{"id":128477,"date":"2014-07-07T19:04:47","date_gmt":"2014-07-07T19:04:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=128477"},"modified":"2014-07-07T19:04:47","modified_gmt":"2014-07-07T19:04:47","slug":"birth-americas-religion-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/birth-americas-religion-violence\/","title":{"rendered":"The Birth of America\u2019s \u201cReligion of Violence\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thomas J. DiLorenzo<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Laurence Vance has coined the word \u201cwarvangelical\u201d to describe so-called evangelical Christians who are obsessed with supporting all of the state\u2019s wars and all of the death, destruction, and mayhem that they entail. They ignore the ancient just war tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas, among others, and simply support all war and all military aggression \u2014 as long as the U.S. government is the aggressor.<\/p>\n

These are the people who booed at Ron Paul when he reminded them at one of their conventions that Jesus is known as \u201cthe Prince of Peace.\u201d These are the people who became quite hysterical (and hateful) when Ron Paul quoted the Biblical admonition, \u201clive by the sword, die by the sword\u201d in response to a question about a U.S. Army sniper who had written a book boasting of murdering hundreds of Iraqis after he was murdered after returning to civilian life.<\/p>\n

These are the people whose churches are littered with gigantic American flags that dwarf any Christian icons; who routinely ask anyone who owns a military uniform to wear it to church; who sing the state\u2019s war anthems at\u00a0their services; who divert their Sunday offerings away from the poor and needy in their communities so that the money can be sent to grossly-overpaid military bureaucrats; and who can never stop thanking, thanking, thanking, and thanking \u201csoldiers\u201d for their \u201cservice\u201d in murdering foreigners and bombing and destroying their cities \u2014 if not their entire societies \u2014 in the state\u2019s aggressive, non-defensive, foreign wars.<\/p>\n

Where did this very un-Christian \u201creligion\u201d of violence come from? The answer to this question is that it first developed as a part of New England\u2019s neo-Puritanical \u201cYankees\u201d in the early and mid-nineteenth century. It reached its zenith in the 1860s when, finally in control of the entire federal government, the New England Yankees waged total war on the civilian population of a large part of their own country, mass murdering fellow Americans by the hundreds of thousands, and then singing a \u201creligious\u201d song that described it all as \u201cthe glory of the coming of the Lord.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Murray Rothbard described them in his essay, \u201cJust War\u201d:<\/p>\n

The North\u2019s driving force, the \u2018Yankees\u2019 \u2014 that ethnocultural group who either lived in New England or migrated from there to upstate New York, northern and eastern Ohio, northern Indiana, and northern Illinois \u2014 had been swept by . . . a fanatical and emotional neo-Puritanism driven by a fervent \u2018postmillenialism\u2019 which held that as a precondition of the Second Advent of Jesus Christ, man must set up a thousand-year-Kingdom of God on Earth. The Kingdom is to be a perfect society. In order to be perfect, of course, this Kingdom must be free of sin . . . . If you didn\u2019t stamp out sin by force you yourself would not be saved.<\/p>\n

This is why \u201cthe Northern war against slavery partook of a fanatical millenialist fervor, of a cheerful willingness to uproot institutions, to commit mayhem and mass murder, to plunder and loot and destroy, all in the name of high moral principle,\u201d wrote Rothbard. They were \u201chumanitarians with the guillotine,\u201d the \u201cJacobins, the Bolsheviks of their era.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clyde Wilson described these neo-Puritanical zealots in a similar manner in his essay, \u201cThe Yankee Problem in America\u201d:<\/p>\n

Abolitionism, despite what has been said later, was not based on sympathy for the black people nor on an ideal of natural rights. It was based on the hysterical conviction that Southern slaveholders were evil sinners who stood in the way of fulfillment of America\u2019s driving mission to establish Heaven on Earth . . . . [M]any abolitionists expected that evil Southern whites\u00a0and Blacks<\/i>\u00a0would disappear and the land repopulated by virtuous Yankees\u201d (emphasis added).<\/p>\n

Indeed, the New England Yankee literary icon Ralph Waldo Emerson once predicted that black people, being an \u201cinferior\u201d race, would soon die off and \u201cgo the way of the Dodo bird.\u201d<\/p>\n

The renowned historian and novelist Thomas Fleming, the author of more than fifty books, supports Rothbard and Wilson in his latest book,A Disease in the Public Mind<\/a>.<\/i> The main reason why there was a \u201cCivil War,\u201d and why America was the only country to NOT end slaverypeacefully<\/i>\u00a0in the nineteenth century, writes Fleming, is twofold: First, there was an extreme \u201cmalevolent envy\u201d of Southerners on the part of the New England Yankees, who had always believed that they were God\u2019s chosen people and should therefore dominate the U.S. government, if not the world. Second, several dozen of the wealthiest and most influential abolitionists had abandoned Christianity, condemned Jesus Christ, and adopted a bizarre \u201creligion\u201d of violence based on the words and deeds of their idol and mentor, the mentally-deranged, self-described communist and mass murderer, John Brown, whom they claimed was their real \u201csavior.\u201d<\/p>\n

John Brown \u201cdescended from Puritans,\u201d writes Fleming, and was \u201cthe personification of a Puritan.\u201d He became a \u201cgod\u201d to influential New England Yankees like Ralph Waldo Emerson, who called Brown \u201cthat new saint\u201d who \u201cwould make the gallows as glorious as the cross.\u201d Emerson praised Brown for having murdered a man and his two sons in front of their mother in Kansas. The men were not slave owners; Brown said he wanted to \u201cstrike terror into the hearts of the proslavery people\u201d by committing the murders. He went to Harper\u2019s Ferry intending to repeat the crime in spades.<\/p>\n

Henry David Thoreau wrote that \u201cBrown was Jesus\u201d and \u201cthe bravest and humanist man in the country\u201d (in language that would earn any middle school English student a grade of F). \u00a0William Lloyd Garrison was another John Brown idolater, as was his abolitionist compatriot Henry C. Wright, who declared Jesus Christ to be a \u201cdead failure\u201d and that \u201cJohn Brown would be a power far more efficient than Christ.\u201d<\/p>\n

These literary \u201cgiants,\u201d and many other New England Yankee pamphleteers, waged a decades-long campaign of hatred against all Southerners that were so outrageous that Fleming compares them to the previous New England Puritanical crusades such as the Salem, Massachusetts witch trials (and murders).\u00a0 It is little wonder, then, that Southerners in 1861 no longer desired to be in a union of states with the likes of Massachusetts and its \u201cwitch\u201d-burning, violence-worshipping, Christ-condemning, neo-Puritanical nuts who, to boot, were hell-bent on plundering them with high protective tariffs.<\/p>\n

The glorification of war, violence, and mass killing in the name of \u201creligion\u201d was very prevalent in New England\u2019s newspapers on the eve and on the beginning of the War to Prevent Southern Independence. It is all eerily\u00a0similar to today\u2019s worshipping of all things military by the warvangelicals (and the neocon connivers who use the warvangelicals\u2019 sons and daughters as cannon fodder in their aggressive, non-defensive wars).<\/p>\n

For example, on April 26, 1861, the\u00a0Providence<\/i>\u00a0(Rhode Island)\u00a0Daily Journal<\/i> editorialized that \u201cAt no period in this country\u2019s history, save in the revolution . . . has it been so glorious and joyful to have a life to give.\u201d The editorial referred to the invasion of the Southern states \u201cthe solemn but glorious duty to which Heaven now calls.\u201d Young men should be \u201cproud\u201d to \u201cdie in the holy cause that asks for your services,\u201d wrote the\u00a0old<\/i>\u00a0men at the Rhode Island newspaper, demonstrating that Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and William Kristol were not the first \u201cchickenhawks\u201d in America. No mention at all was made of slavery being any part of the reason for the invasion of the Southern states.<\/p>\n

On April 27, 1861 the\u00a0Buffalo Daily Courier<\/i>\u00a0wrote that \u201cWe do not believe there can be a man . . . who does not thank God that he has lived to see this day.\u201d \u00a0The war, said the Buffalo, New York newspaper, was being waged for the purpose of preserving \u201cthe sacredness of government<\/i>\u201d (emphasis added) \u00a0And, \u201cthe Christianity of the land is vitalized in the prayer that rises from a common altar to the God of battles . . .\u201d Again, there was no pretense that the war had anything to do with freeing any slaves.<\/p>\n

On April 29, 1861, the\u00a0New York Herald<\/i>\u00a0intoned that \u201cwithout war society would become stagnant and corrupt.\u201d The paper lamented the fact that \u201cFor half a century there has been no war on this soil\u201d and praised \u201cthe statesmen of Europe\u201d for instigating wars more frequently than Americans had done. The chief cause of the war, said the\u00a0New York Herald<\/i>, was too much prosperity. \u201cThe chief cause of the present war is excessive prosperity.\u201d Americans were \u201ctoo happy and too well off,\u201d said the neo-Puritanical, happiness-hating New Yorkers. War would hopefully reverse that situation, they said.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Philadelphia North American and United States Gazette<\/i>\u00a0chimed in on May 6, 1861, that war supposedly \u201craises the standard of national character, purifies the moral atmosphere, and dispels the gathering corruption, meanness, and want of principle which long peace and prosperity are apt to engender.\u201d The war will finally establish the superiority of the Yankee over the Southerner, declared the paper in the City of Brotherly Love: \u201cWhen this war terminates the northern man will be recognized for what he is \u2014 the true founder of our national glory and greatness.\u201d (Again, no mention of slaves or slavery, only of empire and \u201cnational greatness\u201d).<\/p>\n

The pulpit of the Northern states \u201chas almost unanimously been in favor of a vigorous prosecution of the present war,\u201d the\u00a0Boston Evening Transcript<\/i>\u00a0declared on May 10, 1861. Pretending to speak for the Northern \u201cpulpit,\u201d\u00a0the Boston editorialists proclaimed that \u201cthere is not a word in the New Testament which forbids\u201d the formation of an army of a hundred thousand men \u201cto annihilate Jefferson Davis and his rascal crew.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such a campaign of mass murder would be justified, said the Bostonians, by the Biblical admonition, \u201cRender unto Caesar the things that are Caesar\u2019s, and unto God the things that are God\u2019s,\u201d the modern-day warvangelicals\u2019 rallying cry. \u00a0\u00a0\u201cThis necessarily implies the use of force,\u201d they said. And, moreover,\u00a0\u201cby rendering unto Abraham Lincoln, who is our Caesar, the things that are Abraham Lincoln\u2019s, we obey a Divine Command\u201d\u00a0<\/i><\/b>(emphasis added). No mention of slavery here either.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Springfield<\/i>\u00a0(Mass.)\u00a0Daily Republican<\/i>\u00a0was just as bloodthirsty when it wrote on May 27, 1861, that \u201cWe can imagine nothing more sublime than a great people moving unitedly to war.\u201d The paper denounced the peace movement led by the Quakers as \u201cdumb,\u201d and declared the motivation for the invasion of the South to be \u201cthis spirit of noble Christian devotion to the country\u2019s flag,\u201d which the paper called \u201cthe\u00a0sacred<\/i>\u00a0national flag\u201d (emphasis added). No mention of slavery, only the \u201csacredness\u201d of the state\u2019s symbols as the cause of the war.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Dubuque<\/i>\u00a0(Iowa)\u00a0Daily Times<\/i>\u00a0informed its readers on May 28, 1861 that Southerners were not a religious people (\u201cWe suspect that the traitors have precious few religious meetings\u201d) and warned Southerners of the perils of opposing \u201can army of men full of christian (sic<\/i>) courage, with God and the Right as their watchwords . . .\u201d No mention of slavery there, either.<\/p>\n

The real purpose of the war, the\u00a0Albany<\/i>\u00a0(New York)\u00a0Evening Journal\u00a0<\/i>announced on June 1, 1861, was to warn the rest of \u201cChristendom\u201d of the coming dominance of the Americanempire<\/i>. \u201cIf we shall succeed in convincing the world that we have a Government strong enough, vigorous enough, determined enough, to overcome all combinations and attacks, whether from conspiracies within or invasions from without; if we shall be able to impress Christendom with the conviction that our Western Empire is built upon a rock, which no convulsion can shake, and no tempests undermine \u2014 if we shall be able to do this, and do it effectively, the war, no matter how long or how desperately waged, will be the cheapest enterprise upon which the nation has ever embarked.\u201d Moroever, \u201cevery drop of blood that has been shed\u201d and \u201cevery dollar that has been expended\u201d will \u201cfructify into future blessings.\u201d No mention of slavery. (All of these editorials can be found in Howard Cecil Perkins, editor,Northern Editorials on Secession<\/i>\u00a0(Glouchester, Mass: Peter Smith, 1964), pp. 1063-1097).<\/p>\n

Lincoln himself never became a Christian according to the two people who were closest to him \u2014 his wife and his long-time law partner William Herndon. But the old Illinois machine politician who H.L. Mencken likened to a\u00a0Tammany pol nevertheless was very slick, if not masterful, in his use of religious rhetoric in his political speeches. As Charles Adams wrote in\u00a0When in the Course of Human Events<\/em><\/a>, \u201cLincoln\u2019s Jehovah complex gave the war a psychopathic Calvanistic fatalism, with God [supposedly] directing the whole affair and punishing both North and South for tolerating slavery.\u201d (Lincoln never attempted to explain why God did not also punish the British, French, Spanish, Danes, Dutch, Portuguese, and Swedes for slavery. Or free black slave owners in the U.S. for that matter). The slaughter of hundreds of thousands of young men, the gruesome killing of civilian women, children, and old men, the massive theft of private property in the South, and the bombing and burning of entire cities and towns would continue, said Lincoln, until God decided otherwise. \u201cNot even the maddest of religious fanatics ever uttered words to equal Lincoln\u2019s second inaugural address,\u201d wrote Adams. (Lincoln\u2019s second inaugural address is where he exonerated himself from all responsibility for the war and pinned the blame on God. The war just \u201ccame,\u201d he said, out of nowhere and without his knowledge or participation).<\/p>\n

It is worth mentioning that all of this editorializing about the war being waged over the \u201csacredness\u201d of \u201cthe flag\u201d is consistent with what Lincoln cultist James McPherson wrote in his book,\u00a0What They Fought For: 1861-1865<\/i><\/a>.\u00a0 After reading hundreds of letters home and diaries of \u201cCivil War\u201d soldiers on both sides of the conflict, McPherson concluded that the average Yankee soldier believe he was fighting for \u201cthe flag,\u201d whereas the average Confederate grunt believed that he was fighting against a tyrannical government that had invaded his country, bombed his town, and threatened to harm his family.<\/p>\n

Having conquered the \u201csins\u201d of secessionism, federalism, states\u2019 rights, and Jeffersonianism, the early-twentieth-century generation of American humanitarians with a guillotine set about to use the coercive powers of government to (supposedly) stamp out even more \u201csin\u201din the world, especially Catholicism and alcohol consumption. They viewed American participation in World War I as a grand demonstration project of how Heaven on Earth can be achieved through Big Government. As Murray Rothbard wrote in his essay, \u201cWorld War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals,\u201d the \u201creligious\u201d warmongers of the World War I generation were animated by \u201ca postmillennial pietist Protestantism that had conquered \u2018Yankee\u2019 areas of Northern Protestantism by the 1830s and had impelled the pietists to use local, state, and finally federal governments to stamp out \u201csin,\u201d to make America and eventually the world holy, and thereby to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth.\u201d They were \u201cdedicated, messianic postmillennial pietists or else former pietists, born in a deeply pietist home, who . . .\u00a0possessed an intense messianic believe in national and world salvation through Big Government.\u201d<\/p>\n

An illustration of this crazed, murderous philosophy that is offered by Rothbard is a congratulatory letter to Woodrow Wilson from his son-in-law, fellow pietist \u201cprogressive\u201d William Gibbs McAdoo, the Secretary of the Treasury, for having plunged America into the European War. \u201cYou have done a great job nobly!\u201c, wrote McAdoo. I firmly believe that it is God\u2019s will that America should do this transcendent service for humanity throughout the world and that you are His chosen instrument.\u201d There were more than sixteen million deaths in World War I, including some 7 million civilians.<\/p>\n

Such \u201creligious\u201d fanaticism provided a moral cover of sorts for the armaments industry and others who supported (and support) war for monetary reasons only. Some things never change.<\/p>\n

Thomas J. DiLorenzo <\/span>is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the author of\u00a0<\/span>The Real Lincoln;\u00a0;<\/span>Lincoln Unmasked: What You\u2019re Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe,\u00a0<\/span>How Capitalism Saved America,\u00a0<\/span>Hamilton\u2019s Curse: How Jefferson\u2019s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution \u2014 And What It Means for America Today. His latest book is\u00a0<\/span>Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

This piece<\/a> was reprinted by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission or license.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thomas J. DiLorenzo Laurence Vance has coined the word \u201cwarvangelical\u201d to describe so-called evangelical Christians who are obsessed with supporting all of the state\u2019s wars and all of the death, destruction, and mayhem that they entail. They ignore the ancient just war tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas, among others, and simply support all war and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,1616],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-128477","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news","7":"category-usa-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128477\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}