The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America

Summary

Morning Wire Podcast Summary: "The Pilgrim Legacy: From the Mayflower to Modern America"

Release Date: November 28, 2024

Host: Georgia Howe
Guest: Dr. Miles Smith, Professor of History, Hillsdale College
Presented by: Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief, John Bickley

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Introduction

In this special Thanksgiving episode of Morning Wire, host Georgia Howe engages in a comprehensive discussion with Hillsdale College history professor Dr. Miles Smith about the enduring legacy of the Pilgrims and their influence on modern American culture. The episode delves into the Pilgrims' societal formation, their religious impact, and the evolving landscape of religiosity in the United States.

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Composition of the Mayflower Travelers

Dr. Smith provides an in-depth look at the diverse group aboard the Mayflower, clarifying that only 30-40% were the devout Pilgrims.

Dr. Smith [00:45]: "It's a Motley Crue. About 30 to 40% are the group of people we call the Pilgrims. They're dissident English Protestants... the rest are what you might think of as working class, rough sort of working people."

The remaining passengers, derogatorily referred to by Parliament as "human offal," lacked the cultural and religious uniformity of the Pilgrims, creating an eclectic mix of individuals with minimal commonalities.

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Formation of Society: The Mayflower Compact

Upon arrival, the diverse group faced the challenge of establishing a cohesive society in the unknown New World. Dr. Smith explains how they overcame potential fragmentation by drafting the Mayflower Compact.

Dr. Smith [03:02]: "They draw up a civil charter, a social and civil charter, and that's what we call the Mayflower Compact... covenant with each other under God to at least create some sort of stable society."

This compact served as the foundational governance document, merging religious and civil authority to maintain order and unity among the settlers.

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Religious Influence and Cultural Assimilation

The Pilgrims, being the dominant group, influenced the cultural and religious practices of the other passengers. Dr. Smith notes that the non-pilgrim members often adopted religious behaviors to align with the leadership, despite their initial lack of enthusiasm.

Dr. Smith [04:16]: "It's more the former people who might not be particularly pious or interested in religion. They decide... I need to at least seem religious."

This dynamic laid the groundwork for New England's stringent religious environment, where church attendance was mandatory and deviations were penalized.

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Life During the Voyage

The perilous journey across the North Atlantic aboard the Mayflower is highlighted as a testament to the settlers' determination despite the inherent dangers.

Dr. Smith [05:01]: "It's very dangerous... waves easily 35 to 40ft. The Mayflower is not much longer than 110, 120ft, that's a heck of a wild ride."

Despite the risks, the Pilgrims maintained a sense of mission, focusing on their divine purpose rather than succumbing to fear.

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Cultural Legacy of the Pilgrims

Dr. Smith explores how the Pilgrims' establishment of a religious-centric governance influenced the expansion of Christianity in the United States, particularly in New England.

Dr. Smith [06:43]: "They're not afraid to use social and civil power to enforce religiosity. So a church going is sort of mandatory."

This enforcement led to New England having one of the largest spaces for public Christianity until the mid-19th century, contrasting with the later religious landscape of the American South.

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Secularization and Regional Differences

The episode discusses the gradual secularization of New England, influenced by events like the Salem Witch Trials, and the demographic shifts that diminished the Pilgrims' strict religious control.

Dr. Smith [09:46]: "It's one of the significant factors. Another is the demographic change with people who aren't from East Anglia moving to New England."

This shift contributed to New England becoming more conformist yet less religiously uniform, paving the way for diverse religious expressions and the eventual rise of secular governance.

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Modern Trends in Religiosity

Addressing contemporary religious trends, Dr. Smith acknowledges a resurgence of religiosity among younger generations, particularly young men, contrasting with previous decades of secular decline.

Dr. Smith [16:14]: "Zoomers... are more interested in religion than my generation... they recognize there's a sort of emptiness to a lot of specifically secularist claims about life."

He attributes this renewed interest to a search for meaning and the appeal of Christianity's acknowledgment of reality and beauty, suggesting that this trend may continue to shape America's religious landscape.

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Conclusion

Dr. Miles Smith's insights illuminate the profound and lasting influence of the Pilgrims on American society, from the foundational governance structures to the complex interplay of religion and culture. The episode underscores the Pilgrims' role in shaping New England's historical and modern identity, while also highlighting ongoing shifts in America's religious dynamics.

Dr. Smith [18:11]: "There's some trend that some historian's gonna write a book about at some point."

As Thanksgiving approaches, Morning Wire offers a reflective exploration of historical legacies and their relevance to contemporary societal trends.

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Notable Quotes:

• Dr. Smith [03:02]: "They draw up a civil charter, a social and civil charter, and that's what we call the Mayflower Compact... covenant with each other under God to at least create some sort of stable society."

• Dr. Smith [05:01]: "It's very dangerous... waves easily 35 to 40ft. The Mayflower is not much longer than 110, 120ft, that's a heck of a wild ride."

• Dr. Smith [06:43]: "They're not afraid to use social and civil power to enforce religiosity. So a church going is sort of mandatory."

• Dr. Smith [16:14]: "Zoomers... are more interested in religion than my generation... they recognize there's a sort of emptiness to a lot of specifically secularist claims about life."

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For those interested in further exploring the history of Thanksgiving, Morning Wire links to last year's popular episode discussing the true origins of the holiday in the show description.

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Happy Thanksgiving from the Morning Wire Team!

Transcript

[A]

Last Thanksgiving we discussed the true history of the holiday and the legacy of the Pilgrims can still be felt to this day.

[B]

In this episode, we speak to a Hillsdale College professor about the Pilgrims long term impact, how it ties into the modern culture wars and the future of religiosity in the United States. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire editor in chief John BICKLEY. It's Thursday, November 28th. Happy Thanksgiving. And this is Morning Wire. Here to discuss the Pilgrims and their long and interesting influence on American culture is Hillsdale College professor of history, Miles Smith. Dr. Smith, thanks so much for coming on.

[A]

Oh, it was my pleasure.

[B]

So listeners may recall last year we brought on a Plymouth plantation historian to talk about the true story of the first Thanksgiving. And that was a fan favorite episode, which we're going to link to in the description. But this year I want to talk about the Pilgrim's cultural legacy in America. So first off, who were the Mayflower travelers? That group included more than just Pilgrims. How did that group come together and who did it include?

[A]

Well, it's a Motley Crue. About 30 to 40% are the group of people we call the Pilgrims. They're dissident English Protestants. They were called the Brownest in England. They were followers of a guy named Brown. And they're convinced they have to actually completely separate from the Church of England. They're not even interested in reforming it. They've got to get out of England. And so they're kind of seen as cranks. Interestingly enough, they go to the Netherlands first. Then they decide, oh, they Holland's maybe even not as holy enough for them. So they sort of set out to find a place where they can truly build what they think is a godly commonwealth. And so they charter a wine ship. Interestingly enough, the Mayflower had been a wine ship. And this was sort of controversial. The Puritans were sort of very pious people who had some thoughts, well, maybe we shouldn't drink alcohol. Some of them did, by the way. So there was sort of a controversy even on what they were charting. So they charter a wine ship and they go to then what was Virginia. All of the east coast was considered Virginia. And so their voyage takes them somewhere in the order of 40 to 50 days. And they're crossing the North Atlantic. And it's pretty clear that the Pilgrims are not sure about the rest of the passengers, who are kind of what you might think of working class, rough sort of working people. Parliament called the rest of the passengers human offal o f f a l. It Means human poop. And so there's not a lot of cultural commonality with the Pilgrims and the rest of the people on the Mayflower. So it's a pretty eclectic crowd who's traveling across the ocean at that point.

[B]

So when they arrived, did they create a society altogether, or did they split off and the Pilgrims made their own plantation and the offals fended for themselves?

[A]

Yeah, it's a good question. So actually, there's sort of a. There's sort of a proposition. Hey, we've all got to learn to get along, because we're going to the backside of the planet. We have no idea what's out there. We've got to sort of at least have some sort of organizing principle. And so what they do is they kind of draw up a civil charter, a social and civil charter, and that's what we call the Mayflower Compact. And they basically say, okay, this is how we're going to run the government. No one in the early 17th century would have conceived of an idea of having secular government. They all think that government's going to be tied to religion. And so everyone's relatively comfortable with the idea, hey, we're going to covenant with each other under God to at least create some sort of stable society. Here in what they think is Northern Virginia, we call it New England, they would have thought of themselves as in Northern Virginia.

[B]

Now when they got there. Historically, we think of the Pilgrims as being a very pious group, but if only 30% were actually part of that cohort, did the. I don't want to keep calling them awfuls, but did the other people absorb some of their ways and mannerisms, or did the Pilgrims moderate to accommodate them?

[A]

So it's probably more the former. I mean, the people who aren't particularly religious and pious, they understand, well, hey, the Pilgrims are the guys with the guns. They're the guys with the ability to control what becomes the New England Commonwealth, the actual state apparatus in New England. So it's more the former people who might not be particularly pious or interested in religion. They decide, you know what, in order to keep on the good side of the people who are kind of running everything, I need to at least seem religious. So it's much more. The former people sort of begin to sort of. They fake it till they make it, if you want to think of it that way.

[B]

Now, I want to go back to life on the ships. This is 40 or 50 days in the North Atlantic. Was that considered safe at that time, or were they taking their lives and their hands doing this?

[A]

No, it's very dangerous. You know, the North Atlantic isn't a regular sort of through fair at that point. There's no cities to trade with in the New World. So it's only sort of recently begun to be regularly traveled at the beginning of the 17th century. So it is dangerous. There's no guarantee you're even going to make it to the New World. You have, you know, sometimes with, with storms in North Atlantic, you have waves easily 35 to 40ft. Considering the fact that the Mayflower is not much longer than 110, 120ft, that's a heck of a wild ride. So they do know it's dangerous. They do think that it's dangerous. They are aware of that, but they're all pretty convinced, at least the leadership, that they're supposed to do it. And so for the writings we have, we don't have this kind of raw terror on the ship. There's sort of a sense of this is our mission, this is our job. And so because the pilgrims form the core, the social core of the Mayflower travelers, it doesn't really become, you know, a sort of terror stricken, anxious journey. It is, but that's not sort of the tell offs of the journey, at least in the writings.

[B]

Now I want to get to some of their cultural impact. So you talked about how some of the maybe less religious members of this community absorbed some of the cultural customs of the pilgrims. How did this early Christian commune, for lack of a better word, I guess it was a commune.

[A]

Yeah, that's a good way to think of it.

[B]

How did that first, you know, Christian culture impact the subsequent expansion of Christianity in the United States? Because we think of the United States of having, you know, maybe a slightly culturally different brand of Christianity than some other places.

[A]

Yeah, so they would have been downstream from English Calvinists. And so for them, they're not afraid to use social and civil power to enforce religiosity. So a church going is sort of mandatory. Hey, we need you to show up for church. You have to show up for church. They fine people for deviant behaviors. And so even if you're not enthusiastic about piety just kind of in your heart in order to sort of get by, you're going to become more enthusiastic whether you sort of feel it or not. So the legacy they leave is that New England always, at least until the middle of the 19th century, had sort of the biggest space for public Christianity. It's interesting, we tend to think of the south as more religious at the beginning of the United States and really, throughout the history of the United States. That's a, that's a relatively new development. New England was more religious because New England was sort of unafraid to use social and civil power to make people religious. And so you have that legacy that's kind of cooked into New England and in a way that isn't in what we would think of as the south and the colonies that are founded from Virginia.

[B]

Now you mentioned that people had to attend church every single Sunday to be part of the society. That itself has certain social impact. So for example, it limits the distance you can live from the church. You can't really travel for extended periods. So it has some trickle down effects on society just beyond the religiosity and it really affects the social cohesion. When did that rule go by the wayside and what were the effects of that?

[A]

It's in the 18th century. I mean, one of the interesting things you bring up space, and it's a really good observation, most of the people on the Mayflower are from a part of England called East Anglia. That's the little nub of England that sticks out into the North Sea towards Norway. That was the part of England that had township governance. That was the type of England you were most likely to be a Congregationalist in. So they came with a kind of preconceived notion of even how a town should be laid out, laid out with a sort of a Congregationalist church in the middle of it. So it means that, guess what, you kind of live in a town around that church. Township governance is something we get from their East Anglian dispositions. And so this is something that they kind of just dispositionally replicate when they get to New England. So the church is the center of civil life. The Massachusetts General Court, what will become the colonial government is a civil and a religious court. It's composed of ministers, many of whom sort of comprise the government of Massachusetts. At the very beginning of the 18th century, you have a lot of the rules change because Boston, Salem, those towns, they get rid of their more authoritarian past. The quote unquote Salem witch trials basically orient people away from using the state to necessarily prosecute things like heresy. And slowly but surely in the eight, in the beginning of the 18th century, you have major changes to how the government treats the relationship between the individual and church, for example.

[B]

So for 200 years, though, people were expected to attend their local township church and they would get a fine if they didn't show up.

[A]

Yeah, for a good century and change. Yeah. So for well over 100 years, I.

[B]

Didn'T realize that the Salem witch trials were such a significant factor in secularizing America. I mean, culturally, of course, everyone knows about them, but that's a very significant downstream effect.

[A]

It's one of the signing factors. Another one is just you have a lot more people in New England by the beginning of the 18th century. And you have people who aren't really from East Anglia. They don't have any history with being a pilgrim or being a Puritan. So you've got folks who might be just a regular Anglican coming and moving to Boston. And they don't want to go to a Congregationalist church. You have Scottish people, for example, moving to New England. And the Scots didn't like the Congregationalists. Cause they remember what Cromwell had done to Scotland. When the First Presbyterian Church is founded in Boston in 6092, the congregational say, there's a Church of Satan among us. So there's a real sort of sense that, hey, we don't have this kind of pure pilgrim Puritan commonwealth anymore. And so everyone sort of recognizes, well, we can't create that via the state either. So that's sort of just. Even demographic change leads to some of these subtle changes in laws.

[B]

Now, what was the cultural effect of that? I'm thinking if you had a society where everyone had to show up at a certain place to do a cultural activity or a religious activity together, and then suddenly you don't have to, I imagine that would exponentially create a more individualistic society. What was the effect of that?

[A]

That's a great, great question. You would tend to think that it would sort of create a relatively individualistic society, but the legacy of it so strong that even today, New England tends to be more kind of conformist than other parts of the country. It tends to vote the same way. People tend to sort of think the same way. You don't even have the same sort of diversity of thought in the region in the 18th century, in the 19th century, the 20th, or the 21st that you do in other places. I'll give you a good example. In Virginia, you have a pretty committed secularist like Thomas Jefferson, and a pretty devout religious, almost sort of establishmentarian guy like Patrick Henry. You don't have that many committed secularists in New England in the 18th through 19th centuries. Most everybody's very religious now. What changes is the type of religion you have the development of Unitarianism. But most everybody thinks of religion as kind of being this thing that needs to have the social and civil force of even government behind it. And so it's sort Of a question of which religion is the government going to enforce, not whether. And that's why you can see the legacy of that in New England today when it comes to legislation, vis a vis, morality, church, all of that.

[B]

You know, it's very interesting. I'm actually from Massachusetts, and most Massachusetts people will remember a time when you could only buy alcohol at the liquor store. You needed a license just to go into the store. And the hours were very restricted. Closed before noon, closed on Sundays. I think they may still be closed on holidays. And I was actually very scandalized when I went to school out of state in Colorado, and I saw you could buy alcohol in the grocery store. So there were just some peculiar things about the Northeast that lasted, I think, much longer than most people realize. So how did we go from the point of having this religiosity in the Northeast to the center of gravity of religiosity now being the Southeast?

[A]

Yeah, I mean, I think the mass migration into the Sun Belt is something we're not even sure what to think about now. You know, I was born. North Carolina has about six and a half million people, and it has 11 million people now. I live in Michigan. When I was born, Michigan had just under 10 million people in it. And today, 40 years later, it has just under 10 million people in it. New England's relatively stable too. It's not growing quite as fast as the south is. And so I don't even know if we've got enough information, if we've seen the legacy of this growth long enough to know. Why do people come? You know, for a lot of people, I always heard it's the weather or the taxes are lower, something like that. I don't know. It's a really good question. I wonder if there's sort of these broader cultural differences. I mean, I know that people consider New England to be somewhat insular. It's a hard place to sort of break into. I think maybe the Boston area is an exception to that. But I was just in Connecticut. I give you an anecdote. I was in Connecticut this summer. That was in Enfield, Connecticut, and I'm from North Carolina. I love chick fil a. It's just, you know, I'm a southerner, and so I was like, oh, there's a chick fil a, so I'll stop in a chick fil a. And the first thing I noticed is it was very quiet. People don't talk to each other quite as much. There's not the same type of public conversation. The south is a pretty loud Place. I studied abroad in Italy, and I never was that alien because I was like, oh, well, the South's kind of loud. Italy's kind of loud. That was so different than in the Chick Fil a in New England I went to. It was quieter. People don't necessarily look at each other as much. It was just very clear to me that, like, this is a different type of place than the one I grew up in. Maybe insulars, not the best term, but something was different.

[B]

More reserved. Yeah.

[A]

Yeah, for sure.

[B]

So, last question. Some of your specialty. It sounds like you watch religious trends, and so no doubt you've kind of kept tabs on the past, say, 10 years. The rise of the religious nuns is sometimes how it's phrased. People who say they are not any religion, so not necessarily atheist, but certainly not weekly church attenders. However, Megan Basham, one of my colleagues, has reported for us recently that that trend may be slowing, maybe crested around 2020. And in very recent years, the past, I would say, two years, I've seen some headlines and articles about the rise of religiosity among young people, specifically young men. I saw one about traditional Catholicism in New York City having a mini boomlet. And anecdotally, I've heard that the Presbyterian Church has had big growth on college campuses, especially with young men. Is this a trend that you have kept an eye on and something that you expect to see more of?

[A]

Yeah, it's definitely real. I teach at a religious college, and faith life of our students is very vibrant. I think that when I talk to them, they're aware that this is something that is typifying their generation. The zoomers, I guess they are, are more interested in religion than my generation, which I guess I'm an elder millennial or Gen X. And I think it's because they sort of recognize there's a sort of emptiness to a lot of specifically secularist claims about life. I think that it seemed to them to be pretty nihilistic. And I think nihilism isn't beautiful. Right? Like, it's purposeless. And I think zoomers, at least those are sort of interesting conservative things, even if they're not religious per se at first. I think thinking about nature and thinking about things that are old and beautiful has led them to say, okay, what if Christianity is actually true? Because it seems old and kind of beautiful too. A friend of mine, James Wood, he's a professor at Redeemer University in Canada, he wrote an article for First Things, sort of saying a lot of people who would never darken the door of a church, are becoming interested in church because of things like conservatives talking about nature, conservatives talking about God, conservatives talking about beauty. These aren't people who are churched people. A lot of them have never darkened the door of a religious institution in their life. But they're sort of thinking about Christianity because Christianity respects reality, and people like reality. They like what's good about reality, embodiment, all of those things. So I think it's real. I think Megan is onto something, and she's identifying a trend that I think a lot of people are sort of looking at and wanting to get more answers about, because it's real and it's happening. And if you're on social media at all or just on a college campus, you can tell that there's. There's something happening. It's maybe too early to tell exactly what that is, but you're right. There's some trend that some historian's gonna write a book about at some point. So.

[B]

All right. Well, Miles, thank you so much for making time for us today.

[A]

Thank you, Georgia.

[B]

That was Hillsdale College professor Miles Smith, and this has been a special Thanksgiving episode of Morning Wire. And happy Thanksgiving from all of us on the team. And if you're interested, you can visit the show description for a link to last year's fan favorite interview, which was about the true history of Thanksgiving.