Recently, Business Insider editor, MSNBC contributor, and public-radio personality Josh Barro called the left’s war on American culture “annoying.” He explained that “Liberals have supplanted conservatives as moralizing busybodies.” New York Magazine‘s Jonathan Chait even tweeted support of Barro’s “sensible thoughts,” calling out the Democrats’ supposedly new-found misadventure of “liberal sanctimony.”
Funny that in all his talk condemning such “moralizing,” neo-liberal Barro went on to further pontificate about the Dems suffering “from a cultural disconnect from non-college-educated voters who have abandoned the party in droves.” But not to worry, the left’s “substantial inroads with upscale suburban voters have been more than offset by the loss of voters down the income spectrum, most of whom did not finish college.”
Translation: If I pepper my blue-blood insults with enough of an overall empathic tone, I can probably admit that “following all the [politically correct] rules has become exhausting,” while also simultaneously telling the poor and stupid masses how poor and stupid they are. Bless his heart, this New England son really tried, but unfortunately, moralizing is all this atheist, Russell-Moore-loving, Harvard “educated,” media elite really has to offer.
In fact, moralizing is and always has been the left’s religion. It’s the “puritanical progressives,” as I refer to them, who are constantly intruding into our lives through never-ending regulations, laws, educational indoctrination, corporate edicts, hive-mind social pressures, and media proselytizing. It’s a devilish scheme in which the pietistic purveyors of “social justice” have concocted a scenario that leaves no room for discussion, logic, or science.
And if you disagree with their flawless emotional creeds and ever-changing but always-correct edicts, well, you’re either an idiot, a hateful troublemaker, or you must just want people to die. That’s why these self-proclaimed Solomons feel no compunction in silencing, discrediting, maligning, bullying, punching, pepper-spraying, or perhaps even killing dissenters.
It’s this diabolical concoction of socialist politics mixed with religious fervor that has become the dominant “cultural power” and is even “more motivating than public policy,” to borrow Barro’s own words. It’s my contention that this holier-than-thou mindset is borne of New England Puritanism and has been a thorn in the side of liberty and self-determination ever since the Pilgrims came to America. So, let’s take a gander at history, shall we?
The Church of England, also called the Anglican Church, was established when King Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church in 1534 in order to divorce his wife on grounds that she didn’t give him a male heir. Henry’s defiance of the Pope, who had denied him a divorce request, and break with Rome made this new state-run Church of England Protestant by definition, yet it still shared many liturgical practices with Catholicism. Thus, Anglicanism was (and still is) considered “high church.”
Enter in lawyer-turned-theologian John Calvin. His seminal writing – “Institutes of the Christian Religion” (first published in 1536) – challenged Catholic Church government and promoted divergent dogma, such as justification by faith alone and Sola Scriptura, and an abandonment of Church sacraments, rituals, and traditions.
