When the Irish fancied themselves Spanish

Of all nations under heaven, the Spaniard is the most mingled, and most uncertain. Wherefore, most foolishly do the Irish think to ennoble themselves, by wresting their ancientry from the Spaniard, who is unable to derive himself from any in certain.

-- Edmund Spenser

On the American Protestant origins of liberalism as freedom from Catholicism and the authority of the pope

From a very useful essay by James M. Patterson, "The Dogmatic Rivalry at the Heart of America":

These Protestant outbursts coalesced into a prominent mid-nineteenth century faction called “Nativists,” who found a home in the Whig Party. Nativists tended to come from the artisan classes who were negatively affected by the arrival of Irish working in factories whose cheaper products displaced artisanal work and, hence, added to the animus for the Irish as minions of “popish plots.” In his recent book Liberal Suppression, [Philip] Hamburger charts how Nativists began to use the term “liberal” during this period to refer not merely to a kind of political gregariousness [among rival Protestants] but to an independent from “foreign influence.” To be “liberal,” then was the opposite of being Catholic. Because Americans loved liberty, they had to be Protestant, since Protestants rejected the impositions of foreign princes in favor of native liberty of conscience. Hence, Nativists identified themselves as the “American Party” and their political program as “Americanism.”

The early Nativists were animated by their Protestant enthusiasm, but over time, they moved from religious convictions to political ones. ... Indeed, one of the most shocking conclusions of Hamburger’s work is the direct link between the ideology of the KKK and today’s “humanist” associations. ...

It is no coincidence that the three critics of liberalism considered here are Catholic. Both because of crises in the Catholic Church and because of the rapid social change of the past two decades, Catholic intellectuals have had to improvise an explanation and have found it to be liberalism. It is not so much wrong as incomplete, but it does explain how American Catholics and Protestants have diverged in their evaluation of liberalism. In the recent dustup between Sohrab Ahmari and David French, one saw this tension reach the surface. The Catholic Ahmari, in keeping with the American Catholic tradition, held liberalism in contempt for its failure to defend the common good, but for the Protestant French, liberalism was instrumental to forming a coalition for religious freedom against the external authority of the secular state. French seems not to understand that for much of American history, Protestants used the same argument against Catholics.

Religion is not the cornerstone of the American Republic

Religion is not the cornerstone of the American Republic, but know-nothings keep repeating that it is, such as "the Framers first listed religious liberty for a reason".

No, they did not.

The original First Amendment to the US Constitution involved representation, not religion. The original Second Amendment in its turn addressed representation's remuneration, not religion. Not until the original Third Amendment did religious liberty come up, and guns in turn in the Fourth, and so on through what is now our Tenth Amendment. The original First and Second Amendments were the first two of twelve, but failed of ratification.

The supposed primacy of religion because it was a subject of the First Amendment is a myth, recently repeated again here by one Josh Hammer:

Religious liberty, defined perhaps as the ability of the religious to freely and unobtrusively practice their faiths and worship and obey the Almighty in accordance with the idiosyncratic dictates of one’s own conscience, is the cornerstone of the American republic. Numerically, the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment are the first enumerated provisions of the very first ratified constitutional amendment. That is no mere coincident — the Framers first listed religious liberty for a reason.

This is nonsense. The original First Amendment, Article the First below, was about a formula for regularizing representation. That was the matter of first importance at the founding of the country. It is first in all the bills of rights which passed the Congress in 1789. Because it and its companion amendment were not ratifed at the founding, however, the Third Amendment became the First only by accident. While Article the First should have been ratified in view of what the Congress later did because the article wasn't ratified, as we'll see below, Article the Second was at least eventually ratified in the 27th Amendment ... in 1992.

Ratification of Article the First remains the great unfinished task from the Revolutionary era. If Article the Second could live on and be ratified in 1992, so can Article the First still be ratified today, or something close to it.

If the Revolution was sparked by a central animating outrage, it was taxation without representation. More than anything else it drove the first Americans to revolt against their English countrymen, with whom they otherwise shared the most intimate bonds of religious feeling, language, law, history, blood and custom. But religion or no, a distant parliament across the sea thought it could pick their fellow countrymen's pockets without their input or consent.

Americans today face a similar situation with the US Congress, even if they can't quite put it into words. The US president today may be greatly disapproved, but even he routinely far outscores the 535 men and women of an insular Congress in far away Washington, DC, who do not and cannot represent the 329 million people sprawled across this continent. The members of Congress go on and on wildly spending money which they no longer even collect sufficient taxes to cover but instead just borrow, in the people's name. This has been the default position of both parties in the wake of tax reform since the 1980s: "If you won't let us tax you to pay for it, we'll just borrow it instead", they seem to say. There is no brake on the spending, and in truth many don't want there to be.

We've seen this default behavior before.

Never too terribly bright in the first place, it finally dawned on the Congress back in the 1920s that it could fix the number in the US House at 435 because the founding generation had never settled the issue in Article the First.  With the Senate becoming a "super House" by virtue of the change to popular election, the House found it expedient to protect its own power by stopping itself from growing. Every new member, after all, dilutes the power of those already there and adds a vote for or against something current membership is already for or against. At the same time burgeoning immigration meant there were many new Germans, Irish and Italians in America which a WASPy Congress would rather not sit next to in the Capitol. The time was ripe to end the growth of representation.

The people, no longer reliably connected to the well springs of the founding, were none the wiser. They still aren't. Yet that act was the biggest power grab in the history of the Republic, second only to Abraham Lincoln's violation of the sovereign rights of the States. Each member of Congress since that time has accrued more and more power as a simple consequence of the country growing in population. Each one wields authority over ever larger legions of nameless faces in congressional districts now bloated to an average of 756,000 souls each in 2019. This subversion of the growth of representation with population was as sure a violation of the original intent of the constitution as was the Executive's War On the States. From the point of view of self-government, the one was as much an expression of tyranny as the other.

The results haven't been pretty. We now have a Congress the election of whose members routinely costs $10 million for a representative on average, $20 million for a Senator, none of whom know your name or care what you think. They pay more attention to the 11,586 registered lobbyists in 2018 than they do to us. There are nearly 27 lobbyists per member of the US House, and nearly one lobbyist for every 30,000 Americans, which ironically is the ratio for initial representation which Article the First originally had in mind. We have the best government which special interest money can buy. But just imagine: The founding generation fought bitterly over representation ratios of 1:30,000 vs. 1:50,000 and couldn't agree about them, but we sit idly by and let grifters domineer over ever growing hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of fellow Americans. The founding generation would not recognize us as a free people.

As a consequence of this concentration of more and more power in fewer and fewer hands in the US House and Senate, the leaders of Congress such as Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner, Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell also loom much larger in importance than they ever should have, as have the political parties they represent. Minority voices get no hearing and gain no traction. A stultifying degeneration to the lowest common denominator prevails, purple in hue, mostly. Mediocrity spreads everywhere. Millions feel disaffected, to the extent that ex-patriation has become a thing in the last refuge for freedom on earth.

A US House today of 6,580 under Article the First, on the other hand, would indeed be more cumbersome and inefficient than the Speaker of the House having to whip just 218 votes to spend us blind, but that's kind of THE WHOLE IDEA. It's much harder to rack up a national debt of $22.829 trillion when you have to herd 3,291 cats to do it instead of 218, but that's exactly what passing the Reapportionment Act of 1929 was designed to forestall. The 1920s was about nothing if not about revolutionizing America in the interests of power concentrated in a large, professional and centralized government controlled by specialists, answering only to an elite of 535 zeroes which has gone on to bequeath to us a debt of $23 with twelve zeroes after it. 

Meanwhile religious people today still have their choice of roughly 345,000 congregations in the US where 151 million worship as they please, and the rest don't. We are not suffering under the dim pall of an Established Religion of Rome, Wittenberg, Jerusalem or Mecca. Yet somehow all this religious activity has done absolutely nothing to prevent all this profligacy and debt slavery. Some would even go so far as to say that religion has more than contributed to this sorry state of affairs. 

The inescapable truth is that WE ALL are indeed in servitude. WE ALL are on the hook for those trillions upon trillions of dollars, with no end in sight. Not individually perhaps, but when countries can no longer pay their bills, they tend not to last too long, and the innocent end up paying the same price as the spendthrifts, usually involuntarily through social decay, disease, famine and war.

We really ought to fix this while we still can. Representation is the cornerstone of the Republic, not religion, and it's high time we had some of the former again.     

Article the First:

"After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred; after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons."

Article the Second:

"No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened."

Peter Hitchens: Protestant England as I knew it has almost entirely disappeared

From his splendidly temperate and richly informative essay, LATIMER AND RIDLEY ARE FORGOTTEN: A PROTESTANT UNDERSTANDING OF ENGLAND’S MARTYRS, here:

 

 

 

 

 

 

For More and Fisher have, more or less, won. The Elizabethan settlement long ago broke down. The Anglican Church, once forged to a gleaming hardness by the fires of Bloody Mary, has rusted away. Its Catholics now brandish thuribles and don chasubles, bowed down by embroidered copes at elaborate High Masses. Even its archbishops of Canterbury now array themselves in garish vestments that would have appalled their grandfathers. Its Protestants have wandered off into a land of guitars and modern language, full of the sort of enthusiasm Anglicanism once feared and despised, its Calvinism quite undiluted by godly order, sobriety, and reverence. The Elizabethan Prayer Book, which Catholics were once forced to endure, has almost disappeared from use in its own churches, except in cathedrals, or in a few services for very old people, held early in the morning or at sunset, until the Grim Reaper takes a hand, attendance dwindles, and they stop forever. The Prayer Book’s penitential, stern theology is too rich a mixture for a land that has grown comfortable with divorce and abortion. The English Bible, that great cause for which William Tyndale was strangled, is neglected and unread, its thrilling trumpet-blasts of seventeenth-century poetry unknown even to the officially well-educated, and almost never used in church. By another paradox, Roman Catholics have their own vernacular Bible and prayers, dreadfully inferior in beauty and euphony to those of the Church of England, though few know, because they have never heard or seen anything better. The Roman Catholics have even introduced Communion in both kinds, taken to singing hymns, and brought in married priests through the back door by ordaining married Anglo-Catholic defectors to the Ordinariate. Protestant England as I knew it has almost entirely disappeared, and its once-universal opinions are now regarded as odd, eccentric, and intolerant. Only in Northern Ireland and a few corners of Scotland will you find any remnant of the once-dominant worldview that saw popery as the ally of poverty, of “brass money and wooden shoes,” and of despotism.

Ireland's oldest working blacksmith in 2017: There isn't a Christian around

Quoted here:

Traditionally, a meeting point where news was shared, nowadays the forge is a quieter workplace, although Florrie is still kept company by people dropping in.

"You'd hardly see anyone now. Rural Ireland is gone. There isn't a Christian around. They don't open the pubs till later and we don't have a shop anymore, and it used to be very vibrant."

Rod Dreher gets a DNA test but gets completely distracted from the fact that his family "turned" German

Here:

I’m 99.3 percent European. About 67 percent of that ancestry is Anglo-Irish, with 9 percent “French and German” (they can’t yet distinguish between French and German ancestry, so my ancestors came from that region; it’s got to be German, because the first Dreher to come to the US came from Germany; Dreher is a German name meaning “turner”), and 4 percent Scandinavian. The rest is “broadly Northwestern European”. But here’s the surprising part: 0.6 percent of my ancestry — the thin red slice — is West African. The genetics timeline indicates that five to eight generations ago (the test can’t be more specific), I had an ancestor who was 100 percent West African. That ancestor was likely born between 1700 and 1820.

Well, isn't that instructive?

So far in life Rod Dreher has "turned" personally from Methodism, to Roman Catholicism, to Orthodoxy of some sort or other. How long will it take for him to understand how in keeping this is with his own name, his own character?

Obviously his family got this name "Dreher" because it turned from what it was to German, and the family accepted it. Now Rod Dreher is turning still, which is why he submitted his DNA for analysis in the first place (there's some innate doubt there), only to find out he's got a little "black" in him somewhere along the way, which turns him some more . . . from the main point.

The money on the test was obviously well spent.

Another country falls to anti-culture

From the story here:

"Ireland will become the 19th country in the world to legalise same-sex marriages once the necessary legislation is approved as expected. The first weddings could happen within six months. ... Congratulations poured in to Ireland from around the world, including from British Prime Minister David Cameron and US Vice President Joe Biden."

When doubting the resurrection got you fined, imprisoned and dead

From Phil Jenkins, here:

'Between about 1690 and 1740, the British Isles were home to several quite brilliant scholars and thinkers who applied critical scholarship to the Bible and Christian tradition generally. I stress “British Isles” because some were Irish or Scottish as well as English. We know them collectively as the Deists. Major figures included John Toland, Thomas Woolston, Thomas Chubb, Anthony Collins, and Matthew Tindal. Their assault on orthodoxy was many sided, but they ranged widely over both the Old and New Testaments. ...

'It was in the early eighteenth century that there came into existence a culture with the critical tools and the relative freedom to examine this question, and the Resurrection soon came under attack.

'In England, this was a central issue in the pamphlet wars known as the Deist Controversy (c.1725-35). Woolston wrote (1727-29) an attempted demolition of the literal Resurrection, together with most of the Miracle stories. The resulting legal reaction led to Woolston dying in prison . . ..'

From the Wikipedia entry, here:

The Discourses, 30,000 copies of which were said to have been sold, were six in number, the first appearing in 1727, the next five 1728-1729, with two Defences in 1729 1730. For these publications he was tried before Chief Justice Raymond in 1729. Found guilty of blasphemy, Woolston was sentenced (28 November) to pay a fine of £25 for each of the first four Discourses, with imprisonment till paid, and also to a year's imprisonment and to give security, for his good behaviour during life. He failed to find this security, and remained in confinement until his death.

Ideas have consequences: The time value of money is being destroyed by the Christian West

The 10-year government bond currently yields less than 1% in the following countries of Europe:

Switzerland: -.18

Germany: +.18

Czech Republic: .23

Netherlands: .26

Denmark: .28

Austria: .31

Finland: .32

France: .38

Belgium: .41

Sweden: .41

Latvia: .54

Lithuania: .59

Ireland: .78

In these nations of Europe and the world, the 10-year government bond currently yields less than 2%:

United States: 1.93

Portugal: 1.65

United Kingdom: 1.54

Canada: 1.44

Norway: 1.34

Italy: 1.22

Spain: 1.15

Slovenia: 1.08

The only others of note are:

Hong Kong (former British colony): 1.50

Israel (!): 1.11

Japan (conquered by America): .33

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Who may worship in your sanctuary, LORD?

Who may enter your presence on your holy hill? ...

Those who lend money without charging interest,

and who cannot be bribed to lie about the innocent.

-- Psalm 15:1, 5

Do good and lend, hoping for nothing again.

-- Luke 6:35