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.
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