Your Jesusland Ain't Like Mine
Here's an interesting passage about Hillary R. Clinton, condensed from one of the columns of Michael Kelly, who died covering the Iraq invasion. He's a conservative, but I'd say a fair-minded one. I think the observation is valid:
This is not a friendly reading of her, like I said, but I think it is essentially accurate. New England Puritanism played an enormous role in American history, right through the early 20th century. It, as much as anything, was responsible for the Civil War, for instance. My friend Jose and I have been discussing in e-mails the role of religions, and how they seem to have life cycles of enthusiasm, decadence, and cold decay. New England's religion would seem to be in decrepitude. It has faded into a set of pale established churches (Unitarian/Congregational/UCC), but it also has transfused its blood into a political expression, in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, which seems at times to be as fervent in its beliefs, and as rock-ribbed in its morality, as the old Massachusetts Bay churches were. In fact, if you look at the map of the last election, the "blue" counties seem to overlay a map of the current black church and the old Puritan churches and their offspring.
Glenn Reynolds, of Instapundit fame, invoked the Kelly quote in the process of pointing out some other qualities of old Puritans that play out in modern U.S. politics:
So, after the vote, the blue staters are raging against "Jesusland," but perhaps they ought to discover, and perhaps even embrace, the religious roots of their own agendas.
"The politics of Hillary Rodham Clinton are indeed largely liberal (although, the post election evidence indicates, no more so than those of her husband), but they are of a liberalism derived from religiosity. They combine a generally 'progressive' social agenda with a strong dose of moralism ...
"They are, rather than primarily the politics of left or right, the politics of do-goodism, flowing directly from a powerful and continual stream that runs through American history, from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Jane Addams to Carry Nation to Dorothy Day, from the social gospel of the late 19th century to the temperance-minded Methodism of the early 20th century to the liberation theology of the 1960s and 1970s, to the pacifistic and multi-culturally correct religious left of today ...
"It is concerned not just with how government should behave, but with how people should. It is the message of the preacher, a role Hillary Rodham Clinton has filled many times delivering guest sermons from the pulpits of United Methodist churches."
This is not a friendly reading of her, like I said, but I think it is essentially accurate. New England Puritanism played an enormous role in American history, right through the early 20th century. It, as much as anything, was responsible for the Civil War, for instance. My friend Jose and I have been discussing in e-mails the role of religions, and how they seem to have life cycles of enthusiasm, decadence, and cold decay. New England's religion would seem to be in decrepitude. It has faded into a set of pale established churches (Unitarian/Congregational/UCC), but it also has transfused its blood into a political expression, in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, which seems at times to be as fervent in its beliefs, and as rock-ribbed in its morality, as the old Massachusetts Bay churches were. In fact, if you look at the map of the last election, the "blue" counties seem to overlay a map of the current black church and the old Puritan churches and their offspring.
Glenn Reynolds, of Instapundit fame, invoked the Kelly quote in the process of pointing out some other qualities of old Puritans that play out in modern U.S. politics:
"Among them were a hostility to wealth - illustrated by sumptuary laws - a belief that the welfare of the community trumped the rights of individuals (Hillary combined both these aspects in her famous recent statement: 'We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good'). Puritans favoured dense settlement in towns over spread-out farmers - they were, in a sense, the first opponents of "sprawl."
So, after the vote, the blue staters are raging against "Jesusland," but perhaps they ought to discover, and perhaps even embrace, the religious roots of their own agendas.
