Why does America produce so many weird heresies?

  • Thread starter Thread starter yawnernonner
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
yawnernonner said:
I want some deeper thoughts on the theological weirdness of America than just “The English dumped their heretics here and heretics heresied from heretics.”
Click to expand...
I think it really is basically what you say here. The founders also generally had an anti-tradition, free-thought mindset. Americans, given their political formation, were also generally mistrustful of any central authority in any matters. So, not only was their no coercive restraint on religion, there were also no social or philosophical restraints. And so, things got crazy.
 
First of all we are a huge country, with a very diverse population culled from all over the world who brought various traditions with them. Second of all, we have never had an “official” religion and we have the 1st Amendment guarantee of religious freedoms, which allows groups like the Scientologists to thrive because the government cannot outlaw a religious belief. And you get people who see all these diverse traditions around them, and they pick and choose what they like and don’t like and don’t end up anywhere officially. So there are a lot of different things going on.
 
I think we need to be careful about spreading the term “weird” too widely. I live in an area in which Southern Fundamentalism is very strong. It has branches one could certainly call “Pentecostal” and some that one could legitimately call “Evangelical”.

But I also remember Catholic author Flannery O’Connor’s statement that “…southern fundamentalists would be surprised to learn that they hold more in common with the CAtholic Church than they do with classic Protestantism…” (paraphrasing)

And, having grown up among southern fundamentalists, I would agree with her. In my parish, we get a lot of converts, almost entirely from among fundamentalist sects.
 
A few thoughts.
  1. 1st Amendment allowed new religious sects to grow instead of being squashed.
  2. Being a magnet for religions.
  3. Frontier expansion.
1 has already been explained by others.

2 factors in because some of the early colonies were set up as religious colonies. Sects that weren’t doing well in Europe came to America either to be free of other influences (Pilgrims) or have more freedom. So we attracted more initial influences.

3 The frontier cannot be ignored in my opinion. A large region with relative isolation from cultural centers like cities. If you started a new religion in Paris, France the people would have achess to the knowledge if other theologies. There’d be a lot more competing views. So if you taught something contrary to mainstream religion, mainstream religion was going to be able to reply.
But on the frontier, if papa starts saying things that are innovations, the next family is ten miles away. Or if Pastor Jeff starts preaching, he only has to compete with Pastor Jim in the next town. There’s not all that access to refutations. This gives a situation where a new sect can start flourishing before meeting opposition.
 
Genesis315 said:
40.png
yawnernonner:
I want some deeper thoughts on the theological weirdness of America than just “The English dumped their heretics here and heretics heresied from heretics.”
Click to expand...
I think it really is basically what you say here. The founders also generally had an anti-tradition, free-thought mindset. Americans, given their political formation, were also generally mistrustful of any central authority in any matters. So, not only was their no coercive restraint on religion, there were also no social or philosophical restraints. And so, things got crazy.
Click to expand...
Absolutely correct. I was going to post a similar thought, but you beat me to it. Thank you for explaining it so cogently! ☺️
 
I just read an early definition of heresy. Something not unanimously agreed on.
 
Well, before America even existed the rest of the world believed in many, many more heresies.

If you think Mormonism is weird, check out hinduism
 
yawnernonner said:
Seriously, American non-Catholic theology is just weird. JW started here. Mormonism started here. United Pentecostalism started here (notice that these three aren’t even Christian because they don’t have Trinitarian baptisms). The Church of Satan started here (Would you count something defined as anti-Christian as a heresy of Christianity?). Seventh-Day Adventism, Pentecostalism, Word-of-Faith, Prosperity Gospel, Zionism, Dispensationalism, Quakers (proto-Pentecostals), Puritans (proto-SJWs)[fine, these came from England. But they thrived here.], snake-handlers, Baptists-who-think-they’re-descended-from-Cathars, and even a semi-explicit revival of Gnosticism: these are all quintessentially American.
Click to expand...
Three points:
  1. In medieval Europe governments decided which faith was the state religion. During the reformation, for example, the reformers in Switzerland had to make their cases to the city councils, which then in turn decided whether the whole town would switch to the new denomination.
Also, In medieval Europe heresy was often punishable by death. Look what Thomas Aquinas wrote: Therefore if forgers of money and other evil-doers are forthwith condemned to death by the secular authority, much more reason is there for heretics, as soon as they are convicted of heresy, to be not only excommunicated but even put to death. (Summa theologiae II-II, q. 11. a. 3)

Do we really want to go back to that!?!?
  1. The doctrine of the Trinity is not found in the Bible and and no religion ought to be criticized for not accepting it. Look at what these scholars say:
“Indeed, until Athanasius began writing, every single theologian, East and West, had postulated some form of Subordinationism. It could, about the year 300, have been described as a fixed part of catholic theology.” (R. P. C. Hansen)

The New Testament itself is far from any doctrine of the Trinity or of a triune God who is three co-equal Persons of One Nature. (William J. Hill, The Three-Personed God (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1982), 27.)

There is no formal doctrine of the Trinity in the New Testament writers, if this means an explicit teaching that in one God there are three co-equal divine persons. (Edmund J. Fortman, The Triune God: A Historical Study of the Doctrine of the Trinity (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1972), 44
  1. Lots of heresies were generated by the Early Church Fathers.
John Henry Newman writes,
If we limit our view of the teaching of the Fathers by what they expressly state, St. Ignatius may be considered as a Patripassian, St. Justin arianizes. and St. Hippolytus is a Photinian … Tertullian is heterodox on the doctrine of our Lord’s divinity … Origen is. at the very least, suspected, and must be defended and explained rather than cited as a witness of orthodoxy; and Eusebius was a Semi-Arian. (Newman, Essay, 43)

Sounds like we need a thread on non-American weird heresies.
 
SacredHeartBassist said:
Well, before America even existed the rest of the world believed in many, many more heresies.

If you think Mormonism is weird, check out hinduism
Click to expand...
You don’t have to look way over at India, but instead look at the Christian world in Europe and the Middle East. All kinds of offbeat sects like the Adamites walking around.

Of course, the information about many of the sects has been lost to history, this was the pre-digital age, and the information about now defunct sects is lost to history with at best just their opposition’s views of their beliefs preserved.

But as far as America itself, we had the 2nd Great Awakening starting around the dawn of the 19th Century. Many of the Baptist and Methodist denominations were started during that epoch as well as adventists, holiness sects, shakers, amana, harmony, mormons, etc. A lot of interest in religion, although the Catholic Church was still quite tiny as the first waves of Irish and German immigration hadn’t occurred yet.
 
yawnernonner said:
I want some links. If you google “American heresies,” you’ll find stuff on Americanism. This isn’t quite what I want. I want some deeper thoughts on the theological weirdness of America than just “The English dumped their heretics here and heretics heresied from heretics.”
Seriously, American non-Catholic theology is just weird. JW started here. Mormonism started here. United Pentecostalism started here (notice that these three aren’t even Christian because they don’t have Trinitarian baptisms). The Church of Satan started here (Would you count something defined as anti-Christian as a heresy of Christianity?). Seventh-Day Adventism, Pentecostalism, Word-of-Faith, Prosperity Gospel, Zionism, Dispensationalism, Quakers (proto-Pentecostals), Puritans (proto-SJWs)[fine, these came from England. But they thrived here.], snake-handlers, Baptists-who-think-they’re-descended-from-Cathars, and even a semi-explicit revival of Gnosticism: these are all quintessentially American.
Click to expand...
Let’s start with Europe. Europe was the birthplace of Protestantism in the 1500s. At that time the original protestant churches remained catholic on the surface in many ways, such as a reasonably clear hierarchy and state churches that maintained a sense of homogeneity and uniformity across nations such as England, Sweden, Denmark, etc. So for example in England, to be an Anglican was to be English and to be English was to be an Anglican. There were lots of other groups that sprung up in Europe as well, but state Protestantism or the Catholic Church remained the two big ones.

Now fast forward a bit and America was a different animal. Groups from Europe facing persecution for not conforming to the state churches found solace in the new colonies in North America. When the United States eventually came into existence, it was laxer on religion, relatively speaking. This allowed the various religious groups to flourish but also to robustly argue and debate and collude amongst themselves. New denominations popped up again and again, each more slightly distant from the Catholic faith. Things got weirder. Joseph Smith was able to establish a widespread membership in the sparsely populated American West. Had he been living in England or Germany, he would have been squashed in the infant stages of his new faith.

Today, after century upon century of monotone national state churches and fairly widespread prosperity, Europe died of boredom and reincarnated itself into a secular land of childless aging white people.

America is secular but less so. The weirdness in the US has also allowed religion to stay more alive.
 
Last edited:
American just kinda has a lot of weird people, period.
And I can say that because I happen to be a Weird-American.
 
Frontier expansion plays a much stronger role than you allow for. Massachusetts was organized as a religious colony, and opposition to new religions flourished there. So colonists here drove out the new religionist people, who then founded Connecticut. And so on.

Instead of conflict, people moved out into the new frontier. Eventually others caught on and went straight from Europe to new religious based colonies like Pennsylvania and Maryland. Mormons are an archetype of this; persecuted in NY they moved to Illinois; persecuted there, they moved to Utah.

It was actually the lack of religious freedom and the availability of land that led to “weird” religions like baptists, methodists and mormons flourishing. In more constrained spaces, like western Europe, they stayed and fought until they reached accommodations so that they could live together and not be thought of as “weird.”
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top