[Buddha-l] Re: Greetings from Oviedo

[Dan Lusthaus]

Richard replies

> > lead article in the New York Times Magazine.
>
> Actually, my source for this was Sidney Ahlstrom's <i>A Religious
> History of the American People,</i> considered by many the definitive
> work on the topic.

Which, I have no doubt, was also the source behind the Times piece. That was
just more recent and on my mind.

> That is not quite the case. Many of the swatches of land were de jure
> territories, but not de facto at all.

Good point.

 >A case in point was Pennsylvania,
[...]
> populated by folks who were not tolerated elsewhere in the colonies.
> Famously Pennsylvania became the home of many German pietists and
> anabaptists, such as the followers of Menno Simons and Jakob Hutter.

True, to some extent. The Quakers did tolerate some others (and became the
new homeland for the Pennsylvania Dutch [actually Deutsch, i.e., German] and
apple butter), but they were also intolerant of still others. They
eventually even became intolerant of their own, leading to a division
between the Eastern Quakers, and the more Protestantized variety (who live
in different places from each other today, the latter in the Midwest, rather
than PA). There was, among some groups, selective tolerance.

>Did you feel you were telling us
> something we didn't already know? Or were you writing this for the
> benefit of the multitudes of religious right Republicans who hang on
> every word we write here on buddha-l and model their lives on our sage
> advice?

Obviously the latter. The Ahlstrom et al. narrative is in danger of becoming
a metonymy for the full American history, and is being manipulated that way.
Lots of groups, with lots of stories and lots of motivations have crossed
the oceans to resettle here, and the "New Jerusalem" narrative is only one
of them ("there are eight million stories in the Naked City, This is one of
them..."). Blanketing all of US history in that metonymy is reductive and
dangerous. Geo. Washington, in one of his second term speeches, explicitly
stated that "this is not a Christian nation." I'd prefer to see that
rhetoric and its full discourse highlighted instead. That's what was encoded
in the Constitution, not the New Jerusalem.

Dan Lusthaus