{"id":6238,"date":"2013-11-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-11-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/2013\/11\/01\/aftershock\/"},"modified":"2013-11-01T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2013-11-01T00:00:00","slug":"aftershock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/2013\/11\/01\/aftershock\/","title":{"rendered":"Aftershock"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\t It is perhaps a clich\u00e9 in contemporary historical studies to ask the question \u201cWhat would the Founders think?\u201d or \u201cWhat would the Founders believe about this or that particular issue today?\u201d Despite being a largely fruitless academic exercise, dozens of books have been written on the subject, including Richard Brookhiser\u2019s entertaining What Would the Founders Do?: Our Questions, Their Answers, <\/em>conservative historian Larry Schweikart\u2019sWhat Would the Founders Say?: A Patriot\u2019s Answers to America\u2019s Most Pressing Problems, <\/em>and Michael Austin\u2019s left-leaningThat\u2019s Not What They Meant!:<\/em> Reclaiming the Founding Fathers From America\u2019s Right Wing.<\/em>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\t These books, and others like them, often attempt to gain new knowledge from the Founders that simply cannot be retrieved. Given the tremendous change in the military, scientific, economic, technological, environmental, and demographic landscapes of the United States since the eighteenth century, it is difficult to grant definitive contemporary authority to the views of politicians and philosophers from a completely different era. When Brookhiser cautiously attempts to ascertain what the Founders might do about modern weapons of mass destruction, using as an example their limited experience of weaponized smallpox used as biological warfare against the Native Americans, he invites a historical comparison that is unhelpful and inaccurate even in relative size and scope. Not even the scientifically minded Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson could have envisioned the awesome, potentially world-ending power of today\u2019s international nuclear arsenals. Additionally, conservative Schweikart ponders the question \u201cDoes the government have a responsibility to keep large businesses solvent in order to protect American industry?\u201d1 This despite the fact that a \u201clarge business\u201d today is part of an infinitely more massive and interconnected global economy than that which existed a quarter millennium ago. Likewise, the more liberal Austin investigates what the founders would think about the Grover Norquist tax pledge while openly acknowledging his own biases in his book, stating in his preface that liberals are less likely than conservatives to \u201clump [the Founders] together into ideologically incoherent proof texts.\u201d2 Little understanding is gained and the national conversation is not advanced in any positive manner when we use the Founders as historical entertainment, conservative ammunition, or liberal attack dogs.\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\t Inevitably, the area of sociopolitical discourse that attracts the most attention when discussing the Founders\u2019 views of American life is sure to be religion in the public sphere and the separation of church and state. These debates tend to become even more heated than the aforementioned issues as thousands of suburban families and media commentators argue each year around the country in PTA meetings and on cable news about topics such as prayer in schools and public nativity displays. Often, once the blustering demagoguery begins, a quote or reference to one of America\u2019s revolutionary heroes is not far behind. Interestingly, unlike the incredible changes in destructive weaponry, economic systems, and levels of taxation over the past 250 years, religion in America, especially Christianity, remains relatively unchanged by comparison.\n<\/p>\n

\n\tMany would argue that the United States is more religiously diverse now than the framers of the Constitution would have ever thought possible. There have certainly been extensive changes in Christian theology and practice. But in attending a weekly Christian church service that features congregational hymns sung in pews, readings from the Bible, participation in the Lord\u2019s Supper, and an individual religious authority figure presenting a sermon, the average American of the twenty-first century has a lot more in common with a colonial Christian of 1776 in regard to religion than in the fields of health, technology, or employment. Today 77 percent of the American population identify as Christian, with about 68 percent attending church services at least monthly, according to a Gallup poll from December 2012.\n<\/p>\n

\n\t While the opinions of the various framers and founders were not as simple and clear-cut as many would like them to be, and despite the fact that they were philosophically a very diverse group, the complex issue of religion in the public sphere is, in fact, a subject that we can look to the Founders for guidance, as many of their thoughts and ideas still remain relevant to us today.A careful look at one of American history\u2019s most significant tragedies and most important religious events could help to shed light into the world in which these eminent revolutionary politicians, diplomats, and soldiers lived.\n<\/p>\n

\n\t The accusation of witchcraft and subsequent execution of innocent women may seem to belong in the Middle Ages; but it was in colonial Massachusetts, in the town of Salem in 1692, where one of history\u2019s most infamous witch hunts took place. The Salem witch trials occurred a full century before George Washington\u2019s reelection to a second term as president, and it was in that intervening period between the tragedy in rural Massachusetts and the early years of the American republic that puritanical theocracy would give way to Enlightenment-Era values of checks and balances and the separation of religious and secular powers. Could it have been that the Salem witch trials were one of the most important cautionary inspirations for the carefully crafted religious and legal protections, including the right to due process and the Establishment Clause, placed in the United States Constitution in 1787?\n<\/p>\n

\n\t It was in a very similar Massachusetts countryside setting that Washington\u2019s vice president and eventual successor John Adams\u2014a prominent Founder, the nation\u2019s second president, and one of the American Revolution\u2019s most celebrated orators\u2014was born and raised. Along with the colony of Virginia that produced four of the nation\u2019s first five presidents, Massachusetts served as one of two epicenters of the revolution and early republic, and was the birthplace of many other Founders and notable early Americans, such as Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Rufus King, Abigail Adams, and Dr. Joseph Warren. To have been raised in the countryside near colonial Boston would have meant growing up among the graves and tombstones of innocent men and women convicted of witchcraft by an incompetent theocratic government.\n<\/p>\n

\n\t In Braintree, Massachusetts, just 30 miles from Salem, Adams\u2019 father, John Adams, Sr., would have been a 15-year-old adolescent in 1706, the year that witchcraft-accuser Ann Putnam, Jr., went on record to repent in front of her congregation. Putnam was part of a group of nearly a dozen girls, who 14 years earlier caused the hanging deaths of 19 residents of Salem, one other execution by the pressing of heavy stones, and the indirect deaths of several other individuals who died in the Salem jail. The deaths would later weigh heavily on the conscience of Putnam.\n<\/p>\n

\n\t \u201cI desire to lie in the dust,\u201d she admitted, seeking redemption from the heavens and her neighbors, \u201cand earnestly beg forgiveness of God, and from all those unto whom I have given just cause of sorrow and offense, whose relations were taken away or accused [in] that sad and humbling providence . . . in the year about \u2019<\/sup>92. I was an instrument for the accusing of several persons of a grievous crime [whose] lives were taken away from them.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

\n\t Putnam was particularly active in the accusation of Rebecca Nurse and her sister Mary Eastey, who, along with 17 other villagers, were judged to be guilty of supernaturally cursing or harming the girls, or committing other heinous crimes of witchcraft, sentenced to death by the religious authorities, and hanged on Gallows Hill.\n<\/p>\n

\n\t \u201cI have just grounds and good reason to believe they were innocent persons,\u201d Putnam continued, \u201cand that it was a great delusion of Satan that deceived me in that sad time\u2026. I did it not out of any anger, malice, or ill will to any person, for I had no such thing against one of them; but what I did was ignorantly, being deluded by Satan.\u201d\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\t The events prior to Putnam\u2019s confession have been dramatized and reinterpreted on stage and screen many times during later centuries, particularly in Arthur Miller\u2019s classic play The Crucible<\/em>. The story of the witch hunt was an onstage metaphor for 1950s McCarthyism and the Red Scare. When the Hollywood Ten, a group of American movie industry writers and producers, were called to appear before the congressional House Un-American Activities Committee and asked to testify on their alleged Communist activities and loyalties, they refused to answer and were arrested and imprisoned for obstruction of justice. The seventeenth-century witch hunt in what is now Danvers, Massachusetts, near Boston, became the archetypal example for the persecution of minority groups in America.\n<\/p>\n

\n\t While Arthur Miller used Communism in his retelling of the story during the cold war, one of the more recent interpretations of the event is to consider its implications for American Muslims today. Consider the difficulties that many American Muslim communities have had in obtaining permission to build mosques in many states, such as the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro in central Tennessee,3 where an arsonist set fire to construction equipment, the nationally controversial Park51 Islamic Cultural Center in New York City, and the mosque in McKinney, Texas, where vandalism occurred in June 2013 .4\n<\/p>\n

\n\t Writing online for the Huffington Post, Kemal Argon professed that \u201cwe can recognize that this hysterical witch hunting and persecution that we sometimes see in America is nothing new. At the very least, we can recognize any pattern of intolerance and persecution recycling itself in American history for what it really is and refuse to be part of it.\u201d5\n<\/p>\n

\n\t \u201cIn the case of Islamophobia manifesting as witch-hunting and persecution,\u201d Argon continued, \u201calthough we cannot oppose this persecution with our hands in our current situation, we can oppose it with our voices and with our hearts.\u201d6\n<\/p>\n

\n\t The similarity between the persecutions of Muslims in 2013, alleged Communists in 1950, and those believed to be witches in 1692 is a perceived threat to the traditional conservative Christian culture of the American people. In fact, instead of strengthening the community during the time of crisis, the strong Christian faith of so many of the Salem residents actually served to fan the flames of hysteria rather than abate them. Jess Blumberg of the Smithsonian wrote that much of the paranoia and fear in Salem came directly out of conservative Christianity.\n<\/p>\n

\n\t \u201cThe Puritan villagers believed all the quarreling was the work of the devil,\u201d Blumberg explained. \u201cWith the seed of paranoia planted, a stream of accusations followed for the next few months. Charges against Martha Corey, a loyal member of the church in Salem village, greatly concerned the community; if she could be a witch, then anyone could.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

\n\t Blumberg explained that one of the primary, certainly most infamous, means of conviction involved the young female accusers \u201chaving \u2018fits.\u2019 They screamed, threw things, uttered peculiar sounds and contorted themselves into strange positions, and a local doctor blamed the supernatural.\u201d7\n<\/p>\n

\n\t The theocratic government in place in Salem, and most of New England at the time, even allowed for \u201cspectral evidence\u201d in the courtroom. Supposed ghostly and devilish visitations that were reported by the accusers served to convict innocent townsfolk. Marc Callis, writing for the Historical Journal of Massachusetts, explained that \u201cspectral evidence was based on the hypothesis that an individual afflicted by [witchcraft] would therefore be capable of seeing a specter resembling the person who has bewitched him or her. Since the doctrine of spectral evidence also stated that God in His mercy would never permit a specter to appear in the form of an innocent person, spectral evidence was considered by its supporters as an all but infallible means of detecting witches.\u201d8\n<\/p>\n

\n\t While this practice of admitting supernatural evidence was eventually discarded, it was too late for the executed \u201cwitches\u201d in Salem village who, in being denied due process and a fair trial by conservative religious authorities, were victims of one of the last theocratic governments the American people would experience.\n<\/p>\n

\n\t We may not be able to know quite how influential the Salem witch trials were for the Founders as they placed into the Constitution legal requirements for \u201cdue process of law,\u201d \u201cpublic trial, by an impartial jury\u201d and protections against congressional \u201cestablishment of religion.\u201d9 However, less than 60 years after the confession of Ann Putnam, Jr., the 1765 Stamp Act would be passed into law marking the beginning of colonial resistance to British rule in what would eventually become the American Revolution. It might be difficult to prove, but it could be even more challenging to dismiss completely the indelible mark that these events left on New England, \u201cthe unique nature and gravity \u2018at least by colonial American standards\u2019, of the Salem witch trials that led many of our colonial forefathers to seek lessons from the sad events of 1692.\u201d10<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is perhaps a clich\u00e9 in contemporary historical studies to ask the question \u201cWhat would the Founders think?\u201d or \u201cWhat would the Founders believe about this or that particular issue today?\u201d Despite being a largely fruitless academic exercise, dozens of books have been written on the subject, including Richard Brookhiser\u2019s entertaining What Would the Founders<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[296],"tags":[128],"class_list":["post-6238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-november-december-2013","tag-november-december-2013"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6238"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6238\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}