Miles Smith
Appearances
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
I think thinking about nature and thinking about things that are old and beautiful has led them to say, okay, what if Christianity is actually true? Because it seems old and kind of beautiful too. A friend of mine, James Wood, he's a professor at Redeemer University in Canada. He wrote an article for First Things sort of saying, a lot of people who would never darken the door of a church,
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
are becoming interested in church because of things like conservatives talking about nature, conservatives talking about God, conservatives talking about beauty. These aren't people who are churched people. A lot of them have never darkened the door of a religious institution in their life, but they're sort of thinking about Christianity because Christianity respects reality.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
And people like reality. They like what's good about reality, embodiment, all of those things. So I think it's real. I think Megan is onto something. And she's identifying a trend that I think a lot of people are sort of looking at and wanting to get more answers about because it's real and it's happening.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
And if you're on social media at all or just on a college campus, you can tell that there's something happening. It's maybe too early to tell exactly what that is, but you're right. There's some trend that some historian is going to write a book about at some point, so...
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
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.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
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.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
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.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
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.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
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.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
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.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
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.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
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.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
Last Thanksgiving, we discussed the true history of the holiday and the legacy of the Pilgrims can still be felt to this day.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
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.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
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.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
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.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
Yeah, that's a good way to think of it.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
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.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
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.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
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.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
And in a way, it isn't in what we would think of as the South and the colonies that are founded from Virginia.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
It's in the 18th century. I mean, one of the interesting things, you bring up space and it's a really good observation. Most of the people on the Mayflower are from a part of England called East Anglia. That's the little nub of England that sticks out into the North Sea towards Norway. That was the part of England that had township governance.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
That was the type of England you were most likely to be a Congregationalist in. So they came with a kind of preconceived notion of even how a town should be laid out. It's laid out with sort of a Congregationalist church in the middle of it. So it means that, guess what? You kind of live in a town around that church. Township governance is something we get from their East Anglian dispositions.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
And so this is something that they kind of just dispositionally replicate when they get to New England. So the church is the center of civil life. The Massachusetts General Court, what will become the colonial government, is a civil and a religious court. It's composed of ministers, many of whom sort of comprise the government of Massachusetts.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
At the very beginning of the 18th century, you have a lot of the rules change because Boston... Salem, those towns, they get rid of their more authoritarian past, the quote unquote Salem witch trials, basically orient people away from using the state to necessarily prosecute things like heresy.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
And slowly but surely in the beginning of the 18th century, you have major changes to how the government treats the relationship between the individual and church, for example.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
Yeah, for a good century and change. Yeah, so for well over 100 years.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
It's one of the deciding factors. Another one is just you have a lot more people in New England by the beginning of the 18th century. And you have people who aren't really from East Anglia. They don't have any history with being a pilgrim or being a Puritan.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
So you've got folks who might be just a regular Anglican coming and moving to Boston, and they don't want to go to a Congregationalist church. You have Scottish people, for example, moving to New England, and the Scots didn't like the Congregationalists because they remember what Cromwell had done to Scotland.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
when the first presbyterian church is founded in boston in 69 too that the congregations say there's a church of satan among us so there's a real sort of sense that hey we don't have this kind of pure pilgrim puritan commonwealth anymore and so everyone sort of recognizes well we can't create that via the state either so that sort of just even demographic change leads to some of these subtle changes in laws
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
That's a great, great question. You would tend to think that it would sort of create a relatively individualistic society, but the legacy of it's so strong that even today, New England tends to be more kind of conformist than other parts of the country. It tends to vote the same way. People tend to sort of think the same way.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
You don't even have the same sort of diversity of thought in the region in the 18th century, in the 19th century, the 20th or the 21st. that you do in other places. I'll give you a good example. In Virginia, you have a pretty committed secularist like Thomas Jefferson and a pretty devout religious, almost sort of establishmentarian guy like Patrick Henry.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
You don't have that many committed secularists. in New England in the 18th through 19th centuries. Most everybody's very religious. Now, what changes is the type of religion. You have the development of Unitarianism, but most everybody thinks of religion as kind of being this thing that needs to have the social and civil force of even government behind it.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
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.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
And so it's sort of a question of which religion is the government going to enforce, not whether. And that's why you can see the legacy of that in New England today when it comes to legislation vis-a-vis morality, church, all of that.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
Yeah. I mean, I think the mass migration into the Sunbelt is something we're not even sure what to think about now. I was born, North Carolina has about six and a half million people and it has 11 million people now. I live in Michigan. When I was born, Michigan had just under 10 million people in it. And today, 40 years later, it has just under 10 million people in it. New England's
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
relatively stable too. It's not growing quite as fast as the South is. And so I don't even know if we've got enough information, if we've seen the legacy of this growth long enough to know why do people come? You know, for a lot of people, I always heard it's the weather or the taxes are lower, something like that. I don't know. It's a really good question.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
I wonder if there's sort of these broader cultural differences. I mean, I know that people consider New England to be somewhat insular. It's a hard place to sort of break into. I think maybe the Boston area is an exception to that. But I was just in Connecticut. I'll give you an anecdote. I was in Connecticut this summer. That was in Enfield, Connecticut. And I'm from North Carolina.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
I love Chick-fil-A. It's just, you know, I'm a southerner. And so I was like, oh, there's a Chick-fil-A. So I'll stop in a Chick-fil-A. And the first thing I noticed is it was very quiet. People don't talk to each other quite as much. There's not the same type of public conversation. The South is a pretty loud place.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
I studied abroad in Italy and I never was that alien because I was like, oh, well, this house is kind of loud. Italy is kind of loud. That was so different than in the Chick-fil-A in New England I went to. It was quieter. People don't necessarily look at each other as much. It was just very clear to me that like this is a different type of place than the one I grew up in.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
Maybe insular is not the best term, but something was different.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
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
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
Yeah, it's definitely real. I teach at a religious college and faith life of our students is very vibrant. I think that when I talk to them, they're aware that this is something that is typifying their generation. The Zoomers, I guess they are, are more interested in religion than my generation, which I guess I'm an elder millennial or Gen X generation.
Morning Wire
The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America
And I think it's because they sort of recognize there's a sort of emptiness to a lot of specifically secularist claims about life. I think that it seemed to them to be pretty nihilistic. And I think nihilism isn't beautiful, right? Like, it's purposeless. And I think Zoomers, at least those who are sort of interested in conservative things, even if they're not religious per se at first—