A hat-tip to J D Vance’s heritage.
I actually had this book, Papismus Lucifugus, one of only a few surviving. Dated 1668, it’s a record of a disputation between John Menzies of the (Church of Scotland) Divinity School at Marischal College in Aberdeen and an English Jesuit named Francis Dempster. All leather, just leaf through it and you can carry yourself back…1668 was during the reign of Charles II, who had only recently returned to the English throne after the death of Oliver Cromwell, who I’ve mentioned regularly on this site, because he did not perform the acts of Protestant generals with the expected “nobility” of the French kings that had brought Britain and the English crown so far since 1066.
There would be only one more Catholic king, his brother James II, who would abdicate in 1688 in favor of the Glorious Revolution that would end the House of Stuart and place William and Mary on the the English throne, ending the palm print of the French on the English ideal of government.
It was a big deal that almost no one pauses to think about this episode of English history anymore, much less mention in any context.
The earliest settlements in America, Jamestown and Massachusetts Bay, were only 60 and 45 years old, respectively, when “Papismus Lucifugus” was written, and God knows, the down-the-nose, holier-than-thou attitudes displayed by early New England Puritans toward the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians coming to America via Boston, “the left foot of fellowship” we used to call it in my Kentucky Appalachians in the 1960s, would cause those “backward” Celtic hicks to seek alternate routes to find the rich valleys of the American interior.
And that best avenue was offered up by the settlers around where Philadelphia now sits, mostly the Quakers.
With the American Revolution still 150 years down the road, no one could calculate what extending this “left foot of fellowship” would mean in how America would spread its wings in those early days. But by diverting their anchorage choice from Boston to Philadelphia, American History, not just colonial history, would be forever changed. And thank God for it. for what lay in front of them was an easy-to-follow path from Philadelphia to the Shenandoah River, where they could turn and follow it due south.
And every sixty-seventy miles down that Valley (look at a road map) a newer boatload of off-the-boat Presbyterians would stop to build their town and build their church. For years a new town would be built down the line by the next boatload, and the next, until they ran out of river, into the 18th Century. The Presbyterian immigrants would form the heart of local militias who would then write the final chapters of the American Revolution in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee, including the final chapter of the American Revolution at Yorktown. (My maternal grandmother was from one of those early clans, a descendant of Mark Renfro, who was an officer in their militia unit and who was granted land around Renfro Valley, Kentucky, by the first Continental Congress. In hindsight, these land grants became a little “eat yer heart out.” to New England militia…all thanks to the caprice of the Puritans in Massachusetts.)
A great story, but the larger teaching lesson here is how “De Lawd sho’ do move in mysterious ways”, for the explorations of Daniel Boone and others would open tens of millions of square miles to thousands more backwoodsmen and their families, putting them into the hands of millions of still newer arrivals, one family at a time; first with only a wagon and a dawg, and maybe a milk cow attached to it, and a flintlock. Inside a generation, longer-rifles would come into play, and bigger wagons to haul wood to build cabins so as to try their hand at farming. Still other travelers would stop to build a restaurant, a hotel, a blacksmith, a saloon…and even some talk of building a church.
Even today, rural America consists of 72% of the land area, and 18% of the population.
This building town-after-town westward movement involved a process that would take two centuries.
The greater lesson learned is that the United States is unique to this… No one else has ever tried it. And it wasn’t just by a random roll of the dice. The Europeans never had such an opportunity because all their land was already owned by a few kings and their families, their maps only changed by wars.
This is why, when the British lost their war with the colonists they knew they had to leave the colonies entirely. Their European king(s) could no longer lay claim to any of our land, and after 200 years the idea that they might reclaim it never even came to mind.To hang around and try to live among these uncouth farmers (Americans) would be more than they could tolerate, so they moved to Canada or back to England, leaving the colonies to the farmers, small business owners (fishmongers, carpenters), people the French called their Third Estate; peasants and bourgeoisie, who went on to bollix up their own revolution a century later. The French had grabbed the zeitgeist of the times and took some really great notions about human dignity and freedom seriously, but sadly, in uniquely French frat-boy fashion, couldn’t find enough men beneath them to get their hands dirty so handed that chore off to a 5’6 Corsican military officer named Bonaparte because the TriDelts, Sigma Chi’s and PiKappaAlpha’s couldn’t agree who should be in charge, or what they should do first. Bonaparte took care of that for them, almost conquering all of Europe, while digging a hole for their grave.
We know this is true because Thomas Paine was there only to find out the French organized their male pecking orders differently. Even Thomas Paine, who wrote the original “Common Sense” for the Americans in 1775, and knew what 2.5 French million petty bourgeoisie needed to do to build their own nation from the ground up, with the minimum of tools, without the permission of any state, or church, or potentate, could do. What he didn’t know was neither the French working class, nor their educated middle management class had a clue. He had misidentified their lynchpin.
He departed France saddened and disillusioned…. but his 56-page outline is still the best way forward.
I’m not sure how I would design it today, but if I could design a high school and college course, using “natural law”-How Things Work-culture-as my model for designing classes at the beginning, I would still begin with Thomas Payne’s approach.
As we now know, “Only I matter” in the Christian sense is too late by the time students turn 18. Christianity recognized “being saved” as an event that occurs when a person has matured and I still believe that 16-18-20 is the age group to plant those seeds…but in the school alone, and around the family dinner table, alone are not enough. They must work in tandem.
But this isn’t an essay about religious differences in doctrine, although this does outline sentiments felt by both sides of the Christians’ argument in 1688. But is does highlight deep gut-feelings, almost child-like in spite and malice, found in the temper of the language delivered, and how those bad feelings simply had to go the basement to throw teat-fits
On the title page Menzies states what he intended to prove, as a prosecutor might in a pre-trial argument to a jury:
“Sundry to the chief points of the Papish Religion are demonstrated to be repugnant to both Scripture and Antiquity, Yea, the Ancient Romish Church
Papismus Lucifigus just oozes sectarian hatred, the language not directed at persuasion and conciliation or anything we consider to be Christian. It is an in-yer-face incitement, as if to say that this churchman wouldn’t have to go through all these flowery arguments if only he could lure this Jesuit down a dark alley… and there wasn’t a magistrate within shouting distance. Classic tribalism, one set of rules when the light is shining, another set in the dark.
You’ll also note in Papismus Lucifigus an incentive for:
Tribalism
Since Menzies equated Evil with the Papacy, and the Jesuits reciprocated with fallen Protestants, who, on the continent, they were still burning, I wonder if the #OnlyIMatter crowd in America could recognize this sort of tribalism if it appeared in America? Would they see it as Good, or Bad, or simply Neutral, as they might the collateral damage in a “Twilight” film, or voting for Hillary then suddenly gasping-for-air conservatives seem to imply they will do? Even P J O’Rourke no longer trembles for his country but only any status quo that will protect his investments.
Does “tribalism” conjure up images of only primitive people like the Comanche in a John Wayne film, or Boko Haram in Nigeria? Would GenY #NeverTrumpsters know to throw in Orthodox Serbia and Catholic Croatia, or Catholic and Episcopal Belfast? Could they find it in Detroit, Cleveland, and Baltimore?
And considering the main thrust of #NeverTrumpism, how about conservatism in general…inasmuch that some use similar rhetoric as Menzies threw around in 1668 against fellow Christians, abusing that word, “evil”, yet unable to define it with clarity, or unwilling to link it with its biblical Author?
Vine Deloria Jr, the Sioux Indian activist, is a name most people under fifty wouldn’t know. He wrote a best seller “Custer Died for Your Sins” in 1969 then in 1970 followed with “We Talk, You Listen, New Tribes, New Turf” which I thought was a good anthropological inquiry into tribalism, while still in my amateur-anthropologist phase. Deloria argued for a return to tribalism, which, at 25 made sense to me. But by 45 I could see it was just plain old left-wing psycho-babble wrapped up in Native American symbolism to seduce smart kids like me, who would buy into any pop-science fad at 25, then let vanity and pride forbid us from ever admitting we could ever be that gullible. (Yeah, the Left’s been working that same street corner for over 60 years, and the best and brightest of MyGen were some of their earlier customers. Great business model, too.)
The “natural law” is simple: Take a vain and arrogant smart kid, and convince him to make a really bad choice at 18-20, about sex, communism, even history (now that they are rewriting most history right now, thanks to a post-modern French philosopher named Foucault, who died of AIDS even after he knew it could be prevented, but refused to give up the rub-a-dub, three-men-in-tub sport)…and you can own them…for their own vanities and appetites won’t allow them.
In the past 20 years it wasn’t that I learned all that much more about anthropology or history. What I did learn was the exceptional nature of America and that tribalism is a thing America was created to defeat…since, under the guiding hand of Evil, tribalism has been the most destructive force on earth. Tribalism is the unifying force of kings in that it insured men of different tribes could never learn to live together and “reciprocate with their neighbors as they would have their neighbor reciprocate with them”, which is America’s Golden Rule of nation building.
We invented that. It is not a French ideal.
This reciprocity has always been a Good Thing, generally accepted by conservatives at one intellectual level, the ordinary American citizen at another, but generally unifying them from the very beginning, long before the term “conservatism” ever became a part of the political vocabulary.
For the past century, and a rising Left by several names, our Golden Rule has been seen as a Bad Thing, splitting us into groups (tribes) made to appear much more cool. Just know Evil, who I call by various names, had seen it as a Bad Thing from the very beginning and had laid plans to recapture his territories before the ink dried at the Constitutional convention. You see, Old Clootie knew right away that his political control, top-down government, could fail if this reciprocity theme ever took hold. He relied on men living, and fighting and killing tribally, in order to keep that system alive. It was one of Satan’s greatest creations, and is why, until America, he was the political head of the entire world for over 5000 years. In 1787 Evil lost just one small spot in North America, but knew the magnitude of it.
About Papismus Lucifugus, what most Americans no longer know, and too many conservatives of good conscience don’t seem to know to inquire anymore is that this has been the state of the rest of the world right up to yesterday. Europe is on the edge of barbarism (again), just like they were in 1668, hanging on by a thread. They were killing people in the northern counties of Ireland until only recently. Catholic children there are still taught about the evils of John Bull and his Church in England as part of their catechism, in the same sort of screed-language found in Lucifigus, while Northern Irish Episcopalians, in better economic surroundings, still teach their children to steer clear of those dirty, grimy Catholics.
And it was much worse on the Continent. The Jesuit Counter Reformation killed hundreds of thousands in the decades before Papismus. The French were especially adept. Into modern times, in the Balkans it didn’t matter if Nazis and Nationalists were faced off against one another, battle lines were as often drawn by religion, Orthodox and Catholics refusing to fight alongside one another, regardless of national cause. Tribalism ruled. And in every melee men took the opportunity of the chaos to settle old tribal scores and take a few scalps, proven in WWII, the break-up of Yugoslavia, and the Kosovo War. It’s still 1668 there. That beat goes on.
The greatest condemnation one can make of the two great Christian churches of Europe is that for over 1000 years they only played these “tribes” off against one another, rather than try to marry them off to one another, which had been rather ordinary in America over the span of our history. So of course those churches’ authority collapsed, replaced largely by the religion of Marx who promised it could heal this internecine warfare with the heavy hand of dictatorship. When Tito died, this experiment came to an expected abrupt failure, an ignominious failure. Now the Caliphatists have the same idea in mind, unifying people with a scimitar hovering over their necks. Today all Europe is lost because it had become hopelessly tribal even before the invasion of Islam. They have been sitting ducks for years.
Outstanding work Vassar!
Thanks, Dave. That will be my theme song thru the election