Jamestown: Christian nation or cannibal island?

April 28, 2007

Guest Post by Morbo

This weekend, a collection of far-right religious figures is gathering in Virginia Beach to “rededicate” America to Christ.

According to this gang, it’s a rededication because the first dedication took place 400 years ago, when a clutch of European settlers reached Jamestown, Va. Various Religious Right leaders have convened a conference called “The Assembly” to commemorate this event.

I suspect it will be quite a show. There will even be foot washing! (Hey, don’t get me wrong — these are consenting adults, and I support whatever kinky thing they’re into.) This will be the largest gathering of fundamentalist wackos in one place since the last Texas Republican Party convention.

I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but these folks need a history lesson. The English settlers who waded ashore in Virginia 400 years ago did stick up a cross and promise to convert the natives, but the main goal of the expedition was to make money.

It didn’t quite work out that way. Many of the settlers were “gentlemen” who had no idea what they were getting into.

The band settled on swampy, mosquito-ridden land with brackish water and little game to hunt. Many of the settlers were unaccustomed to hard work and just figured they’d dig holes and find gold. The company was plagued with disease and harassed by hostile natives.

Inevitably, the food ran out, and the colonists began to starve. Some ran off and offered to become servants to the Indians in exchange for a place to stay and some food. One man killed and ate his pregnant wife. In his book Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen writes that some desperate settlers dug up and feasted on dead Indians. (Yuck!)

We don’t hear much about this stuff today because it’s not very heroic. In fact, we don’t hear much about the Jamestown settlement at all. The Pilgrims loom larger in our national mythology — yet they came along 13 years after Jamestown.

This year, The Assembly and the “Christian nation” crowd hope to restore Jamestown to its proper place in history.

I have no problem with that. Let’s take a good, hard look at our national origins — warts and all. But I doubt that’s what The Assembly plans to do. Rather, they’ll offer up another myth about the hand of Providence, manifest destiny and all that jazz.

Looming over their gathering is an interesting question, one I doubt any of them will have the gumption to contemplate: If the United States was meant to be God’s favored nation, why did he let it get off to such a rotten start?

If the United States was meant to be God’s favored nation, why did he let it get off to such a rotten start?

Thou shall not ask reasonable questions of unreasonable people…

For shame Morbo….

  • Many of the settlers were unaccustomed to hard work and just figured they’d dig holes and find gold. The company was …harassed by hostile natives.

    It sounds like Junior’s Iraq story.

  • ***This weekend, a collection of far-right religious figures is gathering in Virginia Beach to “rededicate” America to Christ.***

    B…but Morbo, the Jamestown folks dedicated the land to King James of England. Are these Christo-freaks saying that “Christ” was really some fancy-pants, silver-spoon-in-mouth, global-conquest dude with a thirst for shiny things?

    Wait—that sound a lot like the fancy-pants, silver-spoon-in-mouth, global-conquest dude with a thirst for shiny things…who’s currently living in the WH….

  • It’s an interesting turnabout. The pilgrims, & their puritan cousins who settled the rest of Massachusetts, were deeply religious people who also believed in a sober, unsentimental relationship with the divine based on reason and devotion to religious texts. Their commitment to reason meant that they valued education and scholarship, and Cambridge, Massachusetts became America’s intellectual capital. Their culture produced Adams, Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, Melville, and a generally enlightened approach to society and government – which is now denounced, spittle-flying, as “Massachusetts liberalism”.

    Meanwhile, the Jamestown adventurers, once they bore down and stopped starving, created an aristocratic culture that was more concerned with keeping their black slaves and white indentured servants under control, and making scads of money out of tobacco and, later, cotton, so they could replicate the aristocratic world they’d left behind in England (many were second and third sons who moved to Virginia so they could be landed gentry on a par with their first-born brothers). One way the poor (white & black) southerners compensated for their exlcusion from “gentle society” was by clinging to their churches, which became increasingly charismatic and anti-enlightenment (hence southern Baptism). Today’s southern-dominated religious right are their direct descendants. The switch from the 17th century is complete.

    Anyone wanting to read more on this should consult “Albion’s Seed” by David Hackett Fischer, which I’m (probably mis-)remembering here. Whenever someone tries to link present-day “American culture” to the colonial past, I reach for Fischer.

  • Various Religious Right leaders have convened a conference called “The Assembly”…

    *Sputter, snort* The Assembly? Really?

    Sounds like something you’d see on Mystery Science Theater. Deformed old men in robes, dribbly candles, furniture made out of bones, eldrich chants, virgin sacrifice (‘natch). All we need is a steroid packed wall of meat in a loin cloth to lop off heads and save/disqualify the virgins.

    I wonder if these clowns will ever realize how fricking stupid they look to the rest of the world. I hope not. I really hope not.

    Popcorn?

  • It really is a scary choice when you think about it, imaginary or actual cannibalism. “And when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me.” or “that some desperate settlers dug up and feasted on dead Indians”.

  • The comment about footwashing was sleazy. Footwashing as a Christian rite is a very profound and spiritual experience with no sexual innuendo involved. I resent that the religious right would advertise it and treat it like a carnival attraction. I also think that it’s historically dishonest since I am positive that the Jamestown colony would not have practiced it. Still, Morbo, your ridiculing and demeaning “kinky” comment reflects an ignorance of a Christian rite that ideally reflects progressive values and derives from Jewish tradition at the time of Christ. This is a ritual that has historically gone hand-in-hand with Christian ideals of pacifism and service towards one’s fellow humans by minority Christian sects. While I am saddened that the religious right has recently discovered it and tried to take possession of it, I am equally saddened by your portrayal of it.

  • Less shrill, please.
    If I wanted snarky comments levied at the mentally challenged conservatives, I’d visit DailyKos.

    CarpetBagger has been spared the usual liberal sputtering. Please help keep it the level-headed, stoic treasure I’ve come to love over the past month.

  • The hallucinogenic plant called jimson weed gets its name from the colony. From Robert Beverly’s The History and Present State of Virginia, written in 1705:
    .
    “Some of the soldiers sent thither to quell the rebellion of Bacon (1676); and some of them ate plentifully of it, the effect of which was a very pleasant comedy, for they turned natural fools upon it for several days: one would blow up a feather in the air; another would dart straws at it with much fury; and another, stark naked, was sitting up in a corner like a monkey, grinning and making mows [grimaces] at them; a fourth would fondly kiss and paw his companions, and sneer in their faces with a countenance more antic than any in a Dutch droll.
    .
    In this frantic condition they were confined, lest they should, in their folly, destroy themselves- though it was observed that all their actions were full of innocence and good nature. Indeed, they were not very cleanly; for they would have wallowed in their own excrements, if they had not been prevented. A thousand such simple tricks they played, and after 11 days returned themselves again, not remembering anything that had passed.”

  • Read also Russell Shorto’s, Island at the Center of the World.

    It’s about New Netherlands colony, now Manhattan Island, New York City and its vigorously tolerant, polyglot growth and its early experimentation with representative government. All this, but perhaps most of all the mixing of immigrants of all stripes and religions when the English seized control in the 17th century.

    Few books in recent years have changed my view of American history quite as much as Shorto’s.

  • The reason Virginia became an English colony is because the original Virginia Company was chartered by the King and when it went bankrupt around 1622 the King assumed its assets. This gave England a foothold in the New World. The Virginia Company went on to become profitable once it discovered how to farm tobacco (with slaves). George Washington carried on that tradition to his death.

    Ironically, after nearly 400 years Virginia is in the process of becoming a smoke-free state. Virginians don’t like to rush to decisions.

  • From what I remember, shorty after Jamestown was established, a taliban style religious order was temporarity imposed mandating forced prayer and church attendance. It did not last.

    Wonder if Robertson and friends yearn for the good old days when a preacher could have someone flogged for missing church.

    My recollection may have beenimfluenced from one of these books (all are good books):

    http://www.amazon.com/Mayflower-Story-Courage-Community-War/dp/0143111973/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-8753896-0992134?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1177936793&sr=1-1

    or

    http://www.amazon.com/American-Gospel-Founding-Fathers-Making/dp/0812976665/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-8753896-0992134?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1177936990&sr=1-1

    or

    http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/156584100X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-8753896-0992134?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1177937036&sr=1-1

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