New Year Events
Hi, all!
I wanted to let you know about two new initiatives coming for Light Against Empire in the new year.
1. Guest Posting: I will be guest posting in February on
It is my hope that I can reciprocate with a post from her on my site as well. If you haven't seen her before, I'd like to recommend her to your attention. She is well worth a sub!
2. I will be starting a new 7 part series entitled: The Puritan Spine. I have included an intro below for a Tuesday Tickle.
Enjoy!
Dino
Series Introduction: The Puritan Spine
I’ve run this questions through my skull so many times in the past I felt I needed to tackle them in daylight: why is it this country feels haunted by forces far older than our present moment. Why our arguments repeat themselves. Why our politics snap back to old patterns even when the language changes. Why we punish so quickly. Why we divide so naturally. Why we act as if someone, somewhere, must always be the elect and someone else must always be the unworthy.
Whenever I look closely at the American story, I feel an old presence standing behind it. Something stern. Something anxious. Something convinced that life’s a test and the world’s a courtroom. And the more I watch our current political life unfold, the more I feel that presence shaping our reflexes without our consent.
This series is my attempt to trace that presence back to its earliest roots. Not to judge it. Not to praise it. Simply to understand the temperament that settled into our national bones long before we had a nation to speak of. A temperament carried by people who believed the world must be purified, that suffering reveals truth, that discipline protects community, and that God sorts humanity into those worthy of grace and those who must be corrected.
The theology faded. The emotional architecture didn’t.
Across four centuries this moral structure learned to change shape. It moved from religion into politics. It moved from the pulpit into the halls of Congress. It moved from sermons into campaign speeches. It even moved into secular life where people who’d never opened a Bible still lived as though the universe was keeping score.
I want to understand how that happened. I want to understand how a worldview that began in a small corner of England traveled across an ocean and became the unseen engine of American identity. I want to understand why it keeps resurfacing in our culture with such force, and why it shows up on every side of our political divide. And I want to know what hope we’ve got of moving beyond it without losing the moral seriousness that gave this country some of its greatest gifts.
These essays explore that inheritance and the many forms it’s taken. They follow the Puritan spine from the first anxious settlements to the fervor of the Revolution, from the reforming zeal of the early republic to the moral absolutism of the Civil War, from the punitive order of Reconstruction to the modern struggle over identity, punishment, and belonging. They also ask a question that troubles me deeply. If both left and right inherit parts of this emotional architecture, can either side see the other clearly. And can either side see itself.
This series isn’t a condemnation. It’s an excavation. A way of asking what kind of people we became when a small and intense religious movement planted its emotional roots in the soil of a continent and then disappeared into the very identity of the land it conquered.
What follows isn’t a history lesson. It’s a study of our unconscious moral habits and the power they still hold. And it’s an invitation to look at the country with a clearer eye, to ask whether we can live beyond the need to sort and punish, and to consider what kind of democratic life becomes possible when we finally understand the temperament that built the nation we keep trying to repair.
If there’s a spine running through America, this is where I think it began.
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My initial reading list and bibliography for The Puritan Spine:
Fischer, David Hackett. Albion’s Seed.
Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Dilemma.
Hall, David D. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment.
Demos, John. A Little Commonwealth.
Miller, Perry. The New England Mind.
Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club.
Gerstle, Gary. Inventing the American Way.
Katzenstein, Peter J. American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion.
Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad.
Bellah, Robert, et al. The Rhetoric of American Politics.
Foner, Eric. Reconstruction.
Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow.
Baptist, Edward. The Half Has Never Been Told.
Lienesch, Michael. Redeeming America.
Jones, Robert P. White Too Long.
Rios, Victor. Punished.
Simon, Jonathan. Governing Through Crime.
Garland, David. The Culture of Control.
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. Strangers in Their Own Land.
Dochuk, Darren. Collision Course.
If you’d like to support this work:
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