The Great Puritan Horror Movie

 I've read a number of things by Gary Wills, and while I wouldn't put him in the first rank of historical writers (who can marshal an army of facts with meticulous care, paint a thorough picture and explain the context with a calm, clear order)--he's still thoughtful and vivid, and almost always sets off small flashes of insight when I read him.

So I've been reading Head and Heart: American Christianities with a great deal of enjoyment. Not only did he point something interesting out, it resonated with something else I've been reading, my epic cover-to-cover slog through The Columbia History of the World. Yep, I got it bad and that ain't good--but it does have its rewards.

Wills points out that (in talking about the Puritan witch trials)  that it was only Protestant countries that burned or hanged witches. Catholic nations and principalities pursued heretics with great and far-reaching enthusiasm throughout history, but people purportedly outside the Church altogether? They were really not a target. He points out that the Roman Catholic laity were supplied by their church with all sorts of items of magical virtue to keep the devils and everyday occult danger at bay: the Mass, the crucifix, holy water, the rosary, ritual prayers, the blessing of a priest, and so on. Catholic theology said, in keeping with its doctrine of good works, that the faithful were protected and more, armed by their faith.

To the Calvinist, all of that stuff was superstition--that is to say, things illegitimately laid on top of core Christian belief. (It's interesting that this Calvinist term has been adapted to, in the present day, apply to all magical thinking. Pretty revealing, too.) This effort to strip away all the trappings of the Roman Church to get to the ancient purity and to expose the hierarchical Church's power over individuals had an intriguing side effect: it stripped the believer naked and deprived them of any protection.

If a Catholic met someone they thought was a witch, they just crossed themselves and went to Mass. No big deal. A Puritan? Deprived of any counter magical gesture, they'd have to kill her.

This fits in with one of the principal distinctions in the history of Europe's conquest of the New World: while Neither the Spanish nor the English meant the indigenous people any good, the Spanish seemed far more willing to enslave the folks already there and rule over them, while the English seemed to want to have nothing to do with them, and would rather annihilate them if they couldn't assimilate them. 

I had always attributed the difference to two factors: that the Spanish colonizers were nobility while the English were merchants and worse--and the Spanish viewed their possessions as rich while the English viewed their lands as raw material. But it was Wills who at least partly changed my mind. As the Columbia History points out, The Spanish really did view and organize their mission as a great good work and spent a great deal of time and effort paying attention to the indigenes--something they had never bothered with before. (It's just that European ruling class mindset just didn't see a contradiction between bringing them the favor of salvation and killing large numbers of them, enslaving them and taking their stuff. It's what they did to their countrymen, after all.) 

But the Spaniards came and set themselves up in the New World with complete spiritual confidence. The power of Holy Mother Church will just overwhelm the deluded demon-inspired tradition of the natives, shriveling before the glory of God. While the Puritans were scared. They viewed the Native Americans as agents of Satan just like the Spaniards did--but to the Puritans, they were a real threat. They were also scared of the African religions brought by the slaves--and of course horrible afraid of the Jesuits brought by the French to organize the Indians for Antichrist. (Part of what convinced me of Wills's argument that the French, who were nowhere near so imperialistic as the Spanish, approached the native Americans in much the same way.)

Now Calvinism, taken seriously, is a really weird and dark religion. Catholicism, like most of your basic garden variety religions, tends to say, obey the law, do good things and God will reward you. (Or at least, you will make God happy. Let's not get carried away.) But Martin Luther turned away from the idea of Works--and therefore of Law and Virtue, and established a religion where the only virtue was loyalty. It was set in a modern bourgeois framework--but it  really had functional similarities to older cults. A devotee of Luther's Baal is automatically blessed and powerful and assured of supernatural reward no matter what his or her unappetizing drawbacks, and no matter how good the non-cultist is, he or she is doomed. No matter the window dressing and the social grounding, any religion so structured is not the friend of civil social order.

But Calvinism goes a step further--and in one sense, out of the danger zone. It removes even the virtue of loyalty, leaving one in the void. It establishes predestination--and that means that even if you want to love God and be good, if you're not one of the elect you're going to hell, and jesus doesn't love you and he didn't die for your sins. He only died for the sins of the elect. Jesus's intercession for Mankind protects you, not from Saran, but from Dad. This arbitrary God of Wrath is, in fact, sometimes hard to distinguish from the Devil. Definitely if you're not one of the elect, there's not a dime's bit of difference.

Most modern Calvinists, at least of my acquaintance, don't really worry about being part of the elect: if they think about it at all, they just sort of assume that they are. Law abiding, prosperous, straight-laced white people couldn't be denied heaven, now, could they? But the Puritans really worried about it. Proper conduct was a sign of being regenerate, one of the Elect, a Visible Saint. So the deal was that no virtuous act could save you, but a non-virtuous act could damn you--or at least move your token back into the Damned category. Swell.

And the part that Wills pointed out is that the Puritans were completely superstitious in the modern sense. Indian powwows were real threats, African juju was, and a bad harvest or a fire was due to bad spiritual influences. And the withdrawn, unsympathetic, vastly strict God gave you no defense. 

Thinking about this amazing mindset, I realized what this all sounded like: your standard American horror movie. Monster movies are different, and Dracula is structured as a Catholic myth--but in a horror movie, demons are everywhere and God is nowhere. Most of the people die--including any teenagers having sex--but the hero and/or heroine wins by either having the building they're in collapse--or, for the male audience, machine-gunning everybody, followed by a small tactical nuclear device. (with of course the little coda at the end showing it didn't work, not, really, there'll be a sequel even if it's direct-to rental.)

I never understood why this was an enjoyable story-line. Not only a cosmology that made no sense, but a miserable little triumph--usually nothing more than an escape. Whenever horror movie material found its way into adventure comics, a conventional balance was almost always restored: powerful forces for good showed up, if not God and Her Angels. But maybe--just maybe, it's because that world-view has been burned into our national unconscious--a supernatural world in which we have no resources, and not even much hope of God? So we should just start shooting?

It may in fact help explain America's relationship to the Native Americans. What the Europeans were doing was conquest, pure and simple, and there's no getting around it. Any fantasy of America obligingly staying on the coast in peonage while the indians lord it over vast estates like lords don't work in any vision, short of Orson Scott Card's giant magical force shield. However, Thomas Jefferson points out that, while a hunter-gatherer culture could not exist with an agricultural one, two cultures could--or rather, ultimately become one. And if you look at present-day America, after a temporary smash and grab, white folks are abandoning their farms for  the cities. Our bond to the land isn't all that strong.

It's not beyond the realm of possibility, though, to have combined the best of both worlds: the Catholic spiritual assurance combined with the middle/working/merchant class absence of subjugation. You would not have an intact Native American culture under any circumstances--not there was just one, anyway--but we might see a culture more heavily intermarried, a colonization of the Great American Desert without the destruction of the buffalo and so on. Our culture might resemble Brazil's more, whose exuberant multiraciality is magnificent--even while its aristocratic heritage leaves an economic nightmare.

It was not to be, though--because for an exuberant, optimistic nation, we acted contrary to naive expectation: for all our Enlightenment enlightenment, al our pragmatist, all our idealism--every time we met something really outside, really different, we tended to look on the meeting as a horror movie, and we reacted, not with nobility (yeah right) , but not even a Yankee trader's eagerness for a new market , or even with straightforward predation--but a fear that fairly reeked of lost opportunity.

The conventional wisdom is that all this is just human nature, simple tribal xenophobia, but maybe it isn't. That fear, when you think about it, doesn't sit all that well with a courageous people. But maybe our fear is that dark Calvinist fear of a God who is often indistinguishable from the Devil, and a human predicament not solved by being wise, or clever, or good, but being scared of everything and carrying a big stick.

It may be another reason why we suck at empire, too. Besides being too egalitarian--which is the nice part--it might be  that we're simply too scared of the rest of the world, of Gog and Magog and the Antichrist to be good at building empire.