From Pulpit to Democracy: How Puritanism Shaped the Soul of America (Sponsored Stream)

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:16):
All right, welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. This is David
Patrick Carey with Church of the Eternal Logos, and today
we have actually surprisingly very interesting stream sponsored stream. Major
shout out to Jason today regarding Puritanism. Puritanism is kind
of a topic. Usually it seems a little boring. It's

(00:39):
you know, actually I struggled trying to find some video
content for today's stream. But but I gotta say, actually
diving into this, I am no expert on Puritanism or
some of the religious sentiments and their influence on America
per se. So this research, this deep dive was actually
very interesting to me more so, and I mentioned this

(01:01):
to Jason more so than I was even expecting to
begin with. So shout out to again Jason for responsoring
today's stream. And we're gonna give his he's got his
own historical podcast. We're gonna give him a shout out
here in just a few I'll I'm going to have
it pulled up here when we start looking at some
of the videos and some of the links, and I'll

(01:23):
share that with you guys. But we're gonna be looking
at the puritan influence. What I'm arguing on the soul
of America. Now, this is actually a debated topic amongst
historians is how much influence did Puritanism have in shaping
the sort of American ethos, And it is a debated topic. Obviously, Puritans,

(01:47):
the name comes from their advocacy for further reform, and
so they emerge essentially during the English Reformation, So we're
talking about the fifteen thirties and such, were King Henry
creates essentially the Church of England so that he could
divorce his wives. But Puritanism emerging out of this cultural milieu,

(02:09):
it was very much interested in purifying the Church of
England from what it considered the detritus of Catholicism. And
so Puritanism never intended to be its own religion per se,
or it's a Protestant sack divorced from the Church of England.
Their goal was essentially reforming the Church from within. And

(02:31):
this is going to cause major problems. Anybody who's familiar
with the English Civil War and the fight against the
Royalist and the Parliamentarians, you're gonna be familiar how Puritanism
and this religious theological impulse. And I'm gonna give you
guys a historical context here because actually, you know, shaping

(02:54):
the historical context I think makes the subject a lot
more interesting. Because Puritans as a just generic, specific group
of study, I personally don't think it's the most interesting
topic in the world. But their influence, as I'm going
to try to make the case today, is actually considerably profound.
And I have four areas where I'm going to make

(03:16):
the argument that Puritans have shaped the general soul of America.
And I'm going to make those arguments in just a second,
but they go. The first one is democracy versus monarchy,
and again that's going to connect with what I'm about
to say, kind of setting the historical context of Puritans
in the English Civil War and all this stuff, but
their reluctance in their their admonishment of monarchy and hierarchy.

(03:41):
The second one is a revolutionary spirit. Is that because
of the intensity of their reforms, it never stops Puritism.
Is I would argue, I know I've seen some people
online in preparation for the stream, they don't not everybody
would make this case, but I would argue that pure
Puritanism are the skeletal bones of contemporary evangelical Christianity. I'm

(04:06):
going to make that case, and then number four, I'm
actually going to make the case that the radical modern
left or the progressive cancel culture ethos, that this is
actually rooted again in a sort of puritan spirit. So
the goal is to connect this historical phenomenon that really
I mean really by the second Great Awakening, so before

(04:28):
the Civil War in America, Puritanism is essentially massively on
the decline. Now, its influence has already been felt, and
it was a great catalyst for some of the Baptists
and the Methodists during that period. But when we're talking
about Puritanism today, really what we're talking about are these
groups of people in England that really emerge after the

(04:49):
fifteen thirties, and I would say the height of their
influence it's all before the American Revolution. And so the
most iconic American Puritan theological thinker is obviously Jonathan Edwards,
and so him being an extreme catalyst for the first
Grade Awakening, I would argue that was kind of the

(05:11):
climax of Puritanism in America, and really after that it
begins d Wanne because of the growth of secular rationalism,
especially during the founding of the United States. I mean,
really like the kind of twenty year period that includes
the founding of the nation. I would say, from you know, seventeen,

(05:32):
let's do seventeen sixty five to seventeen eighty five. This
is really kind of the beginning ethos of what we
would consider the American Revolution and then the founding of
the country. And after the Revolution. Certainly Puritans exist, Certainly
their influence is felt in New England, and their influence
is going to be felt, including the abolitionist movement, the

(05:56):
temperance movement trying to due away with alcohol in the
United States u usage of alcohol, and then feminism. I'm
going to explain how all these things connect. So it's
not an expansive history. It's not like we're talking about
even the Church of England, where there's a much longer
historical lineage. Here, Puritanism is kind of short lived in

(06:17):
its purest form, right for Puritans that are interested in purity.
So the purest form of Puritanism is really kind of
a small window. I would say, really about three hundred years,
I mean, and really it's great influence is probably less
than that. So okay, now with all that being said,
and now we're going to come back to its relevance

(06:39):
in the contemporary period. But first I want to set
the historical context of what's going on when we're talking
about these pilgrims coming to America and setting up shop
in Plymouth, right and New England area, and essentially creating
the image of what we now understand is the Puritan

(07:00):
and so imagine and I've talked about this before, Okay,
So Protestant Reformation fifteen seventeen, and one of the things
that is occurring after that period moving forward is that
Protestants kind of have a religious liberty in places like
Switzerland and Germany more so compared to England once we

(07:23):
start getting into the seventeenth century. And so I've talked
to you guys about the sixteenth century, the fifteen hundreds,
and I think this and it's probably biases because part
of my specialty in the field of religious studies is
looking at Western esotericism, the history of Western magic and
these sort of esoteric spiritual ideals. And I have always

(07:47):
talked to you guys about the sixteenth century being the
most magical century in European history. And this is where
we get a figure like John d the Great Alchemist,
the Great magician, and his legendary tails with Edward Kelly
and so if you guys aren't familiar, So this is
during the reign of Queen Elizabeth the First, and she

(08:08):
was much more of a moderate regarding this tension that
emerges after the fifteen thirties between the ones. The Puritans,
if we will, that want further and further reform in England.
They see the Church of England and they hate vestments,
they don't like the crucifix with Christ on it, and
there's the Book of Common Prayer. There's a handful of

(08:28):
really external factors within the Church that the Puritans want
to purify from. They want to do away with these things.
They view them as too much Catholic influence, and they
feel like the Reformation project has not yet been completed.
It needs to continue to go further. Somebody like Bloody

(08:49):
Mary marry the first Queen Mary the First of England.
She is very much on the pro Catholic side of
this debate, and so she ends up marrying like a
was it a Spanish prince and then she basically reinstates
the dominance of Catholicism back in England and forces some
of these Puritans to leave England and they flee into

(09:10):
places like Germany and France. Well upon coming back with
the reign of Elizabeth the First, they are now in
a cultural context where they're accommodated in the sense that
they're allowed to speak out against what they believe to
be the sort of drags of Catholicism left within the
Church of England, but as long as they didn't rock

(09:33):
the boat too much. But during the reign of Queen
Elizabeth the First, this is where we get a figure
like John D. And why am I talking about the
magic stuff because I'm trying to set the stage. If
you were a Puritan in the seventeenth century, what is
the world that you're looking at? What is the world
that you're experiencing? Well, during the sixteen hundreds, the fifteen hundreds,
we have again John D Edward Kelly. They create the

(09:54):
Anachian language. According to John D. The shoestone, this black
of Citian stone fall the sky, which he claims to
be a gift from God that allows him upon meeting
a man that had no ears, which signified that he
was already deemed to be a thief or a con artist,
so that wherever they went, your ears were cut off.
Everybody would know that you were found to be guilty

(10:16):
of theft or conning people for one one enterprise or another. Anyways,
Edward Kelly, this con artist, links up with John D,
who at that time is the court magician, the court astrologer,
arguably the most learned man in England you could debate
maybe other people, but very very influential, and he is

(10:38):
really becomes the archetype of the Double O seven, the
James Bond, because he would travel around to various royal
courts in Europe and he would spy for Queen Elizabeth,
and Queen Elizabeth allowed him and she accommodated his sort
of magical enterprise. And so the story with John D
and Edward Kelly is that they do these conjurations, they

(10:59):
do these ritual and vacations, and they claim that they're
contacting these angels and they're deciphering these messages and writing
them all this out and this eventually makes its way
over to the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Rudolph
the Second, who was a very strange type king. I
mean this is he again. He was kind of an
overweight man signifying his wealth at the time, very much

(11:21):
interested in magic and alchemy kind of allowed Bohemia to
be a ground swell for people interested in these enterprises.
You get people like Michael Meyer and the other alchemists
during the time. So he actually gives an invitation for
John d and Edward Kelly to come over, and their

(11:42):
goal was he was going to pay them not only
to conjure these entities what they called angels we would
probably see them as demons, but to actually transmutate led
into gold to complete the alchemical project. But for Rudolph,
he wanted it very literal. Obviously, you ask a contemporary alchemist,
they say, well, this is all spiritual metaphor for the
purification of my soul. And that was true, but it

(12:05):
was also believed that you could distill lead into actual
physical gold. Well, it turns out that enterprise didn't work.
Edward Kelly, the con man, their conjurations aren't working. He
convinces John d Hey, I need to sleep with your wife, who, again,
John Dee's very well educated, very high status, has a
much younger, beautiful wife and basically forces her to sleep

(12:29):
with the conman, Edward Kelly, and then John d sleeps
with Edward Kelly's wife again, funny how all this magic
stuff always ends in sex sleeps with Edward Kelly's wife.
Then they go to do the magic ritual again, it's
still not working. John d claims this is one of
the worst things that ever happened in his life. Anyways,
fast forward, he eventually goes back to England. Edward Kelly

(12:53):
is locked by Rudolph the Second to stay at his
court and he is commissioned to continue this trans mutation
of lead into gold, of which he realizes he's not
going to be able to do. He tries to sneak
out and escape one night, slips off one of the
Spanish tiles on the roof and falls to his death.
So that kind of encapsulates that little period. Now why

(13:13):
am I saying all this, Because it is in this
cultural malou where we get the Rosicrucians, where we get
the Illuminati of Adam Vaishop, and that the spirit for
esoteric spirituality was very, very deep after this Protestant Reformation,
because they thought they could incorporate her Meticism or even
Kabbalah Christian kabology of Anni Pikadella Marendola into a new

(13:37):
form of Protestant Christian theology. That wasn't tied with the
Catholic Church, their arch rival in many ways. So after
Elizabeth and John d goes back and he, unfortunately for him,
dies in disgrace and poverty. His wife never forgives him
for forcing her to sleep with Edward Kelly. But the

(14:00):
next person that comes in power in England is James,
the First King James the First formerly James the sixth
of Scotland and unites Scotland and England. This is the
King James that gives us the King James Bible. Well,
why we get the King James Bible because of his
accommodation to the Puritans in England. Because one of the

(14:21):
things that we'll see and one of the reasons why
even public education in America is rooted within product of
Puritanism is because of their immense focus on education and literacy.
And this is also going to tie into their influence
on the beginning of first wave feminism, is because Puritan
women were tended to be very literate because they were

(14:43):
expected to read scripture daily, they were expected to understand things,
they're expected to memorize things. And so because of this
formal education that women got in their community, literacy and
their role within the community was you could say, a
little bit elevated compared to other sex if you will. Anyways,
so James the First comes to power in England and

(15:07):
he very much doesn't want to rock the boat and
is much more of a sort of moderate regarding this
this tension within England between you know, the maintaining the
sort of vestment and the liturgical sort of ancient feel
and esthetic of the Church of England versus the Puritans
who want to purify. And the Puritans held societal influence

(15:31):
because they were the parliamentary parliamentarians. Many people in Parliament
were of wealthy status and they were Puritans. And this
is where you get the English Civil War and this
and this battle between what eventually comes from the son
of James the First, Charles the First, and the Parliamentarians.

(15:51):
This is where James the First shuts down Parliament and
then the parliamentarians eventually behead Charles the First. And so
it's in this cultural maleu that the Puritans actually begin
to leave England and come to America. Now, the general
commentary is that the Puritans came to America to flee persecution,

(16:13):
and that's not entirely true. The first settlement Jamestown, I mean,
obviously Roanoke is under Elizabeth, and of course that's a
mystery to history. We don't even know what happened to
those settlers where they killed, was a disease, what exactly happened?
The ships came later that year and nobody was there
in Roanoke. So the second settlement in Jamestown Jamestown refers

(16:37):
to this settlement being issued by King James. And so
unlike the general narrative where we think that these Puritans
were fleeing like the like the the threat of death
for their religious beliefs, not so much. Actually Britain was
funding their trips. Now did the king be it Queen
Elizabeth or King James, or Charles the Firs or then

(17:00):
later Charles the Second after the English Civil War? Charles
the First, of course, is beheaded. Did Charles the First
persecute the Puritans? Yes he did, Yes he did. But
my point in the caveat here is that migration to
the United States had already occurred, and the twenty to
thirty thousand Puritans that come after the founding of Plymouth

(17:24):
in sixteen thirty that was during the height of Charles
the First, the son of James the First and Charles
the First. He believed in the absolute rule of the king.
And so my first point here that I really want
to highlight is when we're talking about Puritans and we're
talking about their trip to America, we have to realize

(17:44):
that they are bringing a new world mentality. And this
has to do with their democracy and their animosity towards monarchy.
And so because of the reform of the Reformation, they
are constantly wanting to reform and reform and reform, and
it moves from the external factors of the Church of

(18:05):
England eventually to as we'll see theologically, to the internal
state and these conversion experiences. But then when they get
to America creating the sort of millenarian utopian kingdom. These
were post millennialists. So the Puritans believed and I didn't
even get into the theology. These are Calvinists, so they

(18:26):
all believe in predestination. They believe in the Five Tulips,
the five sort of principles of Calvinism, and they believed
that they were predestined to go to America and essentially
create the millennial kingdom that was going to bring Christ
back after a thousand years of this millennial kingdom that
they're going to create. So yes, they were being persecuted

(18:50):
under Charles the first who agains later beheaded during the
English Civil War. But it's a little bit exaggerated to
say that the first like the Pilgrims that came to America,
came because of they were under threat of it. No,
the British monarchy, I mean they paid for them to
come here. They gave them the ships, the Mayflower. They

(19:10):
are the general thinking. The way that I read it
doing the research is is that the British were like, look,
you guys are callsing a lot of ruckus here, and
the general disposition of the throne, be it a queen
or a king is to kind of like, you know,
not make too many reforms, like we're already kind of
done reforming the Church of England, although eventually they make accommodations,

(19:33):
which has been a continual, a continual pattern of the
Anglican Church. Now, don't they want to say that God's
no longer they don't want to use male pronouns, so AnyWho,
So I want to go back with the Puritans. And
one of the reasons why they're fleeing America is Frederick

(19:54):
the Elector Palatine under James the First, he had a
dollar Mary Stewart and his king James of the Stewart dynasty.
She marries Frederick the Elector Palatine, who he believed himself
to be the Rosicrucian king. Protestant king expected to create
a new kingdom in Germany, essentially converting what was the

(20:18):
Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg Power into what they
believed these rosa Crucian movements, the Illuminati movement, all these hermeticists,
all these alchemists who were Protestant. They believe that Frederick
the Elector was the one promised in the Rosicrucian manifestos,
and he was very much interested in this magic stuff.
James the First actually wasn't. James the First hated John

(20:40):
D because of all the magic he did, and did
everything he could to further tarnish James John D's name.
And even though his son in law, Frederick the Elector
Palatine was very much into this stuff, he did have
a close relationship with King James. Now, King James does
not come to his aid or his defense because it's
Frederick the Elector Palatine, who again supposed to be the

(21:04):
new king of Bohemia, creating this Protestant hermetic kingdom, fulfilling
the wishes of Christian Rosenkreuz. Right, this mythical figure that's
the founding of Rosicrucianism, which is really a perennial understanding
of like a sort of generic Christianity surrounded by a
perennial spirituality, really rooted within esoteric spirituality. And he loses

(21:28):
at the Battle of White Mountain. This is the beginning
of the Thirty Years War. So this is what sixteen twenties,
and so this is right at this point, we're already
getting Puritans in British colonizers coming to America. So this
is the culture m maliu that they're operating in. And
of course that fails. The Thirty Years War ends in

(21:51):
an uninspected way for these Hermitic Protestants, and the Puritans
see all this stuff and they want further reform. They
don't want any of this magic stuff, and they don't
want any of this Catholic stuff. And so this really
sets the basis, then the cultural basis for how they
come to America. And create the New England as a

(22:12):
Puritan hub. And so we're going to break it down
all that different history. But that's kind of the cultural
historical context where all this stuff is coming from. And
it isn't till seventeen seventy six that we get the
founding of the United States. So you could argue, I mean,
so from sixteen thirty, which is the second shipment, right,
it's not the Mayflower and the Pilgrims of Plymouth that

(22:32):
comes earlier. It's the second shipment of people under j
of Charles, the first where we get twenty to thirty
thousand more Puritans come to the New England area. Now
they have a thriving community of people in One of
the things that the Puritans did is they were very
well educated, and we're going to see this. Even talking
about Jonathan Edwards, I mean Jonathan Edwards, and he really

(22:57):
is emblematic of a man between two periods, because this
period between the sixteen hundreds and until that, the American Revolution,
the American Revolution of my mind, is really the entrance
into full modernity, full modernism with the scientific rationalism, democracy,

(23:18):
progressive ideology, all these things that I've talked about, These
pillars of what the modern mindset is. And so because
Jonathan Edwards exists really at the beginning of the seventeen hundreds,
he exists between two worlds, and the Puritans are bringing
this new world mentality where they're no longer interested in

(23:39):
the divine right of kings right back in the old world,
back in Europe before they came to America, it was
just commonly accepted, even still in the seventeenth century the
sixteen hundreds, that the king was divinely appointed by God,
and that Christians, even Protestants under King Henry Catholic Orthodox

(24:01):
believe that the king or the emperor was divinely appointed
in that whether how immoral or moral they were, this
was reflective of the piety and the sanctity of the people,
so that their judgment is based on the people who
rule it. This is a biblical understanding. The Puritans were
not interested in this anymore. And this has to do

(24:22):
with the rereading of Romans right when when Paul tells
you essentially not to try to overthrow the government, that
is this is God's providence. The Puritans had to struggle
with this because, especially during the English Civil War, they're
interested in reform, reform, constant reform. Let's change things. We
got to purify things, because for them, theologically civil society

(24:46):
and their moral theology are intricately tied. And that this
is why they believed America was going to be the
shining city on a hill, right, because it was going
to be a place where these Puritans, for these reformers,
these Calvinists, these predestined elect right. So imagine this, these
these Puritans, and this is where you got to give

(25:07):
them credit. I mean, they're literally going across the Atlantic
to an unknown world with their wives and their children too.
In their minds, they are divinely elected by God. They
are what they would believe as the visible Saints. So
they don't believe in saints the same way that we
Orthodox do. They believe the practicing reformers are the visible Saints,

(25:28):
that they are predestined to come to America and create
the millennial Kingdom. Now, this, I would argue, is a
central feature and Puritan residue within America today. So let
me lay out now some of the are what I
consider the four biggest influences that Puritanism. Puritanism has had

(25:48):
in America and continues to exert to today. That's a
that's enough on the sort of historical contact, and we're
gonna come back to the historical context so that I
got a video that's gonna give you pictures and things
to express the things that I was just talking about.
But the number one thing that I would say is
one of the greatest influences of Puritanism on the American soul.

(26:10):
And I don't mean my soul, although it certainly affects
us in our disposition, it expects our affects our paradigm
and our worldview. I would say the American soul as
a nation. Number one is the privileging of democracy over monarchy.
This is the basis of the English Civil War that
these people are fleeing from, is that they are ready

(26:32):
to do away with this king. They view the king
as tyrannical. They're against hierarchy, right, so the Puritans don't
have bishops in the same way. This was another riff
that was occurring in the Church of England because the
Puritans who are in the Church of England are criticizing
the Church of England for its hierarchical structure, and so
the Puritans saw democracy then as a covenant with God.

(26:54):
In a sense, because of their anti hierarchical thoughts, they
replace the body of Christ, meaning the Orthodox Church. For us,
we are the body of Christ. They replace the Church
per se with the polity of civic society. They are
now the body of Christ, and they are going to
reflect their predestined elect status through the changing and the

(27:16):
reforming of society. This is why you're going to see
Puritans related to the abolitionist movement, the educational reforms, the
temperance movement, the feminist movement, all these different things Puritans,
or at least Puritan influence is going to effect because
deep within this theology is we have to reform societies

(27:36):
by reforming ourselves and being pious Christian followers of Jesus Christ,
so that we can then build the millennial kingdom, so
Christ will come back after that existed four thousand years.
As I said, these are post millennialists. And so this
is really the new world mentality. This is shaping the
American disposition towards authority and towards monarchy and towards kings. Right.

(28:00):
So even today it's so common and I grew you know,
we grow up in this water. We swim in this
water that it's really hard to notice this American spirit
that is anti authoritarian or anti really hierarchical, and Puritanism
was shaped by this. They had local congregations that were

(28:20):
ruled by the majority, so that when a situation came up,
two hundred and three hundred people would cast a vote.
Whatever the majority ruled was, that was decision made, and
that was seen as God sort of working within the community.
So when we look at evangelical Christianity, this is the

(28:41):
continuation of the Puritan mindset and the Puritan ecclesiology. And
so this mentality of that democracy is somehow sanctified by God.
Or you can call it republican or democratic, whatever you
know word you want to use. I have a whole
stream breaking down the difference between democracy and report public
looking at Athens and Rome and all this different stuff.

(29:04):
But it doesn't matter which adjective or descriptor you want
to use. The democracy was viewed by these Puritans as
divine system and that it in what it did was
did away with the hierarchical threat that they viewed. So
this is a new world mentality versus the old world mentality. Again,

(29:26):
I would argue this is modernism versus premodernism and premodernism.
The king was there because God wanted him to be there,
and if he was good or bad, that was based
on the will or the status of the people, and
this is a sort of divine judgment. The Puritans aren't
interested in this anymore because they're elected, and that's why
they had so much animosity with the Armenians, the Armenianism,

(29:50):
because that was a Jacobis Arminius of the Netherlands. He
was one of these other reformers, and so he was
not he beaved in free will. This where you get
something like the Methodists adopt more of an Arminianism that yeah,
God has fore knowledge of the future, but you still
have free will to affect things. And God's salvation is

(30:13):
open to anybody, it's just whether you choose it or not. Well,
for these Calvinists and for these Puritans, everything's totally predestined,
and so you either part of the elect or you're not.
And Puritan ecclesiology viewed themselves as the elect, and therefore
they had a moral obligation to perfect society, and they

(30:35):
did this through the democratization of their churches themselves. So
remember Puritans back in England were still part of the
Church of England. When they get to New England and America,
now they have their ability to structure their own churches,
and what do they do. They totally democratize it. They
do not have bishops. They're not interested in authority. But

(30:55):
I will say, unlike what happens in the Second Grade Awakening,
that a lot of uneducated people kind of become ministers,
and the Second Grade Awakening, this spiritual revival of Christianity,
Puritans were actually very highly educated. And a perfect example
is Jonathan Edwards. As I said, he existed between these
two worlds of like the old world mentality and the Enlightenment.

(31:20):
The Enlightenment comes a little bit later, but it was
already influencing that period a scientific rationalism. I mean the
Royal Society, the official institution of what we consider modern
secular science is in sixteen sixty in England, in London
sixteen sixty. So Jonathan Edwards being essentially a second to

(31:41):
third generation American, right this is before the Revolution, he
was highly educated. He wrote actually something on spiders. He
was really into what at that time science and natural
observation of nature, and so through natural observation, I there
was a thing that I I read. At eleven years old,

(32:02):
he wrote some type of scientific work explaining how science
spider's move. Now, well, it's an accurate but the fact
that eleven year old could write something that would actually
be published in the newspaper for the general populace demonstrates
how much emphasis education was. And he was not against science.
He believed science validated his Puritan Calvinist worldview. But again,

(32:27):
he's such an interesting figure because he's right in between
what we would consider the Enlightenment deism of the Founding
Fathers and the sort of scarlet letter Salem witch Trial
puritanical spirit of the Puritans. He's right in the middle,
and this is where we get the first grade awakening,
which we're going to go over today. So he was

(32:50):
to give Jonathan Edwards credit was a he published something
again at thirteen years old. He ended up working under
his grandfather, Solomon Studdard, who was the Puritan pastor there
in New England, and Jonathan Edwards at at like late
teen's early twenties, was the priest or, not the priest,

(33:13):
the pastor scholar, and he was there basically to give
theological answers for questions not just from other pastors, but
also from the general population. So his job was just
to be as educated as possible, to read and understand
the world as much as possible, especially his Calvinist theology.
He also was from my reading and looking into him,

(33:33):
I'm not a big expert on Jonathan Edwards, so this
stream caused me to dive into him because in my opinion,
he was the most iconic figure during this whole movement,
and he was, from all intentsive purposes, a great husband.
He married a woman I believe her name is Sarah,
and from most historians, he was a devoted, loving Christian husband,

(33:53):
had multiple multiple children, and was a good father. So
even though we get the sort of fire and brimstone own,
you know, sinners in the hands of an angry God sermon,
I'm going to provide a little bit of context on
how that was received in what was going on because
during that time Jonathan Edwards again, imagine he's one of
the most educated men living in his society at the time,

(34:17):
his grandfather, Solomon Stuttered, is wanting to get more people
to become Puritans. The problem was to have full membership
into the Puritan Church in New England, you had to
have it. You had it described usually through written unless
they're you know, usually through written testimony, a conversion experience,

(34:38):
and so you could make your confession of faith, you
could be a daily attendee to the to the services,
but unless you had some powerful conversion experience, you couldn't
be a full member. And so Solomon Jonathan Edwards grandfather,
he wanted to then democratize the Eucharist. Now, as I'm
going to point out, the Puritans, just like the the Evangelicals,

(35:00):
and where the Evangelicals get it. It is a word
centered worship. It's not a sacramental centered worship like Orthodoxy
or the Catholic Church. It is a word centered worship,
as most Protestants are. But even then they still had
the sacrament of the Eucharist. And Jonathan Edwards actually you know,
obviously were Orthodox. But to give him credit, he said

(35:22):
hell no to his grandfather and he got kicked out
of the church, the community he grew up in, because
they voted on it. They kicked him out because he
was saying that the eucharists should only be for members
of the church. This is not something that we should
democratize and allow people in the street to partake and
hoping that they'll begin to come to the church so
that we'll have more people in the pews. And his

(35:45):
grandfather he was very much in favor of sort of
making it a little bit easier for people to come
into the church. So the first grade Awakening, one of
the things that propelled it is Jonathan Edwards as a Puritan.
He is wanting to revive the Christian spirit in America.
America was becoming wealthy, you could say, and certainly obviously

(36:05):
different from twenty first century, but it was becoming a
bit decadent. And the second the third generations Americans were
not as religiously on fire as their ancestors were. It
was kind of they were getting a little bit more
moderate Christianity. Their convictions weren't as firm or weren't as fierce.
And Jonathan Edwards thought this was a problem because in

(36:27):
his Protestant in his Puritan world, they were destined to
create the city on the hill. We got to get
God's fire lit in these people's butt so they'll start
reforming society and make this thing better. And that's part
of what the first Great Awakening is. It's providing the
opportunity for people to have this conversion experience so that

(36:48):
they could then become full members of the Puritan Church.
Now there's other denominations that it's not just Puritanism, but
for today's stream, Jason requests that we just focused on
Puritanism and its influence on early America. So there's that.
And so these Puritan Christian communities were totally locally autonomous.
As I said, there's no bishops, there's no jurisdictions, there's

(37:10):
no dioceses. The communities are completely rooted within democratic consensus
majority rule. Whatever the church community rules as majority, that
is it that is the will of God that the
Church has spoken. And because of this, church and state
are intricately linked because their civil responsibilities are tied to

(37:32):
their moral theology. Therefore, there isn't this secularism that we're
going to see grow after the founding of the nation
from the founding fathers. That's not really there. And in fact, Americas,
one of the videos I'll show you, they had state churches.
That was not, you know, uncommon at the time. But anyways, anyways,

(37:55):
so the first one, the number one influence, the number
one influenced Pureism has had on contemporary America and the
contemporary American mind is this idea that democracy is somehow
divinely inspired, and that monarchy and these these more ancient
systems of governmental structure, these are deleterious, These are authoritarian.

(38:19):
These are ways in which the reforming spirit of the
Christian becomes entrapped by tradition, and therefore democracy is the
only way in which people can have full liberty. This
is part of the Puritan spirit. This is absolutely rooted
in America. I mean, when George Bush was talking about,
you know, bombing Saddam Hussein, what's he's talking about, We're

(38:41):
gonna make the Middle Ages democratic? Why? Because America rooted
in the American ethos is this idea that somehow American
democracy or spreading democracy is inspired by God. And we
then are living out through these social reforms of instituting
democracy in places where it doesn't exist. We are spreading

(39:04):
God's dominion on the planet. That is intricately related back
to the Puritans who founded this country. Number two, my
second point, now, these are just mine. These four points
are the ones that I've come up with. So you know,
if you're asking for you know, what scholar did you
it's not. These are just my takeaways for my presentation,

(39:24):
So you know, do with that what you will. I
would argue number one is democracy over monarchy. Number two
is the reform and the revolutionary spirit. And what do
I mean by that? As John Winthrop said, America was
destined to be the shining city on the hill. This
was supposed to be the endpoint of history. The American

(39:47):
as a historical person was one that was emancipated from
the confines of history. This was the expectation that the
American was somebody who wasn't relegated to historical animosities and
historical contexts. That this was the point in which we
could begin new This was the new Garden of Eden,

(40:08):
this is the new Jerusalem. And that language was utilized
immensely by the Puritans and other Christians, other Protestants, and
it still influences in modern evangelical Christianity. And we're gonna
come back to Zionism and stuff like that here in
a bit. But Puritans, as I said, felt, excuse me,

(40:35):
excuse me, guys, smash that like for everybody who's here.
And if you have any questions you'd like to support
the stream, please send in a super chat. In fact,
let me create a goal real quick. I don't even
have a goal setup. Sorry, something got in my throat.
Not sure what that was. We'll make it twenty okay, okay.

(41:11):
So Puritans felt that the Reformation, as I was talking
about regarding the Church of England, did not go far enough,
and that they were billed to call a literal utopia,
which was the destiny of America, and that through their
reforms they were continually going to perfect society. So for them,

(41:32):
and this is where we wouldn't even disagree as Orthodox Christians,
they viewed sin both personal sin having collective societal consequences,
and this is all rooted and they were very very
rigid on a moral absolutism, which you could say is
totally absent in America. I mean, we now live in

(41:54):
a relativistic morality. But to give credit to the Puritans,
they had a very strict moral absolutism, and that they
believe the transgression of sin not only affected the soul
of the individual, which is also Orthodox theology, but they
believe that it affected society as a whole, and it
brought society to a further and further deleterious place. So

(42:19):
therefore any perceived injustice within society must be reformed. This
is where we see the Puritans begin to be vocal
about the abolitionist movement. In fact, many abolitionists come from
the New England area, and so this is all rooted
within again their theological vision about moral absolutism, the millenary

(42:41):
and destiny of America, and how they got to get
their neighbors to get in line, because if you're living
a debochroous life, you're going to cause judgment on the nation.
And so this is the same argument you can make
about gay marriage. Right, was it twenty twelve? Gay marriage
was legalized two thousand fourteen. Actually it's twenty fourteen. Gay

(43:02):
marriage was eleven years ago. Guys, look where we're at now.
They're castrating children and giving them puberty blockers. And people said,
that's a slippery slope. And then people respond, what happens
in your bedroom, you know, doesn't matter. The Puritans, I think,
like us conservative traditional Christians, they would say, no, what
you do in your bedroom absolutely has an effect on society.

(43:24):
We cannot allow this stuff to exist. Oh, twenty fifteen. Okay,
so fourteen fifteen around there. So they was saying what
you do in your bedroom, how what you do in
your private life absolutely has an influence on society, and
we need to curtail these things. We need a society
of pious people. So they're influence in the abolitionist movement,

(43:47):
their influence on feminism because Puritan women were highly literate,
as I talked about, within their Puritan communities, they were
encouraged to go seek social reform, go protests, go to
different movements, go sit in different places where they're discussing
the latest thing that needs to be done, and one

(44:08):
of them was the temperance movement. So they saw alcohol
as a moral sin. They saw it as essentially a
social evil that existed, that it was a social evil
that needed to be done away with. And so the

(44:29):
moral reformers emphasized self control, sobriety and industry. This was
how the Puritans they would again advocate for the abolition
of not just slavery, but the usage of alcohol and
encourage self control, sobriety and industry, and wanted a total
societal wide reform from the moral and social evil of alcohol. Also,

(44:53):
the educational reform. Right, This is why the Puritans are
tied with these huge movements educational reform is that Puritans
were committed to universal literacy. They believed it to be
essential because again being Calvinist and being believing in you know, predestination,
all these different things. You needed to be literate to
read the scripture. If you weren't literate, you know, you,

(45:15):
you probably weren't of the elect So that's on you,
Well technically it was on God from their worldview, but
because you needed to learn how to read so you
could actually do your daily scripture reading, in journaling and
stuff like that. These spiritual practices that I'll get to
in just a second of influence contemporary evangelical Christianity. So
Horace Mann, who's considered the founder of public education in America,

(45:39):
literally comes from Puritan New England stock. He comes from
these people that settled here for multiple generations, again imbued
with this Puritan worldview about social reform and then universality.
Puritanism is even it's morally absolute, but it has this
universalist etho because it's so focused on the millennial period.

(46:03):
It's it's focused on creating Christ's millennial kingdom. And so
I would say that the second big influence that Puritanism
has had in America is this idea that to purify America,
to make America better than it had been years previously,

(46:24):
we have to continually reform it with new movements. Right
for them, it was the abolitionist movement, it was the
temperance movement, it was the feminist movement, it was the
educational movement. Why were the Puritans behind these Because we
have to reform society to get to the millennial kingdom.
And I would argue that that is still absolutely in
effect within the American ethos, that Americans are still colored

(46:48):
by this revolutionary spirit, that America is a democratically destined
gifts from God, and because of that they need to reform,
have new moved move change things. I mean in number
four here, I'm getting ready to argue that the modern left,
the progressive left, is rooted within this Puritan legacy, and

(47:08):
that's one of the reasons why they're so interested in
social justice, although obviously it's secularized and divorced from Christianity.
So that was number two. The reforms and the revolutionary
spirit that underpins America, and that even colors the American Revolution, right,
because why did the Puritans leave England. They left because
the monarchy was not allowing the reforms to the Church

(47:31):
of England that they wanted, and therefore they saw America
and the New World as an opportunity to start scratch.
So number two is reforming this revolutionary spirit. Number three,
I would argue, is that Puritanism is the skeletal bones
of contemporary evangelical Christianity. Now there are differences, obviously, they're

(47:53):
not exactly Puritan in the same historical sense. Hey, shout out,
slow boy, whiteboard throws in five dollars. Thanks for all
your work. Thank you, sister for the support. God bless
you and the family appreciate you being here and appreciate
everything you do for the chat. Slowgoid whiteboard. Thank you
so much for the support. God bless you, sister. So

(48:13):
number three, Puritanism is the skeletal bones of evangelical Christianity.
Puritans emphasized personal inward transformation, that you had to have
what they called a spiritual rebirth to be part of
their church, what modern evangelicals call being born again. And so,
as I talked about with Jonathan Edwards and his grandfather

(48:36):
Solomon Stutterard. He again, there was this huge barrier to
entrance into the Puritan community because you had to have
a conversion experience. It needed to be profound, it needed
to change your life. And this was signifying that you
were part of the elect that you were chosen by
God to create this new millennial kingdom, because look at

(48:56):
the experience God gave you. That is the show that
you were elected it. I would argue that this emphasis
on almost a charismatic spiritual transformation is the heart of
contemporary evangelical Christianity, and this emphasis on being born again
in the ecstatic forms of worship now where Puritan the

(49:19):
Puritans have a rock band. Of course not, but this
emphasis on this conversion experience has absolutely colored evangelical conversion testimonies.
And in the evangelical community, your conversion testimony means a lot.
And if you were really, really bad and now you're evangelical,
well look what God did for you, Like that's a

(49:41):
source of pride. And if you were just born evangelical
and you really never left the faith and you really
never apostatize or anything like that, you know, you really
don't have a good conversion testimony, which is really kind
of a prestigious thing within the evangelical community. I argue

(50:01):
that is rooted within Puritanism. Another one is the word
centered worship. As I mentioned earlier, so Puritans again moving
away from the Church of England, which would still sacramental
at the time. And you even have people like Montague
argue that the Anglican Church was ancient. He was trying
to argue that the Anglican Church somehow was tied with
the first millennial Church. Obviously people dismiss that. You still

(50:26):
hear Anglicans try to talk about how they're like Orthodox
adjacent and stuff like that. But you actually had people
like Montanesque make those arguments back in the day. But
what Puritans did is they moved away from the sacramental
focus of the liturgical worship and emphasize a word oriented
form of worship where the sermon the message was central

(50:49):
to the ways in which people were spiritually uplifted. It
wasn't a mystery, right, There's not a mystery in the Eucharist.
There's not a mystery in the sacraments. The mystery is
in through It's kind of a gnostic in the sense
it's in your irrational understanding of things in your in
your comprehension of the theology, and your place within the

(51:09):
chosen so word centered worship instead of sacraments. What did so?
The personal? Uh, these were things that Puritanism focused on
regarding your spiritual life that I would argue evangelicals have
adopted personal Bible reading, daily personal bibrary. Now, there's nothing wrong,
there's you know, being reading your Bible every day is

(51:32):
what every Christian should do, every orthodox Christian should do.
I'm just highlighting the emphasis that the Puritans had daily
personal Bible reading, journaling your spiritual experiences and your inner thoughts,
having reflective prayer slash quiet time and having and then
many of the evangelical modern devotional books actually mimic if

(51:55):
you look at some of the Puritan diaries and meditations
from that period that I've talked about from sixteen thirty
essentially to a little bit past the American Revolution. That's
kind of their heyday. If you look at their diaries
or the way that they constructed a sermon, all of
this is repeated within the evangelical community, and they don't

(52:16):
hide it. I mean they literally say that this is look, look,
this is what we're doing. We're connected with the founding
of the country. We're connected with the Christian heritage of America.
So this led to independently governed churches. Again, this was
a Puritan innovation. There were no democratically local governed churches

(52:42):
until the Puritans made this a thing within New England.
Wasn't that is an innovation that was a novelty at
the time. Right, Even the Lutherans they had bishops, they
had hierarchy. The Church of England had bishops, they had hierarchy.
It's the Puritans who come to America and say, look,
we're totally democratizing thing. We don't want a vertical structure,

(53:02):
we want a horizontal structure. And they again they believe
that this was allowed God's grace and God the Holy
Spirit to influence the body of Christ the community, and
so formal membership within the Puritan community is really the
same as the Evangelical community. You do have a formal membership.
You have to be baptized, you have to make a

(53:24):
confession of faith, and though not as much today within
the evangelical community as previously, but you had to have
some type of conversion experience or at least a conversion
testimony that was important, and so America was seen as
a chosen nation by God, as I've already talked about.
And so like Puritans, Evangelicals fuse their religious millenarianism with

(53:49):
a moral theology and civic responsibility. And this is where
I come to Zionism, Christian Zionism. That's one of the
next streams that I'm getting ready to do. It's a
historical overview on Christian Zionism. And when you look at
the evangelical community and you see their ah historicity right
there is essentially a innovation from an innovation of the

(54:12):
Puritans who came here and settled in the New England area.
That Evangelicals then gain a source of historical identity through
the Old Testament reading of Israel and then modern day Jews.
But the emphasis on Christian Zionists to vote for Zionists,
to support American defense of Israel, to fund Israel through

(54:36):
the billions of dollars we give every year, This mentality,
this religious moral mentality, tied with the nation state of
America and Protestant theology is very very Puritan, and I
would argue that it colors all evangelical Christianity, most Protestant
Christianity for sure. So my third point then, as I

(55:00):
was saying, is that Puritanism really is the skeletal bones
of contemporary evangelical Christianity. And we see that in the spirit,
the emphasis on the born again, spiritual rebirth, the word
centered worship, the democratized ecclesiology, and lack of hierarchy are
even being antithetical to hierarchy itself. Is all hierarchy is

(55:25):
all authority is viewed with suspicion. And then number four
that America is inspired by God and that those who
then participate in the civic life of America are participating
almost in a religious sacrament. It's almost a religious sacrament.
I mean for the Puritans, would they put it that way?

(55:45):
Probably not, but maybe very close. If you ask your
contemporary evangelical is voting a religious duty, I would suspect
at least fifty percent would probably say yes, would probably
say yes. And again, this is that residue from Puritanism. Okay,
now number four, number four, You're not gonna get this

(56:07):
one anywhere else because I haven't seen this one fully made.
I've seen people use the term puritanical describe the modern left.
But I'm making the case that the fourth great influence
Puritanism has had in America is you get the right
wing side, or the right of center side, the Evangelical
Christian Church, the Christian conservative Evangelical Christian Church, and on

(56:30):
the other side of that you get the secularized Puritanism
of the modern left. Now what do I mean by that?
The progressive left has essentially inherited this this ideal of
moral progress. Right, So, being a racist, being a misogynist,
or a sexist, or a homophobe or a transphoonte these

(56:51):
things are naughty, naughty things. And what do they believe
that that does to the society. It brings society down
almost again a sort of religiously purified understanding. And so
moral progress. Morality is changing, right, just as the Puritans
believed with slavery. Right, once it was okay, now it's

(57:14):
no longer okay. And that they have decided the Puritans
has deciphered absolute morality and then viewing the history of
morality as a progressive change to get to their absolute structure.
And this is done then through social purification. That's exactly

(57:35):
what the left is trying to do. They are trying
to socially purify you through the words you use, the
people you associate with, the things you look at. All
of these things are i would say, sort of colored
by a secular puritanism. And that's why, in a sense
they're puritanical. Again, that's where that word comes from, is puritanism.

(57:57):
They're puritanical about the progressive. But progressivism, as I've already
highlighted with point number two, reform and revolutionary spirit is
rooted within the theological doctrines brought here by the Puritans themselves.
Does that make sense? So I would argue that the

(58:19):
left even believes in a sort of society of elect
and reprobates. Right, So you and I are reprobates, right.
We believe in religion and we have all these We
believe in the traditional nuclear family, and that women have
a unique role in the home, and then men have
a unique role to be providers and engaging in society

(58:41):
and building things. Well, the modern left sees that is reprobate.
That's old, right, you're not up to date with our
new moral progress, with our societal reforms, with the new
ways in which we envision the world. Therefore, we are
part of the elect you are a reprobate, and in
fact you probably deserve to be canceled through cancel culture.

(59:02):
And so does the left still have shaming rituals. Absolutely,
the Puritans had shaming rituals. That's what again, the scarlet letter,
the sale of them witch trials. If you if you
were believed to have been, you know, messing around with
herbs in the field. And I'm sure some of the
women actually were witches, but we know for a fact

(59:22):
that some women were killed or hung and during the
witch scare, uh, and they were not witches. They were
actually maybe just getting herbs and stuff for medicine, or
knew how to do certain things. And this puritanical spirit
would kill them but hang them. That is exactly the
same sentiment the the the intensity of the modern left.

(59:45):
It's very indicative of the intensity of the early Puritans
who inhabited the New England area. And then of course
ritual purification, confession, public confession of your sins. You have
to apology you you said the inward as a joke
twelve years ago. Get on your knees and profess your
loyalty to the new moral progressive ethos and apologize and

(01:00:10):
then they go through the ritual. Right, everybody has seen
various public figures have to go through the ritual. And
now you're cleansed of your sins. Right, you've made your
sort of a ritualistic confession. You've atoned collectively amongst the
community or the public for what you've done wrong, your transgression,
and so and then, like I said, cancel culture of

(01:00:33):
the modern left, the idea that you just shut people
out from the town square. I mean Puritans were into that.
Puritan Now, again, as an Orthodox Christian, I'm okay with
blasphemy laws. I mean the puritan like stuff like this
that Puritans probably would have been on part with. So
I don't mean to over dramatic dramatize the Puritans as

(01:00:55):
everything that they viewed, everything they supported, was wrong. I'm
just trying to highlight the continuity between some of their
thoughts and contemporary America. But cancel culture. It's very Puritan
that the society has to be purified, and if you
violate that purity, you need to be out. You're out.

(01:01:16):
You cannot contribute to the town square. You're out, you're out,
You're okay, you're gay, you're out. That type of thing. So,
you know, Puritans, one of the things that they did
was police speech. That was one of the things that
I found because I started to dive in to see
like what connections can I make with the Puritan Christians
and contemporary of the modern left. One of the things

(01:01:38):
that I found is that they police speech to enforce
ideological orthodoxy, the Puritan theology. Now, if you just replace
you know, reform Calvinist Puritan theology with the modern progressive left,
it's the same thing. They're policing your speech to make
sure that you're in ideological conformity with what they deem

(01:01:58):
as orthodox. And so you have to use certain pronouns,
you have to use certain words. You have a wife, No,
you have a partner, You have a partner, Okay, be
a little considerate for the LGBTQ plus community that's also
here at this conference. This type of thing that you know,
you have to refer to people by their right pronoun Why,

(01:02:19):
because if I refer to a woman who's identifying as
a man as a she, I'm violating. I'm forcing reality
to confront this sort of social construction, right, this this
ideological conformity, very very Puritan, and so I thought. I've
thought of like three different phrases that's used by the
modern left and how they might be able to be

(01:02:40):
interpreted as from a Puritan perspective. And so first one
is check your privilege. Well you just you're a white
straight man. Check your privilege right now, Okay, you have
a history of racism, patriarchy, and oppression. Checking your privilege
is like, in my mind, equal to confessing your depravity. Right,

(01:03:04):
so they believed in total depravity. These were Calvinists, right again,
learn your tulip, the five characteristics of Calvinism. They believed
in total depravity. And so is that not a correlation.
It's like confess you know, check your privilege, meaning check
all the things that anybody who has looked like you

(01:03:26):
or even mildly tangentially related to you, all the bad
things they did. You better recognize that. And that's like
the Puritan saying, confess your depravity. Right, you are nasty,
You're a gross human creature. You need God's grace, right,
you need you need the grace of the social justice warriors.
Another one is we just need to do the work.

(01:03:48):
Do the work. Well, what is do the work? But
that means like being an ally. That was actually the
next one. I have, uh, do the work, do the
work of social justice, do the work of social reform.
Again central to the Puritan Christian worldview, I equate that
with sanctify yourself through practice. That's how the Puritan would
view it, is that if you want to know of

(01:04:09):
your if you're of the elect, you want to know
if you're predestined for heaven, well you better work it
out right now through practice. Buddy. You better be reading
your Bible, you better be doing your prayers, you better
be treating people nice, you better be doing everything you
need to do. And that's how you demonstrate your elect status.
And it's like, that's exactly so we have to do
the work. We have to participate in their social reforms

(01:04:33):
or somehow. Again we're a reprobate. We're outside the orthodoxy,
we're outside this moral ethos. And then the last one
I have is be an ally. They always say be
an ally. I'm an ally for the LGBTQ community. What
be an ally? I equate that to witness to the
elect cause. Right, so, the social justice, the progressive last,

(01:04:55):
they are the elect, they've taken institutional power. They are
the CEOs. They are the professors, they run the universities
and the institutions. And therefore the Puritan would say, look,
witness to the elect, cause you need to do what
we're doing because we're the elect. We're the ones that
are predestined for heaven. If you want to get into heaven,

(01:05:17):
you need to follow us. And I would say that
that ethos, that's that mentality, is totally consistent with the
modern left. So that was a long winded, roundabout way
to open. I did not expect to go over an hour.
I apologized. I literally thought that my opening statement would

(01:05:38):
be about twenty to thirty minutes. We're now at an
hour and ten minutes. So I hope that was useful.
Sorry for all that that long windedness. I probably could
have said that in more brevity. I don't know, but
hopefully that was useful. So now we got a bunch
of stuff. I got notes show notes on it. We're

(01:05:58):
not going to go through the whole thing, and I
got a handful of videos that are kind of going
to go over many of the things that I just
mentioned to you. So Keenan throws in five dollars, Thank
you so much. Keenan beat shout out to him, he says,
doctor David Patrick Carey with Church of the Eternal Logos.
Where exactly do you think there are democratics slash liberal
ideas came from the Enlightenment. No, it's pre Enlightenment. It's

(01:06:22):
pre Enlightenment. They're they're allegiance to democracy is not so
much about because I mean, the French Revolution is later.
You know, the second big wave of Puritans is in
sixteen thirty. You know, the American Revolution. It's really indicative

(01:06:45):
of like right being squared right in the Enlightenment period.
That's seventeen seventy six. So that's that's like one hundred
and forty years away. And so where they're getting this
this idea of democracy is through the parliamentary system in England,
which is part of the English Civil War is that
they're battling between you know, Charles the First, for example,

(01:07:06):
son of James the First. He believes that the king
has right to do anything he wants. Everybody must submit
to his will because he's divinely appointed by God. You
can again, I'm no fan of Charles the First. I
don't think he was a great king. He's the one
that was beheaded by the parliamentarians. So the parliamentarians over
here you have the Royalists who in favor of the
monarchy generally speaking, much more in favor of Catholicism and

(01:07:31):
the way that the englic of the Church of England,
the Anglican Church already was. So they're okay with vestments,
they're okay with the Crucifix, they're okay with the Book
of Common Prayer, They're okay with all this different stuff.
The Puritans, on the other hand, they want to purify it,
they want to do away with it. And so the
battle between doing you know, the Parliamentarians actually do away

(01:07:52):
with the monarchy during the English Civil War, and so that,
I would argue already set the basis for it being inspired,
inspiring these Puritans to say, look, we don't need a king.
We've governed ourselves for a decade without a king here
in England. We don't need it. And the Puritans see
this and they're like, we don't need a king, we

(01:08:14):
don't need a hierarchy, we don't need bishops, we don't
need these vertical structures of authority and power. We need
to democratize all this stuff. We need to totally decentralize,
and so they go from one end of the spectrum
to the other end of the spectrum. And so were
they liberal It depends on how you use that word.

(01:08:35):
Were they reformers? Absolutely, and I would generally equate a
sort of liberalism with a sense of reform. It is
tied with this sort of an Enlightenment revolutionary spirit. But
they're before the Enlightenment. They're before the Enlightenment, so you
can't say that they were liberal like a classical liberal.
The Puritans weren't classical liberal. They were and this is

(01:08:57):
why I'm saying that the Puritans really exist in n
and Edwards as an indicative figure between two worlds. They
exist between this old world monarchy and religious identity in
this new Enlightenment system, and they're right in between where
they're like trying to figure out how to maneuver and
how to repackage these things together. And so they want

(01:09:19):
the old world intensity of religion and religious focus, but
they want a new world mentality where there is no monarch,
everything is decentralized. It's about the will of the people.
It's about being able to self govern yourself, and it's
about your interior state related to God and then through
practice demonstrating your elect status. So I would argue that's

(01:09:44):
where the there their fervor for democracy of that sort,
and it is just straight democracy. I mean, the way
the Puritans govern themselves was majority rule, right, so it
wasn't like you know, the American republican democratic structure. But

(01:10:07):
that's why we get that, right. So those people think
of you think of the Founding Fathers, I mean, they're
coming out of a cultural milieu of people who are
inspired this way. And this is one of the reasons
why when you look at the period of the American Revolution,
the churches that supported the revolution the most were the

(01:10:31):
ones that were most democratized. And the Anglican Church, for example,
there's multiple examples of like Anglican priests having to shut
down their churches because they were royalists. They support it
because they were old world. They believe that the monarch
was divinely appointed and that any revolution against the monarch
is anti biblical. That was even the Anglicans that came

(01:10:52):
to America. That was kind of their perspective. Generally speaking,
there's always exceptions where you had the Puritans, who from
the beginning, we're not interested in ever having a sort
of monarchy, and we're not interested in high hierarchical structure Jason.
Jason actually shout out to Jason for sponsoring today's stream.

(01:11:12):
Thank you so much, Jason, God bless you, brother, he says,
thanks for doing my topic. How would you say the
Puritan concept of sin is different from the Orthodox one? Well,
I would say a big difference between the way that
they conceptualize in is it has to do with their

(01:11:34):
calvinism and being predestined. Right, So, for us, sin is
a willful turning away from God and a dissipation of
God's energies within us. For the Puritan sin was the
natural state of everybody except for the elect who strove

(01:11:56):
to move beyond their corrupted human flesh. And there is
no understanding of these energies. There is no again. And
this predestination is essential because if you weren't predestined, didn't
matter how much sin you got rid of. Uh, you're

(01:12:17):
not making it to heaven. God already made his decision
and you're not on the list, Bud. So their understanding
of sin is it has a different soteriology than ours.
So our understanding of salvation is that everybody is under
the same process. We're all dealing with the same fallen
human nature. Everybody has the law written on their heart,

(01:12:40):
according to Saint Paul. And then the Orthodox Church is
the hospital for humanity. And we then are understanding of
sin is therapeutic. Right. Their understanding of sin was very legalistic,
and that's why they felt like that civic society, civic responsibility,

(01:13:01):
and their moral theology had to fuse because it's not
so much about a healing of the person, it's about
a purifying of the of the civic space from anything
that could tainted. So I would say that's probably one
of the big differences between their concept of sin and
ours is ours is a therapeutic process. Christ heals us,

(01:13:25):
the hospital heals us. The Church, Uh, the sacraments heal us.
They don't have that same sacramental theology. They are healed
by demonstrating their elect status and they're already chosen. And
then those who are not part of them, those who
aren't Puritans, are not chosen and they're just gonna have

(01:13:45):
to deal with their consequences. So uh. And then Snaglebeast
snagglebe has been a member for seventeen months. Thank you,
so much, brother, he says, good day, and God bless
awesome news. I'm about to be received next month in
the Carpatho Russian Diocese. Well, wonderful you and Jay debunked
my pro theology. Well, glory to God, snagglebeast, that's great

(01:14:07):
to hear. God bless you on your journey, my man.
Thank you very much for the support and for being
a codal crew member. Let's see here anything on the
Dono chat No and we're going to dive into and
then over on stream labs. William throws in twenty dollars.

(01:14:30):
Thank you so much, William, he says, been watching your
stuff for around a year now. After nineteen years of
New Age last Atheism and a year of inquiry, I'm
now a catechumen in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Well, glory
to God, William. That's great. Can't thank you enough. Well,
I'm humbled, and I'm sure Jay would say the same
thing for Snagglebast or you William. If we have helped

(01:14:52):
you in any way find your way to the Orthodox Church,
Glory be to God. We're humbled if we helped. Thank
you very much for you for your support, my man.
I do appreciate that. Again, I got a few. I'm
going to just show you guys my note section here
real quick. We're not going to go over the whole thing,

(01:15:13):
much of it. Again, my long winded monologue to open
the stream I think covered most of it. So, as
we said, background English Reformation fifteen thirties to fifteen fifties,
this is kind of the founding of Puritanism. After King
Henry broke from Rome, it retained many of its Catholic structures,

(01:15:36):
was frustrated the reform minded Protestants. Puritans were those who
wanted to purify. As we already talked about, YadA YadA YadA.
Under Elizabeth First and James the First, Puritans grew increasingly discontent,
although they were not persecuted. Again, they come here being
funded by the Brits. They're saying, look, just go over there.
We're going to create an economic compact. Essentially what they did.

(01:15:59):
They created an ECM contract where you're going to go
over to the New World. You can start your own communities,
but you're also going to work for us and trade
with us so that we can get goods from the
New World. They're like, okay, deal, it really isn't unchilled Charles.
The first that we see real persecution of the Puritans.
So first Plymouth Colony sixteen twenty. Again, they were known

(01:16:21):
as separatists back in England, known as Pilgrims who came
to America. Mayflower Compact again a document of self government
and can covenantal society. Right, so they believed in this
covenantal theology of society. The great Migration, that's sixteen thirty.
That's when we get twenty. I saw I read something

(01:16:43):
that said thirty thousand, so I put twenty thousand because
that's the number often reference. But I saw up to
thirty thousands migrated to the Massachusetts area and then a
theocratic covenant society. They're very theocratic instructor. Church and civil
governance were intertwined. Church membership was required for voting in
civic participation. So again you can see how the civic

(01:17:07):
life and the church were tied up together. Predestination, emphasis
on biblical literacy, visible saints.

Speaker 2 (01:17:14):
Oh.

Speaker 1 (01:17:14):
The thing that I said, and one of the things
I didn't say, was again Puritans were the ones that
founded Harvard College in sixteen thirty six, and then when
Harvard began to what they Puritans viewed to become too liberal.
They founded another one called Yale. So Yale and Harvard
are both founded by these Puritan communities, Congregationalists, autonomous local churches. Oh,

(01:17:42):
the Halfway Covenant of sixteen sixty two, So this is
what I was mentioning these. It was basically a compromise
that allowed partial church membership for the unconverted children of
saints meaning they had not yet have their convert experience yet,
so you couldn't be a full member, but it allowed

(01:18:07):
allowed the baptism of children. This was a controversial document,
the Halfway Coven. It's not really that important. The decline
of Puritanism by the late seventeenth century, a new generation
lacked the same zeal. This is where we get the
first grade awakening, now, right, kind of that mid seventeenth century,
and then the Halfway Covenant. We marked that a confession

(01:18:28):
minus the conversion experience, and then the rise of secularism.
Economic prosperity. That's one of the factors here that it
was really a historical phenomenon is that when places become wealthy,
they lose the religious fervor. Places that are persecuted tend
to have much higher religious commitments. That's just a general trend.

(01:18:50):
So the rise of secularism, economic prosperity, enlightenment, rationalism contributed
to the weakening of Puritan orthodoxy. And then here's a
history timeline. We're gonna watch a video that kind of
goes over some of this stuff. But fifteen thirty four
active supremacy, King Henry Brigaks from Rome established as the
Church of England. Fifteen fifty eight through sixteen oh three

(01:19:12):
is the Elizabethan Settlement. Queen Elizabeth solidifies the Anglican Church.
This is where we get the Roanokee Colony. Fifteen sixties
early Puritan activity. Puritans push for elimination, investments, more biblical preaching,
congressional church governance. They wanted the preacher. They believe that

(01:19:32):
the priest should dress in like academic, secular garb, academic, educational,
essentially a suit, which is exactly how the evangelical community
dresses today.

Speaker 3 (01:19:45):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:19:46):
There are no vestments, there is no ordinate garments that
the religious leaders wear. Just like the Puritans, they were
to dress as somebody who was like an intellectual or academic,
and that's what they do. They address as businessmen. They
wear suits. So let's see James the first comes with

(01:20:08):
the throne. We talked a little bit about that great
migration John Winthrop, City upon a Hill sixteen thirty six.
Harvard College again, two people, Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson exile.
They challenged the Puritan orthodoxy in New England and they're
kicked out and create the state of Rhode Island and

(01:20:29):
allow for more religious diversity. Puritanism and decline and transformation.
Salem Witch Trials kind of undermined their the fervor by
some of the Americans in the country. Yale College found,
as I said, seventeen oh one, to combat Harvard's liberalization,
which is ironic, right. So if you connect my fourth

(01:20:50):
characteristic of the modern left with the puritan spirit but secularized,
you can see the universities of Yale and Harvard be,
you know, at the leading forefront of this sort of
puritanical social justice movement in creating people, creating priests of
social justice to go out and inhabit various business or

(01:21:11):
strata in society and influence it. Then you have the
first grade awakening seventeen thirties, I would actually say the
fifties here seventeen thirties to the seventeen fifties, Jonathan Edwards
Centers in the Hand of an Angry God, George White Whitfield,
and others promoting evangelical renewal. I have a thing on

(01:21:32):
the First Great Awakening, so we'll check that out if
you guys are interested, let me know if you want
to watch it. And then the Puritan legacy in the
nineteenth century. By the time the Second Great Awakening, it's
kind of it's massively on the decline Puritanism as an
actual strong religious community. Revivalism spreads across America. While more
populous than Puritanism, it retains emphasis on sin and conversion,

(01:21:55):
personal morality, revival of covenant language, especially in the North,
abolitionist movement. So eighteen thirties to eighteen sixties, right before
the Civil War, we see Puritans, and again many were
influenced by descendants of Puritans. Some of the you know,
influential people weren't exactly quote unquote members of a Puritan community,

(01:22:17):
but they come from those people. Mid eighteen hundreds, transcendentals
and liberal theologians emerged Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker. They
view Puritan orthodoxy or they reject it, but are shaped
by its moral seriousness and stuff like that. And then
what I found today in the twenty first century is
there's like a movement called new Calvinism or new neo Puritanism.

(01:22:41):
I am not even familiar with these these guys. I
just found him by doing research online. John Piper, Mark Dever,
Tim Keller, Kevin DeYoung. They all promote Puritan theology, church discipline,
biblical exposition, and family centered piety. So Puritanism is according

(01:23:02):
at least in some small evangelical circles, making a sort
of a rise again today. And then I was going
to talk a little bit about again. This will be
available at the website, but I'm actually getting ready to
launch my new school community later this week, so all
of my stuff. I can't wait to show you guys

(01:23:22):
my new school community. It's literally Logos Academy. It's I'm
super excited to launch it. But that's going to come
later this week. So Puritanism and progressive social movements, the
Temperance movement, Puritans emphasize self control. As I mentioned this earlier,
first wave feminism and women suffrage. Ironically, although the puritanciety

(01:23:44):
was patriarchal, promoted literacy among women so that they could
read the Bible, planting seeds of intellectual empowerment. The moral
agency upheld the idea that women had an important moral
role in shaping the household and community. That was the
big one, is that men were okay with women shaping
the household and educating the children. It's the Puritan community

(01:24:05):
that emphasized women going and participating in these social reforms.
This translated into moral leadership and reform movements. Many women
entered public life through moral reforms such as anti slavery
and temperance, then progressed to women's rights. Notable figures Susan B. Anthony,
Elizabeth Caddie Stanton, leaders of women's suffrage movement, were deeply

(01:24:26):
involved in abolitionism and temperance before advocating for voting rights.
Educational beforeim mentioned Horace Mann I mentioned that earlier. So
here's some of the continuity between modern evangelical Christianity and Puritanism.
But I kind of covered that in point three of

(01:24:47):
my characteristics, So we're gonna skip that. Here's a little
here's a little graph I put together so this may
help the sacraments serious, reverent and covenantal for the Puritans,
often a symbolic and less central for modern evangelicals. So
as I said, Puritans still had Again it was a
word centered worship. It was not sacramentally centered, but they

(01:25:10):
did take it seriously, as I mentioned, with Jonathan Edwards
actually arguing against his grandfather, ecclesiology, covenant community with strict discipline,
more individualistic, less emphasis on membership, theological depth, deeply intellectual
and catechetical. I mean, you have to at least give
it to the Puritans. They were incredibly educated people. The

(01:25:33):
evangelicals often criticized for being shallow and anti intellectual. So
interesting difference their view of the world, suspicious of worldliness
and pleasure, Evangelicals more open to culture and media i e.
The megachurches, and then liturgical simplicity, solemn, austere sermon centered
from and then diverse from charismatic to seeker sensitive styles,

(01:25:56):
but still word oriented. The last one I want to
show you, though, is my section on the political left.
And so as I said, it is a sort of
secularized Puritanism. I keep saying Protestantism, Puritanism and so belief
in moral progress, social purification, all this stuff I said,

(01:26:17):
the elect and the reprod way shaming rituals cancel culture
inquisition two point zero. Like the Puritan communities that expelled dissenters,
modern activists often seek to identify or expel the impure
from their social justice circles. They police speech like the
Puritans did, and they use public shame as a means
of enforcing communal values wokeism as secular sanctification. Many progressive

(01:26:43):
movements operate as if pursuing personal and collective sanctification. And
then those are the three little phrases I came up with.
So anyways, I don't want to belabor the all the
notes again. If you want to get access to these
the essentially a study guide again, become a website member

(01:27:05):
or just hold off for a few days and join
my new Logos academy. I promise you'll be worth it. Okay, Now,
with that being said, I do want to give another
shout out to Jason for sponsoring today's stream. Thank you
so much, Jason, and I told him I would give
his podcast, The Unsung Substack a shout out today. And

(01:27:25):
if you guys would like to check out Jason's podcast,
you can do so with this link right here. Uh, actually,
Jason just threw in ten bucks, thank you so much.
Jason says, Theodore Parker was one of the Secret Six
who funded and supported John Brown in his attack on
Harper's Ferry to instigate a slaver Bulte, Emerson, and Thureau

(01:27:46):
were also big fans of John Brown. Oh. Interesting. Interesting.
And then Jason followed up and said, Susan B. Anthony's
brother Dan was a Kansas jayhawker in the late eighteen
fifties and during the Civil War. Super violent guy. Yeah. Well,
and even the misnomer that Puritans didn't have slaves is false.

(01:28:07):
That was one of the things that I found doing
the research for the stream was that it wasn't as common.
But yeah, Puritans still had slaves in certain circumstances. They
were just expensive. But it is, I mean, but they
were instrumental behind the ebolitionist movement, and this this reformed

(01:28:28):
theology colored everything, so everything's just more gray than black
and white generally speaking. All right, let's get into some
of our videos here. So this one right here is
pretty interesting. This one is it talks about how the

(01:28:50):
South became insanely religious. Now, it took me forever to
try to find some type of visual to use for
today's stream, because almost everything thing talking about Puritanism is
so incredibly boring. There aren't like a lot of cool
interesting videos per se. This one isn't specifically about Puritans,

(01:29:12):
but it's about how Puritans coming to America, and then
how the sort of religious landscape of America is presented
in the contemporary day. I assume it's kind of presented
by a left of center guy, but the graphics and
everything are pretty good on it. And then as I
was talking about regarding the history and the historical context,

(01:29:35):
if you guys are interested, this video does a pretty
good job of providing a sort of horrible historical context
of everything that I was saying to you guys. And
so if you're interested in that again, I got multiple videos.
Some of these are long. This one's twenty eight minutes.
This is from a scholar who's from the Gordon Cornwell

(01:29:58):
Theological Seminary. I believe it's in South Carolina or somewhere
around there. This guy named Ryan Reeves and his YouTube Jenny.
He has some pretty good educational videos. He doesn't make
him very often, is like this one's from ten years ago,
but it is again kind of boring. The way he
speaks is boring, but it is a great overview of
the first grade Awakening, so we can go over that.

(01:30:20):
And I thought one of the cool things about his
video on the second Grade Awakening was the section on
apocalyptic movements and how the anticipation of the end days
really gets imbued with the with the Burgoning Evangelical Christian community, right, so,
you know the Left Behind series and their focus on
the end times and their accelerationism toward the end times

(01:30:43):
through their devotion towards the secular, semi secular state of Israel.
I would argue that a lot of that gets going
through the second grade Awakening. And so this little section
on the apocalyptic movement, I would like to show you
that although it's not specifically about Puritanism, it is about
how Christiane's been shaped by some of these movements. Keena says,

(01:31:05):
I actually love Ryan Reeves. I've watched hours and hours
of his videos. Yeah, they're they're quality content. It's quality content.
Is it the most engaging content? No? And I could
imagine if I just played all his videos, I would
probably lose some of my audience. But but I do
want to play some of it because he does have

(01:31:26):
great information in his in his stuff. And then here
was a little article that I read, one of them
that I read in preparation for today, so I can
share that link if you guys are interested. It's just one.
I was reading a bunch of different stuff, but I
didn't put it all together for the stream. So if
you're interested, here's here's the link on this article. But

(01:31:47):
I think first, just to bring it all full circle,
we're gonna watch the video. I think this is probably
the most engaging of the videos, and this one kind
of lays out the entire quinner Christian framework of America.
So let me play this and let me I better.

(01:32:08):
I have all these turned to like two point oh,
let me we'll do one point twenty five so we
can get through more of it. So here's the first one.

Speaker 3 (01:32:18):
This is a map showing the percentage of adults who
are highly religious per state. Looking at it, you'll notice
the southern region over here is much more distinct than
the rest. In fact, it's so distinct it even has
its own name, the Bible Belt.

Speaker 2 (01:32:30):
Protestants.

Speaker 3 (01:32:31):
Christianity plays a strong role in society here, and church
attendants across the denominations is much higher than the nation's average.
But why is that? Why is this part of America
so much more religious than the rest? I mean New
England was literally founded by Puritans who thought Europe was
too godless, and is now the most atheistic region in
the Union.

Speaker 2 (01:32:47):
So what's happened?

Speaker 1 (01:32:48):
Well?

Speaker 3 (01:32:49):
To understand this religious flip flop and the intensity of
it in the South, we need to go all the
way back to the beginning, and I mean back to
the literal founding of the thirteen colonies themselves, with the
first one being Jamestown, Virginia in sixteen oh seven. Like
with many other European powers at the time, economic reasons
were the best way to sum up the motivations for colonization,
and the British colonizing North America was no different. So

(01:33:09):
people were sent to live in this area to establish
a British settlement here. And since they came from England,
where the Church of England aka the Anglican Church, was
the official state religion, the people who made up this
region were mostly Anglican. The thing is, though the Church
of England at this point in time had only been
separated by the Roman Catholic Church and turned into a
Protestant Anglican country since fifteen fifty four, and even then
there were some brief restorations of Catholicism, like under the

(01:33:30):
reign of Queen Mary the First from fifteen fifty three
to fifteen fifty eight. So the point I'm trying to
make is even though the Church of England was technically Anglican,
there were still many retained elements of Catholicism in it.
And this is where the Puritan movements became a thing,
because they were a group of people who wanted to
purify the church from what they viewed as Catholic practices
and to implement a more rigorous form of worship and
church governance. But the thing is their efforts and beliefs

(01:33:52):
caused tension and persecution, causing them to feed the country
and to create a society in the manner they believed
to God truly intended it to be designed. So from
sixteen twenty to sixteen forty there was a Puritan migration
to the New England colonies of British America, with as
many as twenty thousand of them making the trip over,
mostly in families as opposed to isolated individuals, and establishing
the now Plymouth Colony, the second permanent English colony in

(01:34:12):
America after Jamestown. So at this point in time there
was basically a religious divide between Puritanism in the North
and the Anglicans in the South. This was reflected in
their living too, with the Puritans establishing a society deeply
rooted in their faith, with strict moral codes and a
focus on community worship. The Puritans influence was so profound
that it permeated nearly every aspect of life in New England,

(01:34:33):
from governance to daily routines. Meanwhile, in the South, and
it's not to say they weren't religious at all, because
they certainly were, but their motivation for the settlement was
largely economic from the start, focused on agriculture, trade and
that sort of stuff. The establishment of the Anglican Church
in these colonies was part of replicating English societal structures
and maintaining loyalty to the Crown. There were also a
mix of other denominations among settlers two, meaning that there

(01:34:54):
was no one central religious identity that held all the power.
So as a result, the scietal structure in southern states
like Virginia were more hierarchical and less centered around religion
compared to the Purits of North.

Speaker 2 (01:35:04):
Then things started to change.

Speaker 1 (01:35:06):
Is the video too fast for you, guys? I mean
I listened the videos at two point zero one point
five regularly, so I can't tell because I'm used to it.
But I always get comments about how things are moving
too fast? Do you want me to put it at
normal speed? Or is one point twenty five? Okay? Chrispy says,

(01:35:29):
it's okay, make it faster. Okay. See I I do
it super fast. It's not fast, g okay.

Speaker 2 (01:35:42):
You see.

Speaker 3 (01:35:42):
While the original Purits and settlers with this very religious bunch,
as time passed, the second and third generations of settlers
who were born in the New World didn't always share
the same intensity of religious conviction or the sense of
urgency that drove their ancestors. Some even started to become
disinterested in it for all the adherents that required, and
as the colony began to develop more economic pros verity
started to take precedence over religious matters for many people.

(01:36:03):
The once religiously unified society also started to see a
migration of people with different backgrounds and beliefs over time
by looting the Puritan influence and their ability to enforce
religious conformity. It was these things that led to the
rise of secularism in New England. Now you may be thinking,
wouldn't the South be affected by these things too, and
you'd be right. It did, But ironically, being less religiously
intense actually helped preserve Christianity.

Speaker 1 (01:36:24):
There.

Speaker 2 (01:36:24):
Let me explain. Because the South was.

Speaker 3 (01:36:27):
Less homogeneously religious, it means that over time evolved a
form of Christianity that was more intertwined with everyday life
and less rigid than Puritism, allowing for a more flexible
adaptation of religious practices to changing social conditions. This helped
sustain its influence, leading religion in the South to become
a part of the cultural identity beyond just theological obedience.
Along with this, there was also a geographical factor at play.
While both regions started off with agriculture as the main business,

(01:36:49):
the geography and climate of New England is less conducive
to large scale agriculture than those of the South. New
England has rocky soil, a relatively rugged terrain, and a
shorter growing season, making large scale farming more challenging. In contrast,
the South has more fertile soil and a longer growing season,
which supports large plantations. This meant that New England's economy
diversified early on fishing, shipbuilding and trade, with significant economic

(01:37:10):
activities alongside farming. The region's abundant water power from its
rivers was also a key factor in its early industrialization.
New England became a center for manufacturing, with industries like
textiles and clockmaking growing rapidly from the end of the
eighteenth century, and this industrial growth spurred urban development as
people moved to cities for factory jobs. So while the
South did care about their economy, obviously, they were and

(01:37:31):
have been able to maintain a more agricultural focus, having
been initially based on cash crops like tobacco, cotton, and rice,
which relied heavily on slave labor.

Speaker 4 (01:37:38):
Cheap slave labor un vast tracts of land along by
the planter.

Speaker 3 (01:37:42):
And this agricultural focus created a much different economic trajectory
compared to the North's industrialization, with their starting much later,
particularly after the Civil War. Obviously, the impact on religion
of this was also key. The more rural and agricultural
nature of much of the South for a longer period
helped maintain a traditional, community centered way of life where
the church played a significant role, whereas the industrialization and
hence urbanization of the North led to the growth of

(01:38:04):
public education, which often led to increased exposure to diverse
viewpoints and a greater emphasis on secularism. Now I realize
i'd basically just time jumped from the beginning and development
of these thirteen colonies to the end of the Civil War.
But it was also everything that happened between these two
time periods that heavily contributed to making the US South
much more religious than the North. Simply put, the Great
Awakening a series of religious rivals.

Speaker 2 (01:38:24):
Now, like I said before, the South.

Speaker 3 (01:38:25):
Was affected by the same things as the North, just
to a lesser degree due to the reasons mentioned above,
So religion wasn't in a great place across all the colonies.
A lot of this was due to the rise of
the Age of Enlightenment, an intellectual and philosophical movement that
occurred in Europe from.

Speaker 2 (01:38:37):
The end of the seventeenth century.

Speaker 3 (01:38:39):
Enlightenment thinkers wanted to improve human conditions on earth, rather
than concern themselves with religion.

Speaker 2 (01:38:43):
And the afterlife.

Speaker 3 (01:38:44):
These thinkers valued reason, science, religious freedom, and what they
called natural rights, life, liberty, and property. Naturally, the Enlightenments
movement made its way across the Atlantic two to the
thirteen colonies. In many ways, religion was becoming more formal
and less personal during this time, which led to lower
church attendance. Churches couldn't keep up with population growth, Christians
were feeling complacent with their methods of worship, and some

(01:39:04):
were disillusioned with how wealth and rationalism were dominating culture.
The colonies were still deeply religiously divided at this point too,
with the Puritans in the North, the Anglicans in the south,
and the Middle colonies basically a mix of everything from
Quakers to Lutherans, to Baptists to Presbyterians and a few
other denominations too. This all set the stage for the
First Great Awakening, starting from seventeen thirty to seventeen fifty five,

(01:39:24):
though some placed the beginning of it as early as
seventeen twenty and even the end of it as seventeen seventy.
In response to these trends, ministers, influenced by New England Puritanism,
Scott's Irish Presbyterianism and European Pietism began calling for a
revival of religion and piety.

Speaker 2 (01:39:38):
The blending of.

Speaker 3 (01:39:39):
These three traditions would produce an evangelical Protestantism that placed
greater importance on quote seasons of revival or outpourings of
the Holy Spirit, and unconverted sinners experiencing God's love personally.
This movement, sweeping across the colonies, marked a stark departure
from the more reserved religious practices of the past, and
it was brought to the forefront by passionate preachers like
George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards. George Whitefield, and English minister,

(01:40:00):
traversed the colonies, captivating immense crowds with his powerful and
emotional sermons. He had a unique ability to connect with
his audience on a deeply personal level, often moving them
to tears or spiritual awakening. Similarly, Jonathan Edwards's preacher from
New England, made a long lasting influential impact with his
sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, emphasizing
God's wrath upon believers after death to a very real,
horrific and fiery hell. Edward's methods of preaching was characterized

(01:40:22):
by a vivid imagery and a passionate delivery that appealed
directly to the emotions and fears of his listeners. This
period of Revivalism, driven by such charismatic preaching, was not
just about religious teachings. It was an emotional experience that
deeply resonated with the masses. Many sources from this time
report people falling into transits, being struck down to the ground,
or crying uncontrollably. And even though this was at the
time during slavery and extreme racism, these preachers made sure

(01:40:45):
to preach to anyone who would listen, breaking the traditional
barriers of class and race in religious practice, and of
course spreading their religion widely. However, this shift towards emotive
spirituality was controversial, leading to significant divisions within the religious communities.
The Awakening gave rise to two distinct groups, the Old
Lights and the New Lights. And yes, this all relates
to the modern day divide, but basically, the Old Lights,

(01:41:05):
made up of the Puritans, Baptists, and Presbyterians, rejected the
revival movement, saying it wasn't true religion, but rather just
a theatrical experience, meaning the New Lights embraced this revivalist movement.
They viewed the emotional experiences and passionate preaching as genuine
manifestations of divine power and a necessary revival of true
Christian faith. As you might have guessed by now, in
the North, the Old Light was strong enough to largely
maintain their whole. Meanwhile, in the South, the New Lights

(01:41:27):
aka Evangelicism, took off like wildfire. The Baptist and Methodist
churches became dominant here. In these churches, there was less
reliance on religious authority all the way through. While the
Oldlit churches thought that extensive education was necessary to interpret
the Bible correctly, the New Light ones were more inclined
to say that its meaning could be understood by anyone.
If you were a farmer back then and felt called
to preach and could gather a congregation, then you're already

(01:41:48):
a minister. So there were a lot more Baptist preachers
than any other denomination, and the South at this time
was very rural, so this idea appealed strongly to people
who might not have regular access to a church. This,
combined with the inclusive message offerings salvation to all, regardless
of social status, and race resonated deeply in the hierarchical
society of the South. These denominations grew rapidly in the South,
establishing a strong evangelical presence more fully into the daily

(01:42:10):
lives and identities of.

Speaker 2 (01:42:11):
People across different social classes.

Speaker 3 (01:42:13):
In the North, even with the rejection of the movement,
its emphasis on personal experience and questioning of authority in
religious matters laid early influence for individualism and a questioning
attitude in the North, which combined with the region's focus
on education and commerce, gradually led to a more secular society.
That was just the first Great Awakening two there were
still two, arguably three more after this. By the time

(01:42:34):
the Second Great Awakening started, which was in about seventeen
ninety five, the United States had already officially become an
independent country. The beginning of the Industrial Revolution had also
very recently started in the US, and the Age of Enlightenment,
even though it had started decades ago, was only reaching
its peak around this time. So these two things combined
to mark an increase in secularism and focus on the
contemporary world and science. While the First Great Awakening focused

(01:42:56):
more on existing members of the church, the second focus
on attracting new members. To re engage worshipers and attract
new members, evangelical denominations again began to hold active, energetic
Tenrabibles where faith was renewed. The earliest of the Tenrabibles
focused on the Appalachian Frontier, but they quickly moved into
the area of their original colonies. These weren't small revival
meetings either, Thousands would meet up at a time. Revival

(01:43:17):
meetings were not restricted to the frontier or to white people,
though in many areas, particularly the South, black people had
separate revivals at the time. The Baptist and Methodists often
worked together in these revivals, with both religions believing in
free will with personal redemption. The Baptists were highly decentralized,
with no hierarchical structure in place, and preachers lived and
worked among their congregation, while the Methodists, on the other hand,
had more of an internal structure in place. They had

(01:43:38):
people traveling on horseback all over converting people to the
Methodist faith, and it paid off. By the eighteen forties,
the Methodists were the largest Protestant group in America. Just
to put all these efforts into perspective, they grew from
fifty eight thousand members in seventeen ninety, to two hundred
and fifty eight thousand in eighteen twenty, and then to
one million, six hundred and sixty one thousand by eighteen sixty.
This growth factor of over twenty eight times in seventy

(01:43:59):
years out paced the national population growth, which increased by
a factor of just eight during the same period. The
most significant Revivalist in this area was the Presbyterian minister
Charles Finny. A key change he made was in promoting
mass conversions during revival meetings. No longer were individuals converting alone. Instead,
they were joined by neighbors converting on mass. In eighteen
thirty nine alone, I.

Speaker 1 (01:44:22):
Just got a comment on that art. Looks like they're
looks like they're drowning the guy. And this is this
is a depiction of some of the revivalist movements where
they had mass baptisms. I saw that looks like they're
killing him. They're not fair to save him.

Speaker 3 (01:44:42):
Instead they were joined by neighbors converting on mass in
eighteen thirty nine alone when he preached in Rochester, New York,
and made an estimated one hundred thousand converts. But the
second great Awakening ended in eighteen forty due to the
deep culture of slavery in the South, leading to the
division of Northern versus Southern religious sects during the eighteen
thirties and eighteen forty. In fact, in eighteen forty five,
Southern Baptists split from the National Baptist denomination in the

(01:45:05):
US and established the pro slavery Southern Baptist Convention, as
they interpreted the Bible as supporting slavery. In technicality, the
third Great Awakening actually started from eighteen fifty five, with
the Civil War happening not much after this from eighteen
sixty one to eighteen sixty five, and the eventual movement
ending in the nineteen fifties. It was also near the
end of this movement when the term Bible Belt started
to be used in media. This Great Awakening didn't really

(01:45:26):
have a profound impact on the growth of Christianity in
the South and the decline of it in the North.
As the first two. It was marked by a more
promotion of social activism. This was seen, for example with
the founding of the Salvation Army the rise of the YMCA.
Don't get me wrong, though, it was still growing rapidly
during this time. In the South, especially, many intellectuals of
that era took part in the movement and were strong
advocates of Christianity. They tried to systematically reach the parts

(01:45:46):
of the country where there were no churches and spread
the religion. Some of these intellectuals and scholars started building
schools and universities that were closely tied to Christianity, which
of course has had a lasting influence over a century later.
As a result, the Protestant churches in the United States
were growing at extreme speeds during this period, though like
everything else, it was meant with an opposite force that
was just as powerful. The rise of scientific thought, particularly
the theory of evolution and higher criticism of the Bible

(01:46:07):
began to challenge the traditional religious beliefs that supported the awakening.
With a further rise in industrialization and urbanization everywhere, especially
in the South after the Civil War and a whole
World War a couple decades after that, the priorities of
religion became slightly more on the back burner. This shift
towards modernism and critical approach to religious texts gradually eroded
to the foundation of the Third Revivalist movement.

Speaker 2 (01:46:26):
So at this point in the timeline.

Speaker 3 (01:46:27):
There's been three great Awakenings which created and heavily promoted
evangelicism everywhere, especially in the South, and we're not done yet. Arguably,
while the concept of a fourth Great Awakening is heavily
debated among historians based on if it had an impact
equivalence to the first three to warrant the same title,

(01:46:48):
what it certainly did do was cement the South as
the region of the very religious people in the US.
Having started in the beginning of the nineteen sixties till
nineteen eighty, this timeline lined up with the growth of
the radio and television, which, when used for religious broadcasting
and evangelists played a significant role in spreading religious messages
and connecting believers. There's even a word for it, televangelism.
Keep in mind that farming in the South remained independent

(01:47:08):
far longer than it did for the rest of the country,
so small, isolated communities got their hands on radios and
were connected to a much larger world. Within a single
generation of early rural radio, you see the rise of
someone like Billy Graham, who is now seen as the
evangelist of the twentieth century, and arguably the direct link
between the controversial Fourth Great Awakening to the present day.
Being part of the Southern Baptists here is a big
reason it's now the world's largest Baptist denomination and the

(01:47:29):
largest Protestant and second largest Christian denomination in America. In
the Bible Belts, Graham's evangelist crusades reinforced and revitalized evangelical
Christian beliefs. His large scale events and dynamic preaching style,
focusing on a personal relationship with God, resonated deeply with
the region's religious culture. His crusades through mass media, reached
to millions, increasing the visibility and appeal of evangelicism. This
heightened interest laid the groundwork for the growth of large

(01:47:49):
evangelical churches. The main line Protestant churches weakened sharply in
both membership and influence, while the most conservative religious denominations
like the Southern Baptists grew rapidly in numbers and spread
across the United States. Soon, with so many members, megachurches
came to be, and they won attention for the simple
reason that ten churches with two thousand members were more
visible than one hundred churches with two hundred members. So
now we go to the modern day. Both Jimmy Carter

(01:48:11):
and Bill Clinton, the most southern recent US presidents, were
raised in the Southern Baptist Church. In states like Alabama
and Mississippi, fifty one percent and forty nine percent of
adults at ten religious services at least once a week.

Speaker 2 (01:48:21):
This contrasts sharply.

Speaker 3 (01:48:22):
With states in the North like Maine and Vermont, where
figures are twenty two percent and twenty one percent, as
well as states in literally any other region, like Oregon
in the West at twenty nine percent and North Dakota
in the Midwest at thirty three percent. However, there's more
hidden factors at play here that I haven't explained yet.
Because the North industrialized faster and rarely didn't have to
rely on agriculture as much, they are richer regions. In fact,
every region in America is richer than the South. Just

(01:48:43):
look at this map of the poorest states of twenty
twenty two. You'll see it generally mirrors the Bible Belt.
And while this may be because of a variety of
things such as voluntary poverty, lack of education, or lack
of opportunities, they aren't directly related. But the thing is
just like how Christianity has been undecline in the North
for a long time. Now it's in the entire US
as a whole, and yes, that includes the Bible Belt. Christianity,
the largest religion in the United States, experienced a twentieth

(01:49:05):
century high of ninety one percent of the total population
in nineteen seventy six. This declined to seventy three point
seven percent by twenty sixteen and sixty four percent in
twenty twenty two. Ironically, the Southern Baptist churches, which if
you remember, weren't popular in the North, are declining in
every region besides New England. That's right, it is literally
the only region in the US where South Baptist churches.

Speaker 1 (01:49:24):
I thought that was the most fascinating things about this video.
Much I was already aware of, But I did not
know that Southern Baptist Church is growing in the New
England area, which kind of brings the conversation back full circle,
because what we've been talking about is the English Puritans
landing in Plymouth, are their effect their theology, the reform

(01:49:45):
Calvinist theology, and how that was unique and how it
influenced ther civic responsibilities. How that then gets morked with
some of the other Protestant denominations and what becomes the
Episcopalian Church, Methodist, Baptist. And now we come back full circle.
As I argued earlier about the Puritanism is the skeletal
bones of modern day Evangelical Christianity. We come back to

(01:50:09):
where Evangelical Southern Baptist Christianity is only growing in the
New England area. What are the chances of that it's
grow overall?

Speaker 3 (01:50:18):
Christianity has been in decline in the US for a
number of reasons, with some of them actually murdering the
same reasons that ended the greats Awakenings, such as this
last ending.

Speaker 1 (01:50:25):
What he's getting ready to do is basically say that
Christianity is eventually going to be a minority faith in
the United States because of the rise of the nuns,
the people who on a religious survey when the Pew
Research Center sends out, are you religious, and it says
you know Christian, or it says Protestant, Christian, Catholic, Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, Hindu,

(01:50:47):
these types of thing, And then at the end he'll
say none of the above, which includes atheist, agnostis and spiritual,
but not religious, and well, I think it was twenty eighteen,
twenty eighteen that that Nune demographic was the biggest of
all each demographic, especially amongst younger people. So he's going
to make the argument that Christianity is going to go away,

(01:51:10):
and I would argue this is one of the This
is why I feel like he's probably left of center,
because anybody who's kind of has their finger on the
pulse of culture and what's going on online is Christianity
is not going to go away. And in fact, more
traditional forms i e. Orthodoxy and Catholicism are going to
grow stronger and stronger in America, and it's tied with

(01:51:33):
the movement towards conservative christian values because people are looking
for something that's non changing. And if you got anything
from the video that we just watched, is that Christianity
in America is constantly constantly changing, always revising, always reforming,
always moving into new new presentations, new theology, accommodating various

(01:51:55):
belief systems. And so I feel like that is the
kind of archetype in the tone and tenor of Protestant
Christianity in America. And so where he thinks Christianity is
going to go away. I think Protestantism is going to
go away, but Christianity is not going to go away.
That's my personal opinion. But you're rat to hear his
case for why he thinks none nuns are going to

(01:52:17):
be the.

Speaker 3 (01:52:18):
Majority arise of rationalism and science, but also because of
new factors like America becoming more multicultural and religion starting
to get mixed more intensely with politics, which has disillusioned
many people, especially the younger generations. An increasing number of
Americans now identify as religiously unaffiliated, often referred to as
nuns and no, not those nuns. This group includes atheists, agnostics,
and those who describe their religion as nothing. In particular,

(01:52:40):
the rise of the nuns reflect a broader trend of
disengagement from organized religion. So I guess the question is,
with America's Christian population set to dip below fifty percent
by twenty seventy, making it no longer the majority religion
for the first time ever in the country's short history,
is there anything they can do to stop this? It's
not just a North or South problem, but a country
wide one. Or dare I say, is it even a
problem at all?

Speaker 1 (01:52:58):
Thank you yeah to major problem. Major problem. I just
want to note that Rip said my aunt tried to
tell me we were related to Jonathan Edwards. Turns out
we weren't, but I do have an ancestor who lived
on the East Coast around the same time with the
same name. That's funny. So thanks Rip for letting us

(01:53:25):
know a little bit about your family lore and what
your aunt's been telling everybody. Hey, shout out to Wicked Wally.
I see Wicked Wally in the chat. God bless you brother.
Hope you and the family are doing well. Let me
just check to see if we had any super chats
come in. Guys. If you appreciate the time and research
it takes to do some of these streams, please support

(01:53:47):
with a superchat comment question, use stream labs or Dono chat,
or if you prefer to use YouTube, feel free to
use YouTube. And if you're feeling generous, please give some
codal crew memberships. I would always appreciate that. Justin Hindley
he throws in ten bucks, says God bless you and
yours keep the world informed well. Thank you so much,
Justin Henley, do appreciate that. Thank you very much. Okay,

(01:54:10):
so the other one. Now we're going to move to
a totally different framework where we're going to focus on
actual the historical context what I was trying to lay
out in the beginning. And it doesn't hit everything that
I was kind of promoting, because I see it, you know,
through my own lens, my own biases. But this was
the best one I could find in the most engaging video.

(01:54:30):
And so unless you guys really want to watch Ryan Reeves,
I may just play this one of the apocalyptic movements
at the end. I really don't want to play this
whole thing. But this is about the First Grade Awakening,
which actually has real puritan influence. And I would argue,

(01:54:52):
as I said earlier, that Puritanism begins to sort of
die off after the American Revolution. It's in constant decline
from that point forward. And so Jonathan Edwards and the
First Grade Awakening really is the last attempt to really
revive Puritanism, which it does briefly. It does briefly. Oh,

(01:55:15):
Austin Detulio just gifted five total crew memberships. Thank you
so much, Austin, God bless you. Brother. Really appreciate that. Oh,
Wicked Wally got a membership, and he says, whoo prizes
for showing up w Austin. God bless you what wicked Wally,

(01:55:37):
And thank you so much Austin for the support man.
God bless you. Really appreciate everything you do for me.
So if you guys want to get more into these details,
I mean much of my monologue, which I didn't plan on,
hits on much of all the different main points. But
I may just share those links if you guys want
to dive in privately later for it. PJ asked, do

(01:56:01):
you prefer monarchy over democracy? Yes? I do, Yes, I do,
And I make the argument that really orthodoxy is a
pre modern worldview, and from an Orthodox perspective, you know
the famous quote that he is a Heaven is a
monarchy and hell is a democracy. I am pretty much

(01:56:26):
blackpilled on democracy. So I do not have faith that
democracies are viable systems for long term nation states. In fact,
there is no historical example of that. Even in the
instance of like democratic Athens, it didn't last that long.
And so I believe that with the democracy, essentially you're

(01:56:50):
you're led by an entrenched bureaucratic structure that you can't
vote out. And I, as we already know that the
right left political spectrum in America it's all rigged. It's
the same lobby asta, same donors on both sides, and you,
despite you having the choice between two people, you really
don't have a choice. And there's no way to make

(01:57:12):
the government accountable. If we lived in a monarchy, the
whole town could rise up when we can go to
where the king's at or the emperor and we can
try to overthrow, you know, wherever the crown is. We
at least we know who's in power. We know who
has the final decision on government policies and enforcement of
ary laws and regulations. In a democracy, it's just it's faceless,

(01:57:36):
it's abstract, and I believe it's it's actually you know,
anti liberatory. Like maybe maybe in the Puritan example, where
you have an incredibly homogeneous both both ethnically, racially and
religiously homogeneous, maybe you could have something like that. But

(01:57:57):
still I believe monarchy is the superior any to where
I put governmental structure. So I'm I'm black pilled on
basically all of the modernist options. So you have democracy, socialism, fascism, communism,
and then variations of the four. That is kind of
the modern period. I mean, the question of modernity is

(01:58:19):
how do we govern our nation states an absence of
monarchy and absence of explicit religious identity, and so, as
I said, monarchy ends with World War One, and so
after that, it's like the entire Western narrative, including the
post World War two consensus, is about trying to restructure
the values of democracy, its importance, and how it's tied

(01:58:40):
with the identity of the West, and and look at
the state of the West. So yeah, I'm pretty black
pilled on democracy myself. Does that mean I don't vote
for my local elections. No, I do vote for my
sheriff and in my local elections because I've said before
I think that's important. And my black build on presidential

(01:59:01):
elections or federal elections. Yeah, absolutely absolutely. I am suspicious
of anybody who gets elected on the federal level. Not
that everybody's bad, but I'm just suspicious of everyone because
the whole system is rigged and I don't see there's
any way to change the government or the American system
without eventually collapsing. Does that mean I think that America

(01:59:22):
is going to be monarchical. No, I don't. I do
not and so I think Orthodox Christians or pre modern
Christians need to be kind of pragmatic about the way
that we live. And in a sense we are of
that old world mentality. So our rulers are a sort
of judgment against us, as an indictment against the nation.

(01:59:43):
And in that sense, America pretty much is led by
the people who deserve to lete it based on the
values of the populace and what we've condoned to happen,
because Americans, despite some of the positive attributes, have just
been incredibly lazy and the whole twentieth century, I would argue,

(02:00:03):
is a slow deteriorization of whatever project America was supposed
to be. So that's kind of my my take on that.
Thank you very much, PJ for the two dollars super chat.
Do appreciate that. Okay, let's uh, let's now this last
video is very much muldy apple. What was that? If

(02:00:28):
you have a panel on playing with nuts all day,
invite rip ye, okay, we'll do yeah exactly. Rebel Umbrien says,
like I said, we have the leaders, we just unfortunately
that is true. Unfortunately that is true. I mean from
our orthodox elders, you know, New York City and in

(02:00:49):
La Are Sodom and Gomorrah. And you know, as much
as I would defend my family or my you know,
American compatriots lesser greater extent, I mean, America is Babylon.
I mean, look at what we export to the world.

(02:01:10):
Doesn't mean there aren't good values, doesn't mean there aren't
great people, doesn't mean there aren't inspiring points of our
history that we can look at. But yeah, generally speaking,
we as a nation have really really dropped the ball.
You can point to the boomers, you know, you can

(02:01:30):
point to the presuppositions of the American project, which is
kind of what we're laying out here today. So anyways,
let's check out our last video here, and guys, if
you'd like to support my work, please do so with
a super chat. Would greatly appreciate it. And this is
a video that's going to give you a historical context

(02:01:51):
for our conversation today and everything that I was laying out,
So check it out.

Speaker 4 (02:01:56):
Austerity and spiritual purity. The Puritans weren't all this and more.
One might go as far as to call them religious zelots.
Zelot here is not a derogatory term, but a grounded
depiction of their way of life. The Puritans believed very
strongly in their religious sensibilities and were willing to do
just about anything to see them be carried out. As
was often the case with new religious movements, the title

(02:02:16):
of Puritan came from the opponents of this religious movement,
who ridiculed them as being unrealistic purists. Those labeled with
this title took up the challenge, declaring that they were
indeed puritants, just as their adversaries had claimed. The Puritans
were successors of the Protestant Reformation that shook the Catholic
Church to its core. The Reformation was sparked when a
Catholic monk named Martin Luther began questioning the official teachings

(02:02:38):
and narratives of the Church. On October thirty first, fifteen seventeen,
he nailed his ninety five THESS to the doors of
an abbey called All Saints Church, also known as Castle Church.
Luther ignited a dialogue that led to a new movement
among Christians, and soon new denominations began to spring up.
Before the Reformation, the Catholic Church, whose very name Catholic
is the Latin derivative of a Greek word meaning universal,

(02:02:59):
had positioned its as the universal church in the land.
After the Reformation, several denominations in Europe competed to gain
faithful converts. Martin Luther became a primary leader of the Reformation,
but he was not the only one. Close on the
heels of Martin Luther's rise to prominence was a man
named John Calvin. John Calvin is crucial to the history
of the Puritans, as it was upon his subsequent doctrine

(02:03:19):
of Calvinism that many Puritan beliefs and thoughts would be based.
John Calvin was a French reformer who, after fleeing his
native France, set up shop in Switzerland, where he preached
his beliefs on predestination. Like Luther before him, Calvin stressed
the need for faith for Christians to achieve salvation, and
also like Luther, he believed that salvation was not something
someone could earn through good works. Rather, it was something

(02:03:39):
one could only achieve through faith in God.

Speaker 2 (02:03:42):
He preached that.

Speaker 4 (02:03:43):
Man is truly humble who neither claims any personal merit
in the sight of God, nor probably despise his brother
or aims at being thought superior to that, but reckons
it not that he is one of the members of
Christ and desires nothing more than that the Head alone
should be exalted. He believed that whether we come to
faith in God or go astray and turn our backs
on Great Face and faith, all of it had been
predetermined in advance. This viewpoint would become an important fixture

(02:04:05):
in the life of the Puritans. In medieval Europe, religion
and politics often went hand in hand. Persecution and minorities,
whether ethnic or religious, was quite common.

Speaker 2 (02:04:14):
In the beginning.

Speaker 4 (02:04:14):
The Puritans were religious reformers who sought to separate English
Protestants from the last vestiges of Roman Catholic tradition. In
neighboring regions like Switzerland and Germany, the Protestants enjoyed considerable
religious freedom, making their brethren in England quite envious. While
England entered the Reformation shortly after Martin Luther nailed his
thesis to the church door, it took time for Protestantism
to take hold. The English Reformation's initial cause was also

(02:04:36):
much different. It began due to a falling out between
King Henry the Eighth and the Pope, which led the
English king to separate from the Mother Church and declare
himself the head of a brand new church, the Church
of England, even though he was theologically opposed to Protestant thought.
The excommunicated Henry wanted the annulment of his marriage to
Catherine of Aragon to stand. In many ways, the Church
of England was Catholic in all but name. Many of

(02:04:57):
the Catholic Church's doctrines and rituals carried over to the
Church of England. Perhaps the biggest difference was that the
Pope in Rome no longer had any authority over the
English King. Henry Yte's declaration as head of the new
Church of England opened up the floodgates and a religious
reformation began to take hold in England. The Puritans were
against the Catholic Church and sought to purify the Catholic teachings.
The founders of Puritanism did not intend to start a

(02:05:18):
new religious movement. They simply wanted to cleanse the Protestant
Church of England of underlying vestiges of the Catholic Church.
One of these early reformers was Thomas Cranner, an archbishop
of the Church of England. With the progress of these reformers,
the Puritans would become even more Puritanical, soon rejecting just
about all other Protestant faiths that differed from their teachings.
Protestant gains were overruled in the era of Mary the First,

(02:05:39):
who was also remembered as Bloody Mary. Before long it
was a crime to engage in any religious practice outside
of Catholicism. Queen Mary the First angered England's Protestants even further,
which she married the Catholic stalwart Philip, the King of
Spain in fifteen fifty four. Close on the heels of
this marriage was the announcement that Catholicism in England would
be officially restored. Then, in fifteen fifty five, Mary went

(02:05:59):
a step firm by putting Catholic laws regarding heresy back
in place. This renewed push against heresy would cause Protestant
reformers such as Cranmer their lives. This persecution forced many
Protestants to flee to Switzerland. After the death of Mary
in fifteen fifty eight, a dichotomy emerged among the following
British monarchs. They realized that the best way to deal
with the religious disparity was to walk the fine line

(02:06:19):
between Catholicism and Protestantism without leaning much towards either. The
Puritan Protestants wish to eliminate this tradition since it seemed
to harken back to Catholicism. Considering the Protestant reforms in
some other parts of Europe. The Puritans were ashamed of
the slow pace of the Reformation within the Church of England.
This sentiment was summed up in the anonymous tract Admonition
to the Parliament, authored in fifteen seventy two. The tract

(02:06:40):
proclaimed its disdain, stating, we in England are so far
off from having a churish rightly reform according to the
prescript of God's work, that as yet we are not
come to the outward face of the same. Queen Elizabeth
the First was a middle of the world reformer regarding
domestic affairs and a stickler for keeping the status quot. However,
while she sought to maintain the slow pace of reforms
at home, she was quite progressive when it came to

(02:07:01):
her Protestant policies abroad. Queen Elizabeth became a kind of
Protestant crusader when it came to taking on Catholic Spain.
She was a staunch supporter of the Protestant leaning Netherlands,
which King Philip of Spain was actively trying to bring
back into the Catholic fold. The political and religious dispute
between Britain and Spain escalated to war when Spain tried
to invade England in fifteen eighty eight, but was repelled
by the British Navy. Many Protestants and Puritans alike viewed

(02:07:24):
this success as a sign of divine providence at work.
After Elizabeth's passing in sixteen oh three, more Puritans became
hopeful regarding her successor, James Stewart, a champion of the
Protestant sect known as the Presbyterians. Before being crowned in England,
he was the King of Scotland, where the Presbyterians hailed from,
also known as James the sixth. He became King James
the First after the union of England and Scotland in

(02:07:44):
sixteen oh three, and proved to be uninterested in most
of the suggestions put forth by the Puritans. He did
agree on one important point, there should be a new
English translation of the Bible. The King James Bible was
welcomed with open arms by the Puritans, who had been
calling for an English version of the Bible for all
to be able to freely read for many years. The Puritans, however,
did not have the favor of the King when it
came to their battle against priestly vestiments. Many Puritanical Protestants

(02:08:07):
ended up getting booted out of the church simply for
declining to where the Puritans in the Church of England
began separating and creating their own religious movement. King James
was a Calvinist, but a reformed Calvinist movement called Arminianism
started to find its footing in England. To tackle the
so called Arminianism controversy emerging in Protestant circles, the great
minds of Calvinism came together in the Netherlands in sixteen eighteen.

(02:08:28):
King James the First sent his representatives to the conference
to argue for the complete rejection of Arminianism. Such efforts
pleased the Puritans. These positive developments were enough to keep
the more vocal voices of the Puritans down, and many
were content just to engage in what they called practical divinity.
But soon after, in sixteen nineteen, some Puritans felt it
expedient to circumvent the will of their king when he
decided against backing his son in law Frederick, the new

(02:08:50):
King of Bohemia and his struggle against Catholic.

Speaker 2 (02:08:52):
Forces during the Thirty Years War.

Speaker 4 (02:08:54):
However, besides some clandestine efforts such as these, most Puritans
were willing to tolerate King James as long as he
in turn toleer rated the main tenants of Calvinism. In
sixteen twenty two, King James issued a command to safeguard
the public from religious confusion. Only those who held a
Bachelor of Divinity or hire would be permitted to teach predestination,
further upsetting the Puritans. Many Puritans sensed further trouble ahead

(02:09:14):
when King James allowed his son Charles to wed a
French Catholic princess, and when Charles the First came to
the throne in sixteen twenty five and began practicing Catholicism openly,
they felt that their worst fears had been confirmed. The
arrival of King Charles led many Puritans to seek a
new place to plant their faith.

Speaker 2 (02:09:29):
The Americans.

Speaker 4 (02:09:30):
The Pilgrims and others came to America on the mayflo
making their home in Plymouth, in sixteen twenty, but many
are unaware of just how much religious piety drove these
settlers to leave their old world for a completely new one.
It was not in search of gold or land that
the Pilgrims, who were separatists, although they shared many things
in common with other Puritans, embarked on this dangerous voyage.
They wanted religious freedom and a chance to build a
society according to their ideals. Today Plymouth is a city

(02:09:53):
in Massachusetts, but initially it was a part of the
General Colony of New England before separating off into the
Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Pilgrims who settled Employmouth were led
by William Branford, among others. Before even stepping foot on land,
the Pilgrims famously signed the Mayflower Compact, in which they
dictated how the colony should be run and how their
individual lives should be lived. This document would prove pivotal
in shaping America. The philosopher John Locke, whose famed Social

(02:10:16):
Contract later influenced the very creation of the Declaration of Independence,
cited it to say that the words of the Mayflower
Compact were influential would be an understatement. Upon landing the
Pilgrims began building up their settlements and practicing their principles.
Not long after, the non separating Puritans sailed to the Americas. However,
the nonconforming Puritans did not break away from the Church
like the Pilgrims dead. Rather, they sought to fix it

(02:10:37):
from within. Further waves of Puritan migration were in the works,
and by sixteen thirty a Puritan leader named John Winthrop
was leading the so called Great Migration of a large
Puritan flock to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Church of
England was far too oppressive and retroactive for English Protestants
who wish to reform how their religious services were carried out,
Even though the English had broken with the Catholic Church
in many ways, It's in that England was Protestant in

(02:10:59):
name only, with all the trappings of the Catholic Church intact.
It was foolish to pretend otherwise. Only when the situation
was no longer tolerable in English did the Puritans begin
to look toward the Americas as a permanent refuge for
their flock. To learn more about why the Puritans left England,
check out her book The Puritans, A Captivating Gun to
the English.

Speaker 1 (02:11:17):
So that video gives you a good Again, that's basically
much of what I presented in the opening monologue, but
just for your own edification and a comprehensive analysis for
Jason's stream today, I thought we could certainly include that,
and I'm going to share. We're not going to dive
into Ryan Reeves. Those are long videos. They are worthy

(02:11:40):
of consideration, though, and you should check them out. That
one right there is on the first grade Awakening, and
then this one is on the second grade Awakening. So
check those out if you are interested in the topic.
Pablo WinCE Gobar throws in a couple of bucks, says,

(02:12:00):
tell Tony, this is every last penny in my bank.
Thank you. I don't know who Tony is, Pablo. You
have to let me know who Tony is and I'll
make sure to relay the word. Hello. Listener throws in five,
says democracy is a way for the j to make
us think it's our fault. Things are going wrong. You

(02:12:21):
pick the wrong guy, goy, it's your fault. Pick the
wrong guy. Is that reference to something I said? Did
I pick somebody? Oh? Hello, listener? Is Tony? Okay? Okay,
Well this is Tony. Hey, Tony, God bless you, brother,
Thank you very much for the five bucks. So, I mean,

(02:12:47):
obviously does it make does democracy allow subversive forces to
manipulate the country and the governmental institution more easily? Absolutely, absolute, utely. So,
I mean I Jay's weren't behind democracy itself. That's very

(02:13:07):
much the European Enlightenment. But but your point, I get
your point. I don't disagree with subversive elements in the
donor class and the manipulation of democracy. Yeah, I'm picking
up what you're putting down, Tony, So I do appreciate it,

(02:13:29):
my brother, God bless you. Let me just double check.
Mark throws in ten bucks over on dono Chat. He says,
thanks Patrick, Well, thank you. Mark, really appreciate that. God
bless you. And let me just check stream labs. Tony
says enlightenment was seeded from Masonic halls, which were funded

(02:13:52):
by not exactly, not exactly. I mean, I've done a
lot of research into the history of Freemasonry, and really
it was a I mean where Jays involved, yes, but
a lot of non Jays as well. I mean, masonry
really is founded by the knights templar when they flee
after the Inquisition up to Scotland and found the Scottish

(02:14:14):
Rite freemasonry, and it was influence if you want to
talk about Jays. I mean, it was certainly influenced by
esoteric spirituality, so you know, Christian Kabbala, which really got
going after Giovanni Picadella Marendola during the Renaissance, and that
mixed with again the Rosicrucianism, the Hermeticism, the Gnosticism during

(02:14:38):
that period and when I mean during the when the
Royal Society is founded, which is what we consider the
founding of modern science. That's sixteen sixty in London, and
in that same century is when we start to get
the speculative masonry, right. So speculative masonry is what we're
talking about where they have these weird rituals, thirty three degrees,

(02:15:00):
all this different stuff, Alfred Pike and you know, all
that different stuff. So it was really a way. Masonry
was a way for many of these people who are
part of these elite scientific communities to essentially maintain their esoteric, kabbalistic,

(02:15:21):
distorted form of Christianity and relationship with these ancient mysteries.
Because free masonry, speculative masonry is tied with the belief
that these ancient mysteries are efficacious. You have to make
your devotion to the Grand Architect, the general monotheistic God.
So is masonry more consistent with Rabbinic Judaism. Absolutely absolutely,

(02:15:44):
if you're talking about, you know, again the monotheism or
the theological understanding of God within Rabbinic Tamudic Judaism and Masonry. Yeah,
there's a lot of overlap there. But I I it's
definitely not true to say Jay's funded or founded. Freemasonry
totally comes out of of heretical Gnostics and heretical Christians

(02:16:09):
that were incorporating gnosticism, esotericism, Kabbalah, all that different stuff
into this new Hodgepodge worldview. So but I get your point, Tony,
I I get what you're I get what you're putting
down there. It was funded by London banks. Am I
wrong on this? Yeah? But those London banks during that time,

(02:16:29):
that's well before the Rothschilds get there, you know, from Germany.
So London banks were not Rothchild controlled by the time Freemasonry,
you know, the seventeenth century. Uh, the roth Child's come
a little bit later, Aby, says doctor David just let

(02:16:50):
me Jasper's true at least leading to the French Revolution,
Yeah to, I mean absolutely, are are Jay's part of
a revolutionary spirit? Yeah? I think E. Michael Jones has
a book on that if you're interested in looking into
the Jewish revolutionary spirit. Did it influence again much of

(02:17:12):
the social reforms after the Enlightenment? Absolutely? Absolutely, And so
you know, after the French Revolution, I mean that entire
eighteen hundreds, that nineteenth century, you know, socialism, and you
really can't avoid That's when you start getting into the
influence of various Jays and the Bolsheviks and Lenin, you know,

(02:17:37):
Lenin being a Mason, Marx being a Mason, and it's
because the you know, they both had like this weird
utopian anti God understanding or at least anti Christian I
should say anti Christian understanding of white society should be shaped.
But yeah, the French Revolution, I mean we're talking early

(02:18:00):
nineteenth century there, and then you know the what is
it like, eighteen forty eight isn't that the year of revolution?
There's like four or five different revolutions in Europe that
occurs at forty eight, eighteen forty eight, I don't know
I'd have to look it up. The eighteen hundreds, there's
one of the years that I think it's eighteen forty eight,
had like multiple multiple revolutions, and then once I mean,

(02:18:23):
because once you start moving out of the eighteenth the
end of the eighteen hundreds or the nineteenth century, the
global Jewish allion. You know, various various Jays are certainly
working behind the scenes for during these especially the socialists,
communists movements, anything related to those, and many of them

(02:18:45):
were Masons for a fact. I mean, I think when
I did a stream on the history of Freemasonry, we
talked about how Lennon was a Mason. I can't remember
if Trotsky was a Mason or not. I would suspect
that he probably was, I mean, because that's how part

(02:19:07):
of the they built these pamphlets and the social fervor
that they built up was in with these Masonic logic,
especially in Switzerland, right, Switzerland was a huge hub of this.
So Tony says, I have a whole timeline on this,
but it's too much to do in text. Yah, dph

(02:19:28):
you should definitely do a stream about France after Napoleon.
That's an interesting topic, Tony said. I wasn't trying to
politely wreck you, Tony. I mean, I get where you're
coming from. I think we're on the same team. I
just think there's a little bit more nuance regards. God

(02:19:50):
Bless you brother. I appreciate you being here. Thank for
your support, Tony, God bless you man. So no shots
fired on this end, So don't take it that way
at all. No shots fired here. Freemasonry and the Jays
are very subversive. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's the same team,
same team, same team. We're on the same team here. Oh,

(02:20:13):
the Napoleon Napoleon Simp letters, that was outrageous. If you
guys didn't check the stream I did with what was
it like the historic Simp or something like that. Napoleon
was one of the biggest simps of all time. We
read his love letters with Rachel Wilson. That is hilarious. Uh,
if you guys didn't check that out, do Kean says, dude,

(02:20:36):
I can feel the tension our Dph and Tony about
the fistfight. Uh, no tension here, Keen. I don't know.
I don't know what internal problems you're picking up on.
And you're chaotic, you know, internal monologue. But me and Tony.
We're on the same team. We've established Tony and I
are on the same team. There's no friendly fire here,
no friendly fire. Yeah, Napoleon is the biggest simp of

(02:20:59):
all time. That is a that is I think we did.
We made the conclusive case he was the biggest simp
of all time. You guys are hilarious. Anyways, guys, one
of the streams I got. This week, we're gonna be
doing a deep dive of Christian Zionism and how various

(02:21:21):
Jews influenced the development of this heretical, dispensationalist gofield Bible
theology and why it's really important to be aware of
for any traditional Christian when talking about America, because, let's
face it, we just talked about the Southern Baptist Convention
and the Southern Baptist Church. I'm sorry, how many of

(02:21:43):
them do you think are Zionists? You know, if that's
the second largest denomination in the United States. I mean,
last time when we looked at it, at least I
forget which article I pulled up, but it showed that
evangelicals it was about fifty percent or more like devoutly Zionist.

(02:22:04):
So it's a large it's a large swath of the
United States. Unfortunately, so I thought that that's gonna be
one and we got I got three other sponsored streams
to dive into. And so if you guys are interested
in sponsoring a stream, please do so with this link
right here. I'd be happy to message you and we
could dive into whatever topic it is you'd like me

(02:22:25):
to do a stream on. But you know, let me know,
feel free to sponsor a stream. Like I said, I
got three more, at least one more I'm gonna do
this week, and then I have a Christian Zionism stream
that I president. Sundowner says, Josephine was an only she

(02:22:49):
was she was Josephine. She knew how to control Napoleon.
It was pretty pathetic. Tony says Snead Vangelia Evangelicals. Snead Evangelicals,
you guys are hilarious. Oh, Jason says, I think Prince

(02:23:10):
Harry is the biggest simp could be. I mean he
was also on our list. I think he was voted second.
We did a poll during that stream. I think we
did four different historical simps and Napoleon won by a
large shot. But Prince Harry was in second, so it's
not wrong to depict Prince Harry for sure. But President Sundowner,

(02:23:33):
thank you so much, brother for the twenty dollars super chap.
You're totally right, Josephine. She was not only sleeping with
other I mean she was literally sleeping with every man
but Napoleon while he was sending her tons of love
letters while he was conquering Europe. That's the most ironic
thing about it is the man was undefeatable until he
stepped in Russia. He was undefeatable in military conquests, just

(02:23:56):
won everything, and he was simping for an older woman
who was sleeping with every man but him. Sad. It's sad.
You know, history is full of ironies. But thank you
so much, President Sundowner. Yeah, it is brutal. It is brutal, factly,
especially if you're Napoleon and people are now reading your

(02:24:18):
love letters on live streams. That's gotta be embarrassing. Anyways, guys,
thank you so much for the support. Let me just
double check I didn't miss anyone before we hop off.
Doesn't look like it, and all right, guys, I just
want to thank everybody so much for the support. God
bless you all, and like I said, I'll be back

(02:24:40):
later this week, potentially tomorrow. I may do an open
panel tomorrow. I have an open panel topic I've been
wanting to do on the rise of Gnostic spirituality, or
at least Gnostic ideas, because that seems to be so popular,
whether it be the Billy Carson's of the world or
all these sort of secret New Age teachers. It's all

(02:25:00):
just repackaged Gnostic heresy. So I may do an open
panel tomorrow, but we're gonna be at least doing two
more streams this week, so I'll see you guys then,
so as always, until next time, God bless

Speaker 2 (02:25:18):
H

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