Wednesday 30 November 2011

The Original Winterval

I have been participating elsewhere in a most interesting discussion of the decision of President Obama to omit any reference to God from his Thanksgiving Message. Such an omission is really only proper. Thanksgiving was invented in no small measure to supplant Christmas, and the American Founding Fathers were not Christians. They were Deists, and their position is exemplified by The Jefferson Bible, from which he excised all reference to Christ’s Divinity, Resurrection or miracles.

However, the actual phrase “the separation of Church and State” does not occur in the Constitution. Rather, the First Amendment’s reference to religion was designed to stop Congress, full of Deists as it was, from suppressing the Established Churches of several states, although they all disestablished them of their own volition later on precisely because they had fallen so completely under the Founding Fathers’ influence. The 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, “of Peace and Friendship between the United States of America and the Bey and Subjects of Tripoli of Barbary”, was submitted to the Senate by President John Adams, was ratified unanimously, and specified that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion”. Although he attended Episcopalian services with his wife, George Washington did not receive Communion.

It has been suggested that Thanksgiving was a continuation of Puritan and older Harvest Festivals in East Anglia. It was not. Such things did and do go on in Europe, but certainly not among the Puritans. Next, you will be telling me that they believed in religious liberty. Whatever next! The historical facts are as I set them out. As Chesterton said, in America they give thank for the arrival of the Pilgrims, in England we should give thanks for their departure. A good line and one with various truths in it, but the link between Thanksgiving and the Pilgrim Fathers is a piece of fiction - at root, it is a lie. Arguably a harmless lie. But undeniably a lie.

Thanksgiving has been rather successful in supplanting Christmas, being the holiday for which people make a point of returning to their family homes and so forth, because the government of America started out as explicitly anti-Christian and has been terribly effective in de-Christianising its country, despite the First Amendment protections that every state then went on to relinquish voluntarily because they had fallen under the spell of the Founding Fathers.

However, since 1776 predates 1789, the American Republic is not a product of the Revolution, but nevertheless sits under a radically orthodox theological critique, most obviously by reference to pre-Revolutionary traditions of Catholic and Protestant republican thought, on the Catholic side perhaps Venetian, on the Protestant side perhaps Dutch, and on both sides perhaps at cantonal level in Switzerland, where it is possible that such thought might hold sway even now.

There simply were Protestant Dutch Republics before the Revolution. There simply was a Catholic Venetian Republic before the Revolution. There simply were, and there simply are, Protestant and Catholic cantons in Switzerland, predating the Revolution. The literature must be there, for those who can read the languages sufficiently well. Furthermore, there is no shortage of Americans whose ancestors came from the Netherlands or from Italy, and there may well be many who assume from their surnames that their bloodline is German or Italian (or possibly French) when in fact it is Swiss. It is time for a few of them to go looking for these things, with a view to applying them as the radically orthodox theological critique of that pre-Revolutionary creation, the American Republic.

Within that wider context, far more Jacobites went into exile from these Islands than Huguenots sought refuge here. The Jacobites founded the Russian Navy of Peter the Great. They maintained a network of merchants in the ports circling the Continent. Their banking dynasties had branches in several great European cities. They introduced much new science and technology to their host countries. They dominated the Swedish East India and Madagascar Companies. They fought with the French in India. And very many of them ended up either in the West Indies or in North America.

New York seems the most obvious place to look for them, being named after its initial proprietor as a colony, the future James VII and II. However, there were many Jacobite Congregationalists, such as Edward Roberts, the exiled James’s emissary to the anti-Williamite Dutch republics, and Edward Nosworthy, a gentleman of his Privy Council both before and after 1688. There was that Catholic enclave, Maryland. And there was Pennsylvania: almost, if almost, all of the Quakers were at least initially Jacobites, and William Penn himself was arrested for Jacobitism four times between 1689 and 1691.

Many Baptists were also Jacobites, and the name, episcopal succession and several other features of the American Episcopal Church derive, not from the Church of England, but from the staunchly Jacobite Episcopal Church in Scotland, which provided the American Colonies with a bishop, Samuel Seabury, in defiance of the Church of England and of the Hanoverian monarchy to which it was attached.

Early Methodists were regularly accused of Jacobitism. John Wesley himself had been a High Church missionary in America, and Methodism was initially an outgrowth of pre-Tractarian, often at least sentimentally Jacobite, High Churchmanship. Very many people conformed to the Established Church but either refused to take the Oath or declared that they would so refuse if called upon to take it. With its anti-Calvinist soteriology, it high sacramentalism and Eucharistic theology, and its hymnody based on the liturgical year, early Methodism appealed to them.

So the redemption of the American republican experiment, of which Thanksgiving is one of the great popular expressions, is clearly possible. But only by looking beyond the Founding Fathers and by submitting them, whatever the consequences, to what lies in that Great Beyond.

6 comments:

  1. I have been following that thread, it is exceptionally good. As you said on it, if I may:

    "Like neoconservatism, the Tea Party is strikingly uninterested in abortion or in the definition of marriage. For all the good that he did when he caused the godfathers of neoconservatism to liken him to Neville Chamberlain, Reagan remains the only President of the United States ever to have been divorced, his Californian no fault divorce law has since been adopted by almost every state, he appointed two diehard social liberals to the United States Supreme Court, and – read this one over until it sinks in – he legalised abortion in California. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” was Reagan’s favourable quotation from Tom Paine, to which Reagan added, “We still have that power.” As utterly unconservative a sentiment as his beloved, “I know in my heart that Man is good.”

    Where are the Democrats who can and will confront Middle America with these realities? Who is preaching for a decision between reading the Bible as if it were the Bible and reading the Constitution as if it were the Qur’an?"

    Like this thread, writing of that quality deserves a far more prominent platform so much that it surely must be given one sooner rather than later. No wonder your "Why you and not me?" brigade is turning vicious again, so you cannot tell the rest of us where that thread is in case they turn up on it. You should take it as a compliment. I have no doubt that you do.

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  2. It could not be more obvious why it should be you and not them, including several of them who already have these pulpits but see someone not only younger but a million times better.

    Professing to be mainline Protestants, orthodox Catholics or bien pensant atheists, they have allied with the Shachtmanites, Straussians, Randoids, Scientologists (Sharron Angle), witchcraft practitioners (Christine O'Donnell), Aqua Buddha worshippers (Rand Paul) and Moonies (The Washington Times, base of Nile Gardiner the Telegraph blogger and Romney foreign policy chief). And with Romney's Mormonism, for that matter.

    All of those can and do keep Thanksgiving unredeemed by reference to the traditions that you mention: pre-Revolutionary European Catholic republicanism, pre-Revolutionary European Protestant republicanism, Jacobitism. Not in the way that atheists keep Christmas, but in full. So much for the myth of Puritan roots. So much for Thanksgiving and the American republican tradition as Christian while still not yet thus redeemed. I would call you a prophet, if that did not make you sound like Joseph Smith.

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  3. Fr. Thomas Kocik deconstructs to shreds the dreadful Mass for Thanksgiving Day celebrated in the dioceses of the United States, which identifies the American Republic as the New Israel founded by the English Puritans. Wrong on all counts.

    http://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2009/11/thanksgiving-day-mass-no-thanks.html

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  4. http://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2009/11/
    thanksgiving-day-mass-no-thanks.html

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  5. Is this purely a New Rite thing? Father's article seems to suggest so, yet it is the sort thing that one can easily imagine went on in the 1950s.

    I have looked up the Propers suggested by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and they are from the New American Bible, even though the RSV is no less American. They also, rather oddly, have nothing to do with the Thanksgiving myth. Wouldn't you have expected Leviticus 23:33-43?

    As I set out, I am in principle opposed to celebrations of the American republican tradition. Once it has been redefined by reference to the pre-Revolutionary Christian republican tradition and to its own Jacobite roots. Liturgical life can contribute to that redefinition. But, as Father explains, this most certainly does not.

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  6. "I am NOT in principle opposed to celebrations of the American republican tradition"

    Sorry.

    But you will have known what I meant, anyway.

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