> >From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
> >
> >I've often been struck by how Catholics create serious universities and
> >important hospitals - what comparable things, aside from Bible colleges,
do
> >American Protestants create?
>
> [How about Harvard? It's no Notre Dame, but stilll ...]
>
> Harvard's foundation in 1636 came in the form of an act of the colony's
> Great and General Court. By all accounts the chief impetus was to allow
the
> training of home-grown clergy so the Puritan colony would not need to rely
> on immigrating graduates of England's Oxford and Cambridge universities
for
> well-educated pastors, "dreading," as a 1643 brochure put it, "to leave an
> illiterate Ministry to the Churches." In its first year, seven of the
> original nine students left to fight in the English Civil War.
>
> Harvard was also founded as a school to educate American Indians in order
to
> train them as ministers among their tribes. Harvard's Charter of 1650
calls
> for "the education of the English and Indian youth of this Country in
> knowledge and godliness".
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_University
European Protestantism is a different animal than the evangelical, anti-intellectual and anti-institutional variety that infested this side of the pond (cf. Richard Hofstadter, _Anti-intellectualism in the American life_). Hofstadter goes as afar as arguing that normally "institutionalist" Catholics became infested with anti-institutionalism and anti-intellectualism on this side of the pond.
The reason, Hofstadter argues, is the social structure of the colonies, which consisted mainly of illiterate and un-churched masses (so much for the myth of the role of religion in founding this society). To grab the attention of this un-churched and non-religious folk and to "bring them back to religion", various religious entrepreneurs had to speak the language that was appealing to that folk, and that involved suspicion of authority and anti-intellectualism. Those proselytizers who appealed to anti-institutionalism and anti-intellectualism did better than the conventional Harvard- or Oxford-trained clergy.
If Hofstadter's analysis is right, it is the American style of "democracy" or rather mob populism ("Tyranny of the majority" as deTocqueville would later call it) that dumbed down religion rather than the other way around. To be sure that dumbed down religiosity had a profound dumbing down effect on society for the years to come - the causal chain goes in both ways - but it was the dumb populism that started the chain on this side of the pond.
Wojtek