HOW RELIGIOUS AWAKENINGS PRESAGE RADICAL REFORMS

(July/August 2010 GroundSwell)


By Dr. Mason Gaffney, Riverside, CA


[Originally for presentation at Annual Meetings, History of Economics Society, Syracuse, July 2010]


Before there were a U.S.A. and a 1st Amendment, church and state were intertwined in western Europe, whence came most of our traditions. Kings and Cardinals vied for primacy, but joined in overawing and dominating others. Both royalists and clerics were major landowners, at the tip of "The Geocracy". They worked together to rationalize and sanctify landownership based on conquest, chicane, fraud, slavery, debt slavery, prison labor, male chauvinism, imprisonment, ethnic bias, genocide, murder by burning, drowning, torture and other barbaric acts, witch-hunting, primogeniture, entail, confiscation, exile, etc. Missionaries supported imperialists abroad, and shared in their power and wealth, even owning slaves. Centuries of struggle against Islam shaped fanaticism especially in Spain, Austria and Russia, and less extremely in all the Crusading states.

At home, however, heretics were more dangerous than infidels. Ruling Geocrats feared and persecuted egalitarian heretics like Anabaptists, Diggers, Levelers, Lollards, Hussites and Taborites, Albigensians, Waldensians (Vaudois), Bogomils, Cathari, Donatists and Circumcellians, Humiliati, Poor Men of Lyons, Calvinists, Puritans, et al. Rome coopted successive new grassroots monastic orders into acting as Roman agents: Cluniacs, Cistercians, Benedictines, Carthusians, Franciscans, Dominicans, Jesuits, et al., went through somewhat parallel evolutions from their ascetic, abnegant, pietistic origins in protest against clerical ritualism, hierarchy, luxury and wealth. Troubadors and Minnesingers could distract and bypass censors with tales of romance and scandal and tragedy, arts that flourish today, but fail to prepare the ground for practical reforms. Jews, carriers of the parent religion with its egalitarianism, wrapped in its own language and mysteries, made a special and important case, too complex to sum up fairly in a few words. The Crusades bred Chivalric Orders, some of which went into banking and grew too rich and powerful for their own survival.

On the good side, churches tempered the harshness of class exploitation with charity, welfare, and education. Cynically, however, one might see it as a "good cop, bad cop" act. The "education" inherently entailed self-enhancement and associated brainwashing. Churches sought a monopoly of this, as the Vatican did more recently under its 1933 Concordat with Hitler. Currently in Alabama many conservative Southern Baptist Churches are at war with Christian tax reformer Susan Pace Hamill who would make State taxes less regressive, in ways that churches could not control and cap as they can their voluntary "charity". A Federal counterpart is former President George H.W. Bush with his "thousand points of light" to displace Social Security and other Federal welfare programs.

Again on the good side, church texts (to the extent laymen can and will read them) abound with egalitarian and distributive sentiments, as in Exodus and Leviticus; as in The Prophets, especially Amos and Isaiah; and as in the Gospels of Jesus. There have been dozens of Utopian colonies with some such religious basis, from the smallest sects up to regional powers like Puritan New England, Quaker Pennsylvania, and the Mormon State of Deseret. Religious blacks have likened themselves to Hebrew slaves fleeing Pharaoh. There were, of course, currents and countercurrents, rebellions and repressions, reforms and reactions, filling many tomes. Struggles inside and among churches mirrored class struggles in politics, a series of long and fascinating stories.


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