God in America draws upon various scholars of “the American Religious experience” such as Steven Prothero, Professor of Religion , Boston U.

See the Series

The series also used actors such as Michael Emerson of Lost as John Winthrop.  Was a little bothered by that,  but I can’t help but associate the almost lunatic vibes of “Ben” on lost,  with the wide-eyed assurance of the Winthrop leadership;  I suppose that the actor’s efforts to play “fervor” and “conviction” comes off to Lost fans as sinister.  Maybe that’s not completely inaccurate.  The “true believers” and their self-assured leadership pronouncements often led to atrocities ,  carried out by those convinced that such things had to be done to keep God’s favor.

Prothero explains that the  men of colonial Massachusetts take the same stance that the Catholic church,  from which they were in rebellion: “God speaks through the Bible,  and the Bible is mediated through us”.

“God can speak through any of us”.   And yet,  when those “revelations” clash,  then that idea is put away,  just as the John Winthrop puritans so quickly forgot their own ‘speaking their conscience to the state’ and leaving that behind them to seek their own “City on a Hill”,  and took up the mantle of “the Bible is mediated through us”. 

When Prothero speaks of how this is taking place “inside of us”,  I immediately wince,  since this is the retreat into a subjectivity that can be kept separate from “City”;  the idea of the people as a “Polis’;  a “community”.  That seems tome to be the ideology of a liberal democracy that encourages us to keep socio-political expressions “private”.  It constricts the notion of a wholistic, communal, “social” reality that is a part of that whole expressed in both “faith” and “politic”.

As of this posting, I’m still watching the episode (about half way in, having been taken through the Pueblos vs Spanish troops and Friars around 1670-1680,  and the clash between John Winthrop and Ann Hutchinson. As I watched that courtroom clash of wills between Winthrop and Hutchinson,  I was starting to re-think my objection to the “Ben” effect of using Michael Emerson of Lost as John Winthrop.  It almost seemed fitting. 

More after the second half,  and I’ll come back to the matter of  the clash of Native North American religions and the “missionaries” backed by Western European powers.  That is a tremendously troubling chapter in the story of “God In America”