Our blogs about
America's Wars
War on Iraq
War on Drugs
War on Afghanistan
War on Columbia
War on Philippines
War on Venezuela

MORE
Matrix Masters
Blogs
World Events
Katrina's Aftermath
US News
Bush Crime Family News
Science & Health
Earth News
Free Speech
News from Africa
News from Palestine
Bill of Rights Under Attack

Support Bloggers' Rights!

Lorenzo's
Random Musings
. . . about Chaos,
Reason, and Hope

 

Puritanism and the Bush Junta
(George Monbiot, The Guardian, November 9, 2004)
Puritanism was primarily the religion of the new commercial classes. It attracted traders, money lenders, bankers and industrialists. Calvin had given them what the old order could not: a theological justification of commerce. Capitalism, in his teachings, was not unchristian, but could be used for the glorification of God. From his doctrine of individual purification, the late Puritans forged a new theology. . . . At its heart was an "idealisation of personal responsibility" before God. This rapidly turned into "a theory of individual rights" in which "the traditional scheme of Christian virtues was almost exactly reversed". By the mid-17th century, most English Puritans saw in poverty "not a misfortune to be pitied and relieved, but a moral failing to be condemned, and in riches, not an object of suspicion ... but the blessing which rewards the triumph of energy and will". . . . the late Puritans added another concept. They conflated their religious calling with their commercial one. "Next to the saving of his soul," the preacher Richard Steele wrote in 1684, the tradesman's "care and business is to serve God in his calling, and to drive it as far as it will go." Success in business became a sign of spiritual grace: providing proof to the entrepreneur, in Steele's words, that "God has blessed his trade". . . . Of course, the Puritans differed from Bush's people in that they worshipped production but not consumption. But this is just a different symptom of the same disease. Tawney characterises the late Puritans as people who believed that "the world exists not to be enjoyed, but to be conquered. Only4 its conqueror deserves the name of Christian." . . . Ronan Bennett's excellent new novel, Havoc in its Third Year, about a Puritan revolution in the 1630s, has the force of a parable. An obsession with terrorists (in this case Irish and Jesuit), homosexuality and sexual licence, the vicious chastisement of moral deviance, the disparagement of public support for the poor: swap the black suits for grey ones, and the characters could have walked out of Bush's America. . . . So why has this ideology resurfaced in 2004? Because it has to. The enrichment of the elite and impoverishment of the lower classes requires a justifying ideology if it is to be sustained. In the US this ideology has to be a religious one. Bush's government is forced back to the doctrines of Puritanism as an historical necessity. If we are to understand what it's up to, we must look not to the 1930s, but to the 1630s.

posted by Lorenzo 1:38 PM