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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, for a good century and change. Yeah, so for well over 100 years.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe insular is not the best term, but something was different.
Yeah, for sure.
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