Were Founding Fathers deists, evangelicals or something else? Perhaps all of the above … with occult beliefs thrown in

 

Mitch Horowitz throws this monkey wrench into the discussion of how religious, how pious and how devout the original American Christians and their secular-minded co-patriots were.

Occult America is the name of his book which hits the nail on the head in terms of no absolute defining belief or morality as the original basis for founding America and authoring whatever the Dream is supposed to be.

An earlier but equally informative examination of occult and magical thinking in the early decades of America’s history was written by Michael Quinn whose honesty and quality scholarship got him booted out of the Mormon Church.

Early Mormonism and the Magic World View is an exhaustive recounting of the role of 19th-century folk magic  and lore that was part and parcel of how early Americans in general saw the world and those who united with Joseph Smith and became part of the Mormon experience. 

The obvious conclusion is that those who asserted the strongest early impact on religion in this country were not the authors of what social conservatives consider the secular society so harmful to America’s core values.

Nor were the founders the authors of the judgmental and authoritarian Christianity the most outspoken religious activists proclaim today.

The real truth lies inside the radical extreme opinions of our modern and currently popular atheist bomb throwers of the Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens ilk as the equally explosive grenades flying out of the reactionary Christian right with it’s imperialistic claims about the one truth and a born-again experience over which those particular biblical literalists claim proprietorship.

Books that survey occult and magical thinking are not mere entertainment, but necessary to understand both historical as well as contemporary religious or spiritual mindsets.

Alan Watts wrote more than 50 years ago that without mysticism Christianity would devolve into a mindless fundamentalism.

He was right.

Read both books if you date. The devil is not in the details nor will note-taking angels report you to that judgmental god that is not real.

But you might come out of the experience more the wiser.