I believe analogies are an effective rhetorical device.
I also believe some rules are meant to be broken.
Protestants just want resources. I knew it.
Thanks for following up, NW. Nitpick:
In an urban situation, though, where the family is no longer the prime economic unit, monotheistic religions with clear boundary conditions provide a way for people to join new coalitions more suitable to the conditions than the ones they are born with.
I think there've been plenty of non-urban heretics. The Peasants' War (?), Dalit conversions in the 19 and 20C I posted about in the last Big Sort thread. I don't think the urban bit is necessary for your argument though.
Stronger than class solidarity? What evidence do you have for this? In what sense? For which side? I'm no historian, but it seems likelier to me that they were mostly forbidden from practicing their traditional religions and adopted Christianity with some covert traditional inflection from a combination of conformity with the violent overwhelmingly dominant power and needing some collective ritual and only having safe access to this one form.
Widespread popular interest in theology is correlated with competition for resources precisely because it leads to disputes and schisms.
More seriously, is this true? Has it been studied systematically?
(Those I quotes I pulled I think from the linked piece.)
I don't know anything about religion really. One of few places I know anything, in the run-up to the Thirty Years' War, Protestantism in the Habsburg lands spread mostly among the upper classes. To the extent that gave them reasons to resist exactions by the state, I guess that's consistent with pressure on fixed incomes caused by the post-Columbian inflation; conversely, adopting the Counter-Reformation gave the Habsburgs reasons to strip privileges and income from those Protestant nobles.
8: Assuming here we're talking about Christianity 1.0 (not African slavery in America), my understanding is that a. slaves were not generally restricted from practicing their native religions*, and b. I'm not aware of any evidence that the slaves in early Christian churches were outliers in this. Further, since Christ's original teaching was very much aimed at outcasts, presumably the early evangelists continued this, offering a message aimed at slaves themselves, not one that would reach slaves through their owners.
*a zillion caveats here, but let's start with: the (vast?) majority of slaves within the Roman Empire in the 1st & 2nd centuries CE would have religious traditions that slotted in just fine within Roman pantheism, and
12: She's talking about African-Americans under slavery.
8: Not sure what exactly you're talking about. AIUI in Spanish America Church activism caused serious reductions in abuses and the banning of chattel enslavement of Native Americans, so there at least there were positive advantages to conversion.
I feel that determining what exactly was heresy at Unfogged was a large part of the McManus project.
Of course the "class" of Catholic clergy was complicated, even more so in early Spanish America, but it definitely wasn't the same as that of the Indios.
14: Well, I don't remember reading anything about Uncle Tom accepting Jesus and consequently being emancipated, but maybe I missed that.
I had literally no idea Harriet Beecher Stowe was writing about Hispaniola.
I would like Tia actually to confirm what she was talking about, because her comment isn't clear.
I was writing about African Americans under slavery.
22: Thank you, Tia! Now I should retire.
It's the only way to have time to start your own religion.
Also I just went back and read the post, thinking maybe I had gotten something wrong about the context, and no, I didn't. I was responding directly to the sentence where the phrase "stronger than class solidarity" was used, which makes the context explicit.
My guess is that in that sentence Werdna was focusing on slavery under the Roman Empire.
25: Two people just misread you in good faith, so actually no it doesn't.
25, 27: Can we agree that good faith misunderstanding of even clear, competent writers intending to be explicit is always possible, and just be content that it's cleared up now rather than worrying about where the fault for the misunderstanding lies?
And of course Werdna was explicitly addressing both time periods, but I think his explanation is conventionally accepted and plausible for the Roman Empire, and at least possible as a partial explanation in 19th century America.
Competent reading comes by faith alone.
Would this apply to the Burnt-over District and its outgrowth as Later-Day Saints? I think of that as a resource-rich time/place, but as the Mormons moved west their group cohesion pre-dated their resource struggle.
32: Would the Mormonism count as heresy in the sense NW is talking about? Theologically I assume it is heretical, but was Smith a heretic in that he knew and cared about Christian theology and believed it was being misinterpreted? Given the whole Angel Moroni thing it looks to me more like Islam, a new religion formed in part by adapting elements of preexisting religion.
31 You've got to work at it too and if you fall short, beg for indulgence.
33: Hrm, maybe not. But that time and place (perhaps extended a bit to include the non-costal US North in the early 19th century) surely had a few heretics, given the religious diversity. The Seventh-Day Adventists surely count.
*non-coastal. My keyboard's been wonky.
Seventh Day Adventists are all over Lincoln. They can't be that hereticy because they have an office park with a nice lawn.
The Protestant Work Ethic literally invented the office park.
hang on. Work is interfering with my ability to comment. I will get back to people properly, promise.
If it weren't for heretical Protestantism, Nw would be able to slack off and talk to his friends like a good Christian.
Every fanatical heresy make a bargain with the world
I had never heard of the Burned-over District, except accidentally via Rockefeller's father, who was a traveling conman in the region. Based on 10 seconds of wikiing though it sounds as if the revivalists were maybe as much conmen as heretics, and Mormonism a con which got out of hand. Rockefeller's father, and Smith, remind me of this dude (PDF), a conman in interwar Natal, who tried inter alia herbal medicine, starting a church, and union organizing. He was working in a milieu of serious economic stress, and I think the religious opportunism is consistent with NW. (Though again not obviously extending to heresy.)
33: My understanding is that the sort of things Smith claimed as revelation were in fact ubiquitous as exurban legends in that time and place. That is, everybody in Upstate NY in the 1820s was telling stories about Indians as lost tribes and gold tablets and suchlike. I won't venture an analogy, but Smith was essentially somebody collecting together lots of strands of rumors & conspiracy theories and taking it VERY seriously.
I don't know whether "heresy" is a useful concept theologically speaking, but in terms of Nworb's thesis, I think it fits, because he was rearranging existing religious (and cultural) pieces to create a new religious identity.
somebody collecting together lots of strands of rumors & conspiracy theories and taking it VERY seriously
QAnon is in the other thread.
I'm so fascinated by the burned-over district and the explosion of 19th century christian splinter groups (not just Mormons and 7th Day Adventists, but also Church of Christ, Oneida, indirectly Jehova's Witnesses). What I find particularly fascinating is how *different* theologically so many of these groups are from each other despite coming out of the same milieu and drawing converts from the same pool. I used to find it really baffling why early christianity had such wildly contradictory strains, but seeing this in recent New York where we have such better data makes it much easier to understand what's happening.
Also the cold open of Season 3 of The Leftovers.
44: Fortunately, in our enlightened age, cons never get out of hand.
47 is a good comment. Coincidentally, Loomis at LGM wrote today about Thoreau, and linked to an older piece he wrote about him which puts him in the context of how Northerners tried to cope with industrialization, another example of which is the Burned-over District.
Anyway, when I said I wasn't a historian, I didn't mean I'd never read anything about it, but my sense of things is a complicated almalgam of nonfiction, diaries, and fiction I have read and I won't be able to tease it apart, but sometime in the past year I read an autobiographical piece by a woman who was trying to recover some of the religious practices of her ancestors, and she described their loss as resulting from a combination of the kind of forced forgetting that can happen when families are repeatedly separated (for a striking example of this, I do vividly remember the epilogue to King Leopold's Ghost, in which it's discussed that the history of colonization had been lost to many of the Congolese and the book itself was extremely clarifying) and active suppression of traditional practices. Maybe she was mistaken, or had an incomplete sense of the mechanisms. Another mechanism that seems plausible to me is the difficulty of fully resisting being constantly taught the inferiority of your past cultural identity. Nothing I've ever read about the antebellum south suggests that there was a force stronger than class identity, where class is racial caste, or that Christian practice meaningfully formed a bond across caste. Got you out of some beatings you might have otherwise taken for other kinds of ritual practice, I'd believe. I don't pretend to know all about it, which is why was asking.
Speaking of slavery and very early Christianity, it's so weird that of the very few documents we have of very early Christianity, one of them is the letter to Philemon. (For people who didn't do Sword Drills as a kid, Philemon is a very short letter of Paul's writing to a Christian slaveowner asking him to forgive a slave who had fled but later converted to Christianity and worked with Paul.)
I find amusing that the scholarly consensus about whether Philemon is authentic is basically that although it's too short to really have much evidence either way, why the hell would anyone have kept it and read it if it weren't really by Paul?
47/50: Pushing the snake-oil connection, from the link in 44:
Perhaps in this category one could find the peripatetic "Doctors of Medical Electricity" armed with batteries, wires and stethoscopes diagnosing a wide variety of illnesses.2' Here, too, were the pedlars of bottled fat of white men, fat of utokoloshe and medicines for winning at cards and finding buried treasure.Many of these same people were involved in a big wave of Ponzi schemes. The same period also produced Shembe, among many other syncretist churches.
Kuzwayo's brief move into office of churchman contained a certain logic. As a founder of his own church he became, if rather briefly, part of a small army of modestly educated individuals who appropriated notions of chiefly authority and developed styles of prophetic leadership in order to secure followers in town and countryside of Natal.
This theory doesn't seem quite complete unless you can work the Cathars into it somehow.
55: For convenient transport and storage.
It's easy to transport, except for the extra pressure on your ankles.
You have any idea how hot it gets in Natal? No sane person would haul a whole white man around down there.
45.1. tends to confirm my impression of the similarities between the origins of Islam and LDS. There seems to be a strand in pop Muslim apologetics* that emphasises the supposed continuity from some forms of Ebionism**. Which I've always thought likely though unprovable, but it's interesting that the idea is taken up more from the Muslim angle than the Christian.
*Shit in English I can find easily on google.
** Taken as supporting the assertion that the apostles were Muslim avant la lettre.
Apropos the role of the Church in Latin America, one imagines that the Nicene Fathers would have condemned observances such as Dia de Muertos with some gusto.
Nothing like a rich tradition of human sacrifice to lower the bar.
I MEAN, "BOO!". SHIT.
60.3: On the other hand, it would have been quite a competition between them over who had the best white beard to be Santa Claus in the Xmas production of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
Elsewhere, from Bulgaria to Italy and France, Germany and Flanders, popular heresy appeared particularly attractive to urban artisans and the rural poor. Yet despite Cathar communities in Toulouse and the much smaller towns such as Béziers and Carcassonne, urbanization in the areas of Languedoc most affected was limited. There was little or no heresy in Narbonne, the second great city of the region. Rural Catharism revolved around the small castles, fortified villages and households of the local nobility, whose adherence to the radical faith was eased by the sophisticated literary cosmology imported by Nicetas from Constantinople, which was not predicated on hierarchical social or economic tensions or guilt. Lords had much to gain from opposing Catholic assertion of financial ecclesiastical rights and from the Cathars' absolute, rather than the Catholics' conditional, separation of church and state. In return, support from social leaders afforded Catharism material protection and financial support; physical centres for study and proselytizing; and networks for the transmission of the faith both laterally, through extended aristocratic family contacts, and vertically, to the servants, tenants and peasants of the lords.
OK. Sat down now, and working my way through the comments
8: I wasn't primarily talking about African-American slavery in the US. But the evangelical agitation against the slave trade in England, and perhaps in the northern US, ("Am I not a man and a brother") made some prosperous white people identify more with slaves than with their owners.
11: So far as I understand it, Lutheranism spread from the top down; Calvinism was more bottom upwards. But most of the Calvinist communities of Eastern Europe were crushed in the 30 years war, and the German ones which survived were mostly destroyed after 1945. But I have travelled among Romanian baptist communities which somehow survived, and which played an important part in the downfall of Ceaucescu
32: Mormonism worked as a heresy in my sense for its very large contingent of early converts from Lancashire - one of the weirder aspects of its history.
51: I don't think, to clarify, that my thesis works at all well in the antebellum south. It's not meant to be a general theory. And I don't think, either, that the south ever understood its conflicts in primarily theological terms.
56: no, I don't think the Cathars fit. But I don't know enough about them, or what led people to convert to them.
There's so much moss in Lancashire that people just needed an excuse to move to Utah.
To clarify: my original question, the one that sparked all this off was not "What is the nature of heresy?" But "Why are some civil conflicts understood by both sides as theological when others are not?"
In this light, the inapplicability of my thesis to the American South should be clear. That was understood by both blacks and whites to be primarily about race, not creed. Outside the south, religion could allow the formation of interracial alliances, and on the abolitionist side it did. In fact I don't think there would have been a mass abolitionist movement without it. So then you get Julia Ward Beecher.
You can't be a heretic in Hinduism, or Shinto, or classical paganism
I wondered about this - can a strict monotheism be a heresy in a polytheistic society?
Thinking about how Islam and Christianity played in India, especially.
I don't think the Cathars fit. But I don't know enough about them, or what led people to convert to them.
The promise that centuries in the future they would become mainstays of conspiracy theories and potboiler occult fiction was the draw for many.
72. Yes. Monotheists function as heretics in this sense because they deny the validity of all other beliefs.
But of course the term used is infidel, because they are operating right outside the "baggy" polytheisms which have no internal heresies.
So far as I understand it, Lutheranism spread from the top down; Calvinism was more bottom upwards. But most of the Calvinist communities of Eastern Europe were crushed in the 30 years war, and the German ones which survived were mostly destroyed after 1945. But I have travelled among Romanian baptist communities which somehow survived, and which played an important part in the downfall of Ceaucescu
Church of Scotland in Hungary, going strong sine 1841!
I don't think, either, that the south ever understood its conflicts in primarily theological terms.
Have not read A Kingdom Divided, but it seems to argue that *some* groups or regions did just that -- that the conflict was too deep for any congregation to contain, so churches changed their theology and/or sides until the two aligned.
Mormonism worked as a heresy in my sense for its very large contingent of early converts from Lancashire - one of the weirder aspects of its history.
From what little, what very little, I know, everything about Mormonism strikes me as some kind of 19th-century American hucksterism, and as just deeply weird. Not that my own religious affiliation (of Roman Catholicism) is without its, er, quirks...But Catholics are theological snobs, of course: I'm thinking, What would count as heresy for a Mormon? Aren't they heretics from the very get-go?
71: In this light, the inapplicability of my thesis to the American South should be clear.
I don't need to be too concerned about this because I thought you were making a claim that surprised me, and I was curious about it, and to the extent you were you're not anymore, but in these two sentences
The examples of this kind of disruptive religious coalition building that I am familiar with come from Christian history. The appeal to slaves, both in the ancient world and in 19th century USA was in part that it gave them a link with some members of the slave-owning classes which was stronger than class solidarity.
you were saying that slaves in the North in 19th Century USA were drawn to Christianity because it allowed coalition building? Ok, I don't know much about that. Wikipedia gives the date of formal abolition in all Northern states as 1804 but it looks like there were still people living in slavery, especially in the early part of the century, though a relatively small percentage of the overall census of American slaves.
It wasn't easy for me to suss out the inapplicability of your thesis to the American South because when I hear slaves in 19th century USA I think of the American South -- that's where the vast majority of them were.
I sort of wonder if you're not also thinking of free African-Americans living in the North? Because your whole argument makes more intuitive sense to me regarding people who had been given formal, legal freedom. When not under this overwhelming dominant, totalitarian system then I could imagine that Christianity provided useful narratives by which African-Americans could communicate with whites and with which they could argue against their oppression.
Sure, Joseph Smith was a huckster and a polygamist and maybe a pedophile. But my religion was started by a guy who got rich by renting out one of his wives. We win!
On that note, just today there was a guy walking down the sidewalk toward me while looking at his phone. He was wearing a kippah. Unfortunately, he looked up just before I had a reason for my "non-observant Jew" joke.
Anyway, the entire list of religions started by Nebraskans consists of Scientology. I probably better stick with orthodoxy.
78: The LDS movement has a pretty strong history of schism and heresy* for how young it is. My favorite is this guy.
* I was going to bring up a chart showing how all the LDS churches are related to each other, but it's remarkably straightforward compared to, say, the history of the church in Scotland.
I really wonder whether the main LDS church will ever get their hands on the Temple Lot. At some point won't the remaining few schismatics just sell for a lot of money?
83.1 I don't know if anyone has crunched the data but schism and heresy seem much more common in the early formative period of religions, at least with regard to Christianity and Islam.
My ancestors include a nest of Quakers from Rottingdean, and also a bunch from SE Mass (Nantucket, New Bedford, etc.) A cousin of mine was on Long Island last month and went to find the monument to our shared ancestor Cassandra Southwick, exiled for converting to Quakerism, whose children were ordered sold into slavery in Salem in the 17th c. The plan fell apart when no one would buy them, and no captain would transport them to Barbados . . .
Here's a heresy I was thinking about reading the comments above. IMHMHB a case involving a plantation purchased by a religious group in the 18th century to free slaves that had already been converted. The whole thing started when Graf Zinzendorf was a guest at a wedding at the royal court of Denmark, and heard of how the slaves were treated.
He got permission from the king to evangelize them. The first Danish missionaries tried to sell themselves into slavery, the better to share the lot of their flock. Too heretical!
https://wikivisually.com/wiki/The_Ballad_of_Cassandra_Southwick_(poem)
Thinking out loud: NW is talking about two questions, which aren't quite the same.
1. from OP.1: Why do large populations sometimes become interested in theological questions?
2. 71: "Why are some civil conflicts understood by both sides as theological when others are not?"
Put differently:
(1) Why do laypeople sometimes care about theology?
(2) Why is theology sometimes politicized, or politics sacralized?
I think NW is saying basically that the answer to (1) is often "Because the theology has been politicized"; the rest of his discussion is about answers to (2), and I think is basically correct.
For instance, it seems on skimming that Catharism initially arose and spread for apolitical reasons: it offered a solution to the problem of evil many Christians found more compelling than the orthodox ones. Subsequently, as described in 66, some Occitan nobles found Catharism useful in their pre-existing political disputes with the Church, that is to sacralize their politics. By the same token, their enemies could then sacralize themselves with orthodoxy, mobilize additional resources through crusading mechanisms, and eventually win a decisive political victory (though the theology actually remained unsettled, and the heresy would only be eradicated much more gradually).
I separate from NW in that he characterizes sacralized politics as enabling "coalitional realignment", uniting forces across traditional lines. On the face of it it seems to me that coalitional reinforcement is far more common. In the Cathar case, the crusade brought additional forces into Occitan conflicts, but those forces came from the Languedoïl, ultimately under Capetian direction: sacralization helped those parties mobilize, but they were interested the conflict anyway, for secular reasons. I think similar arguments will apply to most Reformation conflicts, culminating in total secularization by the end of the Thirty Years' War.
Thanks, Mossy. This is very helpful. I do agree with you about coalitional reinforcement. I think that's a distinct motive for the sacralisation of pre-existing conflicts and one we can see very clearly in our lifetimes wrt Islam in the Nigerian central belt, the increasing religiosity of Israeli and Palestinian politics, the growing use of "Muslim" to mean "brown person" in Europe and so on.
But this is a separate process to the one that originally interested me, which was the crystallisation of conflicts in the first place.
92 last: Not sure I follow. When opposite sides of theological questions start to become antagonistic?
When a peasant in southern France can't urinate, they consider converting to Catheterism .
But that's banned. Hence the notoriously short French temper.
So you have to be sure you piss before you head south?
In France, religious heterodoxy always involved penis modification. The Jews and Muslims cut off the foreskin, the Catheters put a tube up it, and nobody will even say what the Huguenots are up to.
Whatever it was, four terrible wars were fought to stop it.
The refugees spread to England where they created public schools.
Of course, the Inquisition confiscated all the catheters, intoning the dread sentence: there is no piss for the wicked!
72: IIRC pagan Rome occasionally executed prominent converts to Judaism for the crime of atheism.
A monotheist is just an atheist with one important exception, after all.
If Roman emperors were clever, instead of just deifying themselves, they would have also made their opponents the god of premature ejaculation.
93: yes. Why do normal people suddenly decide that these questions matter tremendously?
Commenting likely to be extremely limited for a while, as thought will be, because I have handed in my macbook to have the keyboard fixed and am now using one with a Japanese keyboard. _Half an hour's work with Karabiner has turned the "type Japanese" key into an extension of the space bar, which is what my thumb already believed it was; the Yen sign is now a back space; the "English keyboard layout" is now the command key ... But the spontaneous appearance of underscores before capital letters is a mystery I cannot solve.
85: schism and heresy seem much more common in the early formative period of religions,
ISTR the Baha'i founder thought so and made a point of trying to avoid schism in the first century.
106: I don't know enough. My first guess is that the vast majority of individuals who care about such things start caring because some authority tells them to; but then my heart has been salt for many years.
I also think NW is very right in identifying theological claims as politically useful precisely in that they are metaphysical and irresolvable. In secular politics I'm reminded of the Cold War, where a lot of thinking just collapsed into communist/anti-communist pejoratives regardless of everything else; "the mutual and simultaneous manufacture of outgroups" is very elegant. Like HUAC: Un-American, the othering is right there in the title. The stripping of actual content from pejoratives there continues to be useful even decades after the Cold War, calling Obama a "socialist" for instance. I also wonder about the very short career of Marxism, where AIUI the USSR ultimately collapsed in large part because its elite knew that socialism simply wasn't working: while Marxism was a parlor game it was bulletproof, but once in power it became subject to empirical testing.
The OP reminded me of "On the Late Massacre in Piedmont;" despite Milton's best wishes, not too many Waldensians left.
Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple Tyrant; that from these may grow
A hundredfold, who, having learnt thy way,
Early may fly the Babylonian woe.
Isn't there a popular children:s book series devoted to finding the last Waldensian?
