Sounds About White
Puritanism, White Roots, and American Racism from European Ancestors
Hello my lovely readers at the Fireside. Bring over your warm beverage and pastry, and sit by the fire for our little chat.
This week’s chat has been inspired by my thoughts about Threads and the intense amount of hatred towards Americans right now.
Americans are not doing enough. Americans should be rioting in the streets. Where is the American patriotism that we all knew from WWII?
Well, my grandparents who fought in WWII are dead. My grandfather would have been 104 this year.
It’s as bad as reading the armchair generals and couch activists complaining about how No Kings Protests aren’t doing anything…blah blah blah. That’s your opinion, bro.
I mean, can everyone see a seed root int the soil? Can we immediately see the changes from winter to spring? Is everything a visible act for you to condemn and bitch about? I mean, at least those people are doing more than your complaining is. I digress.
And, it got me wondering about, oh, you know, imperialism and colonialism, and monarchs, and religious groups that came to America from across the Atlantic in the late 1400s. All the worldly upheaval to conquer and submit “savages” to the civilized, Christian viewpoints and belief systems.
We, Americans, with our 6th Grade reading levels don’t know our history, and it’s quite evident. Lucky for you, I am a highly qualified pastlife teacher.
Where does the American Hate come from? Where does the megachurches and their racist views root in? Well, there is a history of religious groups seeking refuge in the English and European colonies….that’s what they told us in our US history books. They sought refuge.
What they didn’t teach us is how the English were so terrified of Roman Catholicism that they made whole romantic gothic novels about it. They had whole wars over it. They didn’t teach us how many Protestant Reformists were political millenarians (a belief that a group in an imminent, total, or terrestrial transformation of society often featuring a 1,000 year utopian reign [millennium] or apocalypse) influencing English and Scottish communities as clergymen.
It seems to me, by loose definitions, this reads like a cult. Also, it also mirrors what I read a couple weeks ago when US Generals were telling soldiers that their fight in Israel would bring upon the apocalypse.
In 1660, many of these splintered protestant factions left England and went West to the colonies because the Church of England wasn’t radical enough for the Puritans and because the English were tired of them.
We know them as American Puritans. These English settlers went to places like the Netherlands and America due to their desire of theocracy and “godly rule”. Many settled during King Charles I reign when the Church of England was acting more Catholic. Later, Charles I was executed.
English History calls it the Great Ejection after the Act of Uniformity of 1662 restored the Church of England to pre-Civil War constitution with minor changes. The term dissenter included Protestant Puritans. From 1629 to 1640, many English Puritans arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, no longer holding political power. They went to Virginia, the Caribbean, and other New England Colonies. Puritan rule lasted about 100 years in the America and it became the political and familial roots of laws, schools, and churches. Even Puritans founded Harvard University.
In the 1500s, Puritan came to mean a “stickler” for purity and rules. In English, it means “against pleasure”. I also learned that Puritans were a type of Calvinist and Puritans didn’t call themselves Puritan. They called themselves: the godly, saints, professors, and God’s children. They believed their “passion for truth was a cast iron product, rigid, definite, and complete” according to Matthew Arnold.
Even William Shakespeare adds Malvolio as a “kind of Puritan” in his play, Twelfth Night. H. L. Mencken defined Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
I write this as a preface for ongoing propaganda that is the racist, bigoted, all holy campaigns that rip through United States thanks to a bunch of unhealed racist, bigoted immigrant European white descendants who thought they were the only right race and made everyone suffer in spite of it. And I am not excluding Catholics, as we saw what happened to indigenous peoples who were forced into Catholicism thanks to the Spaniards that came to North and South America or the French to Canada and the Caribbean.
So, before the rest of the world begins pointing at America as the sole evil, I fear that European seeds trickled here from European wars and their histories of intolerance, bigotry, racism, and purism that scattered like a virus to each continent they touched. Their descendants brought their intolerance and biases with them.
These political and aristocratic landowning gentry who benefited from feudalism (a decentralized, hierarchical system in medieval Europe) believed they were better and far superior to the native inhabitants of the lands they “conquered”…in the Americas, the African and Indian continents. For Britain, imperialism would have included conquering Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.
The Sun Never Sets on the British Empire. After 200 years, the sun finally sets on only a few of its oversea territories. Any European country that sailed the Atlantic Ocean to claim an island or land-strip as a territory are part of the hypocritical dynasty left behind years of brutal sexism, racism, and greed.
Feudalism was a pyramid scheme where only the King benefits at the top with the promise of “protections”.
I write all this because even now, 250 years after the Declaration of Independence and 334 years since the Salem Witchcraft Trials due to Puritans, it runs deep in this country that immigrants seek refuge here from other callous people and ideas, they escape the cruelty of other regimes. That’s the story we have told:
“Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” - Emma Lazarus, 1883.
However, looking at European history…it seems that the American colonies were a place to remove inconveniences and then make profit off of them.
In times of division in this country — it’s a shake up between the ingrained beliefs in established hierarchical systems established by white men from the early 1600s. We are still trying to shake the roots from chattel slavery, which emerged in the 1400s in Europe with Slave Trade. (These countries included Britain, Spain, the Netherlands, and Portugal).
When we, as US American Citizens, do not understand the biased and bigoted nature of our history, we begin to repurpose it for new types of conquering and obedience, and it’s usually internalized because some of us unconsciously believe we do not deserve better and that we cannot change our circumstance. We cast a large shadow that comes to meet us now at the threshold.
Life is always about choice and what we do with our time here. It’s so much easier to be mean, cruel, and hateful then it is to learn hard uncomfortable truths. Some people would rather to put their heads in sand then to ever see the truth. It’s easier to avoid the hard things about ourselves then to deal with it directly and with compassion.
“White people who think they're the correct ones, news at 11”
The title of this article and the quote above are not my genius. These were shared with me and I had to include them in this article.
That’s why we’re here. People fear being wrong and being judged. They dig in their heels and refuse to admit mistakes. And guess what? People make mistakes. We err all the time. It’s the human condition. We cannot control how other people feel about us. What we can control is how we respond to it.
It’s so depressing to know that a traumatized and righteous people with outlandish rigid beliefs tried to force those beliefs on others who were not interested. They shackled them. They imprisoned them. They ripped their rights away. They killed others who did not believe in their rigidity or religiosity. Those beliefs become trapped in a long line of behavior from parent-to-child.
Of course, this is a brief introduction and general overview of invisible strings that weave into white America. When we learn about history, when we dive into the stories and narratives of people, different perspectives and points of view emerge, and we begin to see a fuller picture of human struggle and suffering. We also see the human spirit combat oppression from evildoers who long to shackle us all to their single, myopic lens of reality.
Where there are other pools and mirrors and windows and glass, there are other ways of living and being. Why else did people come to the colonies? When the prisons became too full, the British sent their unwanted to places like Colonial America (the Carolinas and Georgia) and Australia.
Now, we watch as some United States Americans revert back to a preferred appetite of cruelty. I see it online constantly. It’s so easy and thoughtless to point blame and say to another person, “You are unwanted”. “You are too much”. “You’re not enough.” “You’re not American.” “You’re not white enough.” “You’re not manly enough.” “You’re too womanly.” The spirit of the unwanted and tyrannical English Puritan telling strangers they are the “godly ones”, “the saints”:
You, stranger — immigrant — criminal — woman — dark skinned other — chained body, you must listen to just this point of view because God elects who is chosen for salvation: we are that Great Awakening. Unbelievers will die very real, horrific deaths and rot in the pits of hell. We are not worthy of God’s love, and neither are you. Women, you are subordinate. Other religions are excluded because their view of God is wrong. Indigenous and native people, your souls are not capable of salvation. Therefore, you are damned. You can be our servants and slaves, and mayhaps God will offer his kindness upon you when you divorce yourself from your heritage.
These are the beliefs of American Puritans, the roots of the Colonial America. The Puritans did not believe in the “just and fair treatment of the oppressed”. And these stem from European ancestors who traveled to the colonies to escape their own European penal systems.
We learn this behavior from our predecessors and, up to about thirty years ago, this country questioned our forefathers behaviors and avarice and tried to create a democratic system (albeit imperfect) for all its peoples.
In 1772, England ruled that chattel slavery was unsupported by law.
In 1803, Denmark abolished the slave trade.
In 1807, Britain and the USA abolished the Atlantic slave trade.
In 1833/1834, British Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act throughout the British Empire.
In 1848, France officially abolished slavery in all it’s colonies while the last of slavery ended in the 1850s.
In Europe, countries still struggle with xenophobia and religious animosity. According to the EU, 1 in 2 Muslims experience discrimination via hate both on and offline. Not only are they targeted for non-Christian beliefs, but also the color of their skin. A third of Muslims could not buy or rent a house because of discrimination.The highest rates of xenophobia are in Austria (71%), Germany ( 68%), and Finland (63%). Wasn’t Austria and Germany part of another war, that had high anti-immigration sentiment and praised whiteness?🤔
The Europeans are not different than the United States. We learned it from them.
So, the next time you see an angry hateful xenophobic post about how awful Americans are, just remember — Americans were the outcast Europeans that no longer fit into European Purity Culture. Even though Puritans were wrong in their fears, hatred, and rhetoric, they were shunned from England for not being “English enough” and “too religiously radical”.
The US anti-immigration sentiment in conservative thought is as old as the European continents that claimed land from native and indigenous folks hundreds of years ago. Stolen land. Stolen people. Human history is a wild thing to learn about.
And if epigenetics are true: it takes seven generations to move through a traumatic event in your family. Famine. War. Starvation. Genocide. Slavery. How many traumas do we keep reliving from our ancestors? Your great great grandparents? How much of that is playing out right now in our politics? Questions to ponder.
Thanks for stopping by and catching a chat with us at the Fireside. Enjoy your religious holidays and spring breaks. Until next time!
Resources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puritans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Ejection
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millenarianism
https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/u-s-troops-told-iran-war-will-bring-on-biblical-end-times/
https://njsbf.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Theme-One-Background-Info-1.pdf
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6857662/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinners_in_the_Hands_of_an_Angry_God
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/review/race-and-redemption-in-puritan-new-england/
https://freetheslaves.net/slavery-today-2/slavery-in-history/
https://fra.europa.eu/en/news/2024/muslims-europe-face-ever-more-racism-and-discrimination
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6857662/
How you can help:
Call your representatives
Know Your Rights: ACLU
Support Public Broadcasting - PBS (As low as $120/a year)
Information for Ongoing Protests
Read Banned Books: Most Challenged and Banned Books