Beneath the stones, the beach; beneath the beach, Cthulhu

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Jack Graham

Jack Graham writes and podcasts about culture and politics from a Gothic Marxist-Humanist perspective. He co-hosts the I Don't Speak German podcast with Daniel Harper. Support Jack on Patreon.

3 Comments

  1. Stephen
    January 22, 2025 @ 11:13 am

    While I don’t disagree with any of this analysis, I think it is missing one thing. Just as the apocryphal quote claims “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them,” various Christianities constructed to ideologically justify the ruling elite also contain within themselves the contradiction that can tear it all down. It was Calvinism that led John Brown to becoming a radical abolitionist, because he saw God’s law as higher than human laws and believed that the elect could be of all people, including Black people. After all, a religion that said only the powerful in society can be saved doesn’t help pacify the masses. Further, it was his postmillennialism that led him to take violent action to end slavery. Brown viewed his actions as leading towards the thousand year rein of Christ, which could only be accomplished after the evil institution of slavery had been abolished.

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    • Jack Graham
      January 22, 2025 @ 5:15 pm

      Great comment, thank you. I agree with what you add. Indeed, you are anticipating stuff I’m planning to add myself in later essays! J.G.

      Reply

  2. Doug M.
    January 29, 2025 @ 8:19 am

    Couple of notes.

    1) Anglicanism grabbed onto the Third Way and, finding it successful, never let go. The weird thing is, this was probably the greatest theological legacy of the absolutist Stuarts; this got going under Charles I and became full orthodoxy under his son.

    2) That said, don’t leave Cromwell out of the story. Anglicanism splintered under Cromwell and it never recovered. Multiple different Protestant sects, from Baptists to Quakers, spalled off the English Church in the 1640s. They were never recovered! After the Restoration they all got lumped together, along with diehard Presbyterians and Independents, as “Nonconformists”. Most were doctrinally Calvinist, but the emphasis placed on predestination varied wildly!

    3) And also, religious toleration — leading inevitably to religion as a consumer choice — was made inevitable under Cromwell. The early Restoration tried stuffing it back into the bottle but it was too little, too late. After the Glorious Revolution, the Church of England and the ruling elites had to accept formal tolerance for dissenting (Protestant) sects. Various sorts of formal discrimination endured for decades — Nonconformists couldn’t get degrees from Oxford or Cambridge, for instance, and they still had to pay Anglican parish fees — but they were officially tolerated. And if you want to look for the most bourgeois of salvations, you won’t find it in the Anglican Church, but in its half-acknowledged children, the Nonconformists. The modal Anglican elite was fox-hunting landed gentry; the modal Nonconformist elite was a merchant or, a bit later, an industrialist.

    Doug M.

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