Explore the Pilgrims' epic journey, their establishment of a Christian commonwealth, and their lasting influence on American cultural and religious life with Hillsdale History professor Miles Smith. Get the facts first on Morning Wire.Last Year's Episode: https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/morning-wire/the-true-story-of-thanksgiving-11-23-23https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/morning-wire/id1576594336?i=1000635778428
Chapter 1: What is the legacy of the Pilgrims in America?
Last Thanksgiving, we discussed the true history of the holiday and the legacy of the Pilgrims can still be felt to this day.
In this episode, we speak to a Hillsdale College professor about the Pilgrims' long-term impact, how it ties into the modern culture wars, and the future of religiosity in the United States. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley. It's Thursday, November 28th. Happy Thanksgiving. And this is Morning Wire.
Here to discuss the Pilgrims and their long and interesting influence on American culture is Hillsdale College Professor of History, Miles Smith. Dr. Smith, thanks so much for coming on.
Oh, it was my pleasure.
So listeners may recall last year we brought on a Plymouth Plantation historian to talk about the true story of the first Thanksgiving. And that was a fan favorite episode, which we're gonna link to in the description. But this year I wanna talk about the Pilgrims' cultural legacy in America. So first off, who were the Mayflower Travelers? That group included more than just pilgrims.
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Chapter 2: Who were the Mayflower Travelers?
How did that group come together and who did it include?
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.
So when they arrived, did they create a society altogether or did they split off and the pilgrims made their own plantation and the offals fended for themselves?
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.
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Chapter 3: What was the Mayflower Compact?
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.
Now, I want to go back to life on the ships. This is 40 or 50 days in the North Atlantic. Was that considered safe at that time, or were they taking their lives in their hands doing this?
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.
Now, I want to get to some of their cultural impact. So you talked about how some of the maybe less religious members of this community absorbed some of the cultural customs of the pilgrims. How did this early Christian commune, for lack of a better word, I guess it was a commune.
Yeah, that's a good way to think of it.
How did that first Christian culture impact the subsequent expansion of Christianity in the United States? Because we think of the United States of having maybe a slightly culturally different brand of Christianity than some other places.
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.
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Chapter 4: How did the Pilgrims influence American culture?
Chapter 5: What were the dangers of the Pilgrims' voyage?
Now, you mentioned that people had to attend church every single Sunday to be part of the society. That itself has certain social impacts. So, for example, it limits the distance you can live from the church. You can't really travel for extended periods. So it has some trickle-down effects on society just beyond the religiosity, and it really affects the social cohesion.
When did that rule go by the wayside, and what were the effects of that?
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.
So for 200 years, though, people were expected to attend their local township church and they would get a fine if they didn't show up?
Yeah, for a good century and change. Yeah, so for well over 100 years.
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Chapter 6: How did early Christian culture shape America?
I didn't realize that the Salem witch trials were such a significant factor in secularizing America. I mean, culturally, of course, everyone knows about them, but that's a very significant downstream effect.
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
Now, what was the cultural effect of that? I'm thinking if you had a society where everyone had to show up at a certain place to do a cultural activity or religious activity together and then suddenly you don't have to, I imagine that would exponentially create a more individualistic society. What was the effect of that?
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.
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Chapter 7: What were the social impacts of mandatory church attendance?
And I was actually very scandalized when I went to school out of state in Colorado and I saw you could buy alcohol in the grocery store. So there were just some peculiar things about the Northeast that lasted, I think, much longer than most people realize. So how did we go from the point of having this religiosity in the Northeast to the center of gravity of religiosity now being the Southeast?
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.
Chapter 8: How did governance from England influence New England towns?
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.
More reserved. Yeah.
Yeah, for sure.
So last question, some of your specialty, it sounds like you watch religious trends. And so no doubt you've kind of kept tabs on the past, say, 10 years, the rise of the religious nuns is sometimes how it's phrased. People who say they are not any religion, so not necessarily atheist, but certainly not weekly church attenders.
However, Megan Basham, one of my colleagues, has reported for us recently that that trend may be slowing, may be crested around 2020. And in very recent years, the past, I would say, two years, I've seen some headlines and articles about the rise of religiosity among young people, specifically young men. I saw one about traditional Catholicism in New York City having a mini-boomlet.
And anecdotally, I've heard that the Presbyterian Church has had big growth on college campuses, especially with young men growing. Is this a trend that you have kept an eye on and something that you expect to see more of?
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