By Hunter Wallace
In the course of writing my speech on what makes Southerners a separate and distinct people, I realized that there are some aspects of the South that I wanted to explore in greater detail.
I’m much more familiar with some subjects than others. Foremost among these, it seemed to me that the South’s religious heritage was an area in which I needed to add some greater depth. As racial identity has faded since the 1960s, religion has become more important in sustaining a separate and distinct Southern cultural identity.
Samuel S. Hill’s The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Religion seemed like a good place to start. A few years ago, I bought a previous volume in this series on Agriculture & Industry. That book which was edited by James C. Cobb was very resourceful and I regret that I posted all that material from it on Confederate Renaissance and didn’t save it here.
Anyway, I was less impressed with this volume. The bibliography is fantastic and makes a used copy of this book worth the price of buying it on Amazon. Unfortunately, the book is weighed down with dozens of useless entries on marginal subjects like “Asian Religion,” “Islam,” “New Age Religion,” and “Spirituality.” There are also entries for individuals like Brooks Hays, James McBride Dabbs, and Thomas Merton who were included for no other reason than their appeal to liberal political sensibilities.
I found the introductory essay to be quite thought provoking. The South is the only place in all of Christendom that is dominated by evangelical Protestantism. Compared to the North and West, the South is relatively homogeneous. By 1860, 3/4ths of Southern Christians were Baptists or Methodists. During the Confederacy, the South’s leading Protestant denominations broke away from their Northern coreligionists to form the Southern Baptist Convention, Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America, and the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of America. By and large, the Southern churches supported the Confederate war effort and sustained Southern Nationalism.
This was also true of religious minorities like Jews and Catholics. We’ve already seen how Southern Jews conformed to slavery, segregation, and white supremacy. The same is true of Southern Catholics who justified slavery, supported secession, the Confederate war effort, opposed Reconstruction, instituted their own form of Jim Crow in parochial schools, and opposed the Civil Rights Movement. Unlike the North, the Catholic Church in the South “entered a period of relative stability” after the War Between the States and “slipped into a respectable obscurity in the region until the 1960s.” Southern Catholic writers like Allen Tate, Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy would later echo some of the same conservative themes as their Protestant counterparts in condemning rootless, American individualism, industrialism, and abstract liberalism, while praising the traditional South’s organic, communal social order.
During the early 20th century, Dispensationalism and Pentecostalism arrived in the South. The former came from Great Britain via the Northern states while the latter radiated outward from Los Angeles. There are no statistics available on Dispensationalists, but their estimated numbers range from 5 million to 20 million nationwide. As for Pentecostals, they presently range from 3 percent of the population in Louisiana (the low) to 7 percent of the population in Kentucky (the high). I was surprised to learn Pentecostals are 7 percent of the population of Oregon. Their numbers are a bit higher in the South than the national average, but Pentecostals are a minority within the evangelical fold. Worldwide, there are now almost half a billion Pentecostals, which makes them second only to Roman Catholics within Christendom.
Charles Reagan Wilson has a great overview of the South’s religious landscape. A condensed version would be that Anglicanism was the established religion in all the Southern colonies. Presbyterians and other religious minorities settled the backcountry. After the American Revolution, Anglicanism was disestablished, and evangelical Christianity – mostly Baptists and Methodists – swept across the frontier and became the dominant religious force in the South after the Great Revival of 1787 to 1805. Thereafter, the evangelical Protestant core of the South has dominated a Catholic periphery in Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, Florida, Texas, and Louisiana.
The biggest failing of this book is easily the lack of discussion of the “Nones.” 19 percent of Southerners are unaffiliated with any religion: 2 percent are atheists, 3 percent are agnostics, and 14 percent are “nothing in particular.” It seems like a waste of space to have such a full discussions of “Islam” or “New Age Religion” or Jains and Sikhs in the South when there are three times as many “Nones” as Pentecostals. There are fewer “Nones” in the South than in the Northeast, Midwest, or the West, but nationwide “Nones” are now almost a quarter of the American population.
I’m going to acquire some of the sources cited in this book to learn more about Pentecostals, Christian Zionists/Dispensationalists, and megachurches. These are the subjects which seem to attract the most attention although they seem to be a lot more Sunbelt than Southern. We will also take a look at when, why, and how the Southern churches rejected their traditional racial values.
I found this passage in the cited Wilson overview most interesting:
‘The generation before the Civil War represented the one moment in southern religious life when blacks and whites shared the same ritual and spatial setting, listened to the same sermons, partook of communion together, and shared church disciplinary procedures. The interaction within biracial churches represented a foundation for later spiritual commonalities among blacks and whites in the South. Slaves also worshipped in secret praise services in the slave quarters—THEIR “INVISIBLE RELIGION” (Raboteau, 1978). Here, God stood in judgment of the Christianity of the slaveowners, and slave preachers applied the biblical story of Exodus to their own people, with ultimate liberation a hope. Slave spirituals became the creative group expression of these aspirations. The ring shout was the most distinctive expression of religious worship in the praise service, with African-derived dancing and body movement emphasized. The invisible religion of the slave quarters also included conjure, a system of spiritual influence that combined herbal medicine with magic and sometimes gave surprising authority to slave practitioners who believed they could affect whites as well as blacks’.
I am sure that the Papists and Talmudists among the slave-owning southern elite class, who outwardly ‘conformed themselves’ to the much more numerous Anglo-Protestants, also had some ‘invisible’ religious views about delivering themselves and supplanting the Anglo-Protestantism.
Golden Circle slavery-based culture was in fact hostile to Christian community. German Anabaptists who ventured south from Pennsylvania tended to return or disappear, though they endured in the Shenandoah Valley, maintaining ‘the breadbasket of the Confederacy’.
It is thought that Jakob Amman travelled to Pennsylvania after the expulsion from Alsace, and from there to the Piedmont of North Carolina, where some traces of heritage remain.
Hunter, one book you should read about dispensationalism is “The Incredible Scofield And His Book” by Joseph Canfield. This book was responsible for blowing the cover of one of dispensationalism-fundamentalism most sainted figures. It proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Scofield was a con man par excellent, just like too many of the fundie quacks that would follow in his footsteps.
As I pointed out in the previous thread, “evangelicalism” flourished in the South while “radicalism” flourished “north of the Line.” The South was a hostile environment to the sort of religious utopian radicals who founded Pennsyvlania and Massachusetts.
http://www.occidentaldissent.com/2015/06/10/southern-religion/
Because of the “Golden Circle slavery-based culture” here, both evangelical Christianity and Catholicism were also put on a short leash. Their egalitarian tendencies were restrained and Protestantism and Catholicism became more conservative and adapted to the hierarchical racial caste system. This is ultimately why the Baptists and Methodists split from their northern wings in the decades before the war.
In contrast, radical Christianity “north of the Line” was free to degenerate into Unitarianism and Transcendentalism. In the South, however, even the Jews conformed to the status quo.
Here’s one of the books that was cited about how Southern religion has traditionally conformed to the status quo:
Churches in Cultural Captivity: A History of the Social Attitudes of Southern Baptists
http://www.amazon.com/Churches-Cultural-Captivity-Attitudes-Southern/dp/087049547X
Can t say many positive things about religion in the South now , except Southern women tend to be more traditional than their feminists sister in the North, East.
You know you are getting old when you can remember the time that flaming Leftist, anti White Jews in Hollywood were concerned with the American Christian religious Right, thought it looked and sounded like National Socialism.
Norman Lear founded “People for the American Way” to oppose Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson’s the Moral majority which has just morphed in to a Jew worshipping Neo Conservative something or really more precisely …
Nothing.
What exactly does Ralph Reed do these days?
Pick up a paycheck from Sheldon Adelson?
Serve as a a dorman at one of Adelson’s casinos?
Religion has never been a driving force of social change in the South:
– In the antebellum era, the evangelical churches conformed to the status quo, split into sectional churches, and supported the Confederacy.
– In the Jim Crow era, the evangelical churches supported segregation and opposed the Civil Rights Movement.
– In the post-1965 Sunbelt South, the Southern churches are again conforming to the status quo. It wasn’t until the 1990s that the Southern Baptists condemned racism and apologized for slavery. It was the last mainstream institution in the US to do so.
Change in the South has always come from the outside: the Union Army, which imposed abolition on the South; federal troops, which imposed integration on the South; Congress, which opened the borders; the Supreme Court, which legalized abortion and interracial marriage, and soon gay marriage; and Hollywood movies and network television which have eroded the foundations of our culture.
‘The South was a hostile environment to the sort of religious utopian radicals who founded Pennsyvlania’:
The German Christians who settled the southeastern counties at Penn’s invitation are conservative, NOT ‘utopian radical’. Nor were the Welsh Primitive Baptists and Welsh Quakers for whom Penn originally provided ‘New Wales’.
‘Because of the “Golden Circle slavery-based culture” here, both evangelical Christianity and Catholicism were also put on a short leash. Their egalitarian tendencies were restrained and Protestantism and Catholicism became more conservative and adapted to the hierarchical racial caste system’:
The various religions of the southeastern states (which were more religiously diverse, more Catholic, and more Jewish than all the other states through the middle of the nineteenth century) conformed to the profit-oriented caste-elitist system of Slavery (importing, breeding and using Africans to ‘create immense wealth’) — while German Anabaptists who could not conform returned to where they came from.
‘Christianity “north of the Line” was free to degenerate into Unitarianism and Transcendentalism’:
Are you saying it is thanks to Slavery that the heresies of Unitarianism and Transcendentalism did not flourish?
‘In the South, however, even the Jews conformed to the status quo’:
So they conformed to the status quo of wealth-making Golden-Circle-ism, which they were also partially in charge of, and responsible for. But note that they never conform themselves to Christ.
Everyone always forgets about the “Methodist Protestants” who were the other large Southern Methodist Church. They split from the main Methodist body about 10 years before it broke North-South over slavery.
The Methodist Protestants (MP) originated in North Carolina, and were somewhat anti-clerical, and they did not have Bishops as in the main Methodist church. The church decision making was based on the people, not on the clergy. The early MP’s were no doubt influenced by Jacksonian democracy.
Slavery wasn’t an issue among the MP’s, and they had a higher than average Confederate participation rate from studies I’ve seen.
In 1939 the three main Methodist churches, North, South, and Protestant merged on promises that nothing would change…
Yep.
The Southern Baptists are the only denomination which chose not to reunite.
Pennsylvania was founded by the most radical utopian sect in the British Isles, the Quakers, who spent much of their time trying to build a multiracial utopia with the local Indians. It was also the home of “conservatives” like the Shakers cult who were so crazy that they condemned procreation. Ben Franklin and Benjamin Rush, two of Pennsylvania’s leading “Founding Fathers,” argued in favor of racial equality and against Jefferson’s theories of racial differences.
“North-of-the-Line” Pennsylvania was the first US state to repeal its anti-miscegenation law in 1780. Contrast with “South-of-the-Line” Virginia and Maryland which had an anti-miscegenation law until the Loving decision in 1967. For almost a hundred years, “South-of-the-Line” Maryland was segregated while “North-of-the-Line” Pennsylvania was integrated.
In the South, there was a racial caste system. White racial identity mattered. Racial equality was rejected here. Social equality was considered a radical idea in the South into the 1960s where our universities were still segregated.
How about Pennsylvania? Because of the Quaker influence, it was so egalitarian that it abolished slavery and repealed its anti-miscegenation law before the American Revolution was even won. Blacks were citizens and had the right to vote in Pennsylvania until 1838 … it only changed because of the influx of Irish immigrants who resented being on the same level as Philadelphia’s teeming slums of free negroes.
After the War, “North-of-the-Line” Pennsylvania returned to its Quaker egalitarian roots with black citizenship, black voting rights, and anti-segregation laws:
http://www.studythepast.com/weekly/pacrow.html
1867: Barred public carrier segregation [Statute]
Unlawful to exclude any person on account of color or race from riding on railroads. Penalty: $500 to be paid to injured party. Employees who violated the law guilty of misdemeanor, and could be fined between $100 and $500, or be imprisoned between 30 days and three months.
1869: Education [Statute]
Black children prohibited from attending Pittsburgh schools.
1872: Barred school segregation [Statute]
Repealed law of 1869 that prevented black children from attending public schools in Pittsburgh.
1881: Barred school segregation [Statute]
Unlawful for any teacher or school administrator to discriminate against students based on race or color.
1887: Barred public accommodations segregation [Statute]
Denial to use restaurants, hotels, railroads, streetcars, theaters, concert halls, or places of amusement to a person based on race or color was unlawful. Penalty: Misdemeanor, punishable by a fine between $50 to $100.
1911: Barred school segregation [Statute]
Banned school segregation
1935: Civil rights protection [Statute]
Outlawed racial discrimination. Penalty: Criminal prosecution.
1945: Barred public accommodations segregation [Statute]
All persons entitled to equal advantages of places of public accommodation. Penalty: Up to $100 and/or up to 90 days imprisonment.
1950: Barred school segregation [Statute]
Unlawful for school officials to discriminate.
1956: Adoption [Statute]
Petition must state race or color of adopting parents.
1957: Barred residential segregation [Statute]
Barred segregation within public housing.
Unlike Pennsylvania, the Southern colonies were not founded as a “Holy Experiment,” so that sort of nonsense didn’t flourish here. The presence of slavery here was a check on abstract doctrines of liberty and equality. Among other things, it nurtured a respect for authority, a hierarchical social system, and conservative temperament. The social order was held in greater esteem here than in Pennsylvania. Anarchic “liberty” was valued much less.
Southern Jews were far more conservative and less disruptive than any number of Northern leftwing radicals like Pennsylvania’s Thaddeus Stevens.
‘Pennsylvania was founded by the most radical utopian sect in the British Isles, the Quakers’:
‘Radical utopian’ is a pejorative term as you use it, or misuse it. Certainly such a thing as utopian groups do exist. The Shakers for example were a HERETICAL cult that can reasonably be called utopian, but it is a huge exaggeration to call the Friends (Quakers) ‘utopian’. Even Winstanley’s Diggers (England, not Pennsylvania) you seem to despise were not truly utopian, only ‘commoners’ trying to escape the mass starvation, making use of common land that was available for them legally under the Great Charter and Charter of the Forest. But Cromwell’s government decided to persecute its own retired soldiers to please the nobility.
Penn founded the colony specifically for the persecuted Friends in Wales, all Welsh speakers. They did nothing un-Christian here, only cleared forest, planted crops, reared children, respected each others’ private property, and were buried under Welsh-inscribed stones. The Friends were ‘radical’ in a sense that they spoke the truth about the corruption of Christianity and the injustices of the Norman elite establishment. But they were not ‘radical’ in paying the Indians for land, which the Indians sold to them entirely voluntarily. (However, later, Penn’s sons cheated the Indians with the Walking Purchase.) Penn also invited the NOT-‘radical utopian’ German Anabaptists to join his experiment and settle just north of the Welsh Tract, since there were ‘too few’ Welsh Quakers and Welsh Primitive Baptists to fully establish the colony. The colony had now become multi-ethnic and multi-lingual, and Calvinist Ulstermen arrived on the frontier soon after, then liturgical Hessian mercenaries, but the great disaster was the importation of Roman Catholic ‘cheap labour’ (and cannon fodder) from Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century, opening the way for more cheap labour from the eastern and southern Europe leading to the very large Catholic Italian population today, in the towns and urban areas.
‘Unlike Pennsylvania, the Southern colonies were not founded as a “Holy Experiment,” so that sort of nonsense didn’t flourish here’:
You conveniently overlook Oglethorpe, the Moravians and Wesleys. That Christian effort was overrun too quickly with greedy masters and imported ‘wealth creators’. Christian community cannot flourish in a slavery-based multiracial environment.
‘How about Pennsylvania? Because of the Quaker influence, it was so egalitarian that it abolished slavery and repealed its anti-miscegenation law before the American Revolution was even won. Blacks were citizens and had the right to vote in Pennsylvania until 1838’:
Pennsylvania was notably kind toward Africans, since there were very few of them, an ‘exotic foreign species’ found mostly in Philadelphia, NOT ‘teeming slums in Philadelphia’ until after the war. Miscegenation seemed to be a non-issue since it was almost non-existent, unlike ‘Golden Circle Civilisation’ where close proximity of master and slave gave Amerikan Africans a generally estimated 20%-White genetics.
‘Irish immigrants resented being on the same level as Philadelphia’s teeming slums of free negroes’:
In Golden Circle Jamaica, the same Catholic Irish WERE on the same level and they didn’t resist interbreeding.
‘Southern Jews were far (…) less disruptive’:
The southeastern states were their major population centre until after the war, the most religiously-, ethnically- and racially-diverse region, with the most opportunity for power (first Jewish congressmen elected, and the sometimes de facto Presidency of the C.S.A.) and the most opportunity to create wealth, until after the war. Charleston, South Carolina was their New York, their ‘New Jerusalem’ as they called it then — so why would they have been disruptive?
‘Anarchic “liberty” was valued much less’:
You don’t value freedom for the White ‘commons’ then? The problem is not ‘anarchy’ but tyranny — not that we have rights, but that our rights are taken. Do you hope to become one of a future aristocracy or even the king of a future monarchical Golden-Circle Norman ‘DIXIE’? You will never have peace with God and on earth if the poor are oppressed.
The Quakers were the only group in the American colonies who made the New England Puritans looks reasonable by comparison.
They were the hippies of their age: utopian ideologues who believed in the inherent goodness and equality of all mankind, radical individualists who rejected church authority (both Anglican and Catholic) and would do things like smear themselves with excrement to show their contempt for social conventions, a group of people who attached the least value to authority, to hierarchy, to social cohesion, and the necessity of maintaining a social order that would constrain their extreme egalitarian ideals. This is why they ended up in the New World because no one else wanted them in England.
For those who are unfamiliar with the Shakers, they were the most extreme branch of Quakers who were so radical that they condemned marriage and procreation. Among other things, they believed in the equality of men and women like their Quaker brethren who were the pioneers of women’s rights and feminism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaker_views_on_women
Some of the groups which settled in Pennsylvania were refugees … the Germans, the Scots-Irish, and Irish Catholics, who were ordinary, mainstream Europeans who were pushed out of Europe by war or famine, but not the Quakers, who founded their colony as a “Holy Experiment” in their religious worldview.
That’s actually why Pennsylvania became so ethnically diverse. It was because Quakers were radical utopians who attached such little value to maintaining social cohesion. “All of mankind” was invited to settle there where the Quakers were already building their multiracial utopia with the local Indians.
Why were they persecuted? Wasn’t it because they were a radical utopian sect and that fact is what caused them to clash all other groups and authority in general?
You left out the part about how the Quakers tried to build a multiracial, egalitarian utopia with the local Indians.
On the contrary, the Irish Catholics were far more pro-White and racially conscious than the Quakers. It was due to the Scots-Irish and the Irish Catholics that Pennsylvania finally rejected black citizenship … in 1838.
Georgia wasn’t founded as a religious utopia either.
Wrong.
Pennsylvania was welcoming toward Africans because Quakers were adamant that blacks were their equals. They repealed Pennsylvania’s anti-miscegenation law because race-mixing was consistent with their belief in racial equality, social equality, and political equality between Whites and Africans. As I pointed out above, Pennsylvania’s leaders like Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush contested Jefferson’s theories of racial differences and insisted on racial equality.
This was an example of Oliver Cromwell punishing his enemies.
Unlike the Quakers, Southern Jews never agitated to overthrow slavery, white supremacy, or the racial caste system in South Carolina. As we have seen, they conformed to the status quo. OTOH, it was the Quakers who set out to create a multiracial, egalitarian paradise in early America. They were the earliest fountain of radicalism in America before Eastern European Jewry washed up in New York during the Great Wave.
Southerners valued what we called “ordered liberty,” which is to say, liberty within the constraints of a social order which upheld certain cultural norms, one of which was that the South was a “White Man’s Country.” Quakers valued “liberty” and “equality” as such and thus became the enemies of all authority, hierarchy, social order, social cohesion, social stability, etc.
I hope that Quakers are excluded from a future Dixie in light of their track record in Pennsylvania. We don’t need a radical utopian cult which is constantly at odds with authority trying to rip apart the social fabric to advance its ridiculous egalitarian fantasies. Those people can stay “North-of-the-Line” in the culture they pioneered there where everything that has two legs and walks is the equal of everything else.
‘would do things like smear themselves with excrement’:
Those filthy Yankees….
‘enemies of all authority, hierarchy, social order, social cohesion, social stability’:
If you’re on the side of ‘all authority, hierarchy, etc.’ (a.k.a. tyranny) against our ‘anarchy’ (the exercise of our rights) don’t worry, the present global Hierarchy needs NO special assistance, is very strong and very unlikely to be ‘ripped apart’ by the Quaker Yankees or anyone else.
‘I hope that Quakers are excluded from a future Dixie’:
‘Good, solid southern Jews’ are accepted, but can’t have any of those congenitally evil Northern WHITES, especially not Yankees that are Quakers….
‘Georgia wasn’t founded as a religious utopia either’:
I didn’t say that Georgia was a religious utopia. Nor was Penn’s colony a religious utopia. But let’s look at the inconvenient (for your ‘slavery-based culture’ theory) similarities to Pennsylvania of the Oglethorpe Plan (from Wikipedia):
‘The plan framed a system of “agrarian equality” designed to support and perpetuate an economy based on family farming (…) Land ownership was limited to fifty acres, a grant that included a town lot, a garden plot near town, and a forty-five-acre farm (…) No person was permitted to acquire additional land through purchase or inheritance (…) Oglethorpe negotiated with the Yamacraw tribe for land and became great friends with Chief Tomochichi, who was the chief of the Yamacraw (…) He then returned to England and arranged to have slavery banned in Georgia (…) It was Oglethorpe’s idea that British debtors should be released from prison and sent to Georgia (…) in fact it was Britain’s “worthy poor” whom Oglethorpe wanted in Georgia (…) many of Georgia’s new settlers consisted of poor English tradesmen and artisans and religious refugees from Switzerland, France and Germany, as well as a number of Jewish refugees. There were also 150 Salzburger Protestants who had been expelled by edict from the Archbishopric of Salzburg in present-day Austria (…) and established the settlement of Ebenezer near Savannah. The colony’s charter provided for acceptance of all religions except Roman Catholicism’.
The article also mentions that Charles Wesley was Oglethorpe’s personal secretary, but no mention of ‘radical utopian’, Indian-evangelising Moravians, who were also present. It all ended too soon as the Golden Circle closed in.
Incidentally, I am not a Quaker and have NO Quaker connexions. I do not support the present-day apostates who call themselves Friends, and I do not defend the many ‘excesses’ of George Fox and other primitive Friends. It is equally impossible for me to become an apologist for Slavery.
In case anyone didn’t read what I said above, I specifically called out the Quakers … who were known for doing this both in England and New England, where they were fond of shocking both Congregationalists and Anglicans in displays of their “humility.”
We live in a world of radical social leveling … a world where women are equal to men, blacks are equal to Whites, where racial distinctions are denied and even sexual distinctions like the biological differences between male and female are under assault. It doesn’t take much digging into our past to find out who in America pioneered radical egalitarianism and social leveling.
I mentioned above that the Quakers were pioneers of abolitionism and women’s rights. I forgot to mention that CORE was one of the leading civil rights organizations and evolved out of a Quaker group called Fellowship for Reconciliation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congress_of_Racial_Equality#Founding
It’s unquestionably true … Southern Jews had a long history of conforming to our customs and traditions, but radical utopian sects like the Quakers do not, but instead have a long tradition of radical leftwing activism.
Pick any crazy, utopian leftwing cause that involves social leveling and you will find Quakers in the ranks of its leadership as surely as you will secular Eastern European Jews. That’s why they were run out of Barbados.
Pennsylvania was founded as a “Holy Experiment.” From the beginning, it was launched as a religious utopia. Georgia, however, was founded as a refuge for the English poor. Similarly, Maryland was founded as a refuge for English Catholics, but neither Georgia or Maryland were formed as a religious utopias.
Yes, Georgia and North Carolina evolved into colonies with a racial caste system, whereas racial equality triumphed in Pennsylvania under Quaker leadership
Sure, Mosin.
The Quakers were banned from entering law or politics in England because they were recognized as being a subversive religious cult:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Quakers
Puritan Massachusetts also banned Quakers as a subversive religious cult:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_martyrs
Christians in the Apostolic age were also treated as a dangerous ‘subversive religious cult’ by the Romans, and also by the Jews.
Still you must give the first generation of primitive Friends credit for their immense influence and effectiveness in winning legal recognition of our God-given liberties — to an extent far out of proportion to their very small numbers, perhaps more than any other group in history, besides the Apostles, thanks to God’s grace and their ‘insane’ determination to endure persecution, imprisonment and martyrdom.
‘Georgia, however, was founded as a refuge for the English poor’:
Like Pennsylvania, Georgia was a refuge for the persecuted, but more egalitarian, with strict limitation of property — exactly forty five acres allowed to each head of household. Oglethorpe intentionally lifted the poor, not to use them, and banned slavery out of genuine pity for the slaves. He associated with the Wesleys and involved evangelical groups such as the Moravians. Unlike Penn, he was a military man.
‘Sure, Mosin’:
It can’t be spelled properly here, Hunter, since Mosin was banned.
‘Georgia and North Carolina evolved into colonies with a racial caste system’:
Yes, I should have mentioned North Carolina. Friends, Wesleyans, Moravians and German Anabaptists (according to tradition, Jakob Amman himself died there) all flourished on the Piedmont, until the ‘Golden Circle’ caste elitist monster matured.
‘Maryland was founded as a refuge for English Catholics’:
Establishing a beach head for Romanism in the centre of Anglo-Protestant America, clear evidence of absence of religious conviction in the monarchy.
Please give us a reliable citation for Quakers smearing themselves with excrement to make themselves look humble in England and New England.
Really?
I’m pretty sure there were already plantations in eastern North Carolina before the above arrived in the Piedmont.
Has the social order of the South ever been disturbed by Catholics in places like Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, Texas, Louisiana, or Florida? Let me think about it for a moment … the answer is clearly no, the Catholic fringe of the South has never caused us nearly as much trouble as radical utopian Protestant sects located “North-of-the-Line.” Even the Jews here haven’t caused us nearly as much trouble.
We’ve had this conversation before:
https://books.google.com/books?id=Sb40EosBr90C&pg=PT95&lpg=PT95&dq=quakers+excrement+england+american+nations&source=bl&ots=l4H2PqaznP&sig=PG0jLt9IFNG8QzQrW3Xo2bChRWw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=PDCCVdywIPPisATYpIOIDg&ved=0CCEQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=quakers%20excrement%20england%20american%20nations&f=false
“Ironically, its beginnings were far from ordinary. Like Yankeedom, the Midlands were intended to be a model society, a utopia guided by the tenants of an unorthodox religion. In fact, Pennsylvania was created by perhaps the most controversial religious cult of the era, a group contemporaries accused of undermining “peace and order” and “sowing … the seeds of immediate ruin of religion, Church order … and … the state.” Difficult though it may be to understand today, the Quakers were considered a radical and dangerous force, the late seventeenth century equivalent of crossing the hippie movement with the Church of Scientology.”
Pennsylvania was created as a religious utopia like Massachusetts.
“Quakers spurned the social conventions of their day, refusing to bow or doff their hats to social superiors or to take part in formal religious services of any sort. They rejected the authority of church hierarchies, held women to be spiritually equal to men, and questioned the legitimacy of slavery.”
Does this sound like anyone we know?
“Their leaders strode naked on city streets, or, daubed with excrement, into Anglican churches in efforts to provide models of humility; one Quaker rode naked on a donkey into England’s second largest city on Palm Sunday in an unpopular reenactment of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. Overcome with rapture, they would fall into violent fits, or “quakes,” that frightened non-believers. Many embraced martyrdom, repeatedly marching into unfriendly neighborhoods or onto New England town greens to preach or challenge ministers, reveling in the imprisonment, whippings, tongue borings or executions that followed.”
Here’s another source:
https://books.google.com/books?id=0g77Gf7qLZkC&pg=PT46&lpg=PT46&dq=quakers+excrement+covered+humility&source=bl&ots=MCYg7NeMYA&sig=OcHb_YnkyhW0L7jVPSktIb_Jfzk&hl=en&sa=X&ei=UzGCVZCxAaGLsQTynI7ABQ&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%20excrement%20&f=false
Here’s an even better source: Holy Nation: The Transatlantic Quaker Ministry in an Age of Revolution
https://books.google.com/books?id=opnMCQAAQBAJ&pg=PA13&lpg=PA13&dq=quakers+disrupted+anglican+churches+naked&source=bl&ots=WxZjVzkFbG&sig=ajCCl_wF3EJnuSbHko2A5CfKcEs&hl=en&sa=X&ei=izKCVZrKGPWasQSdgYHAAQ&ved=0CDMQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=quakers%20disrupted%20anglican%20churches%20naked&f=false
These were the people who founded Pennsylvania. They couldn’t have been more different from the settlers of Maryland and Virginia or many of the other ethnic groups – the Scots-Irish, Germans, Catholic Irish – who later settled there.
Everyone else who dealt with the Quakers considered them a subversive, radical utopian cult who “sowed the seeds” of the ruin of religion and the state. They were banned in England, New England, and Barbados.
Still you must give the first generation of primitive Friends credit for their immense influence and effectiveness in winning legal recognition of our God-given liberties — to an extent far out of proportion to their very small numbers, perhaps more than any other group in history, besides the Apostles, thanks to God’s grace and their ‘insane’ determination to endure persecution, imprisonment and martyrdom.
The Quakers had nothing to do with our freedom:
1.) First, they didn’t settle the Southern colonies in the same way they colonized Pennsylvania, and the ones that were here in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina gained a reputation for being obnoxious fanatics.
2.) Second, our English ancestors were already “free” in the 18th century. In fact, the hand of the government was never lighter in the South – either before or since – than it was under the Georgian monarchs.
3.) Third, if you are referring to American independence, it was the Scots-Irish in Pennsylvania who fought for it, not the Quakers.
Georgia was founded as an economic refuge for the English poor, not as a “Holy Experiment” by a notorious utopian religious cult. It was also founded as a buffer zone between South Carolina and Spanish Florida. The history of Georgia is nothing like the history of Pennsylvania.
Well, I see the notorious crank is back, hopefully not for too long. If he thought spelling his screen name backward was going to disguise him, he was sadly mistaken. The language he started to use from the very first day under his thinly disguised pseudo-nom told me this was our old troll back in action. And as usual, he contributed absolutely nothing to a post. If it wasn’t for Hunter’s responses to his balderdash, his foolishness wouldn’t be worth reading.
That treatment of Friends is as hostile, unfair and unreliable as any Catholic inquisitor’s treatment of Bogomils, ‘Hussites’ or Lutherans. So that is your only source for assertion that Quakers frequently donned ‘excrement to appear humble’? Perhaps it happened sometimes, but more likely as a living illustration of the New Testament warning of the ‘filthy rags’ of false righteousness — and the instances of ‘nakedness’ (I have read about only one case) like the Old Testament prophet who ‘went stripped and naked’ to illustrate grief or repentance, were undoubtedly from the waist up, not full nudity. Read the original sources, the journals of Fox and other founders before you rush to judgment. But as I wrote above, I do not defend any emotional excesses, weaknesses and failures of the early Friends. Also, your view that Shakers were a sect of Quakers is not accurate, and using Benjamin Franklin as an example is misleading since he was really an outsider, immoral, agnostic and quite critical of the Friends, though he supported the Quaker Party.
Don’t ignore or contradict Jesus’ teaching of peaceful non-resistance. Love and truth are more powerful than any physical weapons.
‘If he thought spelling his screen name backward was going to disguise him’:
Mr. Dalton, no disguise was ever intended. Having been banned as you wished, my comments would disappear when I spelled ‘Mosin’ forwards, then one day I discovered backwards. I disagree that my comments are ‘balderdash’ and contribute nothing useful to any discussion. They have all been pertinent to this discussion of religion in the southeastern states, but your personal attack is not.
‘Hunter’, it appears sadly we couldn’t disagree more about these things….
Yeah, I know, right?
What an unfair assessment of people who literally covered themselves in shit while disrupting Anglican church services. There’s nothing radical or subversive about acting like the 17th century equivalent of FEMEN.
Nisom, I stand by my assessment of your remarks as “balderdash”. Your historical references are always distorted or downright wrong. For example, to call the Bogomils “mistreated” shows your pathetic ignorance on them. The Bogomils were gnostic heretics who were subverting the Eastern and Western branches of the Church. Their doctrines and beliefs were things that any modern day leftist could embrace as his own. That’s why they were “mistreated” by the Catholics and the Orthodox. BTW, Wyclif, the so called Morning Star of The Reformation was a Bogomil. One only has to compare his writings with Bogomil works to realize he was one of them.
I’ll let the blog master and the Papist have the last word here on all these things, but God will not.
Hunter the whole confusion about Negro Citizenship Pre-1861 is because our 1787 Constitution established two types of citizenship, State Citizenship and U.S. Citizenship. Sometimes this meant a person could be eligible to be a State Citizen but not a US Citizen and vice versa. In 1789, Free Negroes were only considered non-citizens in Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia. Now in all of the new unorganized territorial lands it was assumed they would forever be non-citizens with no rights. As I have said before the USA Founders were very ignorant on the Negro issue as compared with the Confederates Founders.
Kentucky and Tennessee were admitted and both briefly allowed Free Negroes to vote, although by 1800 they outlawed it. By 1834, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, New York, and every New England State excluding Connecticut recognized Free Negroes as having a form of citizenship. North Carolina finally did away with this oversight in 1835 and Pennsylvania did three years later. By 1860, New York recognized Negro Citizenship if said Negro had taxable property, and all of New England excluding Connecticut did as well.
When Judge Taney ruled in Dred Scott, he was fundamentally correct Negroes could not be US Citizens but his problem was that he had no jurisdiction over the State Citizenship laws. The Confederate Constitution finally set this to bed and said that a person had to be a CITIZEN OF THE CONFEDERACY to be a Citizen of a State and be eligible to vote.
As we see many of the problems we faced then and now was because the Founders believed states should be supreme in all things. Now there are certain things that should have been placed into the Constitution from day one such as boldly outlawing Negro Citizenship and Interracial Marriage but it never was. This was left up to the states and even in the Antebellum Southern states there was confusion over what to do with certain mixed-bloods and indians.
Some states only counted Negroes or Indians as people who were registered as such or were visibly in appearance as one. The confusing part in reading those old laws pre-1861 is that in areas that were formerly French and Spanish, some of those places allowed Whites and quadroons, etc to marry which is downright bizarre but I think that issue mostly showed up in Louisiana.
Had the Confederacy survived, I think it would have as Eugenics became more scientifically developed clarified and straightened this mess of overlapping and confusing laws out. Unfortunately in 1860, Eugenics was in theory about 20 years away. What makes me sick is Science PROVED DIXIE RIGHT but 20 years too late.
Hunter is 100% Correct on the Quaker Issue. North Carolina was once beset with Quakers and these other Liberal groups and then expelled them about 1820 or so, most of them going to Indiana.
The Founding Fathers were way too influenced by Quakerism. In 1787 the United States had TWO cultural regions, New England and the South. New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania were a mis-mash of diversity. The Founders unfortunately liked the Pennsylvania model for the United States and threw open the floodgates of immigration.
If you look at the Midwest, you see the results of the Pennsylvania model. Everyone knows what a Texan, a Southern California dopehead hippy, a New York City Person, an uppity New England educated type re; Fraiser Crane is supposed to be like from television. Can anyone tell me what a person from Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana etc is supposed to be? Nope because these regions are DEVOID of culture which is why Hollywood sees them as American. American=Cultureless
The religious history of Dixie was complicated because of how it was settled. Colonial New England was settled in tight micromanaged towns where the Church ran your entire life. This was because of scale, New England was a tiny region at that time. In Virginia which was vast by comparison, this was impossible. The Anglicans drew diocese maps and assigned you to church districts as they also did in South Carolina, but the large distance between farms and plantations made any religious establishment almost impossible to maintain. By 1800, the South was considered by New England almost Godless and then the shift began.
The first thing that happened was the Scots-Irish in the backwoods exploded in an Awakening of Religious fervor never duplicated before or since. This movement then washed back over the Appalachians and Church membership exploded. The Episcopal Church, left moribund without state sponsorship as it had during Colonial days withered in significance.
The second thing that happened was Unitarianism and Atheism from the French Revolution hit Philadelphia, New York and Boston like a tidal wave. By 1830, Unitarianism had displaced Congregationalism in New England and officially made Harvard a Secular institution. Yale and the rest followed Harvards lead over the decades.
Unitarianism left the populace in these areas largely religiously dead. While Methodism boomed in the Northwestern States(Midwest), New England and her colonies in New York and the coasts of the Great Lakes, were open to new ideas and crazy cults, ie Mormons, Millerites, Oneida, Spiritualism, you name it. Atheism largely grew only among the wealthy and on college campuses. Then the Catholic Immigration boom set everything really off kilter.
The Bible Belt came into being in 1850 by the Census Numbers and by 1860 you had this scenario. You had gigantic religious growth largely in the South and to a smaller extent in the Northwest. You had religious decline in the Northeast ie PA to ME. The difference was in the South the evangelical religious growth had overtaken and largely won over the political class and Aristocracy and even the few old fashioned Aristocrats who viewed the Baptists and others with contempt had to show respect to them. In the North you had a largely religious class of common folks ruled over and dominated by a wealthy secular political class. This was largely because of the cities.
The oft-quoted Lincoln quote from the Second Inagural about Praying to the Same God should actually be understood to be this way. When it came to Yankees the Commoners prayed and the Wealthy Aristocrats laughed at them. In the South everyone joined in. Nothings changed really.
Hunter what Catholic Periphery is he speaking of in Kentucky the Cincinnati/Covington Corridor or Louisville? I do know of Saint Rose near Springfield Ky near Bardstown but Catholicism was extremely rare in most of Kentucky. Missouri I understand it was practiced by the Missouri Creoles at Saint Louis and down the valley but it mostly came with the 1848 Germans if memory served me correctly yet the vast majority of the population in these two states were Baptists. Louisiana and Texas are self explanatory, but I believe Florida that was mostly among the Florida Spaniard families at Saint Augustine.
Maryland was founded as a Roman Catholic refuge but by the 1770s it was largely like Virginia Anglican (Episcopal) The state shifted back to the Catholics with the Irish immigrants in the 1820s and the Irish and German Immigrants in the 1840s. Strangely enough the Know Nothing Party in Maryland was partly composed of old Aristocratic Southern English Catholics against the new arrivals. Maryland also lacked a large Scots-Irish-Welsh population. The original Maryland Southerners were 99% English.
I think this may be part of the explanation why every Southern State, excluding Maryland became the Bible Belt after the War of Northern Aggression. H.L. Mencken, a Marylander and by definition a Southerner himself seemed to be very hostile toward the hyper-religious culture of Postwar Dixie. The Maryland Aristocracy, who came through the war the least damaged, as most remained Episcopal or Catholic and with that came the more urbane and liberal attitudes which partly explains the Old Line State today. HL Mencken’s Sahara of the Bozart was brutal on the South.
Being that Nancy Pelosi is from Maryland doesn’t that by right make her a Southern politician? Food for thought