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(2016
midterm assignment) Sample Student Midterm Answers 2016 (Index to # 1 samples) #1: Long Essay: learning, challenges, issues |
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Michael Bradshaw
Anger vs Reason (Essay 1)
The Christianity of early America is not the Christianity of today. It was not
one of love, grace, and mercy, but one of conquest and condemnation. The
hellfire and brimstone sermons that are so derided today got their start in this
era. Columbus used it to rationalize his conquest of the New World. In fact, the
closest we have gotten to a message that resonates with modern Christianity, is
from someone who professed to have no belief in the church.
“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.” (Genesis 1:1). These
words are the origin of both the Jewish and Christian faith, but not the first
words that were imparted to the Native peoples when Columbus discovered their
land. More apt, they were victims of the edict to Christians to “Be fruitful and
multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it: and have dominion… over every
living thing that moveth upon the earth,” (Genesis 1:28). As the Native peoples
surely were not Christians, they were to be dominated. Columbus even acts as
though he is Adam: naming all that which he sees, regardless of the fact that
they are inhabited. “To the first island I discovered, I gave the name of San
Salvador … The Indians call it Guanaham… and thus to each one I gave a new
name.” (CC 1:1).
This is a Christianity of conquest, where “be fruitful and multiply” for the
Christian means “assimilate or be eliminated” to the Native. Handsome Lake later
wrote about the arrival of Columbus in,
How The White Race Came to America. In it, Handsome Lake recounted the
suffering as so great that Hannise’ono, the evil of the Iroquois culture said “I
think I have made an enormous mistake, for I did not dream that these people
would suffer so.” (Lake, 10.) If an event causes shock to a culture’s embodiment
of evil, it must have been devastating indeed.
After settling in the New World, the Puritans’ version of Christianity was one
of superstition and condemnation, not only of non-believers, but also of their
fellow European Christians. Often these people were poor, or societal outcasts,
but some actually help positions of authority. George
Burroughs, a Reverend was tried and hanged for witchcraft based entirely on
hearsay. He was “accused by five or six of the bewitched, as the author of their
miseries,” (Mather, 11). Again the words of the Christian God were distorted for
the rationalization of persecution, only the scope widened to include
undesirables from the community. Granted, there may have been some people
genuinely afflicted with some illness, but they were used to generate mass
hysteria which was directed towards disenfranchised members of society, (as a
certain tiny handed businessman is doing right now).
After the witch trials, the hysteria eventually died down, but the angry
rhetoric of the Christian clergy was in full swing. Sermons were full of fire
and brimstone such as Jonathan Edwards’
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Edwards writes quite emphatically that
non-believers “are already under a sentence of condemnation to hell… [E]very
unconverted man properly belongs to hell,” (Edwards, 10). We see the evolution
from very matter of fact prose, to a fiery impassioned sermon. Edwards’ words
paint an admittedly graphic picture of God’s wrath and anger towards
non-Christians, and their ultimate destination in the fires of hell. However,
interspersed with all of that anger does lie a message of mercy. “ And now you
have an extraordinary opportunity, a day wherein Christ has thrown the door of
mercy wide open…” (Edawards, 35). This
may be the first example of the hellfire sermon; a sermon that threatens the
pain of hell, then calls out for repentance and acceptance of God’s mercy. There
is love in the words, but the chief motivation for repentance is fear.
With all of the religious texts we have read in this class, I find it remarkable
that the person, in my mind, has come the closest to interpreting the will of
God is one who disavows the divinity of any church. In his essay,
The Age of Reason, Thomas Paine
stated, “I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy,
and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy,” (Paine, 7). This sounds
very similar to “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Paine writes with the same
passion and eloquence as Edwards, but preaches the tenants of naturalism and
secularism. He denied the divinity of any church, believing them to be “no other
than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize
power and profit,” (Paine, 10). The
passages from the Native Americans experiences with Christianity, and the
horrors of the Salem Witch Trials lend veracity to this statement. It may be
these events, along with the emergence of Darwinism, that lead to many
intellectuals leaving the church for a more humanistic philosophy, if not
outright denouncing the church as Paine did.
Instead of being in the church, Paine would postulate that God is “THE CREATION
WE BEHOLD, and it is in this word, which no human invention can counterfeit or
alter, that God speaketh universally to man” (Paine, 21).
Paine’s belief that God is in nature brings religion in America full
circle to the Native Americans. ‘It is only in the CREATION [nature] that all
our ideas and conceptions of a word of God can unite,” (Paine, 22). I find it
interesting that an intellectual of the Enlightenment would espouse similar
beliefs as the “savages” who lived in America during precolonial time. So as
philosophy and religion evolved from a fear and conquest based version of
Christianity, to a more humanist version of Deism, it also harkens back to those
who were here before. Maybe there is nothing new under the sun…
