Christian Right's Narrative Incomplete
Castelli writes:
Several interlocking narratives and rhetorics are at work in the Vision America program. One critical piece of the puzzle is a traditionalist, triumphalist historical narrative in which the United States was given to Christians by God to establish a providential nation based on biblical precepts. (No apologies -- nor even passing reference -- to the land's prior occupants.) Founded as a city upon a hill (the oft-repeated image deriving from John Winthrop's 1630 shipboard speech to the English colonists he was bringing to the new world) and as a refuge for puritans escaping religious persecution, "America was not an accident," as one speaker at the conference put it. Rick Scarborough, president of the organization that sponsored the conference, is a Baptist. Had he paid attention to what he should have learned in his Baptist history classes at seminary, he would have learned that colonial Massachusetts was far from being a promised land for Baptists. Roger Williams was banished from the Colony because he challenged Winthrop's idea that America was a "new Israel." At the beginning of his Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience (1644), Williams explained one of the theses of his book: "The state of the land of Israel, the kings and people thereof, in peace and war, is proved figurative and ceremonial, and no pattern nor precedent for any kingdom or civil state in the world to follow." (p. 3)
Roger Williams founded the colony of Rhode Island and established the first Baptist church in America. A year after Clarke's book was published, Henry Dunster, the first president of Harvard University, was forced to resign from his position and banished from Cambridge, Massachusetts. His crime: refusing to have his fourth child baptized as an infant and proclaiming that only believers should be baptized. And these are just a few examples of what life was like in Massachusetts during the days of the pilgrims.
When Baptists begin holding up colonial Massachusetts as a model for modern society it demonstrates something about the transvaluation of beliefs and convictions that modern fundamentalists have brought about in Baptist life. They truly have more in common with colonial theocratic Puritans than they do with their Baptist ancestors.
Christian Right's Narrative Incomplete | 13 comments (13 topical, 0 hidden)
Christian Right's Narrative Incomplete | 13 comments (13 topical, 0 hidden)
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