Bookworm Room

Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.

[VIDEO] Michael Medved tells the real story of the Pilgrims

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If you’ve been paying attention to Progressive tales about the Pilgrims, you won’t be surprised to learn that just about everything they tell you is wrong.

Pilgrims landingI’m reasonably well-versed in American history because I had the good fortune to learn it before the Left really got its tentacles into the subject. Still, mine is a broad, cursory knowledge, with a few misconceptions. They aren’t the hate-filled misconceptions that pass for education now, but they’re still wrong. For example, I thought that the Pilgrims were escaping persecution in both England and Holland. It turns out that wasn’t the case.

With Thanksgiving swiftly arriving, Michael Medved is here to fill in the details and get the facts right:

If you’re interested in the true story of Thanksgiving, I highly recommend Rush Limbaugh’s annual Thanksgiving narration. Relying on original source material, he explains that the Pilgrim’s almost didn’t survive to have a first Thanksgiving. Why not? Because their original approach was pure socialism — and a pure failure. [Read more…]

Religion, Rights, and Revolution (Part 1)

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e-pilgrims-landingSometimes we’re lucky to end up with a super brilliant friend who has the gift of making complex information accessible (sort of like Thomas Sowell). My brilliant friend is Wolf Howling, who has spent the last few years delving deeply into the American Revolution and its causes. He wrote here before about the Writs of Assistance that helped drive the Revolution. Today, he’s shared with me an essay he wrote about how inextricably intertwined religion and revolution were in 18th Century North America:

While the Writs of Assistance controversy may have lit the fuse for the Revolution in 1756, it was on January 30, 1750, that the soil in which the Revolution would grow was first tilled. On that day, a young Congregationalist minister, Jonathan Mayhew, but three years out of Harvard Divinity School, would take to the pulpit at Boston’s Old West Church and, for his sermon, read from a document he had labored upon for several months, A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers.

In the sermon, Mayhew was responding to the fact that Anglican clergy in Britain were working to rehabilitate and glorify King Charles I, the tyrannical and hapless King who was beheaded on January 30, 1649 during England’s Civil War. Given that the English Civil War ended up pitting mostly Puritans (by 1750, known as Congregationalists) and Presbyterians (Dissenters, as they were then called collectively) on one side and against a largely Anglican force on the King’s side, it is not surprising that any attempt to rehabilitate Charles and demonize those who fought against him would draw a heated response from a Congregationalist Minister.

Little marked for whatever reason today – perhaps because of the left’s efforts to rewrite our Revolution as wholly secular – the sermon, which Mayhew had printed and distributed throughout the colonies and Britain, was at the time a very influential document. In his discourse, Rev. Mayhew explained that religion justified resisting a tyrant generally and Charles I specifically. Moreover, he argued that British liberties sprang forth from the natural rights God had bestowed on man, so that fighting to protect those rights from a sovereign’s encroachment was more than a secular option, it was a religious obligation. Mayhew, in one of his sermons, in 1750, also was the first on American soil to utter the words “no taxation without representation.”

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