Is the National Rifle Association a type of fundamentalist organization?
01-09-2015, 02:46 PM
On the Deism note, we all do well to remember that in colonial America, just like today, the leadership and the followers were two different classes of people entirely. Whereas statesmen, land owners, slave owners, smugglers, and nobles were all a-twitter with the new clothes of Enlightenment and Industrialization, the common man and woman was still hauling out the chamber pot, boiling clothes in pot over a fire to wash them, and working by the sweat of their brow.
Deism was never the philosophy of the average American. There was a lot of agnosticism or even atheism on the frontier as it moved from the East Coast to the West Coast, but settled towns and farms were overwhelming Christian, be that good, bad, or ugly.
Even the premise that America was "founded" by Deists is flawed, as it ignores all the waves of religious refugees who set up their own para-theocracies with state churches in the colonies. Rich, white aristocrats often dallied with the new ideas of the philosophies-du-jour, but the governors themselves, whether executives, legislators, or paper pushers, were plain old Christians.
Today, we do see a healthier rise of true pluralism, the Christian Right's efforts notwithstanding, but it is the Left today who just as eagerly grasp at straws when trying to unwrite America's very plain history in the evolution of religion.
I speak this as a social liberal, a religious moderate, and a political leftist.
Deism was never the philosophy of the average American. There was a lot of agnosticism or even atheism on the frontier as it moved from the East Coast to the West Coast, but settled towns and farms were overwhelming Christian, be that good, bad, or ugly.
Even the premise that America was "founded" by Deists is flawed, as it ignores all the waves of religious refugees who set up their own para-theocracies with state churches in the colonies. Rich, white aristocrats often dallied with the new ideas of the philosophies-du-jour, but the governors themselves, whether executives, legislators, or paper pushers, were plain old Christians.
Today, we do see a healthier rise of true pluralism, the Christian Right's efforts notwithstanding, but it is the Left today who just as eagerly grasp at straws when trying to unwrite America's very plain history in the evolution of religion.
I speak this as a social liberal, a religious moderate, and a political leftist.
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