Just because something important has been repeated endlessly doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong with trying to find new ways to say it. But you should get it right. If you want to identity something like the “Protestant Work Ethic” as the original sin of this country and the great enabler of racism, then you really ought to acknowledge the white Protestant roots of abolitionism, too. Otherwise your piece is going to read like Introductory Philosophy for Dummies.
I have a Protestant background and Mayflower ancestors on both sides of my family, and I’m well aware of their faults. But I am also aware of their contributions.
And I know that there’s an upside to divinely-inspired industriousness. If you need a modern day refresher, go look at Salt Lake City. Mormons are the new Congregationalists.
I don’t like having to point it out, but our white Protestant ancestors gave us the good with the bad. Our Founding Fathers were children of The Enlightenment. They didn’t emerge pure from Jupiter’s head like Minerva. What they did was give us some values and a roadmap. What we do with them is up to us.
White is the new Black and if one is White, Male and Old, it’s three strikes and you’re out of the Democratic Party.
why can’t white guys ever catch a break in this country?
there oughta be a law
Guess I have to turn in my membership card.
Demographics mean we don’t have to care about middle class white men.
And since upper class urban white men, ie the ones with all the real power, are mostly socially liberal to start with, white guys without millions of dollars are pointless now. They’re a waste of economic and natural resources outside of being good media punching bags because you can’t get into trouble attacking them.
If that sucks… oh fucking well. You were born a white male, if you’re not rich and in a major city, it’s a sign YOU failed at life. Because you had every advantage at birth.
It’s time to divide up what they have, because they only have it due to skin color and having a dick, and give it to the people they abused for years. It’s time to get rid of them.
And as for the Democratic party, we are the ones pushing it and demographics just mean we can be more bold about this because our enemies can’t fight back anymore!
that’s almost as ridiculous as his original comment
I first came to this realization when a frequent contributor posted “I can’t wait for the old white men to die” in reference to we baby boomers. Wen you read someone saying they want you dead, that’s not very inviting. In fact, it tells you that you were very much mistaken about being part of the group.
Unlike my comment, no one objected to his/her comment.
“I want you dead and I can’t wait” and you think I’m paranoid for re-evaluating my Party allegiance?
Actually, this blog is mild compared to what I’ve read at dailykos.
I haven’t been on dailykos for years, it’s a parody of itself and has been for a long time.
you should take the ridiculousness of that previous comment as much as I took the ridiculousness of yours
I still read it for breaking political news. For all it’s faults, it’s still better than ABC,CBS,NBC,and, of course,FOX.
I was forced to watch FOX for a dozen years in the plant cafeteria. It used to be good for the stock quotes.
I just have to tell this story. One day, W was President and he was giving a speech. They ran the DOW, S&P & NASDAQ in a sidebar in those days. Every time Bush opened his mouth, the market dropped. It was so obvious that some called it out and we all laughed as the drop continued, every time he opened his mouth.
Dude, you’re just trolling.
A classic example.
John Brown’s body lies a’mouldering in his grave
And a-wept the sons of bondage whom he gave his life to save
And though he lost his life in his struggle to free the slaves
His truth goes marching on…
That’s one issue, WASPS — positive or negative? Of course, both. No question about it.
But because of the dominant power position of White Protestants in this country, unfortunately it’s inevitable, and hardly unfair, that when the discussion goes into critical mode, the negative side will be focused on. Also because we have definitely been overexposed to the positive mythos of the superiority of northern Europeans as a major form of propaganda. In other words, America (basically White Protestant America) could do no wrong when it comes to its relations with the rest of the world.
And many non-WASPS have assimilated to that and go right along with it.
Yet we should not simply trash this part of our history and heritage. It is what it is, and it’s not going away, but as Boo says, it’s very complex and many-sided. For example, American folklore — good or bad? (Talk amongst yourselves.)
Just as we have the Howard Zinns (who I’ve never much cared for, to tell you the truth), we need a history that shows the REAL positive side of the White Protestant heritage, as opposed to the fake propaganda and horn-blowing.
We have been fed so many lies about our history it seems we could never come to the end of it, yet a one-sided trashing is not the answer either. All we want is the truth.
The real America long ago ceased to be just a White Protestant culture. It is a sui generis hybrid culture that has a lot more virtues than those of the proverbial Puritans. When we hear of the French, for example, forbidding the wearing of traditional religious garments in public institutions, I think most Americans instinctively understand that kind of secular uniformity as unjust, stupid, and counterproductive. And the idea (beloved by most of the RW) that the essence of America is WASP culture, is in itself an attempt to reimpose that kind of power, but in a religious form. We can thank the Founding Fathers for our sense of balance.
The real essence of America is the Constitution and our shared history holding together the cultural diversity mix, very much including American Indians, Afro-Americans, Latinos, Asians, and all the other immigrant and regional cultures. And Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, the Black churches, American Indian religions, Buddhism, etc. And lots of mixing.
That said, we can now come back and look at the legal/cultural heritage of the White Protestants in a much wider context also. For example, the legal heritage that gave rise to our form of government goes back to the Middle Ages, as do many elements of the regional and ethnic cultures as well. The Indian part goes back to time immemorial.
So, coming back to that positive side of the White Protestant heritage, we see many elements in it that harmonize with the above ideals and with those of the other cultures. For example, as bad as the treatment of the Indians was by the white settlers, or of blacks by whites, there have always been some whites that drew on the positive side of their cultural heritage to right the wrongs, where they could “translate” the language of the oppressed into a language of redress and justice, and from language to action.
The point is that it has become meaningless to appeal to tradition — any tradition. The Great Forgetting is in full swing. The Protestant tradition(s) that you allude to (elliptically enough) have been broken and are no longer explanatory or predictive. Ditto for the Catholic tradition(s), which may be better remembered, but which are today equally powerless.
Today, we have contracted the fatal disease of propaganda. Do not speak of values; do not speak of roadmaps; everything has been forgotten. There is no continuity from the past (prior to the first couple of months of the 21st Century). Historical analogies themselves can today only be a form of propaganda; there is no continuous understanding to appeal to.
Today’s racism is not yesterday’s, or that of sixty years ago, or of two hundred years ago. It is, like everything else around us, the product of propaganda. We would have the same amount and the same kind of racism today even if we had had no history of racism.
Propaganda always requires an enemy, but the choice of enemy is dictated by the convenience of the moment. When one enemy ceases to resonate, another must be substituted for it and the change can take effect, for all practical purposes, instantaneously.
Think about it: the people who are susceptible to the propaganda cannot possibly, by that very token, have any context, any collective memory, any “hinterland” (as someone evocatively said of Margaret Thatcher and her followers).
Note that nostalgia is not memory, it is merely a technique of propaganda.
Anyone who knows history is immune to propaganda. But we are the .0001% .
Marin, Well Said!
I’m Catholic & Yes, There’s The “Good” With The “Bad”. Hello Reality. Welcome To The World!
We Are Truly Blessed To Have The “Benefits” Of Enlightened Ideas & Philosophies Bestowed Upon Us By Our Founding Fathers, Warts & All.
We Are All Very Much The BETTER For It!
The GOPers Would Love To BullDoze All Of That Underground.
Goddamn Them.
They Need To Be BullDozed Into Oblivion!
Agree with the good and the bad; this is true of all cultures. But I also think that anything that helps illuminate white privilege for those who don’t see it is a good thing. Most middle class whites are good people. One cannot see what one is ignorant to. So educating people on the background assumptions of a culture is a good thing and will have a positive impact so long as the presentation is not hostile or judgmental.
I really hate the phrase “Protestant Work Ethic” as if Catholics are all loafers. But then Catholics tend to be Irish or eastern European or Southern European or Latino, so I take it as Anglo-Germanic racial prejudice.
You might inquire into Max Weber on that one.
I dream of the day when a white male protestant will be president. or maybe 42 of them.
Like you, I wish that the author of that brave attempt had a better understanding of the religious complexity of this country’s original 13 colonies. I also wish the author had an understanding of the various origins of what are today called Protestant evangelical religious. Some of the doctrines are in fact syncretic and have recent origins.
Max Weber’s thesis may apply to the middle classes; to enough of an extent, Weber was trying to defang Marx’s sociology. But the author of the article uses even that much to broadly.
The US racial system was created in Virginia in the 1680s when the House of Burgesses created legal definitions for “white”, “Indian”, and “negro”. The Anglican church in the colony at the time had very little to say about those decisions. Until then, outside of Spanish America, servitude tended to be indentured, for a period of 7 to 10 years, and depended on the unemployment in Britain after the enclosure laws. Slavery instead of indenture was instituted first for Africans before it became racialized. The decisions in Virginia were practical power decisions relative to plantations and trade with Indians into the present North Carolina.
The Barbadian sugar planters who settled South Carolina has not racialized slavery in Barbadoes, using both natives and Africans in the sugar plantations. (After all the Bardabian plantations had been operating only 40 years or so when South Carolina was settled). Two decisions affect the racialization of slavery in the (South) Carolina colony–the importations of rice coast Africans as slaves who understood the process of raising rice and the copying of Virginia’s race code in order to create the Carolina frontier with the local natives.
What is striking about the Southern arguments for independence is the very wealthy Southern planters with slaves being so concerned about “liberty”. In the South, the Calivinists were the Scotch-Irish, the Scots, a few Swiss, and the Huguenots of Charleston. I’m not aware of many religious sentiments from these folks with regards to race and slavery prior to the Revolutionary War.
After the Revolution, both the Methodists and the Baptists briefly had a policy encouraging manumission, which swiftly died when the cotton gin was deployed.
As the abolition controversy arose after 1800, and especially after the formal end of the slave trade in 1808, it was articulate preachers and politicians who were the larger slaveowners who wrote the polemics in defense of slavery. The preachers, regardless or tradition, were always careful to found their arguments on Biblical doctrine.
Beginning in the late 1700s, racialist arguments were primarily coming from scientists just opening the sciences of anthropology and looking an the history of non-European peoples. Religious racialist arguments generally riffed of the then-current scientific view (pre-Darwin) in the midst of Biblical justifications for the institution of slavery. Probably the quintessential statement of this sort of view is that of Thomas Jefferson on races in his Notes on the State of Virginia. It is a classic statement of consensus US racialism.
That view of race did not begin to be eroded in the US until the anthropologists of the 1920s uncorked the perspective of cultural relativism.
Other colonies developed along different paths, some more driven by religious sentiments than others. By the 1830s, some Quakers of Pennsylvania and North Carolina were providing stops for the Underground Railroad. The Congregationalists and Unitarians of Massachusetts were the main strength of the abolitionist movement.
Sarah Grimke grew up in a Calvinist Huguenot family but was repulsed by slavery, became Quaker, and was too much of an abolitionist for her Quaker meeting.
It was as the civil rights movement gathered momentum that Protestant churches began religious defenses of racism. Until the 1950s, racism was never challenged publicly in popular culture. Probably the signal point in US popular culture was Mitch Miller’s signing Leslie Uggams as a regular performer of pop music and not jazz, blues, gospel or what broadcasters typed as “Negro music”. That is, black performers were presented in a racialized frame; that Uggams wasn’t created a bit of sensation.
Jerry Falwell and quite a few imitating Baptist ministers operated as an anti-civil rights religious movement, but those brands of Baptists are loosely connected to Biblical doctrine. Even those Calivinist Baptists did not use Protestant Ethic doctrines. And most popular opinion in the 1950s and 1960s had difficulties with understanding predestination, the elect, and how the Protestant ethic did not become works righteousness. The “saved by grace” bunch and the Calivinist “works righteousness” bunch split several congregational polity evangelical associations during the 19th and 20th centuries.
If the Protestant ethic is a major line of attack against black communities and other minorities seeking justice, it is really a recent (past 60 years) formulation and not a deep tradition at all. It could even go no further back than William Buckley’s God and Man at Yale and the modern conservative coterie that surrounded him. But Buckley was Roman Catholic, wasn’t he?
The default white nation that so strikes the author in the painting The Apotheosis of George Washington, somewhat triumphalist coming toward the end of the Civil War, was the secular and religious assumption of white people up until the civil rights movement. Its racial ideology is in fact overdetermined in American culture.
Thank you! I was hoping that someone would put this within the context of the historical evolution of the American economic and justice system. Unless one understands how this all began, starting in at least the mid-17th century, then they are speaking from ignorance. If one truly wishes to understand how we got to this point today, it is simply a requisite that they know the history. Sadly, it seems that few have any interest. They simply want to cast stones.
Great post. And contrary to the link and Boo’s POV on it, the Protestant Work Ethic is about “work” rather than collecting material things. It is a direct counter to the sins of Sloth and Greed. It also is not meant as a put down to other, particularly other Christian religions. Protestant just chose to put greater emphasis on personal responsibility for creating personal relationships with God. In this regard they also made up much of the Northern Abolitionist movement. You need only to look at city and street names in Kansas to see that many people from MA moved to KS to help claim it as a free state. Many names were lifted straight from MA.
That led to John Brown and today to the strong right to life movement there. I suppose that might qualify as the bad, but it is incorrect to paint all whites, Protestants, or northerner from any era with the same brush
Tarheel, seriously, have you written any books, or are about to do so, or could be convinced to write one? Or have a reading list to recommend? I really appreciate your depth and breadth of perspective.