People have honestly no idea about the early history of the US.
The pilgrims literally left England because they couldn’t oppress people enough. They can to America to build their perfect religious society.
Many colonies in the South weren’t ‘fleeing’ anything, they were fully funded by the crown with the goal of settling the land and sending resources and taxes back to Britain.
Here’s another semi obscure tidbit.
Do you know what happened to the puritan religion? As in, the actual church that was famous for burning witches and forcing women to wear letters.
It morphed into the United Church of Christ and, I kid you not, the Unitarian Universalists. (Among other splinters)
the Unitarian Universalists
What? No! How? Those poor bastards, I thought they were unscathed. Well, at least their heart’s in the right place these days.
honestly its the heavy emphasis on morality that caused the evolution and growth as well as the splintering. They actually thought about what was right and wrong and see where they had it wrong and allowed current knowledge to be used. Im by no means trying to praise a religion but this is why you get the evolution to unitarian universalist.
I actually went to a UU church in my 20s. I’ve always been an atheist and I’ve made no secret of it and I didn’t then and not only was everyone cool with it, plenty of them were also atheists. Including the minister, who became a UU minister because his father was an abusive evangelical minister who taught him how to speak in a church and he rejected all of his father’s ideas and became a progressive voice in the best way he knew how. The first time I went, they were celebrating Bob Marley’s birthday. I was hooked right away. It was a great way to have a social group at the time and also a great way to find social justice causes to work on.
These days, I’m in my 40s and I’m living in a different place. The church is on the other side of town, I have no idea who the minister is, and I wouldn’t be able to convince my wife and daughter to go anyway, so it isn’t worth it.
But if you’re young, an atheist, and are interested in social justice and also want a social life, you could do worse.
I’m an atheist as well and went to a UU church for a little bit in my mid 30s.
I enjoyed it. It was a nice third place. The people were all over the place with regard to their beliefs.
Really it was what I think church should be in the 21st century. Scripture is read but it was pretty much only positive messages and relevant to current events. The minister was wildly liberal and progressive. We sang. Scripture and songs were from all the major religions, not just Christianity or even Abrahamic. Really it was treated more of a “history of religion” than preaching. Religion itself has some positive messages and a very important place in history.
That is super interesting. I had no idea that there was decent, non-judgemental denominations like that. Especially ones that are so old. It’s still, not for me, but its nice to know that, occasionally, ‘Christian’ churches can actually be cool like that.
Thanks for sharing!
Sure. They aren’t really Christian anyway. They came out of Christianity, but they call themselves a creed rather than a religion. Basically, “don’t be an asshole” and you’re welcome.
You do know that the founding fathers and first pilgrims are different people?
You do know the Founding Fathers didn’t flee here from England?
But they did flee from British Empire!
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were born in Virginia. Ben Franklin was born in Pennsylvania. 48 of the 56 signers of the declaration were born in America. Only two were born in England.
Please tell us how these men fled from the British empire.
They rebelled against the empire because they wanted lower taxes. The freedom from tyranny narrative was concocted to get buy in from the lower classes who had to actually die for the revolution to succeed.
The rehtoric never matched reality - “All men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights”… except all those slaves and Indians.
It wasn’t really the taxes, that was their excuse to get the masses to agree to a rebellion.
The main reason was land. They wanted to expand west to continue growing cotton and tobacco. Kentucky and Tennessee were ripe for cultivation, however, the British empire had made a proclamation in the 1760s saying the colonies were not allowed to expand further into native territory.
The taxes were a tactic to get the poor people to die for them, so they could get rich off of stealing more land for these crops that destroyed the soil they already had
Citation needed. Please show me how you are able to determine the motivation of people who died about 2 centuries before you were born and by the records we have of them show that they argued about everything, hence are unlikely to have a shared conspiratorial vision.
I’m sorry you never heard of the Royal Proclamation of 1763. Google is your friend.
Taxes by somebody else (taxation without representation) is a sort of non-freedom too.
Yes, it took some time to implement principles in federal constitution in all the states.“No taxation without representation” is also a drastically misunderstood line.
What they were effectively asking for was self-governance, being removed from parliamentary control.
Given the technological limitations of the time, there was no way to effect a representative scheme in parliament with a constituency that was a 12-week round trip away. Furthermore, there were serious discussions of adding seats to parliament for the colonies, and the colonies refused to send anyone.
The Assembly of Massachusetts Bay was the first which ever took exception to the right of Parliament to impose Duties or Taxes on the Colonies, whilst they had no representatives in the House of Commons. This they did in a letter to their Agent in the summer of 1764 … And in this letter they recommend to him a pamphlet, wrote by one of their members, in which there are proposals for admitting representatives from the Colonies to fit in the House of Commons … an American representation is thrown out as an expedient which might obviate the objections to Taxes upon the Colonies, yet … it was renounced … by the Assembly of the Colony which first proposed it, as utterly impracticable.
And
Whilst [the radical colonists] exclaim against Parliament for taxing them when they are not represented, they candidly declare they will not have representatives [in Parliament] lest they should be taxed … The truth … is that they are determined to get rid of the jurisdiction of Parliament … and they therefore refuse to send members to that assembly lest they should preclude themselves of [the] plea [that Parliament’s] legislative acts … are done without their consent; which, it must be confessed, holds equally good against all laws, as against taxes … The colony advocates … tell us, that by refusing to accept our offer of representatives they … mean to avoid giving Parliament a pretence for taxing them
What they were effectively asking for was self-governance, being removed from parliamentary control.
Yes, how else it can be interpreted? This is what freedom is on state level - self governance.
Why pay taxes if you could just kill them all ? I can understand if you were in england, kind hard to escape them or exterminate them. But in america, the few of them that would cross the ocean, can just be disposed of as they arrive, already exhausted from the trip. Why give them a single penny ?
You know, that definition of flee where you stay put and don’t go anywhere. I like that definition of the word too. ;)
I’m not sure about the founding fathers, but isn’t that exactly why the pilgrims came to North America?
The British sent a bunch of crazy religious dicks off and hoped for the best.
I’ve been watching a lot of QI lately, and that was a topic in a recent episode I watched. You basically got it exactly.
The whole ‘pilgrims escaping religious persecution’ story is an absolute myth. The puritans basically wanted to be able to persecute others for not following their beliefs - they were the persecutors. It’s wild (and similar to what we’re seeing today).
So, the wannabe theocrats we have today are correct about the pilgrims wanting a theocracy (in 1620), but the people who we consider the Founding Fathers didn’t actually found the country until 157 years later.
That’s a big gap of time they’re overlooking / disregarding.
Maybe we should just set them adrift like England did and hope for the best.
So much of the world is the fallout of the fucking brits screwing things up
Well, more broadly, the age of imperial colonialism was bad for pretty much every civilization said empires came into contact with. The Spanish and Portuguese were doing heinous shit for centuries. Later, the Dutch, French, Belgians, Germans, Brits, the US (don’t forget the Native American genocide and the Monroe Doctrine, amongst other things), and others got in on the action (Japan is in this club too, largely taking their inspiration from the Portuguese and the Brits, but for mostly contextual reasons of “they seriously pissed off two much bigger empires right as they were getting into the positive economic feedback loop” - aka the Pacific Theater of WW2 - had their imperial colonial era substantially truncated).
More pointedly: empires existed before the age of European colonialism, but what with the advent of the age of sail, the Europeans unfortunately went down a road that was on average (arguably) far more nakedly exploitative and obviously unsustainable in the long run than any empire in history (excepting the Mongol empire, of course, which was more or less just Genghis doing a huge zerg rush with early-game cavalry and mounted archery units).
TL;DR: any reasonably-stable country in Europe (plus the US) with enough scratch to put together a halfway decent navy was getting in on the action for literal centuries.
Yes, no, it’s complicated. If you wanted to cherry pick data for either direction, you can do it. It’s more accurate to say there was a wide mix of ideologies.
Maybe we shouldn’t be so beholden to the opinions of people from 200+ years ago.
Yes, to the founding fathers, the monarchy was an entity like god. It was there but did nothing, helped them in no way and only took from them. They were all born into this colony where people were expected to serve a faceless king across the ocean.
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I still don’t get why this is so important to people. Yes there was a religious cult that came to what is now the US. Ok? It’s a cute historical event but it doesn’t add up to a whole lot.
Technically, the pilgrims who fled to America were fleeing away from progressive changes to theology in Europe at the time. That’s why all the pilgrim women covered their hair, their legs, and sacrificed goats.
George and the homies appreciated separation of Church and State, though, so props for that at least.
They were the freaks of their society. They weren’t facing religious persecution. They were utter outcasts for being nuts about it.
Ahh yes the merchant revolution of the US, in which rich white men got mad about paying taxes and the whispers of slave abolition in England and revolted.
It wasn’t the people’s war, it was the merchants war.
Similar thing with the French revolution, it’s the bourgeoisie who found nobility privileges unfair that led most of it.
Had nothing to do with suspending the right to trial by jury, forced deportations, suspending peaceful assembly, demanding quartering troops, cutting off trade routes…
Yeah who cares what the founders wanted? What do we want right now?
I never understood this. Why do deify these men? If anything we should be proud of the progress we have made since they’ve been dead and understand their important, but deeply flawed place in history. Anything else is just mythological, ultranationalist propaganda
The founders didn’t flee anything. They were born here and got tired of taxes and oppression.
Well, most of them were born here at least.
Even if they had, this country is no longer theirs, for they no longer live in it, we do, and it is ours. Even if, for the sake of argument, they had chosen to run things by the rules of a particular religion, we would be under no obligation to run our United States the way they ran theirs.
No, they did it so they could steal land from the indigenous peoples.
They didn’t flee from shit!
They spilled their own blood and the blood of those who would impose their beliefs onto them inorder to free themselves of any such imposing.
Idgaf what they thought.
Didn’t they own people and commit treason??
Yes they did…
Yeah, but try telling that to all the people who’ve been brainwashed into thinking this was founded as a Christian country and that the founders were all Christians.
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What if we were the kings though?
- privileged white dudes
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Um, actually, that is exactly why the Puritans did so. England wouldn’t let them impose their religious beliefs upon the populace at large. (Please note: while someone else answered this already, they did not say um, actually. Therefore I get the point.)
