The science is not settled on this. The idea that we would put Americans’ economy at jeopardy based on scientific theory that’s not settled yet to me is just nonsense. Just because you have a group of scientists who stood up and said here is the fact. Galileo got outvoted for a spell.

There’s been a lot backlash. In one response, Corey Robin dredged up one of the most painful examples of the Galileo Gambit in American history. This is a quote from Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederate States of America, and his famous Cornerstone Speech. This was delivered in Savannah, Georgia, shortly before hostilities began:

As I have stated, the truth of this principle may be slow in development, as all truths are and ever have been, in the various branches of science. It was so with the principles announced by Galileo it was so with Adam Smith and his principles of political economy. It was so with Harvey, and his theory of the circulation of the blood. It is stated that not a single one of the medical profession, living at the time of the announcement of the truths made by him, admitted them. Now, they are universally acknowledged. May we not, therefore, look with confidence to the ultimate universal acknowledgment of the truths upon which our system rests?

Any guesses which principle Stephens was talking about? Any guesses at all? It’s the same principle which Stephens declared was the cornerstone of the Confederate government:

Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.

I could wish that this had discredited the Galileo Gambit for American politicians, but sadly that is not the case.

To treat the Exodus story as literal, factual history, one would have to believe that at some point God devastated the agriculture, economy, and military of Egypt, and yet somehow not only no king but no other person saw fit to mention these events in a letter.

Which is the greater miracle? Believing that God sent plagues and drowned soldiers? Or believing that God ensured that no one in Egypt made any mention of these occurrences and that no shred of tangible archaeological evidence would be left?

McGrath mentions the lack of “correspondence, fiscal transaction records, and other textual as well as archaeological evidence,” which warms my archivist heart (acid-free and buffered). That’s exactly the sort of evidence that we would hope to see. Historians acknowledge that Egyptian scribes generally did not report the bad news, but there still should have been some physical evidence of a mass migration of people out of Egypt.

If nothing else there should have been spin. While we don’t get the bad news directly, there will frequently be back-handed acknowledgements of a crisis. For example, an inscription might read, “Praise to the Pharaoh for guiding us through a time of famine.” So we know that there was a famine, even if no official at the time wrote about it.

Egyptologist Bob Brier quipped that you know that the Egyptians were losing a war when the glorious victories kept getting closer to Egypt. Still, we do tend to find out about the battles and we can piece together the actual results.

The usual response to this is to draw back from the popular depiction of the Exodus. Perhaps it wasn’t as large as the scriptures indicated. Perhaps there are errors in the translation, or things got exaggerated. Perhaps there was no dramatic confrontation.

Which leads us to a tricky question of identity: how large did the migration from Egypt have to have been in order for it to be the Exodus? If a small family escaped during the Fall of the Bronze Age, ditching the slave masters in a swampy “reed sea,” does that mean that Exodus occurred?

These days most theological discussions break down thusly:

Person 1: I believe in X.
Person 2: I believe in Y.
Person 1: You’re a Nazi fag.

Back in the third century, these interactions had much the same flavor, but the stakes were a bit different:

Person 1: I believe in X.
Person 2: I believe in Y.
Person 1: Why don’t you believe in X? I would love to explore your belief system further in hopes of bridging our — hahaha just kidding; I’ve already set you on fire.

The question basically translates to, “What would the world be like if Christianity had never become successful?” It’s an interesting question, but their answers are phoned in:

The influence of Christ’s life greatly influenced the arts. Michelangelo wouldn’t have painted the Sistine Chapel and there would be no Pieta in the Vatican- further, no Vatican at all.

Fair enough. Of course, the wealthy pagans of the Roman empire were great patrons of the arts, particularly religious art that might gain them favor from the Gods or the Emperor. Had Jesus never existed, the art world would be very different but probably just as vibrant.

Christian writers whose works clearly reflect the conviction that the Earth is spherical include Saint Bede the Venerable in his Reckoning of Time, written around AD 723. In Columbus’ time, the techniques of celestial navigation, which use the position of the Sun and the Stars in the sky, together with the understanding that the Earth is a sphere, were widely used by mariners. Columbus himself saw his accomplishments [of exploring the Americas] primarily in the light of the spreading of the Christian religion. – Wikipedia

See what I mean by “phoned in”? Western culture already knew the world was round centuries before the birth of Jesus. Granted, Columbus was an apocalyptic and he was partially motivated by religious fervor. But he was also motivated by financial self-interest, as were his backers and most of the other explorers. Had Columbus not sailed, someone else would have.

Some of the Manhattan Declaration’s answers are just weird: without the Catholic Mass, wine grapes would have died out. Given how popular wine has been in Europe, I just can’t see everyone giving up on the grape.

I used to think that paganism was on the wane when Christianity arose. But I believe that the historical consensus has shifted, and now the belief is that Greco-roman paganism was very much alive, particularly after the revivals sponsored by Diocletian. So if Jesus had never been born, we might still have some version of that old paganism still around. Probably so heavily evolved as to be unrecognizable, but still the dominant religion of the west.

Christmas means that Jesus has defeated the powers, the pagan gods that military rulers used to bring their peoples into subjection, to oppress all dissent, and to bring misery upon the masses of men and women. Christmas means that the tyranny of paganism – its pantheon, politics, and power – have been broken by a Jewish man who died on a Roman cross.

So Star Foster writes a nice – and fairly polite – response. James McGrath – who has been called the “Lady Gaga” of biblioblogging and strangely thinks that a compliment – is gratified that the discussion is civil. In the comments, McGrath and Foster discuss the relationship between Paganism, Judiasm and Christianity. From McGrath:

Speaking from a liberal Christian perspective, there are plenty of places in which, if one wishes to see it, one can see much more openness to things that some Christians would call “pagan” right within the pages of the Bible. It is there in the belief of the author of Genesis that the Earth has creative power. It is there in the hinted reference to “Mother Earth” when Job says “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will return there.” And it is there when Christians and Jews found the Stoic (i.e. pantheist) concept of the Logos was found well suited to their faith, and when Paul in Acts quotes poetic references to Zeus.

As it happens, 3quarksdaily recently awarded its top prize for Political and Social writing to Kenan Malik for his piece, Rethinking the Idea of “Christian Europe.” This was a piece from back in August reacting to the shootings by Anders Behring Breivik, following which many people on the right showed sympathy for Breivik’s idea that Christianity formed the cultural glue that held Europe together. Malik begins to deconstruct this idea by pointing out that Christianity was not novel:

Christianity may have forged a distinct ethical tradition, but its key ideas, like those of most religions, were borrowed from the cultures out of which it developed. Early Christianity was effectively a marriage of Athens and Jerusalem, a fusion of the Ancient Greek tradition and Judaism. Few of what are often thought of as uniquely Christian ideas are in fact so.

Take, for instance, the Sermon on the Mount, perhaps the most influential of all Christian ethical discourses. The moral landscape that Jesus sketched out in the sermon was already familiar. The extensions of the Mosaic law upon which Jesus insisted were already part of the Jewish tradition. The Golden Rule – ‘do unto others as you would have others do unto you’ – has a long history, an idea hinted at in Babylonian and Egyptian religious codes, before fully flowering in Greek and Judaic writing (having independently already appeared in Confucianism too). The insistence on virtue as a good in itself, the resolve to turn the other cheek, the call to look inwards, the claim that correct belief is at least as important as virtuous action – all were important themes in the Greek Stoic tradition.

One of history’s great counters to the arrogance of triumphalism is the recognition of continuity. Christianity drew heavily from pagan ideas, and could arguably be seen as a continuation of certain pagan traditions rather than their replacement. Facing the fact that there is “nothing new under the sun,” a certain humility is called for.

From Eccleisastes, itself a Jewish work that may show an influence from greek Epicureanism:

What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done;
and there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there a thing of which it is said,
“See, this is new”?
It has been already,
in the ages before us.
There is no remembrance of former things,
nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to happen
among those who come after.

I don’t want to be a pedant, and I know that Thomas More the character is not supposed to completely line up with Thomas More the historical figure. And it’s also true that I haven’t seen A Man for All Seasons in quite some time. But I still cringe at lines like this:

Unlike modern-day fanatics, who impose their values on others without regard to conscience or the vital importance of free will, More’s extremism lay not in the way he treats those around him, but in the demands he placed upon himself.

It should always be remembered that during More’s time as Lord Chancellor, six men were burned at the stake for heresy. More was quite willing to impose values, namely the value of obedience to the Pope and the King. We can argue back and forth as to whether this represented a betrayal of More’s humanism or whether he was simply a man of his times, but the fact remains that he was completely willing to ignore the “vital importance of free will.”

Let me finish by quoting Professor Robert Bucholz, from his Teaching Company lecture on the history of the Tudors and Stuarts:

“More didn’t die for his conscience. Remember that he quite enthusiastically burnt people at the stake for theirs. More died for the Pope’s right to tell you what your conscience ought to believe.”

Another tradition has to be observed: the yearly lecture about how we should all be giving thanks to God. This year, Thomas Kidd is doing the honors here at Patheos. Kidd wants to remind us that Thanksgiving was started by the Pilgrims in order to give thanks to God, and that we should remember that rather than indulging in over-consumption.

Frankly, this seems silly. Harvest festivals are as old as agriculture. They predate any particular religion. But let’s look at our current version of the festival.

Pilgrim’s Progress

Consider the usual American Thanksgiving spread: turkey, cranberries, squash, corn (maize) and pumpkin. All of these are New World crops, which the Pilgrims would have learned about from the natives.[1] The Native Americans are always the missing half of the Thanksgiving equation, absolutely essential but usually ignored.

What did they think of the proceedings and the feast? Since they weren’t Christian, I doubt Kidd cares. In truth, perhaps we should be offering thanks to the spirits that the Native Americans believed in. For that you’re better off visiting The Wild Hunt, but for now let’s look at the Pilgrims again.

Kidd paints that Pilgrims as seekers of religious freedom, but he lampshades the problem of that idea with the line, “The Netherlands offered the Separatists religious liberty, but the Pilgrims also became concerned about the negative influences of living in such a culturally diverse society. ”

I believe it was Garrison Keillor who said that the Pilgrims went in search of “levels of religious intolerance that were unavailable to them in England.” They were Puritans – the root is “pure” – and they sought a pure church and government, untainted by any lingering Catholic influences or foreign ideas. The Dutch merchant empire, with its cosmopolitan ideas and famous Dutch religious toleration, was antithetical to their mission.

What Kidd omits is that those revoltingly tolerant Dutch had already settled in the new world, a decade before the Pilgrims. In 1609, Henry Hudson left a small colony of fur traders on a river island near where the Mohawk and Hudson Rivers combined. Several years later a real settlement was established along the Hudson.

A series of forts would later be built; Fort Nassau and then Fort Orange. A small community would grow around Fort Orange, and it was given the name Beverwijck. After the British takeover in 1664, the town was renamed Albany. It is the oldest continually inhabited European settlement in North America.

Black Felt Hats: the 17th Century’s Must Have Gift

The town’s original name – Beverwijck or the more common anglicised Beverwyck – gives you a good idea about why the colony was established. It translates from the Old Dutch as “beaver district,” and jokes aside, beaver was why it existed. Beaver pelts, felted to make those impressive black hats you see in Rembrandt paintings, were big business.

In other words, the Dutch had come to America in order to make a buck. And here we can know what the natives thought of this practice, because they frequently outdid the Dutch. The usual stories portray the Indians as being naive for having sold Manhattan for $24.[2] Setting aside the absurdities of the currency conversion, the Indians actually gave as good as they got.

It’s true that the semi-nomadic natives didn’t consider land something that could be owned, but they were certainly willing the trade for the use of the land. Native tribes had been making treaties like that for centuries. The natives sold the Dutch merchants the right to settle on Manhattan island, but the natives continued to live there as well. As Russell Shorto points out in The Island at the Center of the World, those natives continued to profit off the Dutch for decades to come.

So making a buck (or guilder, or wampum, or tulip bulb) is a fine old American tradition that predates Thanksgiving. What’s interesting is that the Dutch toleration was often an outgrowth of this profit seeking. While Boston was hanging Quakers, the Dutch West India Company had decided that removing them would be too disruptive for business. When local authorities wanted to prevent Jews from settling along the Hudson, the Company overruled them. They explained that the Company had taken a loss in Brazil and needed the money from Jewish investors.

Both the Pilgrims and the Dutch were soon overtaken by the British, but both have left out-sized legacies on their region. But while the New Englanders were stabbing each other in the back for not being sufficiently Calvinist, the Dutch influenced New Yorkers were building a cosmopolitan culture based on commercial capitalism.

I’m not one to shouting the virtues of our culture of consumption. I avoid the malls from mid-October to mid-January (I call it “black quarter”). But America owes less to the Pilgrims and their harvest festival than it does to the tolerant, acquisitive Dutch merchants.

[1] I heard one historian suggest that the only native food the new immigrants would have recognized was eel, since eels spawn in the Atlantic and travel to both old world and new. I looked all over the supermarket for this traditional dish, but I couldn’t find any. I guess all the other holiday shoppers got to it first.

[2] There’s a hilarious version of this myth, courtesy of Washington Irving: “The true version is, that Oloffe Van Kortlandt bargained for just so much land as a man could cover with his nether garments. The terms being concluded, he produced his friend Mynheer Ten Broeck, as the man whose breeches were to be used in measurement. The simple savages, whose ideas of a man’s nether garments had never expanded beyond the dimensions of a breech clout, stared with astonishment and dismay as they beheld this bulbous-bottomed burgher peeled like an onion, and breeches after breeches spread forth over the land until they covered the actual site of this venerable city.”

This is even funnier if you know the legend of the founding of Carthage, and that Ten Broeck is a famous Dutch merchant family.

No big surprise then that O’Reilly’s Killing Lincoln, which he co-wrote with Martin Dugard, has been a critical flop. For starters, O’Reilly wasn’t doing original research. According to a review at the Washington Post, the book doesn’t directly cite its sources, and seems to have come entirely from secondary works. So that’s how O’Reilly and Dugard avoided the lengthy stages of research, they synthesised the works of previous historians.

That’s not a killing flaw – or even a flaw at all if you admit that’s what you’re doing. Since O’Reilly is apparently doing commemorative “great man” history, he can probably get away with it. It doesn’t require much original research at this point to extol the virtues of Lincoln; there are libraries of books doing that already.

What has killed the book are the mistakes. There are tons of little mistakes, like incorrect measurements and confusion about dates. These could be slips of the pen, but they’re not encouraging. Jason Colavito sees them as the result of the poor state of editing in modern publishing. He’d know better than I, but I still suspect that O’Reilly has protection from editors. [Warning: TvTropes link]

There are tons of moderate mistakes, like mentioning the Oval Office, which did not exist yet. Here there really is no excuse, and yet it doesn’t seem to be a case of bias. Just pure sloppiness.

What is more disturbing is that O’Reilly has resurrected some old myths. The authors suggest that Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, was somehow involved in the assassination. They acknowledge that there is no concrete evidence for this, but insist that “circumstantially, he was involved,” a nice little hand-wave that allows them to assert without proof.

There are also some weird ideas that don’t seem to be grounded in anything. Every great man needs a villain, so the authors enlist Lincoln’s successor, President Andrew Johnson. Now, Johnson was in many ways an embarrassment, but O’Reilly apparently wants the long time Democratic stump speaker to be a fire-breather hostile to the south. Would that it were so, but Johnson was far more lenient towards the south, and far less interested in black equality, than the Radical Republicans.

Again, I don’t know what possessed O’Reilly to set himself up for this. It doesn’t seem to be a partisan work, just a bad one.

McCreight rattles off some of the prominent names left off, from Hypatia of Alexandria to Marie Curie. It’s a good list, and I’d add that Brainz.org’s failure to include Elizabeth Cady Stanton is inexcusable, particularly since Stanton’s stock among intellectual historians is rising.

Let me just throw one more name on the list: Frances Wright (1795-1852). Frances Wright – “Fanny” to her associates – was a major part of the Freethought movement during the late 1820s and 1830s. She was a gifted speaker, writer and political organizer, and someone who deserves to be remembered.

Of course, there are reasons that Wright has been forgotten. She was Scottish and was only active in America for a few years at a time. She was also an all-purpose radical, and she’s as likely to be remembered as an abolitionist or the founder of the utopian Nashoba Commune as an atheist. Towards the end of her career, in the 1830s, she seems to have grown bored with religious wrangling and focused more on economic reform.

Another part of the problem was the Freethought movement itself. More or less founded in the mid-1820s, the movement was a reaction to the Second Great Awakening. Wright, alongside reformers like Abner Kneeland and Robert Dale Owens, would fight a rearguard battle against the tide of evangelical Christianity, and ultimately lose. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the movement was basically a men’s club. Its members were more comfortable seeing women as passive victims of religious indoctrination than as potential allies.

Of these reformers, Wright was clearly the most infamous. In the conservative thinking of the time, society was held together by a framework of institutions that curbed the self-interest of the individual and educated them in the virtues of civic life. Since women were seen as morally superior to men, they were considered the lynch-pin of this framework. Their roles as mothers teaching children and wives supporting husbands were the bulwark against anarchy.

As a woman and a radical reformer of marriage and society, Wright threatened that more than any other person. The panic she caused shows up in the invective thrown at her. She was “the Red Harlot of Infidelity,” a “procuress of atheism and infidelity,” and of course, the “female Tom Paine.” The thought that she might lead other women into her system of atheism, free love and community scared the living hell out of American conservatives.

Wright’s name would become a label hurled by conservative at reformers and liberals. For decades, to be too radical was to be a “Wrightist.” An extreme version shows up in the final blasphemy trial of Abner Kneeland. Kneeland had escaped punishment for publishing blasphemous material three times before, and this time the prosecutor was taking no chances. He laid bare the consequences of allowing Kneeland to publish his newspaper:

Starting from this polluting fountain, I might trace the progress of vice and misery in a thousand narratives. . . how infidelity towards God leads to infidelity toward man and woman, destroys domestic peace and harmony, breaks up marriages, blunts the natural feelings and affections between parents and children, and dissolves families. I might show the origin of fraud and crime in young men, of lewdness and prostitution in young women. . . ,

And the final blow, associating Kneeland with that woman:

What too did Fanny Wright come here for, but to plant the standard of Infidelity, to raise an insurrection against Christianity, to make an open and gross attack upon our religious faith and our domestic happiness; to open a rendezvous to gather volunteers to enter upon a crusade against Religion, marriage, chastity, order and decency, and the very foundations of civil society? […]

If open, gross, palpable and indecent blasphemy, and all the consequence of the Fanny Wright system—atheism, community of property, unlimited lasciviousness, adultery, and the thousand evils of infidelity, receive no check, the reproach will not fall on me. […]

If marriages are dissolved, prostitution made easy and safe, moral and religious restraints removed, property invaded, and the foundations of society broken up, and property made common, and universal mischief and misery ensue, the fault will not lie on me. . . . Take care that this day you offend not God, nor injure man, that you violate not the law, and the constitution. . .

And that, finally, is probably the last reason that Frances Wright has been forgotten. After decades of being branded as “Fanny Wright men,” most atheists were probably glad to see her name slip into obscurity.

But I think it’s time to remember Wright as one of the great Freethinkers in that dark period between Jefferson and Ingersoll. She was an abolitionist, a feminist and a great advocate for liberty in all its forms. I’m proud to be a Wrightist.