small area of the Burnt Over District and within the space of a few decades was generated what historians have misnamed the “Jacksonian reform movement:” Joseph Smith received the Book of Mormon from the Angel Moroni; William Miller began the Seventh Day Adventists by predicting, inaccurately, the end of the world; the free love colony of John Humphrey Noyes flourished at Oneida; the first feminist convention was held at Seneca Falls; and John Brown, who was born in Connecticut, collected accomplices and financial backers for his mass murder expeditions.
It was in this milieu that abolitionism, as opposed to the antislavery sentiment shared by many Americans, including Southerners, had its origins. Abolitionism, despite what has been said later, was not based on sympathy for the black people nor on an ideal of natural rights. It was based on the hysterical conviction that Southern slaveholders were evil sinners who stood in the way of fulfillment of America’s divine mission to establish Heaven on Earth. It was not the Union that our Southern forefathers seceded from, but the deadly combination of Yankee greed and righteousness.”
BRA could have only been created by people who are enamored with this type of mindset. Abolition, free love, civil rights, women’s suffrage, feminism, the League of Nations/United Nations, gay marriage, Prohibition, the “War on Poverty,” the “War on Drugs,” and anti-racism are among their many legacies.
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/randy-newman-releases-parody-tune-m-dreaming-180752276–politics.html
The “reform” hypocrisy grew, and continues to grow in direct relation to moral-religious apostasy and depravity. A true revival of genuine faith would have solved all of the problems without creating worse ones.
Obama rather falsly was sold as the interracial messiah.
In the name of of all that is Holy I do not understand how a white person could vote for Obama. White men have altered rivers, moved mountains, designed and built automobiles, jet aircraft, aircraft carriers, submarines, automobiles, trains, nuclear-weapons, TV’s. radios, CD’s and all the sundry marvels of science and technology that make the modern world possible. How is it that men capable of such extraordinary genius would willing, nay, eagerly and enthusiastically, subordinate themselves to a false morality and equally fraudulent ethical criteria? And why is it that our women also do not turn away in horror at BRA, and all that it implies?
Too bad we can’t abolish this anti poverty program crap:
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/entitlement-america-head-household-making-minimum-wage-has-more-disposable-income-family-mak
No white should give power like that to a black. Unless you are attempting to pin the blame for something on him.
Ah Calvins depraved followers; the “self-chosen”. It is amazing to me that the idea of crusading against real and made-up vice would be dismissed as impossible immediately due to the inevitable sins of pride and self-righteousness that HAVE TO COME ALONG WITH FEELING MORE PERFECT THAN EVERYONE ELSE.
Idiots. God almighty it is a self-defeating exercise to “perfect” anyone. “Get the plank out of your own eye” IS NOT MERELY A SUGGESTION. Anyone got a body count for the number of “witches” killed/accused in the North compared to the South?
There really is a damned screw loose with these people. It is hard sometimes to fathom that they are our closest relatives on planet earth.
Eric- Calvin is not to blame for the North’s apostasy. Calvin fully believed in Original sin- indeed, the doctrine of election proves it- for, unless you are first moved by teh H.S., you WILL not turn and be saved- and REMAIN in the State of Sin you were born into.
What happened is utter Gnosticism and hyper-Pelagianism took over. Utter, rank, antichrist Heresy steeped the North/New England, and resulted in the cults that HW noted- all of them a) protestant, b)baptistic, c)millennial, and d) apocalyptic. The Dispensationalist Baptist DTS crowd- those who were called by Robertson the “Moral Majority” thirty years ago, and who are rabid ZioNazis today, are the DIRECT theological heirs of this aberrant theological heresy.
May Finney ROT IN HELL for all eternity, for the evil he has caused. ANATHEMA.
http://www.spurgeon.org/~phil/articles/finney.htm
http://www.mtio.com/articles/aissar81.htm
idk— @ “…The last issue of overcoming the inclination to sin acquired special urgency by 1830 because of a new American Protestant emphasis on human ability and freedom….”
Endlessly locating the “problems” in “Protestantism” (as mainstream academics do) is problematical, and makes everyone miss the connection between them and the previous punishment of the endless (and they were endless) “heresies.”
If one says “Man is ALL BAD” you wind up with the projection of one’s “sins” onto others. In reality, man is “sometimes good and sometimes bad”— but this balanced view seems almost impossible for most whites to grasp. They have to make it “either/or” as if they cannot grapple with finer distinctions. Either polarization has horrid consequences. The problem was not “the Englightenment” it was “the Enlightenment GONE TOO FAR.”
Pioneering Americans (South Africans, etc.) had totally different issues and a different landscape from the Europeans who now set the tone in the u.s. Those people cannot imagine the relative freedom of a vast wilderness. City people cannot even imagine just the freedom of having 50 acres (you can run around without clothes on, lol) Much less 300 (or thousands of acres). You can ride for days without seeing a soul— a level of self-responsibility, self-possession, and grappling with the natural world that NO EUROPEAN really knows.
What pioneers and colonists in the large territories have lost—- the others can’t imagine (and don’t bother to try usually). Many people do not “just live to sin,” lol— they really don’t.
—-Europe is so relatively SMALL and enclosed— by comparison to what the Protestants faced in what became U.S. (and the Spaniard-French-Portuguese, mostly catholics in the southern americans also, though less so on the islands, which are confined). Nobody really thinks about it. But many generational americans still have (and prefer) 10+ acre tracts with areas for home gardens, livestock, etc.
An acre feels CONFINING. Just the freedom to not have neighbors (now so many foreigners and foreign men!) looking into one’s windows!
A whole different sense of PRIVACY, for instance, was created through this (and for many generations—like 20 generations)
Privacy (as experienced and understood by pioneer stock) is just one aspect that now interferes with what “elites” want. Nobody really THINKS or talks about what a different healthier mindset “landed-ness” really is.
Those more recently from Europe seem to see this as “uppity” and “aristocratic.”
But as HW showed, “slavery in the south” was NOT mostly huge planters, but a strong middle class that was LANDED and had help (maybe one other family) on their land.
The cities yankees made—are of renters. A city “elite” and the serfs, with no “landed” quality.
sth_txs says:
Too bad we can’t abolish this anti poverty program crap…
thanks for the link. We know a lot of people who have “chosen” not to use their degrees and intentionally seek “underemployment.” They just got sick of being around people on public paychecks (welfare OR warfare).
In some ways, Walmart Greeter is more admirable. At least they’re not directly living on other citizens.
Eric says it right, imo–
Southerners fix things as much as yankees—but they fix THEMSELVES. The others —any chosen group— fix OTHER people, not themselves! (Whether they are “chosen,” or ‘the only one’s not depraved,” or like catholics who are taught they’re “the only true church and only path to God,” or “chosenite jews,” etc.—- ALL of them (since they believe they are better) will find they have an “obligation” to impose their perfection (that they believe in their imaginations they have.)
@Hunter
Maybe I missed it, but I didn’t see mention for the source of the quotes above. The author?
Dixiegirl, what is the alternative to believing the form of Christianity you practice is the true one? The alternative is indifferentism. I’ve meant plenty of Protestants who held that there particular congregation or denomination is the true church.
“If one says “Man is ALL BAD” you wind up with the projection of one’s “sins” onto others. In reality, man is “sometimes good and sometimes bad”— but this balanced view seems almost impossible for most whites to grasp.”
If you don’t adhere to the doctrine that man is “fallen” then you are not a Protestant. In fact you’re not even a Christian. You’d best read the Book of Genesis and the Gospels a little more closely.
The recent quotes come from David Brion Davis’s Inhuman Bondage.
Nice to see you zeroing in on this. John Stuart Mill, utilitarianism, etc. are a terrible plague unleashed on this nation. Almost all of them from New England too.
“Privacy (as experienced and understood by pioneer stock) is just one aspect that now interferes with what “elites” want. Nobody really THINKS or talks about what a different healthier mindset “landed-ness” really is.”
It’s interesting you bring this up. The type of living you propose is actually “greener” than the urbanized vertical culture the green-washers try to sell us as “earth friendly”.
@Hunter Wallace
“The recent quotes come from David Brion Davis’s Inhuman Bondage.”
Thanks a lot.
I’d like to see dueling make a come back. I think it would fix a lot of issues pert quick
“I’d like to see dueling make a come back. I think it would fix a lot of issues pert quick”
It would certainly thin out the herd of commenters here! And obviously make for far more polite discussions on the issues at hand…