So You Say You Hate the Puritans

American Thinker ^ | 04/19/2015 | Jeremy Egerer

[Mrs. Don-o]

The fact that the Rhineland princes chose to attempt to impose a Calvinist State Church on their subjects in the 1560's does not mean that everyone submitted. One set of my great-grandparents were Catholics from the Diocese of Speyer. Another set were Catholics from the Diocese of Trier.

Most tellingly, they all came to the USA in the 1870's -- a century after Sevier and the State of Franklin --- as they were fleeing Bismarck's Kulturkampf.

You: "So forgive me for taking you at your word. Somewhere along the line you went back to The State Church. So whether the conversion happened with you or a generation ago, it happened somewhere in time! If your Palatinate history is to be believed."

I would thank you to take me at my word.

That last line is so amusing. "If [my] Palatinate history is to be believed..."

Besser allein als in schlechter Gesellschaft.

[Regulator]

Ooooh, that's different.

Y'all's Forty-Eighters. But not Freidenkers, right?

Gutes Deutsch.

And anyway all the radicals went to Texas.

Like I said, y'all followed us here. Coulda just moved west to Alsace or South to Rome.

[Jemian]

I am proud to say that my ancestors were Puritans. They had a strong belief in the sovereignty of God and had an extensive knowledge of the Covenants. I am pleased to say my first cousin, seven times removed, is David Brainerd. I look forward to meeting him.

God keeps His covenant promises. I do not think it a coincidence that Brainerd was a Bible translator and that I am part of Wycliffe Bible Translators (although not a translator, just on the team).

[Mrs. Don-o]

No, they weren’t Fourty-Eighters. They were far from being revolutionaries. They came over in the early 1870’s.

[Regulator]

But they were still the product of the 1848 failed revolution and Bismarck's Second Reich.

Thus it follows that they were also a product of the liberal revolution that was put down 20 years earlier.

So this is different from the traditional American historical Palatinate settlers, who came between 1710 and 1750, for similar reasons: but they were Protestants, mostly followers of Alexander Mack.

And those are the original settlers of Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee.

And the originators of the Revolution, the American Revolution - you might want to familiarize yourself with the Battle of Alamance and the Regulators.

And the idea of Catholics being "victims" is absurd - while it's true that German principalities could choose official Lutheranism or Catholicism in the aftermath of the Treaty of Westphalia but typically for Catholics that simply meant moving a couple of towns over and re-settling.

For Anabaptists, Pietists and other Protestant sects it meant leaving Germany on the first boat up the Rhine.

That part of history is well known and documented.

You should note that the America that was founded reflected their attitudes of religious freedom, no State church, and thoughtful reflection on what is true and what is not rather then slavish adherence to dogma promulgated by "authorities".

This is the essence of what was created. Nothing else could have stood in a Protestant America.

And America WAS Protestant. And we didn't have a non-Protestant president until that Rat SOB John Kennedy.

And the despicable things he did or his compatriots like Norbert Schlei reverberate to this day, and will be the death of America.