FROM THE THANKSGIVING ARCHIVES: STILL FANATIC AFTER ALL THESE YEARS:

The fanatics who founded America (Simon Worrall, August 20, 2005 , Sunday Times)

RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISM of the sort that lay behind the July 7 outrages in London is nothing new to Britain. We’ve seen it before, or something very like it, in the early 17th century, when a fanatical group of extremists sought to transform England into a theocracy governed by a strict interpretation of scripture. These were the Protestant Christians remembered as the Pilgrim Fathers. [...]

They were known as Separatists because they planned to found a church outside the official Church of England. Sounds harmless? It wasn’t. In their fundamentalist theocracy pubs would be closed, maypole dancing and gambling would be banned, men and women would be forced to dress in a sober and godly way and, above all, the Bible would become the foundation of civil society.

Among the draconian measures later introduced by Brewster and his associates at Plymouth Rock was a law making it illegal to live alone. Solitude was seen as a breeding ground for sin and antisocial behaviour. Children and women — always a favourite target of male religious fanatics — were treated with shocking severity. A statute on the books in the Plymouth Colony allowed for execution of minors who did not obey parents.

By demanding religious freedom, and a spiritual life outside the control of the Church of England, the Separatists had lit a match that threatened to ignite English society. If caught, they had their nostrils slit, their right ears cut off, and the letters SS (“stirrer of sedition”) branded on their foreheads. At Clink prison in London (an Abu Ghraib of Puritan England) they were chained up, tortured and beaten, as they stood knee-deep in foetid water. Little wonder that Brewster christened his second child Fear.

In 1608 Brewster plus 14 adults and children, including William Bradford and his family, fled to Amsterdam on the first stage of a journey that would end at Plymouth Rock 12 years later. All except four of the 41 “Saints” who sailed on the Mayflower had previously been in Holland. [...]

Their attitudes to sex, God and the Bible would become the cultural DNA of the United States. Now, at a time when fanatics are seeking to turn back the wheel of history, when twice as many Americans are said to believe in the Devil as Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the most powerful nation on earth has a President described by The New York Times as a “messianic American Calvinist”, it is worth looking over our shoulders at the fanatics who fled these shores to America in 1620.

Yet folk are just now coming to appreciate how central that Puritanism is to even the Founding, nevermind the nation it created.

[originally posted: 08/24/05]

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 27, 2008 6:42 AM