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Those Hippy Puritans
Exploring America’s Millenarian Movements
We are a nation held together, paradoxically, by the agonism of conflicting millenarian projections: communists, race mythologists, space-alien cults, hippie utopians, biblical numerologists and an uncountable number of Great Awakenings.
That’s Joseph Keegin, writing last month in The Point.
I think he’s right, at least partially.
We are a nation of millenarian projections. And they do conflict.
But I wouldn’t say they hold the nation together.
America’s British settlers, Walter McDougall outlines in Throes of Democracy, consisted primarily of four cultures: (1) Puritans, who populated New England, (2) Cavaliers from southwest England, where folks talked differently, who settled the South, (3) Scots-Irish, who loathed the Act of Union that created Great Britain and put Scotland under the British yoke, so they came to America and populated Appalachia, and (4) Quakers, pacifists who merely wanted to follow their inner light and engage in commerce.
Most of those groups weren’t driven by millenarianism. Cavaliers were agricultural and traditional. The Scots-Irish were, well, redneck anarchists who only projected millenarianism after their second jar of homemade whiskey. The Quakers arguably…
