Post-Christian America

The Catholic Thing ^ | August 19, 2012 | Fr. C. John McCloskey III

[Sherman Logan]

I quite agree.

I see no particular advantage of most Catholics over Evangelicals in their morality in practice. In fact, I think there are a great many more “cultural Catholics” than “cultural Evangelicals,” people who are “members” of a religion because it’s part of their culture and lifestyle, but not something they build their life around.

[ex-snook]

As Jesus said - render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s. Christians are growing more in getting Caesar’s laws to set the moral tone of the country rather than going to Church and living the Beatitudes.

[daniel1212]

Just another of the seemingly obligatory posts promoting pro-papal propaganda, this time once again imagining that Rome will save America, and that it is SS that is the problem, while the facts are that it is the churches that no longer hold the Scriptures supreme as the Word of God, to be obey consistent with the Biblical conservative tradition, that are the most liberal, and in this Rome joins Protestant denoms which are most like here.

And as regards such, here are the stats again. http://www.peacebyjesus.com/RC-Stats_vs._Evang.html

And in contrast to Rome’s use of the sword of men to deal with theological enemies, and her historical oppression and denial of freedom of religion - which early Protestantism had to unlearn - and her hindering free reading of the Scriptures,Protestantism promoted literacy and learning among the “laity,” and a priority on education.

Much due to the Protestant belief that lay people should learn to read the Bible in English, instead of Latin or Greek, many colonists pushed for literacy. In 1647 the Massachusetts colonial legislature commented that as the “old deluder Satan” had worked to keep the Bible (in the vernacular) from the people in the times before the Protestant Reformation, they passed a law that towns of over 50 families should provide a school.

However, education was mainly considered to be a local, or a family responsibility, often using private schools, rather than being an duty of the State. Ralph Walker, author of Old Readers, believes that in this period “children were often taught to read at home before they were subjected to the rigours of school. In middle-class families, where the mother would be expected to be literate, this was considered part of her duties.[2]

In Puritan New England this seems to have been particularly evidenced. In The Intellectual Life of New England Samuel Eliot Morison notes that Boston Latin was “the only public school down to 1684, when a writing school was established; and it is probable that only children who already read were admitted to that . . . . they must have learned to read somehow, since there is no evidence of unusual illiteracy in the town. And a Boston bookseller’s stock in 1700 includes no less than eleven dozen spellers and sixty-one dozen primers.”

Some contend that in colonial America literacy rates were as high or higher than they are today.[10] Ruth Wallis Herndon, in Literacy among New England’s transient poor, 1750-1800, states that by using different sources, a number of “historians have discovered a nearly universal literacy among New England men and varying levels of literacy among New England women in the latter part of the eighteenth century.

In addition, while there existed thousands of local schools, nearly one thousand colleges and universities (of varying quality), and scores of normal schools with trained teachers, education was largely locally managed, as the federal bureau of education, while collecting information about the condition of education, possessed no control over local schools. Education agencies on the state level were small, and its few employees had little or no power over local school districts. School systems in large cities could also function with little oversight, such as in Baltimore, where the public schools in 1890 employed only two superintendents for the entire district of 1,200 teachers.

Despite the lack of centralized administration, public schools across America were notably similar, with children learning both the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, and the basics of good behavior – the latter being enforced when necessary by corporal punishment. (More: http://www.astorehouseofknowledge.info/Education_in_the_United_States)

Also, as the Atlantic Magazine in “Our Ten Contributions to Civilization” states,

The American system was a legacy of colonial times, when the theological motive for settlement was intense and the multiplicity of denominations suggested the need for mutual forbearance. Rhode Island, Maryland, and Pennsylvania in the persons of Roger Williams, Lord Baltimore, and William Penn set the pattern to which the Bill of Rights of the federal Constitution gave nationwide sanction. Religion by choice was the natural counterpart of government by consent, and, contrary to Old World belief, the separation of church and state did not in fact weaken either but strengthened both.

The French RC historian Alexis de Tocqueville quoted in the article also said (among other things) of Protestant America,

“The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other; and with them this conviction does not spring from that barren traditionary faith which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live.

And in a pamphlet for Europeans titled “ Information to Those Who Would Remove to America” (1754), Benjamin Franklin wrote,

“ ...serious religion, under its various denominations, is not only tolerated, but respected and practiced. Atheism is unknown there; Infidelity rare and secret; so that persons may live to a great age in that country without having their piety shocked by meeting with either an Atheist or an Infidel. And the Divine Being seems to have manifested His approbation of the mutual forbearance and kindness by which the different sects treat each other, and by the remarkable prosperity with which He has been please to favor the whole country.