New Shun 1730

Although the previous great struggle against paying taxes to the church, the system of combining church and state in Massachusetts has declined. However, Massachusetts is still the most crazy one on religious issues.

As the head of the Masonic Lodge in Massachusetts, Joseph Warren is even more obsessed with religious issues. He really can't tolerate that someone, even a non-Puritan, should lead the future of mankind.

From the beginning, many people clearly said: [New England has been a religious colony from the beginning, not an economic colony, and the goal is to build a city on the hill in New England. Merchants should remember this. The goals and designs of New England have always been religious, not worldly gains].

The Calvinist Puritans were originally a group of fundamentalist fanatics. It is said that Catholics love to burn people, but in fact, Calvin, the Protestant Pope, burned people much more cruelly than Catholics.

The Salem Witch Trials in Massachusetts - from a class perspective, there are too many small producers and self-employed farmers, and the hatred of merchants, wealthy businessmen and other groups, as well as the revenge of family hatred, are just under the guise of religion.

The subsequent Quaker massacre, the prohibition of non-Congregationalist settlement, and other series of actions have made this religious obsession firmly inherit the fine tradition of Calvinism's burning people.

When talking about politics, power, and rule, it is impossible to avoid "money".

In the early days, the Congregational Church relied on oligarchy: non-Congregationalist members were not allowed to participate in politics; Congregationalist members also needed to enter the state legislature according to wealth and social status.

For money, the Puritans did not have tithes.

But they had to pay 10% of their income to support Congregationalist pastors, but it was not called tithes; the rest of the Quakers, Presbyterians, Unitarians and other heretics were no different from Christians under Muslim rule, and were called paying pagan taxes.

Including John Adams; Samuel Adams, the two fathers of independence, could not join the Freemasonry in Massachusetts.

Because they were not Congregationalists, but Unitarians - the ridiculous Trinity did not exist at all, and Jesus was just a prophet. People's conscience and reason judge good and evil, and they do good only because they have reason. They are heretics.

Of course, the Congregational Church is now finished. It's not because people's hearts are not as good as before, or the world is going downhill.

There are two main reasons.

First: After the witch trials, there was a tax resistance. The resistance was not to the British tax, but to the Congregational Church, that is, the tithe tax not called tithe stipulated by the small circle of the state government to support the pastor. Other sects also rose up and refused to pay the tax.

No money, no power.

The second reason is that the economic foundation has changed.

John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts, who wanted to build a city on the hill, had a clear idea of ​​what kind of society the Puritans wanted to create.

One: Class system.

[Society is naturally divided into various levels, and there are always rich and poor... The poor need the rich to educate them, just as children need their parents].

Two: Rely on the love of differences and use benevolence as the lubricant of society.

【We should not only consider our own interests, but also take care of the rest of our brothers (respect the old as well as the old, the young as well as the young), and the society should be orderly, harmonious, and fraternal】

Third: A special class of scholars is needed.

【The rights of "visible saints" as protectors of the church. No "secular person" can enjoy them. 】

Four: The authority of the ruling oligarchy cannot be questioned.

【The people must ensure obedience to authority. The role of the town meeting is to ensure that the agreement arranged in advance by the "visible saints" is reached. It can be slightly modified, but it cannot be discussed. 】

This set of things, coupled with self-employed farmers, churches, oligarchs, Congregational circles... coupled with witch trials, heresy trials, and paying 10 shillings tax can be considered "secular people"...

In the era of farming, it's okay to play.

However, with the rise of the brewing trade, the powerful merchants, the flourishing fur trade, the development of the large-scale blast furnace iron industry, the developed shoe and hat industry, and the trade with West Africa, West India, and Southern Europe occupying the dominant position in the economy, etc.

The economic foundation has changed. If this set of rules can continue, it would be a miracle.

As the saying goes, learn from history. If you read the history of the suppression of Neo-Confucianism in the early Ming Dynasty, the thawing of ideas in the middle period and the beginning of resistance, and the moral return to the Donglin revival in the late Ming Dynasty, it is easy to guess what will happen next after the resistance to the Congregational Church after the witch trials.

Obviously, the next step is the revival of religion and the return of moralism.

There are not many religious people, and the same thing is also happening in North America. The thawing of ideas and the emergence of new ideas after the witch trials eventually led to the religious revival and moral retro movement starting in the 1730s.

The Congregational Church began to counterattack in an all-out way. Repression, confession, the threat of hell, the dissatisfaction of the self-employed farmers with the merchants who made a fortune after the ideological thaw, the dissatisfaction with the decline of morality and the decline of the world... all those old religious rubbish took the opportunity to come back.

This movement to "rebuild the faith in God, rebuild the hard-working and wealthy culture destroyed by merchants and heretics, and rebuild morality" was called the "First Great Awakening."

The first great awakening began in the 1930s. The landmark event was the arrival of a large number of pastors from Europe to North America, which had been morally corrupted and could not build a city on the hill. The business and wealth-making ethos had twisted the morality of North America.

It has continued to this day.

Both Joseph Warren and John Hancock grew up in this environment.

In this strong religious atmosphere, some things, even some ordinary things, would cause great controversy.

For example, Hancock relayed that the people of Dashun were worried about the fantasy of the self-cultivating farmers who had private ownership of land and allowed free land trading and unsuppressed business power.

In short, if the population continues to increase and cannot break through itself and become a butterfly, something will happen sooner or later.

This kind of thing is not uncommon in North America.

Before, when the Congregational Church controlled New England, it issued a very strict exclusion order.

Pagans and heretics, including even other sects belonging to the same Protestantism but with different ideologies, if they come to New England, they will be whipped the first time and hanged the second time.

For this reason, some pastors, missionaries, and local farmers were tortured and killed.

This very strict population control is also a kind of population control.

However, this control is carried out for purely religious purposes.

Rather than a rational conclusion or a conclusion drawn from historical experience, and controlled by this conclusion.

Although, in fact, the effect is the same.

By levying taxes on outsiders and strict religious control, the population growth rate in Massachusetts is relatively slow.

This slowness is relative.

The good climate, the development that has been going on for more than a hundred years, the use of iron cattle plowing technology, the widespread planting of high-yield crops in America, especially corn, and the continuous supply of sugar calories from the nearby West Indies, all make the natural population growth rate here very high.

Excluding the period in the early days when they did not know how to farm at all and were helped by the Indians.

Throughout the 18th century, the New England region of North America was one of the few places in the world where "women who were malnourished and had no menstruation, thus affecting population birth" did not occur. In addition, whether in Europe or Asia, wars, famines, floods, droughts, etc., have caused women to have no menstruation and be unable to give birth due to malnutrition.

Even if heresy and paganism are strictly controlled and various restrictions are added, the population here is still growing.

And population growth...

In fact, after the witch trials, the first attempt at "City on the Hill" had already failed.

The witch trials in Salem were not just a simple religious issue.

Marx and Engels commented on Muslims, saying that every few hundred years, because of the gap between the rich and the poor, they would let the lower class people reinterpret the scriptures and reshuffle the cards in the name of "corruption above". Purity - corruption - purity again. The corruption here is a special word in the teachings of Islam, not the corruption in Chinese semantics.

Indeed, religion is crazy and brainless.

But in addition to being crazy and brainless, there are also deep-seated economic factors.

Puritanism and Calvinism were born under the rule of feudal aristocrats and are more in line with the interests of the newly emerging self-employed farmers and small producers.

They encourage labor, thrift, and getting rich.

But the premise is that you need to work hard.

That is, in terms of ideology and ownership, they tend to be the kind of "workers own their own means of production and get rich through labor."

Loan sharks, right?

Merchants, especially those who speculate and buy low and sell high, right?

Land speculators, right?

Opening plantations, or directly buying a bunch of indentured servants to develop farms, right?

Puritans in Europe did promote the development of capitalism, because what was the situation in Europe? What ownership? What noble serfs? Puritanism, which represents self-employed farmers, petty bourgeoisie, and petty citizens, is naturally progressive.

But in Massachusetts, especially under the previous system of church-state integration, is it progressive or reactionary? What was the attitude of the Puritans towards usurers, merchants, speculators, and land traders?

What was the city on the hill that John Winthrop wanted to build like? In other words, what ownership and class was the main factor in the city on the hill?

What economic changes had occurred in New England before the Salem Witch Trials?

On the one hand, the population began to increase and land became scarce.

The contradictions between the newcomers and the later ones gradually arose.

The feudal traditional inheritance system, the patriarchal system in which one son inherited the family business and the rest had to find food for themselves, caused contradictions between the newly born and the newcomers and the old people before.

Originally, there were no landlords here.

As the number of people increased, the first ones to come became landlords.

There was also a very embarrassing problem.

That is, the first group of people who came really felt the religious persecution in Europe. They might really die in Europe.

And the next generation, the new generation, had already passed the most difficult initial period, and they could not empathize with the suffering and persecution felt by the first generation.

At the same time, if there are more people, they will have to divide into towns.

The towns that were divided out were getting farther and farther away, and the church's control ability was getting worse and worse. The younger generation was no longer so concerned about religion, but instead wondered why the Congregational Church would ask us to collect taxes? The churches and roads they built in those old cities, I would never go there in my lifetime, so why should we pay for them?

Moreover, the property inheritance system, the patriarchal system, the inheritance law, and the fact that the good land was almost gone and the bad land was later distributed, all made people begin to give up the pursuit of "the first version of the city on the hill".

On the other hand, it is still a contradiction between small producers and petty bourgeoisie and capitalism.

It was agreed that everyone had their own private means of production, such as land, or I was a shoemaker and had shoe repair tools.

Everyone was also chosen by God.

Get rich through labor. If I am diligent, my corn will have a higher yield than yours, if I am diligent, my land will not grow grass, and if I have good craftsmanship, people will come to my shoe shop.

Let's build a society where everyone has their own private means of production and land, and everyone gets rich through labor and piety to God.

But what is the result?

Bankers, merchants, those who buy low and sell high, moneylenders...

They are not even Congregational Puritans, but a bunch of Unitarians, Quakers, or some other weird beliefs.

They are morally corrupt.

They are not much different from vampires.

They did not get rich by labor at all.

However, did God punish them?

On the contrary, what we see is that they are making a fortune, occupying land, speculating on land, buying and selling land, lending, collecting money, selling goods, lowering grain prices, using indentured servants and slaves to run large farms, and marrying with the upper class of the Congregational Church...

Originally, everyone was a farmer, a self-employed farmer, and a brother of small producers. Help each other, support each other with fraternity, work hard to survive, and get rich through labor.

Now the rich and the poor have appeared, and the gap is getting bigger and bigger.

The private ownership that deprives others of the fruits of their labor has begun to continuously attack their original private ownership that integrates labor and means of production. This is really a disillusionment of faith.

Puritanism, as a fundamentalist Christian religion, is full of discrimination and dissatisfaction with moneylenders, merchants, etc.

Their class base is self-employed farmers and small producers.

The Salem witch trials started with a poor woman who ate rye with ergot poison, which was just a fuse. It soon developed into a large-scale carnival of dissatisfaction with merchants, wealthy people, and moneylenders and the confiscation of their property.

After the Salem witch trials finally ended the long witch hunt, the "first version of the city on the hill" was officially declared shattered.

Now, a group of outsiders, pagans, and even atheists told them that the first version of the city on the hill could not only not be built. And if they did not break out of the cocoon, they would definitely go to the rebellion of equal distribution of land in the future; and without talking about religion, they only said that reason and experience said that the increase in population would definitely cause trouble, which had nothing to do with religious belief...