Fundie Views of the "Good Ol' Days'" Cultural Hegemony

[AMedievalistKnits]

Hi! I'm a history major, and it really, REALLY irks me when the fundies state that culture (before EEEBIL birth control, women wearing pants, et cetera and ad nauseam) was some sort of monolith--that every person was swanning around in robes de style and worshipping in the same fashion and behaving as some sort of bloc. Do they have any idea that even if the demographics are the same, e.g. a devoutly Christian mother of seven, the cultures and behaviors (e.g. a Parisian socialite, a Nebraskan homesteader, an Albanian peasant) will cause the finished product, as it were, to vary wildly? Don't they understand that since people behave differently in Arkansas than they do in West Virginia, that people from different areas will behave differently? Or is diversity something that only happens with nonbelievers?

ETA: For example, if we take two women in 1880's Nebraska, fundies apparently believe that even if one's barely subsisting in a soddy and the other's living comfortably in town, they would both be dressed to the nines (e.g. bustles, satin, etc.) and both espouse similar views on childrearing, faith, the role of women...

[bananacat]

The only thing fundies love more than Reconstructionist history is Baby Jesus himself. They believe what is convenient for them, not what is actually true. If they can convince themselves that the Earth is 6,000 years old and people lived with dinosaurs, they can believe that everyone in the past lived just like they do on tv shows.

[AMedievalistKnits]

I thought Reconstructionism was saved for everything after 1900, and that maybe they just used "Elsie Dinesmore" as a textbook...the cognitive dissonance (esp. if they have elderly relatives who are allowed to tell anything other than Jesus' pet dinosaur stories) is astounding. The ABeka books had some idea of differences (shitty as they were), so there's no excuse...

[jenny_islander]

Yeah, back when this was a so-called Christian nation, you had umpteen churches in nearly every town because the congregation at each one thought all the others were bound for Hell.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Everyone was a good straight white locally accented male or male-dependent Republican in fashionable clothing because everyone else was invisible unless needed for comic relief or as a target. This attitude was taught in schools. I have read a quote from a public school history text that provides a potted outline of American demographics, casually adding at the end, "leaving out the Indians and colored." This was in use when the Greatest Generation was in school. Imagine going to a school in your own country and finding out at that school that you don't actually exist!

And "feeble-minded" children were warehoused in institutions or kept secluded at home, and gay people pretended very hard that they were not in order to avoid being jailed for existing, and people who lost all their money because God does not in fact reward all morally upright folks with five thousand per were no longer seen on the street even if they were right there.

If OWS has a single message, it is that nobody should have to become invisible because their circumstances disturb other people's self-satisfaction.

[AMedievalistKnits]

Yeah, back when this was a so-called Christian nation, you had umpteen churches in nearly every town because the congregation at each one thought all the others were bound for Hell.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Everyone was a good straight white locally accented male or male-dependent Republican in fashionable clothing because everyone else was invisible unless needed for comic relief or as a target. This attitude was taught in schools. I have read a quote from a public school history text that provides a potted outline of American demographics, casually adding at the end, "leaving out the Indians and colored." This was in use when the Greatest Generation was in school. Imagine going to a school in your own country and finding out at that school that you don't actually exist!

And "feeble-minded" children were warehoused in institutions or kept secluded at home, and gay people pretended very hard that they were not in order to avoid being jailed for existing, and people who lost all their money because God does not in fact reward all morally upright folks with five thousand per were no longer seen on the street even if they were right there.

If OWS has a single message, it is that nobody should have to become invisible because their circumstances disturb other people's self-satisfaction.

EXACTLY. My dad is actually part of the earlier "Baby Boomer" generation and, although he is Ecuadorian and it is painfully obvious that the only part of him that 1950's America would have liked was that he was (at least nominally) white-Spanish and a fairly religious Catholic and most importantly not a Commie, he continues to believe that he would have been at home there. Oy.

[finleeport]

Fundies seem to like getting their history anachronistic as well.

[AMedievalistKnits]

Anachronism is omnipresent in any current view of the past, but they go beyond the pale.

[MailMan]

Hi! I'm a history major, and it really, REALLY irks me when the fundies state that culture (before EEEBIL birth control, women wearing pants, et cetera and ad nauseam) was some sort of monolith--that every person was swanning around in robes de style and worshipping in the same fashion and behaving as some sort of bloc. Do they have any idea that even if the demographics are the same, e.g. a devoutly Christian mother of seven, the cultures and behaviors (e.g. a Parisian socialite, a Nebraskan homesteader, an Albanian peasant) will cause the finished product, as it were, to vary wildly? Don't they understand that since people behave differently in Arkansas than they do in West Virginia, that people from different areas will behave differently? Or is diversity something that only happens with nonbelievers?

ETA: For example, if we take two women in 1880's Nebraska, fundies apparently believe that even if one's barely subsisting in a soddy and the other's living comfortably in town, they would both be dressed to the nines (e.g. bustles, satin, etc.) and both espouse similar views on childrearing, faith, the role of women...

Token Fundie here, and I could't agree with you more. I have a history degree and when I was teaching my kids at home the curriculum contained the book "George Washington the Christian". I was very interested because my capstone study for my degree was on Washington and I had come to think that he was anything but an evangelical Christian. When I received the book I didn't get 20 pages into it until I found that it was sourced from know bad sources. It was the beginning of the end for the curriculum.

I have always pointed out to my kids that things were very bad in the past for large groups of people. There never was a Golden Age.

[Brainsample]

I thought Reconstructionism was saved for everything after 1900, and that maybe they just used "Elsie Dinesmore" as a textbook...the cognitive dissonance (esp. if they have elderly relatives who are allowed to tell anything other than Jesus' pet dinosaur stories) is astounding. The ABeka books had some idea of differences (shitty as they were), so there's no excuse...

I'm chewing on the phrase "saved for everything after 1900," not sure what it means. (I may have misinterpreted your meaning.)

A major motivator in Bible-based cults is the idea that we should recreate the 1st Century AD, before the Protestants think that the followers of Jesus became too Catholic. But then they'd have to deal with life without Constantine's hegemony and all the benefit that came along with it. I don't think anyone would like the whole Paterfamilia deal, save for Dougie.

Rushdoony, though not a nut IRL concerning how he lived, despite some of his problematic ideas, liked the medieval period and looked to that as a society that fostered better Christian ideals because of the religious freedom Christian people had within a certain framework. So there are a bunch of Christian Reconstructionists who look back to feudalism and medieval society as an ideal time, partly because Rushodoony liked it personally.

Some make a modified version of it out to be an integral part of their religion, and they are never at the bottom of the food chain. Somehow, that gets reserved for the heathen or the sinful Christian who becomes twice the son of hell in their eyes. In the fantasy, they always turn out to be the rulers. It is also true of their view of a revived Confederate system. They will never turn out to be the slave, and those who do fall out as the slaves bear that status because a sovereign God saw fit to write things that way.

I know that Rushdoony loved the decentralized government that feudalism created, and he loved how American society adopted that framework concerning how it laid out local government which was largely autonomous. How far that love went for him, I don't know, but there exists a contingent of Calvinists who not only look to Geneva as ideal, they see the feudalisic medievalism as the ideal.

Example: Doug Phillips loves the Bride's Price at VF weddings, and that practice may have more to do with his take on the "ideal" nature of medievalism than it does with the Bible passages. Frankly the Bible describes the Bride's Price as something to be paid to a father after a daughter was violated or after someone falsely ruins her reputation because it puts a great financial burden on the father because the girl becomes of such less worth in that society. Are all the VF types admitting that all of their girls were unfailtful before marriage, and they're just foregoing the stoning requirements? There is a medieval element in it more so than a Biblical one, and Doug may have just found the Bride's Price citation to be a Gothard type of proof text that he could use to support patterns that aren't really there.

I don't know that Rushdoony (essentially the backbone if not father of Christian Reconstructionism) disliked the Enlightenment Period for the same reasons that the fringe wackos do today, but I am certain that his Calvinist principles disliked the optimism concerning man's' ability to do good things apart from God (believing that man is basically good) or merely because it was a good thing for society and people. He's been gone for a decade plus and can't speak to that himself.

But he also loved the religious freedom afforded to us today and didn't want to make the US a feudal state or recreate a past era of history like many of his much less intellectually sophisticated followers interpret. When they read that he liked one element of feudalism, many believe that he liked all elements of feudalism and misunderstand his context. I'm less clear about how he felt specifically about the Confederate period and how much of that era (if any) he wanted to retrieve. I think that most of his followers today think of his writing in terms of black and white or in terms that are just too oversimplified. And his writing was anything but simple, so they miss his purpose.

[Anxious Girl]

I feel that fundies, especially Christian ones really look back to the American/English Victorian days as the good 'ol days when women loved to submit to their husbands, that there no such people who were bisexual/gay/lesbian, and only Christians were the only religious worshippers. They do nont realize that most/some women felt trapped in marriage, and that everybody behaved like good Christians, and nobody heard of such a thing as abortion/womens rights.

I wonder how they would feel if they found/researched out that when the Hull House opened, it doubled as 1 of America's earliest abortian clinics in the late 19th/early 20th century? (somebody please correct me if I'm wrong.); and that some states gave the women right to vote?

Obviously it wasn't always the good 'ol days, with the KKK rising because of the American South's loss of the American civil war, but still the tiny events do matter, saying that the south's economy was based on slavery and blaming the north for making them poor due to the anti-slavery laws. I wonder what they do think of this, if any of them do know about these events in history. Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong, I always love to learn more about history!

[FundiesInMyFamily]

Everyone was a good straight white locally accented male or male-dependent Republican in fashionable clothing because everyone else was invisible unless needed for comic relief or as a target.

Quoted for truth!

[Brainsample]

I feel that fundies, especially Christian ones really look back to the American/English Victorian days as the good 'ol days when women loved to submit to their husbands, that there no such people who were bisexual/gay/lesbian, and only Christians were the only religious worshippers. They do nont realize that most/some women felt trapped in marriage, and that everybody behaved like good Christians, and nobody heard of such a thing as abortion/womens rights.

I wonder how they would feel if they found/researched out that when the Hull House opened, it doubled as 1 of America's earliest abortian clinics in the late 19th/early 20th century? (somebody please correct me if I'm wrong.); and that some states gave the women right to vote?

Obviously it wasn't always the good 'ol days, with the KKK rising because of the American South's loss of the American civil war, but still the tiny events do matter, saying that the south's economy was based on slavery and blaming the north for making them poor due to the anti-slavery laws. I wonder what they do think of this, if any of them do know about these events in history. Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong, I always love to learn more about history!

My response to this was putting up the truth about Victoriana blog. I guess I got most of the frustration out of my system because I stopped actively posting new stuff.

[Brainsample]

Quoted for truth!

And everyone's got to be Westernized for Christianity to work the right way.... :roll:

[So Many Lies]

There was no good old days. All days had abortions, unhappy people, closetted gays etc. Small town people swept it all under the rug but many many port towns and cities around had an extremely happening seedy underbelly.

It's just a fantasy.

[So Many Lies]

Hi! I'm a history major, and it really, REALLY irks me when the fundies state that culture (before EEEBIL birth control, women wearing pants, et cetera and ad nauseam) was some sort of monolith--that every person was swanning around in robes de style and worshipping in the same fashion and behaving as some sort of bloc. Do they have any idea that even if the demographics are the same, e.g. a devoutly Christian mother of seven, the cultures and behaviors (e.g. a Parisian socialite, a Nebraskan homesteader, an Albanian peasant) will cause the finished product, as it were, to vary wildly? Don't they understand that since people behave differently in Arkansas than they do in West Virginia, that people from different areas will behave differently? Or is diversity something that only happens with nonbelievers?

ETA: For example, if we take two women in 1880's Nebraska, fundies apparently believe that even if one's barely subsisting in a soddy and the other's living comfortably in town, they would both be dressed to the nines (e.g. bustles, satin, etc.) and both espouse similar views on childrearing, faith, the role of women...

You're so right.

It is stupid.

I really don't think they think out of their own towns though, some barely leave the house. They read so many "wholesome" books like Pollyanna they've left reality. The whole world used to be small town farming apparently. They should look at say, a colonial outpost like Sydney Australia, in the Victorian age. Military rule, down and dirty as hell, people marrying gold rush chinese settlers (the horror!), the disease, the non respect for the ruling class.

And even closer than that a port town will have a lot more vices than an inland town.

Not good fundy hegemony material at all.

[Lillian]

Very true.

It's also true that it's not just fundies thinking like this, though. I watched a documentary recently on Documentary Heaven (can't remember what it was called) about the study of history in American high schools. Plain wrong, republican slanted history that kids are taught to believe. Essentially exact same thing happening here in Australia, and I'm sure all over the world.

As a fellow history major I can't stand it. Except for when I am arguing against it in an essay. Then I love it- the rush of shutting down every single one of their arguments, disproving point after point and having a ton of credible sources backing you up. Gah, I love history :D :D

Which is why when I am a high school history teacher, the very first thing my students will do is learn the definition of historiography, and how to spot a ridiculous argument!