Miles Smith
speaker
47 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Miles Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Last Thanksgiving, we discussed the true history of the holiday and the legacy of the Pilgrims can still be felt to this day.
Oh, it was my pleasure.
Well, it's a motley crew. About 30 to 40% are the group of people we call the pilgrims. They're dissident English Protestants. They were called the Brownest in England. They were followers of a guy named Brown. And they're convinced they have to actually completely separate from the Church of England. They're not even interested in reforming it. They've got to get out of England.
And so they're kind of seen as cranks, interestingly enough. They go to the Netherlands first. And then they decide, oh, Holland's maybe even not as holy enough for them. So they sort of set out to find a place where they can truly build what they think is a godly commonwealth. And so they charter a wineship. Interestingly enough, the Mayflower had been a wineship
And this was sort of controversial. The Puritans were sort of very pious people who had some thoughts. Well, maybe we shouldn't drink alcohol. Some of them did, by the way. So there was sort of a controversy even on what they were charting. So they charter a wine ship and they go to then what was Virginia. All of the East Coast was considered Virginia.
And so their voyage takes them somewhere in the order of 40 to 50 days. And they're crossing the North Atlantic. And it's pretty clear that the pilgrims are not sure about the rest of the passengers who are kind of what you might think of working class, rough, sort of working people. Parliament called the rest of the passengers human awful, O-F-F-A-L. It means human poop.
And so there's not a lot of cultural commonality with the pilgrims and the rest of the people on the Mayflower. So it's a pretty eclectic crowd who's traveling across the ocean at that point.
Yeah, it's a good question. So actually, there's sort of a proposition. Hey, we've all got to learn to get along because we're going to the backside of the planet. We have no idea what's out there. We've got to sort of at least have some sort of organizing principle. And so what they do is they kind of draw up a civil charter, a social and civil charter.
And that's what we call the Mayflower Compact. And they basically say, OK, this is how we're going to run the government. No one in the early 17th century would have conceived of an idea of having secular government. They all think that government's going to be tied to religion.
And so everyone's relatively comfortable with the idea, hey, we're going to covenant with each other under God to at least create some sort of stable society here in what they think is Northern Virginia. We call it New England. They would have thought of themselves as in Northern Virginia. Yeah.
So it's probably more the former. I mean, the people who aren't particularly religious and pious, they understand, well, hey, the pilgrims are the guys with the guns. They're the guys with the ability to control what becomes the New England Commonwealth, the actual state apparatus in New England. So it's more the former.
People who might not be particularly pious or interested in religion, they decide, you know what, in order to keep on the good side of the people who are kind of running everything, I need to at least seem religious. Right. So it's much more the former. People sort of begin to sort of, they fake it till they make it, if you want to think of it that way.
It's very dangerous. You know, the North Atlantic isn't a regular sort of through fair at that point. There's no cities to trade with in the New World. So it's only sort of recently begun to be regularly traveled at the beginning of the 17th century. So it is dangerous. There's no guarantee you're even going to make it to the New World.
You have, you know, sometimes with storms in North Atlantic, you have waves easily 35 to 40 feet. Considering the fact that Mayflower is not much longer than 110, 120 feet, it's a heck of a wild ride. So they do know it's dangerous. They do think that it's dangerous. They are aware of that. But they're all pretty convinced, at least the leadership, that they're supposed to do it.
And so for the writings we have, we don't have this kind of raw terror on the ship. There's sort of a sense of this is our mission, this is our job. And so because the pilgrims form the core, the social core of the Mayflower Travelers, it doesn't really become, you know, a sort of terror-stricken, anxious journey. It is, but that's not sort of the telos of the journey, at least in the writings.
Yeah, that's a good way to think of it.
Yeah, so they would have been downstream from English Calvinists. And so for them, they're not afraid to use social and civil power to enforce religiosity. So a church going is sort of mandatory. Hey, we need you to show up for church. You have to show up for church. They fine them. people for deviant behaviors.
And so even if you're not enthusiastic about piety, just kind of in your heart, in order to sort of get by, you're going to become more enthusiastic, whether you sort of feel it or not. So the legacy they leave is that New England always, at least until the middle of the 19th century, had sort of the biggest space for public Christianity. It's interesting.
We tend to think of the South as more religious at the beginning of the United States and really throughout the history of the United States. That's a relatively new development. New England was more religious because New England was sort of unafraid to use social and civil power to make people religious. And so you have that legacy that's kind of cooked into New England.
And in a way, it isn't in what we would think of as the South and the colonies that are founded from Virginia.
Showing 1–20 of 47 · page 1 of 3
Next →