[453] St. Gregory of Nyssa, who is regarded as a Church Father, was an ardent anti-Semite. His opposition to slavery was likely partly motivated by his concern about Jews owning Christian slaves at a time when Jewish enslavement of Christians was a major issue See Kevin MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2004; orig. published: Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), Ch. 3, passim. Gregory wrote that “[Jews are] murderers of the Lord, assassins of the prophets, rebels against God, God haters, ... advocates of the devil, race of vipers, slanderers, calumniators, dark-minded people, leaven of the Pharisees, Sanhedrin of demons, sinners, wicked men, stoners, and haters of righteousness.”
[454] Siedentop, 121.
[455] James C. Russell, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity: A Sociobiological Approach to Religious Transformation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
[456] Ibid., 39.
[457] Ibid.
[458] Ibid., 205.
[459] Ibid., 200.
[460] Ibid., 204.
[461] Ibid., 213, 212.
[462] Ibid., 207.
[463] Siedentop, Inventing the Individual, 241.
[464] Ibid.
[465] Ibid., 244.
[466] Ibid., 152.
[467] Ibid., 258.
[468] Ibid., 193.
[469] Russell, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, 120.
[470] Barbara Hanawalt, The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Dominique Barthelemy, “Kinship,” in Philippe Aries and Georges Duby (eds.), A History of Private Life, Vol. II: Revelations of the Medieval World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
[471] From an evolutionary perspective, marrying close relatives leads to inbreeding depression and an increased risk for genetic diseases caused by recessive genes. Many cultures allow first-cousin marriage and a few, such as traditional Judaism, allow uncle-niece marriage. As discussed here, Western societies tend to be more exogamous than Near Eastern societies.
[472] C. B. Bouchard, “Consanguinity and Noble Marriages in the Tenth and Eleventh Century,” Speculum 56 (1981): 268–287.
[473] John Goody, J. The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 145; one effect of this policy, emphasized by Goody, was that families were often left without direct heirs and left their property to the Church.
[474] Karl E. Leyser, Rule and Conflict in Early Medieval Society (London: Edward Arnold, Ltd., 1979), 50.
[475] John T. Noonan, “Power to Choose,” Viator 4 (1973): 419–434, 430.
[476] MacFarlane, Marriage and Love in England.
[477] Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities: Their Origin and the Revival of Trade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1925, 1952, 1980), 112.
[478] Ibid., 116.
[479] Siedentop, Inventing the Individual, 276.
[480] Ricardo Duchesne, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2011), 250.
[481] Siedentop, Inventing the Individual, 113.
[482] Ibid.
[483] Siedentop, Inventing the Individual, 301.
[484] Ibid., 303.
[485] Ibid., 306.
[486] Ibid., 307.
[487] Ibid., 316.
[488] Ibid., 331.
[489] Ibid., 335.
[490] Thomas Babington Macaulay, History of England from the Accession of James II, Vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1848); unpaginated.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1468/1468-h/1468-h.htm
Macaulay, who, as a highly partisan Whig historian, certainly cannot be accused of bias in favor of the Church, does not ignore what he regards as positive Christian cultural influences. The period after the Norman invasion is widely seen by historians as a period in which the English were dominated by an alien, oppressive Norman elite. Macaulay credits the Church with defending the natives against the Norman oppression on the basis of the Christian moral universalism, albeit fairly ineffectually:
It is true that, shortly after the battle of Hastings, Saxon prelates and abbots were violently deposed, and that ecclesiastical adventurers from the Continent were intruded by hundreds into lucrative benefices. Yet even then pious divines of Norman blood raised their voices against such a violation of the constitution of the Church, refused to accept mitres from the hands of William, and charged him, on the peril of his soul, not to forget that the vanquished islanders were his fellow Christians. The first protector whom the English found among the dominant caste was Archbishop Anselm. …
How great a part the Roman Catholic ecclesiastics subsequently had in the abolition of villenage we learn from the unexceptionable testimony of Sir Thomas Smith, one of the ablest Protestant counsellors of Elizabeth. When the dying slaveholder asked for the last sacraments, his spiritual attendants regularly adjured him, as he loved his soul, to emancipate his brethren for whom Christ had died. So successfully had the Church used her formidable machinery that, before the Reformation came, she had enfranchised almost all the bondmen in the kingdom except her own, who, to do her justice, seem to have been very tenderly treated.
Ibid., my emphasis.
[491] MacDonald, “Mechanisms of Sexual Egalitarianism in Western Europe.”
[492] Ibid.
[493] Duchesne, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization.
[494] See Ch. 4; see also Michael Mitterauer, Why Europe? The Medieval Origins of Its Special Path, trans. Gerald Chapple (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010; orig. German edition, 2003), 62.
[495] “Harold Bluetooth,” Catholic Encyclopedia.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07141b.htm
[496] “Christianization of Scandinavia,” Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianization_of_Scandinavia
[497] Kevin MacDonald, “Socialization for Ingroup Identity among Assyrians in the United States.” Paper presented at a symposium on socialization for ingroup identity at the meetings of the International Society for Human Ethology, Ghent Belgium (July 29, 2004).
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308059453
[498] Jonathan Schulz et al. present data attempting to show that the Church’s rules on incest were the decisive force in establishing European individualism. This view cannot explain individualist family patterns being greater in Scandinavia which was Christianized much later than other areas of Western Europe, nor can it explain the north-south cline in family patterns in France and, perhaps, northern versus southern Italy, although the complex political history of the latter region, including Byzantine conquest, implies a shorter period of influence for the Western Church.
Jonathan Schulz, Duman Bahrami-Rad, Jonathan Beauchamp, and Joseph Henrich, “The Origins of WEIRD Psychology” (unpublished manuscript, Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, 2018).
[499] Michael Mitterauer also emphasizes the special role of the imperial Church in establishing Western uniqueness; see Mitterauer, Why Europe?
[500] Siedentop, Inventing the Individual, 146.
[501] MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents, Ch. 3.
[502] Ibid., Ch. 4.
[503] Cohen, The Friars and the Jews, 97.
[504] Inner quote from Ibid., 13.
[505] Entire quote from MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents, 116.
[506] Quoted in Chazan, Medieval Jewry in Northern France, 103.
[507] G. W. Bernard, “The Dissolution of the Monasteries,” History 96 (October, 2011): 390–409.
[508] Population genetic research does not support genetic differences within central and southern England, although there are differences between these areas and other areas in the U.K.. The authors suggest that this could be the result of recent movement within this area, and therefore consistent with genetic gradients between, e.g., East Anglia and other areas of central and southern England in the seventeenth century. The continental European groups
that contributed most to British ancestry were west Germany, northwestern France, and Belgium, with Saxons represented at between 10–40 percent of the population of central and southern England and others (including the Danes) being indistinguishable—again perhaps suggesting recent migration within the area.
Stephen Leslie et al., “Fine Scale Genetic Structure of the British Population,” Nature 519, no. 7543 (March 19, 2015): 309–314.
[509] Kevin Phillips, The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics and the Triumph of Anglo-America (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 26.
[510] Ibid., 27.
[511] See Chs. 3 and 4.
[512] David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
[513] Kevin MacDonald, “Human General Intelligence as a Domain General Psychological Adaptation,” in Joseph P. Kush (ed.), Intelligence Quotient: Testing, Role of Genetics and the Environment and Social Outcomes (Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 2013): 35–54.
[514] Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral, 96.
[515] See section of Ch. 5 labelled “Implicit and Explicit Processing: How Ideology Motivates Behavior” which discusses ideology from an evolutionary perspective, with a focus on the motivational consequences of Christian religious ideology.
[516] G. W. Bernard, “The Dissolution of the Monasteries,” History 96 (October, 2011): 390–409.
[517] Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral, 107.
[518] John T. McNeill, The History and Character of Calvinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 100.
[519] David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 25.
[520] Ibid., 71.
[521] Ibid., 27.
[522] Ibid., 17.
[523] Alden T. Vaughn, The Puritan Tradition in America, 1620–1730, revised ed. (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1997), xv.
[524] Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 70, 81.
[525] Kevin P. Phillips, The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 27.
[526] Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 49.
[527] Ibid., 38.
[528] Ibid., 26.
[529] Phillips, The Cousins’ Wars, 27.
[530] Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 133.
[531] Vaughn, The Puritan Tradition in America, 1620–1730, xiv.
[532] In Ibid., 248.
[533] Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 97.
[534] Vaughn, The Puritan Tradition in America, 1620–1730, xiii.
[535] Thomas Tombs, The English and Their History (London: Penguin Books, 2015; originally published: London: Allen Lane, 2014), 236.
[536] Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 202.
[537] Vaughn, The Puritan Tradition in America, 1620–1730, 179.
[538] In Ibid., 143–144; emphasis in original.
[539] In Ibid., 174–175.
[540] Ibid., 93.
[541] Ibid., 89.
[542] In Ibid., 245.
[543] Ibid., 261–262.
[544] In Ibid., 268.
[545] Ibid., 271.
[546] In Ibid., 194.
[547] In Ibid., 199.
[548] Ibid., 297.
[549] See W. P. Allen, “Theodore Mommsen.” The North American Review 111, no. 229 (1870): 445–465, 457.
www.jstor.org/stable/25109578
[550] Vaughn, The Puritan Tradition in America, 1620–1730, 298.
[551] Ibid., 298.
[552] François Guizot, Histoire de la Civilisation en Europe dequis la chute de l’Empire roman jusque’à la Révolution française (Paris: Didier, 1847), 344; quoted in Tombs, The English and Their History, 465.
[553] Tombs, The English and Their History, 155.
[554] Ibid., 111.
[555] Fraser, The WASP Question, 113.
[556] Ibid., 117,
[557] Tombs, The English and Their History, 225.
[558] Ibid., 247; inner quote from Cromwell.
[559] Fraser, The WASP Question, 122.
[560] Ibid., 156; see also Tombs, The English and Their History, 366–367.
[561] Fraser, The WASP Question, 27.
[562] Ibid., 254.
[563] Ibid., 294–295.
[564] Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 357.
[565] Vaughn, The Puritan Tradition in America, 1620–1730, 20.
[566] Phillips, The Cousins’ Wars, 477.
[567] Ibid., 556.
[568] Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1968), 199.
[569] Mark Twain commented early in the twentieth century in notes for a projected essay: “[Robber Baron Jay] Gould Followed CIVIL WAR & Cal. [i.e., California] sudden-riches disease with a worse one… by swindling and buying courts.” Quoted in Tuveson, Ibid., 208.
[570] Ibid., 209.
[571] Ibid., 212.
[572] Philip F. Gura, American Transcendentalism: A History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007).
[573] Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 1998; orig. published: Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), Ch. 3.
[574] Gura, American Transcendentalism, 121.
[575] Ibid., 84.
[576] Ibid., 18.
[577] Quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Ibid., 15.
[578] Ibid., 266.
[579] Quoted in Ibid., 138–139.
[580] Quoted in Ibid., 139.
[581] Ibid., 80.
[582] Ibid., 143.
[583] Ibid., 156.
[584] Ibid., 85.
[585] Ibid.
[586] Quoted in Ibid., 103.
[587] Ibid., 143.
[588] Quoted in Ibid., 219.
[589] “Theodore Parker,” Dictionary of Unitarian & Universalist Biography.
http://uudb.org/articles/theodoreparker.html
[590] In Tuveson, Redeemer Nation, 153.
[591] Gura, American Transcendentalism, 228.
[592] Gura, American Transcendentalism, 137.
[593] In Ibid., 216.
[594] Ibid., 245.
[595] Ibid., 246.
[596] In Ibid., 260.
[597] In Ibid., 265.
[598] M. E. Bradford, “Dividing the House: The Gnosticism of Lincoln’s Political Rhetoric,” Modern Age (Winter, 1979): 10–24, 13.
[599] Tuveson, Redeemer Nation, 139.
[600] Bradford, “Dividing the House,” 17–18.
[601] Lincoln, quoted in Bradford, Ibid., 19.
[602] Ibid., 53.
[603] Ibid., 67.
[604] Ibid., 68
[605] Gura, American Transcendentalism, 271.
[606] In Ibid., 302.
[607] In Ibid.
[608] In Ibid., 304–305.
[609] Quoted in Fraser, The WASP Question, 299.
[610] Kevin MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (Bloomington, Ind.: Firstbooks, 2004; orig. published: Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), Ch. 5.
[611] Josiah Strong, The New Era, or the Coming Kingdom (New York: The Baker & Taylor Co.,1893), 354,
Strong was a prominent Protestant thinker. His message in The New Era was that a revival of Christianity was necessary to deal with the problems of the cities and the working classes (Tuveson, Redeemer Nation, 137).
This reflects the diminished optimism characteristic of the end of the nineteenth century resulting from concern over immigration, culminating in the immigration restriction law of 1924. This is discussed below in the section titled “The Period of Ethnic Defense, 1880–1965.”
[612] Eric P. Kaufmann, The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 18.
[613] Ibid., 17–18; emphasis in original.
Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition Page 46