Speaker 1: What he says is that Americans, this is a direct quote,
Americans who think they are Christians truly are something else,
intensely religious, but devout in the American religion. And so
what is the American religion? He says that the American
religion centers on the solitary self's direct encounter with God.
It's the believer's conviction of possessing an inner divine spark,
a sense of freedom that expresses itself in total spiritual solitude.
So God is alone, and I am alone, and I
can have a relationship with God, and that relationship is
in total solitude to anything else that is happening in
the world around me. And this to me, if I
were going to put a finger on Okay, what's the
number one defining feature of American religion is that there
has to be this experiential conversion. Every single one of
these things we're going to talk about is not bad
in and of itself. Like obviously, lots of famous people
within the Orthodox Church, beginning with Saint Paul, had radical
encounters with Jesus Christ which totally transformed their lives and
they give up everything to follow him. Obviously, there's nothing
wrong with that it's just not normative for everyone, right,
it's just not the experience that everybody has. Not everybody
has a road to Damascus moment. Well, in American Christianity,
everybody is supposed to have a road to Damascus moment.
Speaker 2: This is Jonathan Pejol Welcome to the Symbolic World.
Speaker 3: Hello everyone, We are back with Deacon Seraphim Roland. We
had our last episode talking about folk magic and fairies
and America, and we ended hint at the great American
experiment in religion, and so I'm very curious to see
where Diggin Serafin wants to take us today.
Speaker 2: Please let us know where we're going.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so it's been a little while since we've recorded
that episode, and since then, I've had so many people
reach out to me very excited that we had teased
talking about Mormonism. So I thought, just to heighten your excitement,
I would tease you a little more and maybe maybe
not actually get into Mormonism today. We'll see how far
we get. But I just want to say that you
guys asked for this. You have been begging for universal
history of America in the comments of literally every video
since we started the series, Like four years ago, and
so you're going to get it right. You're going to
just like it's like, Okay, you guys really want this,
We're gonna have to. Because the thing is that it's
things that are really distant from us. It's easy to
talk about kind of in a more abstract way, and
the closer you get to in this case, my personal
living experience, and to some extend Jonathan's as well, because
although you're not American, you did grow up in a
kind of evangelical Meulu, which ultimately comes from America, and
so when we start talking about American religion, it is
kind of relevant to your experience as well in certain ways.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3: And I mean I think that the crossing over even
in the United States, the crossing over of the French
and the English, the relationship between the French Protestants and
the English Protestants and the French Catholics, all of these
things are part of both the Canadian.
Speaker 2: History and the US history as well.
Speaker 4: So that's right, all right.
Speaker 1: So what I want to do today is to kind
of pick up not exactly where we left off last time,
but to pick up on this theme of folk magic
and talk about how.
Speaker 4: This experience.
Speaker 1: Worked itself out more in the kind of institutions of
the churches in New England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Now,
this will actually give us our setup for talking about
Mormonism and other revivalists sects which come out of New
York and New England in the nineteenth century.
Speaker 2: Because what I want to know is, then you have
Christian science and all Christian.
Speaker 1: Science, so you have Adventism. You have all these different things,
and they all pop up. A lot of those pop
up within a decade of each other, like a few
miles of each other. Makes sense, something weird is happening there.
But to explain what that thing is, what I want
to do is talk a little bit, go back to
the seventeenth century, so this would be the sixteen hundreds,
and talk about the First Great Awakening. So everything, and
by the way, I'm going to be referencing a lot
of stuff today from this book.
Speaker 4: Right here.
Speaker 1: I even brought it to show to the class. This
is called Coppola and the Founding of America.
Speaker 3: It's the early influence, the Foundation of America, Founding of America.
Speaker 1: It's a super good book. By the way, It's not
like gotcha's weird. Anyway, It's really good. It's by Brian Ogrin,
and he makes a really convincing case, I think, and
I'm not going to talk about that immediately, but a
lot of the threads that I'm connecting come from him
and come from some other authors who are all writing
about this one hundred year period that is really formative
for American religion in a lot of ways.
Speaker 4: Okay, so.
Speaker 1: You say the fundamental problem that American religion is trying
to solve, and I'll use here that this term American religion.
This comes from Harold Bloom, who wrote his book on
American Religion, which we'll talk about later, And basically what
he says is there is a thing called American religion,
which is what almost all Americans have. Like that's that's
their actual religion, regardless of whether they are Mormon or
Baptist or Methodist or Pentecostal or what have you. The
thing that they are actually are is American. And that
there is a particular spiritual quality to American religion, which
Bloom defines as being fundamentally gnaustic.
Speaker 4: Now what he means by gnostic.
Speaker 1: Will it will be something we talk about but I
just want to, like just to get people riled up
before we go too much further. I'll just mention that
Bloom thinks that that's true whether you're a Southern Baptist
or a Mormon, and that both of those are forms
of the American religion. So let's get into it. So,
starting around the seventeenth century, Puritans in New England find
themselves wrestling with the central problem of early American Christianity,
which is, on the one hand, everybody in America. You know,
when the Puritans come to America, you know, you have
people talking about, you know, America is going to be
this shining city set on a hill, all these different things,
and what you have is these different foundations of in
the early colonies, not just of Christian societies, which would
be something that they made a big deal about in
the the circles that I grew up in, but in
actually kind of utopianist Christian societies. Basically saying, real Christianity
has never been tried, so we're going to be the
ones who do it and who show what real Christianity
looks like. Nobody's ever seen it before. We're going to
be the first ones to do it. And so we're
going to establish these covenant societies, and this is what
the early colonies are for the most part. We're going
to establish these covenant societies in which not only is
the civil society and all of its members bound to
obedience to Christ and the scriptures via the covenant, but
also everyone in the society is a genuine saint, everyone
in the society is regenerate, everyone in the society has
a strong personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
Speaker 4: To put it in those terms.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so not just people who are living virtuous lives
or following the laws, but people have gone some kind
of dramatic conversion experience which confirms their membership as one
of the elect. So on the one hand, you have
a societal christendom like you would have had in Europe
before the Reformation or even after the Reformation. But on
the other hand you have this everybody has to have
this authentic conversion experience. So basically, the way it would
work is that a new convert, that is, somebody who's
had this conversion experience, would share the conversion experience with
the congregation, and if the congregation believed that the experience
was genuine, they would be allowed to join, which would
allow them to partake in the Lord's Supper, but it
would also give them the civil privileges that came with
church membership, in particular the right to vote. So in
Puritan New England, you could only vote if you were
also a full member of a church. And then what
that would allow also is that your children could then
be baptized into the church, which would bring them into
the covenant community, but they would not be allowed the
full benefits of church membership, which would include communion and
being able to vote, until as adults they underwent their
own dramatic conversion experience, at which time their kids could
be baptized. So you see already I.
Speaker 3: Hear things that I grew up with so much, but
not necessarily the civil part, but like the vision of
how it is that you're a Christian. You know, like
everybody had their story and everybody had to have their
testimony that they tell, and it was always kind of
the same, how you know they grew up in a
Christian family but then fell away sometime and then had
this conversion experience.
Speaker 2: It was like this universal story that everybody again had
to tell.
Speaker 4: Did you ever like make up sins? To make your
testimony like better.
Speaker 3: All I remember from those times is telling the story
and having a kind of contempt from myself because I
knew that it wasn't that I was lying, but I
knew that I was basically.
Speaker 1: Performing yeahs performative, yeah yeah yeah. So the problem was
that by the eighteenth century, these big individual personal conversion
experiences have become incredibly rare among second and third and
fourth generation colonists, and this means that the churches of
this period are full of people who were baptized as infants,
but whose own children had not been and as a result,
now they're neither part of the civil Covenant, nor are
they participating members of the congregation. And so suddenly, not
only do you not have you know, everyone's still going
to church on Sunday, Well, I say everyone. Probably at
this point in history only about fifteen percent of Americans
are actually attending church on Sunday. That everybody's at least
nominally religious, But because they haven't had this dramatic conversion experience,
their own children haven't been baptized, they're not commuting members
of the local congregation, and therefore also they are not
voting members of the civil polity.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so it's interesting. I just want to say one
thing about that.
Speaker 3: What's interesting is that you actually realize that although conversion
is an important part of the Christian story, you see
it in Saint Paul and you see it in several characters,
conversion is always an experience of contrast. And so in
order to have a very strong conversion experience, you and
someways have to be far away and then have this
metanoia and then it like credit, it's like it's this
awakening moment that brings you in. But then if you
create a Christian society that is following all Christian values
and you grew up completely in those values, it becomes
harder and harder to have that that like strong conversion
experience because you're you're not like tempted by the prostitute,
you know, or whatever whatever you're dented by, because she's
not there, Like the sins aren't there, aren't as available,
and so the conversion experience must be a lot harder.
It's just super interesting to realize that, Yeah, it causes
this problem.
Speaker 1: And I'll here, let me talk to my own team
for a second. Those of us who are converts to Orthodoxy.
One of the big challenges is how do we kind
of get over this because if we're going to raise
children and I have you know, six cradle Orthodox Christians
living in my house, right you know. You know, my
kids have grown up in the Orthodox Church as far
as they know this, you know. And the thing is,
like they they they encounter other forms of Christianity all
the time because we have a lot of non Orthodox
family members, and so we constantly have discussions about these things.
But none of them have ever had that big you know,
I mean, partly just because they're all young. But but
the thing is that the big conversion experience, you know,
that being being young was not a bar to that.
Like you could have somebody who is you know, becomes
born again when they're three years old like I did,
so you can have Yeah. So anyway, it's the thing
I'm trying to say is that you're right, conversion itself
is a kind of lateral movement, and the thing that
we've got to figure out how to do as Orthodox
Christians converts or you know, even if you're converting to
you know, some other more older, more traditional form of
Christianity is actually kind of moved beyond the conversion story
and figure out, now, what is it actually? How do
I change that lateral movement to horizontal movement, start moving
deeper and deeper or farther up the mountain, whichever way
you want to talk about it, And do I start
moving deeper into this faith and kind of show what
that looks like. You know, you can always keep converting,
but that conversion has to at some point, it has
to stop being out of something into something else and
just converting deeper and deeper and actually finding a deeper
than surface level repentance.
Speaker 4: You could say, so, all.
Speaker 1: Right, so we have this problem. Lots of people can't
aren't full members of the church, and therefore they also
can't participate in a lot of the aspects of the
Civil Covenant. So there are basically two schools I've thought
about how to address this. The more liberal side, which
eventually becomes Unitarian. Congregationalism pushed for something by its detractors
that was called by its detractors called the halfway Covenant.
And the halfway Covenant was this idea that we can
that baptized but unconverted members could have their children baptized,
and therefore they would have some of the civil privileges
of church membership, but not its full benefits. And there
were several crises in the Massachusetts Colony, several which culminated
in the Salem witch trials, And that's all related to
this stuff.
Speaker 4: I'm just going to keep teasing this.
Speaker 1: Several crises in the Massachusetts Colony caused a lot of
people to believe that actually God was punishing them for
failing to bring society into the Covenant. And so as
a result, about four out of five New England churches
adopt the Halfway Covenant. Now, the most ardent opponent of
the Halfway Covenant is a guy named Jonathan Edwards of
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, fame that name, Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.
In the circles I grew up in, he's like, he's
a big guy. He's the guy.
Speaker 4: He's a big deal.
Speaker 1: So he's a very ardent opponent of the idea of
the Halfway Covenant. He's a he's a hardliner. He's the
he's the leading the kind of the leading light, if
you will. In a revivalist flavor of Calvinism, that's often
referred to as the New Light, which stresses the necessity
of a dramatic and physically intense like you have to
be like feeling something physical.
Speaker 4: To yeah, yeah, like cry vomit.
Speaker 1: Sometimes also like have like crazy physical like what we
would call nowadays like being slain in the spirit, those
kinds of things. You have to have this physically intense
conversion experience in order to know that you are one
of the elect.
Speaker 4: Now, the New Light.
Speaker 1: Basically emphasizes this personal conversion experience as being more important
than the Old Light, so that obviously, if there's new light,
there's an old light. The old light is the is
that idea of the Theocratic Covenant community, which is already
kind of not working right. So, as I mentioned Edwards,
he's the leading voice in the New Light, or one
of them, And this is how we should understand the context,
for instance, of the text of the sermon Sinners in
the Hands of an Angry God. And also what most
people don't know is the occasion on which he preached this.
So basically what was going on was we have all
these congregations that have basically resisted conversion, like full conversion,
like you know, So what we need to do is
send kind of like a specialist in you know, like
I know a guy, you know, a man with a
very special set of skills who can win people into
a frenzy basically and help them, help them kind of
kind of uh uh convert. And And the thing is
that when we one of the one of the odd
things about this kind of revivalist focus in American American Christianity,
which is still very much what I grew up with,
is that you're already you're always preaching to people who
are already Christians. Yeah, like you're you're you're going to
the church, You're you're preaching to people who are in
the pews every Sunday, and what you're trying to do
is kind of like warm them up again, right. So, uh,
he'd been asked to come and preach to this particular
congregation where almost everybody was baptized because.
Speaker 2: Christian, though, like are they you know, are they really?
Speaker 4: I mean, like that's the thing, is like are you really?
Speaker 3: Like are you really?
Speaker 2: And so I keep that to preaching because I don't
I don't know.
Speaker 3: Maybe there's one of you that hasn't you know, really
isn't really a Christian.
Speaker 1: There's someone here who's never put a stake in the ground,
and said Lord, I give my life to you on
this stage, or who haven't done that? Listen, if you
want to play this game, Jonathan, I can. I still
I still remember the lingo.
Speaker 4: So oh man.
Speaker 1: So he's asked to come and preach this congregation where
almost everybody's baptized because they have a very low number
of full members, that is, people who have undergone this
dramatic experience. And they'd already sent two or three other
preachers there and they couldn't get the job done. So
now they're like, all right, it's time to bring the
big guns and Jonathan Edward's job. And by the way,
I have to say, I still like Jonathan Edwards, like
when I'm when I'm talking about people like him or
David Brainer, who I might talk about a little bit later.
I still really have a lot of affection for these men.
I mean I read a lot of their writings as
a young man. I read their biographies, and Edwards had
a really strong mystical side. He believed in something kind
of like theosis. And so he's not he's not really
actually Sue a super fire and brimstone guy, except you know,
like it's one of the tools in his toolbox. Anyway,
I just want to say, like, I'm not an Edwards
hater for you know, I still kind of have a
sort of affection for this guy. But the whole point
of the sermon that he's preaching is literally to scare
the hell out of these I mean that literally as
out of all these baptized but unconverted people, to give
them the conversion experience necessary to become real Christians.
Speaker 4: And that's the context is also.
Speaker 3: All bound up in the civil participations, That's right.
Speaker 1: So that's the thing that we cannot forget here is
that part of the reason it is a societal problem
is because a lot of things are going wrong in
New England. I mentioned the Salem witch trials, right, Well,
there's been this practice of folk magic. There's been this
practice of various kinds of magic, some of them practiced
by everybody, including the people conducting the same witch trials,
and some of them like much much more sinister. Like
I don't believe everybody in the Sanling witch trials was
necessarily falsely accused. You know, it's a it's a really
interesting period. That's a whole video by itself, maybe, But
the point is that you know, things, things have been
going wrong. There's this kind of weird underbelly within the
world of the Puritans where it's very clear that the
thing that they set out to do, which is to
to have this totally theocratic society in which everybody is
genuinely converted, just hasn't worked. There was you know, you
have the same the witch trials. But also you just
have the fact that now by the time of the
Great Awakening, only about fifteen percent of people go to
church on Sunday. You have the you know, the fact
that you have these churches that are full of people
who are who are baptized but not converted, and therefore
their kids also are unbaptized, and you know, just all
these all these different issues, right, So this is the
context for this is the context for this the sermon
Sinners in the Hands of the Angry God is we've
got to kind of get people, get people, uh through
this this idea of having this uh they have to
have this dramatic conversion experience. And this to me, if
I were going to put a finger on, Okay, what's
the number one defining.
Speaker 4: Feature of American religion?
Speaker 1: And this is you know, this is also what Harold
Bluem would say, is this is that there has to
be this experiential experience, experiential conversion right now, every single
one of these things we're going to talk about is
not bad in and of itself. Like obviously, lots of
famous people within the Orthodox Church, beginning with Saint Paul
and the other apostles, had radical encounters with Jesus Christ
which totally transformed their lives and they give up everything
to follow him. So there's not obviously there's nothing wrong
with that. But what is the The thing is that
it's not it's just not normative for everyone, right, It's not.
It's just not the experience that everybody has. Not everybody
has a road to Damascus moment. Well, in American Christianity,
everybody is supposed to have a road to Damascus moment,
And uh, you know, it's hard. I always felt a little,
you know, as somebody who converted, you know, when I
when I was quite young, you know, as you know,
I was three years old, when I said the prayer
and asked Jesus into my heart all those things. It
was always hard because I felt like, oh, I didn't
have any big sins that I kind of converted from
and so then what you do is you you you
start rededicating your life, you know. Or I had friends
who just decided in their teens, Oh I wasn't really saved,
but now I'm saved, you know. And and just like
you need the you kind of need that big moment,
You need that big thing that you could kind of
look back to and say, hey, this is this is
the big moment where where I where I converted. So
this constant push for uh, these big conversion experiences in
New England and in in New England and in New York,
especially in the what is what is sometimes called the
burned Over District, which is what I'm going to talk
about next. This this push is related to all the
stuff that we were talking about last time.
Speaker 4: It's related to folk magic.
Speaker 1: One of the big ideas that you find in the
second generation of the Magisterial Reformation is this this interest
in alchemy and the idea of alchemy as the conversion
of the soul. Now that we've moved away mostly from
a more sacramental approach to salvation, alchemy becomes this kind
of metaphorical all right, we're not changing you know, base
matter into gold, but you can change the base matter
of your heart into gold like it. And so this
idea of like the total conversion of the soul and
all of that stuff is just kind of bubbling up.
There's lots and lots of examples that we talked about
last time. All this stuff is kind of bubbling up
in Puritan New England, and it's bubbling up in upstate
New York.
Speaker 3: And in.
Speaker 1: The early nineteenth century this leads to something called the
burnt Over District in western and central New York State
that becomes This is really where all of these big
movements come out of. So there's several things that are
going on here. One is the survival of all these
different forms of folk magic and folk religion, a big
part of which is the idea of seers, the idea
of visionaries, the idea of you could be someone who
has these kind of visionary experiences and becomes the portal
of wisdom to your community. And again that is a
real thing, but it is also, at least in our tradition,
there's a tremendous amount of sobriety around these kinds of
experiences because it is so easy without discernment, so easy
to be led astray.
Speaker 2: This is something people struggle to understand.
Speaker 3: I want to say just one thing about this is
that people in the Orthodox tradition there is an attitude
of suspicion towards all of these things, like all of
these experiences of the visions, of the miracles and all
of that, and people think that it's in some ways.
I've heard people say, well, you're kind of dampening the
spirit or whatever that kind of language.
Speaker 2: But in fact, our tradition is full of them.
Speaker 4: Though.
Speaker 3: Our tradition is full of people who have foresighted, people
who do miracles.
Speaker 2: It's full of it.
Speaker 3: It's just that it's there's also a critical apparatus which
is there to prevent the kind of accesses and the
kind of charlatanry or just emotional or you know, kind
of people who just get caught up in their own experiences.
And so it's not it's a funny contradict. It's a
funny paradox when people look at it. On the one end,
there's a suspicion to it, and on the other hand,
the tradition is full of these these kinds of reality.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I mean, so the common advice, the common
advice is you know, if you're you know, you're praying
to Jesus, prayer or something like that, and you have
some kind of a vision or visionary ecstatic experience, is
just to ignore it, act like nothing happened until it
happens three times. If it happens three times, then you
go and talk to your spiritual father. And by the way,
the you know, the thing that's implied by this advice
is that you have a spiritual father, somebody who cares
for you, cares about your soul, is themselves much more
spiritually experienced than you are, and also has the authority
to tell you, yes, stop messing around with that stuff,
or no, this is really from God.
Speaker 4: You should follow this up.
Speaker 1: And that aspect of obedience is one of the things
that is intentionally missing, intentionally missing from the American religion.
We'll talk about this a little bit more when we
talk about bloom in a second. So is the burned
over District and the burned over District. By the way,
this title was popularized by Charles Finney. I don't know
if you know that name, Big Big, another big person
in my background. Charles Finny in eighteen seventy six, he
writes his biography. Autobiography is published after his death. Finny
was the most famous revivalist preacher from the era. He
was a former lawyer who approached By the way, it's
just always sort of bad news whenever a lawyer starts
doing theology, like historically speaking, it has not been good.
Speaker 4: But yeah, in his.
Speaker 1: He's a former lawyer, and his approach to preaching was
to approach his congregation as he would a jury. So
what he was trying to do was to get you
to come to a certain verdict, right, and so he
would preach these very emotional, direct sermons that would urge
like these immediate decisions for Christ. This is the guy
who literally invented the altar call yeah wow yeah. So
by the time he wrote his memoirs, he said that
the region, this region had been so thoroughly and so
repeatedly evangelized that there was no spiritual fuel left. That was,
there was no unconverted population left to be converted, right,
so no fuel left to burn the burned over district. Right,
that's the idea, because they'd had these waves after waves
after waves after waves of religious enthusiasm. By the way,
this is still a really weird region in the present
times religiously speaking, but there were these waves after waves
of religious enthusiasm, you had revivals, but you also had
new religions, new colts, new sects, new spreading, and also spiritualism.
And there were more towns experiencing these kind of big
revivals between eighteen sixteen and eighteen twenty one than in any.
Speaker 4: Previous period of New York history.
Speaker 1: And the big kind of climate is between eighteen twenty
five and eighteen thirty seven. So those are the days
that we're looking at. And of course that's right when
Mormonism pops up. That's also right when of a lot
of these other movements pop up. Now the other big
thing that's going on in the area right now, because
these things never happened in vacuums. Of course, the opening
of the Erie Canal in eighteen twenty five, which hugely
transforms the region overnight, right it goes from being kind
of like an isolated frontier to becoming, you know, this
huge corridor of commerce and migration. It's bringing in rapid growth,
it's bringing lots of new money. It's also bringing in
all the stresses that come with that social dislocation. A
constant flow of new ideas and new people, and so
it goes from being kind of the edge to being
actually just this threshold space, this liminal space. It's not
the settled world of like colonial New England. It's not
the wild frontier. And in this place we have several
movements that are all popping up at once, and they
all basically have have in common a heavy focus on
a conversion experience, on some integration of folk magic or spiritualism,
and also the usually this idea that what we need
to do is to found certain utopian certain utopian societies
to either bring about or to wait for the Second Coming.
So Mormonism in eighteen thirty, Millerism in the eighteen forties.
So this is William Miller's revival preaching of the imminent
second Coming, and this is going to be the thing
that eventually Advotism will develop out of. In eighteen forty eight,
this is when you have the big spiritualist movement pop
up in the same part in Hydesville, Hydesville, New York.
You have the Fox Sisters and they're the ones that
start doing the seances with the table tapping and all
this stuff. You have the Shakers who establish a commune,
a commune in central New York in eighteen twenty six
is a big Shaker revival. In eighteen thirty seven, you
have the Anita Community with John Hemphrey Noyes who tries
to establish like a a just like a utopius utopianist
commune there. And then of course you also have lots
of stuff going on with the Masons, a lot of
pro Mason stuff, also a lot of anti Mason stuff. Right,
There's a lot of stuff going on with the Masons
during all of this period, and a lot of the
times when certain groups obviously Joseph Smith, I think this
is pretty well documented, but when certain groups would bring
ritual components into the things that they were doing, they
would often kind of ape the rituals of the Masonic Temple. So, yeah,
let me just talk a little bit about a couple
of these movements. So there's the Millerite movement and something
called famously the Great Disappointment. So this is a second
coming prophecy. They yeah, it's the first big famous one. Obviously,
we have a bunch of them. There was one just
the other day. It's just a few just the other day.
Like I was, I was getting on an airplane and
somebody was like, oh, at least you'll be a little
closer to the sky when you know, the rapture happens.
And I said, yeah, but I'm Orthodox, so I'll just
get stuck in a toll house. But anyway, probably the
toll house of making jokes about toll houses, but anyway.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So there's a guy named William Miller, and he is
he's like this millennialist in this in the in the
old sense, like Achilles, in the sense that you know,
he's trying to bring about the Second Coming or the
second Coming is definitely going to happen really really soon.
And so he reads Daniel chapter eight to eight and
begins this. It's not really original to him, but he's
the first American to really do this thing of reading
the Bible and reading the Book of Daniel closely and
reading the Book of Revelation closely, very much like the
people that I grew up with, and trying to like
work out the exact day, map it out, map it out,
map it out, and in his case, in his case,
he puts this mathematical calculation together to say that the
Second Coming of Christ is going to happen in January
eighteen forty three, and then March twenty first, and then
March twenty first, eighteen forty four, and when that date
passes with that incident, we have the great disappointment, and
all of this leads to kind of they start to
try to figure all of this stuff out. And I've
got a buddy who's definitely going to watch this, who
knows a lot more about the history of Adventism than
I do, so he's been helping me figure some of
this out. But there's this there's this idea that there's
this a special kind of judgment. I can't even I
suddenly blinked out. I had a term in my head
a moment ago, and I suddenly blinked out on it.
But the thing that was actually prophesied is that is
that on this stage yeary judgment. Yeah, that's like, yeah,
it's but it's like God has entered, you know, Christ
has entered into the Holy Place and now he's he's
he's beginning the final judgment there, and that's actually the thing.
And so that's that's what Adventism, Seventh day Adventism kind
of comes out of. Now there's also there's also, uh yeah,
so that the thing that you're being judged on is
Sabbath keeping. The thing you're being judged on is like
the other things that are kind of important in Adventism.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: I thought, I'm sure.
Speaker 3: Somebody mostly a kind of judaizing of Christianity, but I
didn't know it comes out of that.
Speaker 1: It does come out of that. I mean there were
there was a Sabbatarian Baptists, there were other Sabbatarian groups
before this. I mean that that judaizing thing. Oh, I
keep teasing the Kabola thing, and I think we're gonna
run out of time.
Speaker 3: No, you showed the cover of a book with the
word Kabla on it, and now we haven't talked about
kabola at all.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, Okay, Well so maybe maybe maybe it
would be a good time to kind of address this
a little bit. So I'm not going to do a
whole like what even is kabola video because I just
think that would not be helpful for a lot of people.
But I mean, also, like all the stuff is on
the internet now, like it's you can just look this
stuff up. But the thing that I'm particularly interested in
is the ways that the Puritans were were interested in
it So, for instance, Cotton Mather and his father, Increased Mather,
who are like the big Puritans, like big Puritans, connected
to the sale Land witch trials, connected to like a
ton of the the major like puritanical you know, Christian writings,
mystical writings, and things like that. When you think of
Puritans as being like austere biblical literagy, biblical literists, literalists
who are like super hostile to mysticism and esoteric speculation,
that's just simply not the case. The Mathers were hugely
interested and very i think deeply influenced by Jewish mysticism
Kabbo law. And this is not just a peripheral interest
for them. It shapes their understanding of America's providential role
and also their approach to two very important things. One
is eschatology and the other is the conversion of the Jews.
So around the late sixteen eighties, this is according to
Ogrin's book, Puritan leaders began developing a Messianic theology that
is based largely on the conversion of the Jews. And
there's actually a Jewish convert who's part of all of this,
the first Jewish convert in America. And when he converts
to Christianity, he brings Kabalah with him and introduces all
of these major players, introduces them to Jewish mysticism. And
so there's this belief, there's this belief and this maybe
this will kind of just tease our next video a
little bit.
Speaker 4: There's this belief that Jewish mystical wisdom, properly understood through
Puritan Christian eyes, is going to play a role in
the end times and in the establishment of God's kingdom
on the earth. And so there's a cabalistic manuscript that
is attributed to George Keith. He was a Quaker who
was really into Kabola. It makes its way from Pennsylvania
to the Mather Family Library in Massachusetts, and Cotton Mather
engaged in an extended correspondence with Keith and kind of
trying to and starts sort of creating the synthesis of
Puritan Congregationalism and Quakerism and Kabbalah. And this the thing
that they're looking for, the thing that they're sort of
pushing for.
Speaker 1: Is a like a mystical a series of mystical principles
which will ultimately lead to the founding of a fully
Christian nation. That will then usher in the Kingdom of God.
And so this for the pure tens, this is a
big part. And of course, like along with this, there's
like there's these weird like folk magic and ritual aspects too,
and some of that has a weird some of that,
you know, all of the stuff bubbles up in weird places.
The thing about folk magic, the thing about like any
kind of illicit you're like, you know, sub rosa, let's say,
ritual aspects, whether it's sacabolo or masonism or just something else,
is that they they tend to they bleed together so
much sometimes it's hard to like pick a piece out
and say where this piece came from, because because they
just sort of like there's this constant kind of exchange
that's happening.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but I think that that's if you look at
things like if you look at things like voodoo, or
if you look at yeah, yeah, I mean a lot
of this stuff practices, they're they're extremely confused. Like it's
basically like mixture and they just pick and they just
pick things and throw them in and they have these
ritual practices that that that are not pure in any way.
They're basically it's like, it's a bunch of it looks
like some of it is Christians and it is Jewish,
some of it is who knows, Indian, who knows where
it comes from.
Speaker 1: It's we talked about Appalachian Appalachian granny magic last time,
and one of the things that's actually really big in
that context is statues of the Virgin Mary, which are
used in ritual ways for lots of things, even those
people are not Catholics.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so so so interesting.
Speaker 4: So there.
Speaker 1: So there's there's that kind of lower aspect of it,
and then there's also the higher, more philosophical aspect, which
is focused on this idea that.
Speaker 4: America.
Speaker 1: Lets let's say that there is a that America is
supposed to have a Messianic role in the end times,
in the bringing about of the Kingdom of God on earth,
and that this this this is involved within Jewish mysticism
to some extent. And I know we've talking a lot,
you've been talking a lot about the the post World
War two consensus, the post World War two consensus that
was established, you know, after the Second World War, and all.
Speaker 4: The things that come with.
Speaker 1: It, is, among other things, it's more complicated than this,
but one of the main things it is. I mean,
if you if you just think about the fact that
the post World War two consensus is only possible and
has only been possible because of American military power in
the world, American industry. That's that's been aimed at maintaining
that consensus the America, that the post World War two
consensus is aimed at this idea that that America has
a an eschatological role in the in the world right
and therefore what happens in other parts of the world
ultimately is our business.
Speaker 4: We're a force for good.
Speaker 1: And this is not just the Magot people, and this
is not just you know, like crazy religious people who
believe this. I have friends who are who are liberals.
I have friends who are self identifying neo kons who
don't want anything to do with all of that. But basically,
this idea of America as the predominant force for good
in history is something that they would unshamedly say, Yeah,
that's absolutely what they believe.
Speaker 3: Well, let's get the devil it's due, Like, yeah, for sure,
we're doing the we're doing the comedia now, or like
we're finishing up with Paradiso and Dante amongst other people,
had this idea of the Western movement of authority and power,
basically that in some ways that authority and power moved
like the heavens moved from the east to the west,
and that in some ways Rome was this kind of
image of this movement from Babylon and you know, Babylon
to the Greeks all to the Romans. And he even
complained because of Constantine's changing of the capital to Constantinople,
because he was saying it was actually going against nature,
because the.
Speaker 2: Movement is supposed to move from east to west right.
Speaker 3: And so there's like there's like an intuitive thing that
would happen if imagine the Western people discovered this massive
land to the west of them that they began to
inhabit and to colonize and to create in their image,
that there would almost be like a thrust to believe
that this is some kind of eschatological happening, that that
we're creating a kind of kingdom that will be related
to the end of the day, to the end of
the world, to the you know, to the to the
western end of this cycle something like that.
Speaker 1: So I'll do you one more, do more, because because
I've been I've been thinking about exactly this thing is,
like we're teaching through Dante, you know, fishing on our series,
and obviously I love Dante, I also love American history.
Like I wanted to be clear that when I'm talking
about these things, I'm just talking about connections that I see.
I'm talking about stuff that's interesting to me. This is
just this is the kindry that I live in. You
just got to sort of you just got to see
it for what it is, you know. But all of
these people, you know, you're you're you're all of your
all of your Puritans, all of your revivalists, your nineteenth
century revivalists. You're Joseph Smith's and you're Charles Finney's and
all these guys they would have been Franciscans in Dante's time,
like they would have Like like if you if you
just look at the the there's this weird you know. Okay,
So for people who have not been following along with
the Dante coverage here on the Symbolic World, where we
accurately cover events that happened a thousand years ago, it's
the only way you can be sure it's not fake
news is we've really had time to vet things. But anyway,
if you've not been following along with the Dante coverage, right,
so in the background of the Divine Comedy, and then
also by the way, in the background of Umberto Echoes
Name of the Rose, which we ended up talking about
a little bit last class. There are these movements, these
revivalistic movements, which will eventually kind of result in the
Reformation and in the more especially the more radical strains
of the Reformation, but one hundreds of years before that,
they are resulting in both groups like the alpagen Scenes,
you know, these heretical groups, but also groups within the
Roman Catholic Church, like the Franciscans, and especially like the
Spiritual Franciscans and the you know. Anyway, all these different
groups and what they're defined by is a strong sense
of apocalypticism, a strong sense that we need to establish
the Kingdom of God now because Christ is returning soon.
So the more heretical groups they're going off and living
in communes. I mean, it's not at all hard to
imagine them doing this in New England, where they're going
off and they're living in these communes and they're having
these ecstatic religious experiences and they're waiting for the second
Coming within the church though also there's this idea that
while we had Kingdom of God and it was the empire,
but now it's falling apart, and so we have to
re establish it. And the way for us to re
establish it, and Dante is definitely kind of of this party,
is for the church to is for the Roman Catholic
Church to actually embrace poverty, to abandon all of the
like the pomp and the the you know, the flavor
of civil power that the Western Church had accrued to
itself throughout the late Middle Ages, and instead, you know,
bring in a strong emperor who, for Dante is this
messianic figure who's going to come in and kind of
re establish, you know, settle all the squabbles in Italy
and re establish the Kingdom of God in Europe. So
these patterns repeat, and the thing that's interesting to me
is the way that they I think that they do
herald and by the way, like you know, you'll find
this pattern everywhere. You'll find it in late medieval Russia,
you'll find it in the Far East, You'll find it everywhere,
because this is what it looks like when an age
is coming to an end is that you have these
these things that pop up and there's these weird revivalist movements.
What's the unique you could say about America is that
they have been so successful. Typically speaking, they are not
because typically speaking.
Speaker 3: They peter like they just fizzle out, the crush or whatever.
Speaker 1: They fizzle out for the very simple reason that they
that they by nature, they do not have the institutional
framework to last. So what's weird and interesting to me
about these American religious movements which have all of these
apocalyptic flavors to them, and they have all of these
all the same kind of things that you would find
in the late Middle Ages in these little you know,
these sexs of these groups on the fringe, is that
so many of them have continued to be successful. I mean, ultimately,
the charismatic movement Pentecostal also comes from this region. You know, Mormonism,
Jovah's Witnesses are a little later, right, but yeah, it
was a different thing.
Speaker 4: They're a little bit later. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But and this is what this is the thing that
Harold Bloom is really interested in in. This is the
thing he's really interested in his work on American religion.
So what he says, now, this is Harold Bloom. It's
not deconcera from necessarily saying this, this is Harold Bloom.
But he says that who, by the way, Harold Bloom
is a is a non practicing Jew. So he's not
himself religious, he's just he's Jewish, he's secular. Although he
said that if he'd been born in the eighteen thirties
and if he was not Jewish, he would have become
Mormon because he thought Mormon, what he thought Mormonism was
the most perfect American religion. And so when he describes
these things to Bloom, these are all good things. Bloom
likes American religion. This is not it's not he's not criticizing. Yeah,
he's not criticized. Or if he's doing critique, he's doing
it like in an academic sense. He's not doing it
in a way to like cast dispersions. So what he
says is that Americans, this is a direct quote, Americans
who think they are Christians truly are something else, intensely religious,
but devout in the American religion. And so what is
the American religion? He says that the American religion centers
on the solitary selfs direct encounter with God. It's the
believer's conviction of possessing an inner divine spark, a sense
of freedom that expresses itself in.
Speaker 4: Total spiritual solitude.
Speaker 1: So God is alone, and I am alone, and I
can have a relationship with God, and that relationship is
in total solitude to anything else that is happening in
the world around me. It is not a it's not
a So obviously there's a communal or covenantal aspect to
Christianity that obviously the Puritans believed in. But as the
as that starts to fall apart and they realize that
just the conninental aspect is not enough to kind of
keep things together, there's this shift that happens. That's why
I started this video where I did. There's the shift
that happens towards towards this this more like experiential you
need this big physical conversion experience. And so it's fundamentally gnostic.
What does he mean by this, Well, when Bloom says
it's fundamentally gnostic, what he means is he's he's not
necessarily talking about like ancient Valentinian or Seth Sethi, a gnosissism,
but rather what he's he sees these structural and theological
parallels between them. So, first of all, this idea that
that you that we contain a divine spark. Obviously there's
something like this in Christianity, but that it can only
be actualized in the solitary solitary and transcend itself if
you think of somebody like Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James
Walt Whitman. Right, this idea of self reliance, right, which
is the great American virtue, right, the fact that I
can just kind of figure this out on myself. And listen,
Americans have gotten a lot done. Like you know, at
least in a pragmatic standpoint, some of the stuff really works.
But so self reliance the belief that my soul stands
apart from the world, right, that there's something like the
real me that can be actualized and can be known.
And if I can actualize the real me, then I
can truly be free. And so the American Bloom says,
finds God in herself or himself only after finding the
freedom to know God by experiencing a total inward solitude.
So you can only know God basically on your own terms.
The experience cannot ultimately be mediated through anyone else. A freedom,
he describes it as a wildness. It's being liberated from
other selves. It's also being liberated from the created world.
This idea that you know, obviously Morbonism has something in
it kind of like the pre existence of souls in
which you're not even actually sort of part of the creation,
like you came from somewhere else.
Speaker 4: And that one of the things.
Speaker 1: That allows us to do, just to tick off the
other half of the people who are watching this video
is is it allows us to look at the created
world around us in a very instrumental or mechanistic way
and to basically say, all of this is for me
to use for things. It's why, it's why the idea
of even like a kind of environmental conservatism is very hard,
very hard sell for Americans, because ultimately these things are
what natural resources, they're resources, and we can only think
of about them in terms of being resources, not in
some other terms. So Bluem says a lot more about this,
but we're coming up on a hard stop here, and
I wanted the kind of so that's the teaser I
promised to actually talk about Joseph Smith. Next time. I
promised to actually talk some more about also the sacred
geography of the American landscape next time, because America has
its own actual sacred geography as well that plays into
all these movements and how they move west over the
nineteenth century.
Speaker 3: But do you have anything you talk about the way
you do to talk about freemasonry, Because you know the
question of how Kabbala reaches the Puritans and reaches these
Protestant sex My intuition has always been that it has
it has been through freemasonry, because freemasonry was ah even
in England, it was a non Christian let's say community,
the spiritual community, and therefore Jews were allowed in freemasonry
and were quite prominent in.
Speaker 2: The in the in the early.
Speaker 3: Yeah, in the early lodges, And so I mean, I
think that that's I mean, as the question is like,
how did how did people even access these talks? Like
you know, the Zohar is impenetrable, right, Louria is hard
to read. All of these these things are difficult to access.
Speaker 1: In the in the case of the like the Mathers, right,
they got it. They actually got these texts from people
who like there was, there's a chain of transmission. And
we know this because like the books were in their libraries.
You know, It's it's easy to go and take a
look at this. But as far as as far as
like how the stuff, you know, how does it make
the time skip, you know, two hundred years later to
somebody like Joseph Smith, I think the Masons are a
big part of that. And I also think that the
folk magic aspect of it is also a way a
lot of this has passed down. I'm not saying I'm
not proposing, for instance, that one of the you know,
somebody during you know, the eighteen thirties who is part
of one of these big, you know, mystical revivalistic sects.
I'm not proposing that all of them had like direct
access to Cabbola or could have blaned all of the
major tenets of it, you know. But it's it's more
the idea that these things are just kind of in
the air, they're in the water, they're surviving, and these
various we talked a lot a last time, a lot
last time about various kinds of folk magic and things
that people practice, and a lot of those have these
little ritual elements that are basically broken references to things
in kabal la or things in medieval alchemy or things
and you know, other systems things like who do and
stuff like that.
Speaker 3: So yeah, because there's all I mean, there's also a
way out from Spain, like in the sense that the
especially when it becomes mixed with things like alchemy and
kaba la, you know, then then for sure there must
have been in contact with some of the spec of
the conversos, the people that left Spain, some went to England.
Speaker 2: Like there's all of these connections.
Speaker 3: All of this.
Speaker 1: Stuff is is very like it's so hard to talk
about one thing individually, Like you you really have to
always be like talking about a soup that has like
thick bits and thin bits, you know, and like that
you're you're, you're. The thin parts are like the philosophy,
you know, which can which can influence things in one way.
But then there's also like the chunks of ritual that
are just kind of floating around, the.
Speaker 3: Super magic, the actual charms and you know, dallastments and.
Speaker 4: All the minology and talismans on all this stuff. Yeah, yeah,
and all that.
Speaker 3: Stuff gets absorbed at the bottom, like it it gets absorbed
by the old old ladies and and like you know,
the the healers and the villages and all this stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyway, we've got a lot more
to talk about. Unfortunately we have a hard stop today.
I really am sorry. I guess I'm not just trying
to like tease you guys. Actually, but we'll we'll, we'll
look for it in our next video to digging a
little bit more into some of this stuff. And the
other thing that I want to say is is just
acknowledge that we're really just looking at one particular strain
of the American religion right now. I know, like living
in the Southwest, I'm quite aware that there are there's
also a another kind of enchanted America that has to
do with the fact, you know, the Spanish Mission and
you know, our Lady of Guadaloupe all these things. And
I know this because I live around it. I live
across the street from it. In many cases. You know,
I've got neighbors that have, you know, our Lady of
Guadaloupe shrines out in their yards, which I'm not mad about.
It's wonderful, you know, So all of the stuff, you know,
but what I'm trying to do is when we I think,
you know, most of the time when people think American,
they think kind of wasp, you know, white Anglo Saxon Protestants.
And most of the time when people think and talk American,
they have something, you know, they have in mind that
it is and I've been personally guilty of this. They
have in mind that there is kind of this like
totally just disenchanted reality.
Speaker 4: And I think the thing that I would like people
to come away with.
Speaker 1: Is this understanding that actually that version of like I
don't know, seminary Protestantism has never really existed on the ground,
that what actually exists on the ground in people's homes,
in people's houses, especially in those first few hundred years
of the colonies, the American Revolution, the Civil War, all
that stuff, the First and second Great Awakenings, that there
is there is an enchanted aspect to all of that,
and it has certain things which are impossible for us
to get away from as Americans now. But also with
that there comes certain dangers. And one of the dangers
is this this constant need to always be converting, it,
to have a conversion story so that even people who
are now deconstructing. You know, they're deconstructing their evangelical conversion experience.
It's just another conversion experience. And the question is, well,
now that you've deconstructed, what's your next conversion story going
to be? And it always ends up being, you know,
they either come back to Christianity or they get into
like I don't know, Buddhism or some other kind of thing.
Like they're just like this idea that you have a
personal spiritual narrative, you have a personal spiritual story that
you need to tell, and that if you don't have that,
you don't actually really know who you are as a
as a Christian, or you don't really know who you
are as an American. I think it's something we need
to be a little careful of. And and here again
like to talk to my own team, those of us
who are converts, we should be careful about this.
Speaker 4: You know, you're you know, people ask me for my
conversion story a.
Speaker 1: Lot, and I try to usually just give them the
highlights and everything, but like, you're, you better, you better
be more than just that conversion story. You know, at
some point, at some point, the rubber has to has
to meet hit the road and we've got to figure
out how to actually go deeper into our faith in
Jesus Christ.
Speaker 3: So all right, the Conservant, thank you. Next one, we're
gonna keep going and I get time, we'll get into
the weirder and getting weirder. So let's see how weird.
Speaker 4: We can get.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, thanks everyone.
Speaker 4: Bye everyone. All right.
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