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Something like that. They believed it was important that everyone was literate enough to read and understand the Bible themselves, without it being filtered thr
by jandrewrogers 2y ago
Something like that. They believed it was important that everyone was literate enough to read and understand the Bible themselves, without it being filtered through a historically corrupt Church that engaged in selective representation and interpretation of the Bible for their own manipulative purposes. Basically, they wanted everyone to be able to go to the source to determine what was and wasn’t moral and Christian, instead of relying on assertions by self-interested third parties.
Regardless of if they achieved their religious objectives, that earnest mission to make every human soul capable of reading the Bible for themselves produced the social good of a literate population capable of reading prodigious amounts of non-Bible content.
It is an interesting consequence of how the religious wars in Europe spilled over into in the early Americas.
- robertlagrant 2y agoLike most social breakthroughs, this was coincident with a major technological breakthrough: the invention of the printing press.
- PittleyDunkin 2y ago[flagged]
- dang 2y agoPersonal attacks and/or religious flamewar will get you banned on HN. You can't post like this or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42712561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42712561 here. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
- throw4847285 2y agoI would argue the downside was that this perspective got secularized and morphed into the particularly American paranoid distrust of institutions that has caused at least as many problems as it has solved. In fact, I think the American obsession with homeschooling has those same Puritan roots.
- ch4s3 2y agoI think you can more readily and correctly connect the American distrust of institutions first to the treatment of the colonists by the British Empire, and later to immigration of people fleeing authoritarian countries. One also cannot dismiss the distrust in authority among put upon minorities. The British Empire was no less brutal in its American colonies than in other places. The Puritans were always few in number and were demographically displaced by later immigration around the fishing industry in New England.
- throw4847285 2y agoDisplaced in terms of total population, but the aristocracy of the US was mostly Mayflower types will into the 20th Century. I think some overstate the influence of Radical Protestants on American ideology with offhand references to Max Weber or by calling whatever their pet cause is a fight against "secular puritanism." On the other hand, I do think there are some interesting parallels. For example, one could argue that the mistreatment of colonists by the mother country was overstated by a population already distrustful of the Crown. I'm no expert, but it would be interesting to read more about that dynamic.
- ch4s3 2y agoI don't disagree, but the descendants of the Puritans stopped being Puritans pretty quickly. The Halfway Covenant was only about 40 years after they landed in Plymouth and there were virtually no Puritans by 1740.
- Gormo 2y ago"Pretty quickly" may be an exaggeration there, given that 1740 was a good five generations after the founding of the Plymouth colony, and they were still famously conducting witch trials only fifty years earlier. But it surely did happen -- IIRC, Adams and Jefferson were both noting in their correspondence how by the end of the 18th century most of the Puritan descendants had somehow become Unitarians.