[Dialogue] Rick Santorum is channeling the Calvinist John Winthrop

[steve har]

Interesting Breakfast-News Conversation:
Rick Santorum is channeling John Winthrop...
" and the other Puritans who first came to Massachusetts. Puritans fled to
America in the 1600s because they were being persecuted in England for
their hard-edged, Calvinist beliefs, and their rejection of the Anglican
Church. Having one’s ears cut off for having deviationist religious beliefs
was one of the lesser punishments Puritans suffered; being locked up in the
Tower of London, where death was a near certainty, was not uncommon.

Yet Winthrop and the other Puritans did not arrive on the shores of
Massachusetts hungering for religious freedom. Rather, Winthrop’s “City on
a Hill”. The "City on the Hill" was not a "Secular City" it meant to be an
authoritative and theocentric state. Winthrop’s core idea — “that the state
must enforce God’s laws,”
NYTimes Joe Nocera:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/opinion/nocera-a-revolutionary-idea.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

-- 
Steve Harrington
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