William Bradford-John Morton: Creative Tension in the Colonies.

Creative tension is a good thing!

English 290 Blog entry 4/6/10

The remarkable message taken from the William Bradford & John Morton papers, is how similar are the issues discussed with today’s headlines: We’re still ambivalent about the value of diversity in our culture, and the effects of immigration; we persist in our exceptionalism, assuming that everyone else wants to be like us; our understanding of church/state separation is still fuzzy at best. An example of the last item is the polarization that exists concerning civil marriage equality for LGBT citizens.     Something else a close reading of the documents reveals: Tensions did exist between individuals based on their various beliefs and ideologies, and this fervor lacked a large institutional presence to stifle it. In Europe, state and church acted in tandem to maintain social cohesion, and to dampen heretical ideas and practices. Indeed, that suppressive power is what propelled the colonists across the ocean. In the New World there was no such concentrated power, so people were free to think and act as they believed. The other outcome of the European model of crowd control was to perpetuate a communal spirit. With the Protestant Reformation, that sense was already crumbling. In the New World it collapsed altogether, and, due partly to the hardship required to survive here, the concept of the individual emerged.
    Add the two ingredients, tension created by the clash of ideas, and the lack of a restraining system for it, plus the emergence of the concept of the individual, and we see the genesis of our remarkable--we might even say exceptional--system of self-government, including the official separation of the two elements that stifled competing ideas and methods. In less than 150 years this separation of church and state was codified in our Constitution. Ironic proof of the success of this system is the fact that, in America today, there are more churches, with more branches and offshoots than anywhere in the world.