And similarly with “Faith,” “Hope,” and “Charity” it is the repetition by family members that gives it its power, actual literal power, to mold consciousness.
I recall something about Jefferson writing an official declaration of religious freedom in Virginia at least in part to protect the Virginia Baptists from persecution (how ironic is that?).
Anyway, remember that much of the American Revolution was hatched in taverns and godless areas like Pennsylvania. New England defiance against England and the Church of England helped get it rolling, but it’s unlikely it would have gone to completion without the Germans, Scotch and Irish refugees who had been driven from the UK by the Puritans, the Quakers and the rest of the colonies.
Are you sure you’re not thinking of a different Cromwell?
I thought William Gibson’s Praisegod the Satinist was totally made up.
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The female equivalent to a Boy Named Sue.
Probably not. Oliver Cromwell has quite a different reputation in England (where despite his zealotry, he at least limited the power of the crown) and Ireland (where he’s seen as a bit of a war criminal).
I’m slightly alarmed by the thought that, had Iain Banks’ Culture been based on Puritanism, the ship names would have had to have been something like GSV Last Stop for Fuel before Ascension-into-Heaven.
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Parental hopeful-thinking?
And the nice thing about a name like Chastity is that if it doesn’t work out, it’s easily changed to Chaz.
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According to an acquaintance of mine, the only thing in America that cannot be traced to the Puritans is the founding and culture of New Orleans. (i.e., 'twas the Catholics.)
(A bit simplistic, but still…)
I met someone from West Africa (if not specifically Nigeria), an ostensibly religious person named Godbless. He may not have cursed like a sailor but he surely cursed like a non-Puritan.
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These must have gotten tiresome after a while. “If-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned you clean up this room right now, or so help me I will put you in the stocks, young man!”
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I mean his great great great nephew Oliver Cromwell that invaded Ireland in 1649 to crush the Catholics.
Fair enough. Do you have any examples of monasteries or churches destroyed by Oliver Cromwell in Scotland or Ireland? Serious question, I’m interested to know, I was never taught about this at school, though they seemed to go on endlessly about Thomas Cromwell’s dissolution of the monasteries.
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You kind of have to be careful how you use the term ‘Puritan’, as it has multiple meanings depending on context. It used to be, in England, all protestants were sometimes referred to as ‘puritans’, but there was only a small sect of Protestants who were actually Puritans. But in the US, it generally refers to that small sect of puritans who would have come up with these crazy names.
One good example - the zillions of Thanksgiving pictures with Puritans gathered around the table. Except, the Puritan sect settled up in MA, and the first Thanksgiving took place in VA, amongst a mix of Anglicans and Protestants. And they weren’t exactly socially strict in the sense that the word ‘puritanical’ conveys.
The word has become a social meme that is A)pretty darned innacurate; and B) only explains a tiny segment of Colonial people. That social psych theory only holds a certain amount of water. And even then, we see the word pops up again, just about the time restrictive values have run their course and pissed enough people off. The Victorian Era is a good example. The Roaring Twenties was the response. So was Prohibition. Bootleggers and private clubs were the response. And the hugely conformity-rewarding 1950’s. The Summer of Love and all that came with it was the response. It’s a recurring theme - but it doesn’t work to try to tie actual Puritans to the ‘puritanical’ thought complaint.
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That was a 100 Year Mess. It went back and forth so many times, it’s downright crazy.
Just for the record, Thomas Jefferson was, like Madison and Franklin, a ‘deist’. They simply believed there WAS a God - but not according to the definitions of any particular sect. MANY of those early VA families are interrelated, and many came from religious leaders in England. But the thing with the Baptists was that the Irish and Scots who were hardcore Episcopalians could not get ministers trained in the US for a long, long time because of the schooling officially required. And that one fact, more than any other, is what created the boom in Baptists. (In NC, they cut a deal with the Landgrave that they could just move inland, if they promised not to cause a lot of trouble, and he wouldn’t give them any trouble.) The Landgrave’s own family later intermarried with some of those protestant immigrants.
So, obviously, the Baptists were NOT puritans. Although, in practice, their beliefs weren’t really all that different. They actually had these committees, which would take notice of what they thought was bad behavior, and hold hearings, sometimes excommunicating members they thought were bad guys. Offenses could included anything from swearing or boozing, to merely twitching as if you might be dancing. So in that sense…ok. What we think of as ‘puritanical’, in the modern sense of the word - although, I don’t think you’d get too many hardshell Baptists to agree with you. Because, they don’t think they are uptight. They think the rest of us are loose, lol.
Ok, more than porn. But, with your definition of ‘fly’, it just gets even crazier and calls to mind something like Superman Gets Lucky. Or some new Jetsons robot helper, lol.
Now, if they meant, ‘flee-FROM-fornication’, still lame. As a girl’s name, you’d have to figure it would mess up her shot at ever marrying. Unless the fiance was precisely the kind of twisted kinkster the girl’s own name tells her to run from.
I still think I like my first idea best. No human probs, just flies enjoying themselves, lol.
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I’ve never heard that before. Puritans lads used to beat up Quakers for fun, at least in the USA, and were pretty hard on Jews and Mohammedans, too. And of course the Puritan religious authorities hung people and burned them at the stake for religious infractions such as witchcraft, and pressed people to death with stones for refusal to testify against same.
But on the other hand, in colonial North America the majority of Christian churches were congregationalist - they believed strictly in local authority over religious matters. The Pilgrims and Puritans were not exceptions. So yes, they definitely believed in free practice of unequivocally Christian religions. This later came to be a problem for the Old World Christians, when the majority of Congregationalist churches in New England became Unitarian (still a heresy in mainstream Christianity) and the famous Universalist (also still heresy) circuit riders began to convert the Western frontier. American Churches, with their emphasis on a personal relationship with the divine unmediated by pyramidal church hierarchies, were a threat to the income-redistribution and child-abuse racket that Old World Christianity still is, and it’s taken centuries of evangelism to drive Americans back into the old churches, and away from Unitarianism and Universalism.
Incidentally, when you read early American history, baptists are often identified as “Tunkers” and Muslims are frequently called “Turks”, even when they are not in any way Turkish. Just FYI if you like first-hand history best.
Thanks, Simon. And yes, I do very much enjoy firsthand history. Although most of my own study has focused on Constitutional law and Southern culture(s), so you will have read a lot of stuff I haven’t.
But I do maintain that the religious schism that occurred becuse of the differences int he way the northern Colonies and Southern Colonies developed eventually played a huge role in the War of 1865. Even today, we still see regionalism in action. (And even on Boing Boing in the comments, with some regularity.) It existed before that war, and then was enforced as the federal government got into the public education systems - another thing that becomes apparent when you read first person accounts. And it still carries effects, even today.
What’s most amazing, to me, is how we still participate in prejudices and such, though most people have no idea why. Unlike fornicating flies, hatreds and philosophical disapproval tend to survive.
That whole business with the Roman Catholic Church declaring all Protestants to be heretics was the basis for the 100 Years War in England. So, it wasnt all happening in the Colonies, by any means!
It’s not hard to understand why so many immigrants anglicized their names, though. To be anything but English, or anything other than Christian, was a social and economic sentence of huge proportions. I’ve seen most of this happening amongst the Italian, Jewish, Romany, and Germantown settlers. And that was all long before Ellis Island.
It’s not my definition: it’s the period’s definition. “Fly,” imperative verb, “flee, run from, avoid, do not do.” It’s not about moving through the air.
