Ch 2 ABSOLUTE ABSOLUTION - The Forgiveness of Original Sin By Ministers of Government Schooling by John Taylor Gatto

My Scottish Presbyterian wife Janet, is fond of reminding me that only the Pope's gang believes that sins can be taken away. She ignores the many groups that came to be called "liberal" Christians, including the Unitarians, who aren't really Christians at all. Nevertheless, in the strictest theological sense she's almost right. Calvin is pretty clear on the matter - there is no such thing as Sin and Redemption; to Calvin the idea of Right and Wrong is a heresy, since both the Elect and the Damned are preassigned to Heaven or Hell quite independent of their behavior. We're so unused to thinking this way any more that it might be best to regard Puritan Reformation Christianity as a kind of a caste system, from which there was no escape.

Sin was permanent and indelible and you were born with it; no descendant of Adam and Eve could escape the penalties while alive, or the ultimate penalty of damnation after death without God's Grace. And there wasn't any way to earn that Grace.

Liberal Christianity aside, the main line of descent from Calvin through Cambridge University, the laboratory of Puritanism, to Massachusetts Bay was a belief that civil society had to be set up in such a way as to take into account the sad fact most of its citizens were doomed.

This idea was turned into habits of child-rearing, so that long after the theology that spawned them was seemingly extinct, the notion was communicated behaviorally. It was also embedded into institutional protections for the Elect from the hordes of the Damned, in court procedures and legislative habits and in literally hundreds of other invisible ways. You do not need to believe as the Puritans believed to live and feel and think as the Puritans thought; you don't even have to know who the Puritans were to be their faithful disciple. The entire profession of psychoanalysis and counseling is a translation of Puritan obsessions into modern Enlightenment costume; prying into secrets is the main line of defense for a Puritan world-view.

The very complex beginnings of the common school movement in early 19th century New York and in Massachusetts were both a recognition that something would have to be done to contain the Damned in the New World, and - at one and the same time - a radical rejection of the idea that anyone was damned - or even that any of the rules of traditional religion applied in the New World. It is this bonding of the wildest contradictions that has made the American school puzzle so hard to solve. The Calvinist part of American schooling is up on the surface and very easy to trace, but the part in service to what Allan Bloom has called "the new American religion" has not to my knowledge ever been brought into the light for close inspection. We all know, for example, of the critical involvement of Unitarians in the creation of compulsion schooling; what we don't know is "Why?"; in service to what precise dream of the future?

We are faced with the paradox of a powerful, repressive Calvinist strain built into the machinery of schooling, and at the same time, of a powerful anti-Calvinist strain built into the mechanism too; like the little mill that grinds salt, both little religious mills continue to grind furiously inside the school institution as it prepares to enter the 21st century. The future the totalitarian part would make for us is extremely easy to envision, and in fact has happened a number of times in this century; the anti-religious part, however, is also busy at work creating a future that Christians and non-Christians alike seem to turn from in revulsion. Why that is so is wrapped up in the cancellation of traditional Christian meaning, I think, without being able to supply an adequate substitute. But you will make your own mind up when you have more information in hand.