Hofstadter, Chapters 3-5

These chapters are mostly a history of American religion, chronicling our fall from the halcyon era of educated Puritan clergy to the modern era.  To be fair, after the eruption of new denominations, many of them eventually moved away from their "Any idiot can be a minister based on their understanding of an English translation of a text written in Greek and Hebrew" roots and developed a more educated clergy. Still, they were never as scholarly as the Oxbridge graduates who ministered to the Puritans of New England.

I want to quote a few choice items from Chapter 3. First, regarding the Puritans:

...this rather odious image of the Puritan clergy...has dominated not only our popular historical lore but also the historical thinking of our intellectuals. The reputation of this, the first class of American intellectuals, has gone down in infamy, and subsequent generations of intellectuals have often led the campaign against them.

Yeah, there were the witch trials, but he notes that the clergy were mostly urging restraint, while the laity were going crazy and leading the mob. And afterward the devout of New England mostly became peaceable, until the 1850's when they went to Kansas and killed slave-owners.  I mean, if you absolutely INSIST on deviating from Christianity, that's definitely the one time to do it.

On page 63, he notes that:

By the close of the seventeenth century, the leading clergymen were much more liberal in thought than the elderly uneducated laymen who controlled a great many of the rural congregations or the provincial politicians who often invoked religious fundamentalism because it was popular with the growing electorate.

After 1680, the Puritan ministry was more tolerant and more accommodating to disseneters such as Baptists and Quakers than was the Boston public at large; and the influential Boston ministers--including the Mathers--were more liberal in this respect than the older preachers of the countryside.

Also on page 63, and relevant to our current circumstances with the COVFEFE-19 virus:

So far as the encouragement of science is concerned, this was almost entirely in clerical sponsorship before about the middle of the eighteenth century (Harvard had its first lay scientist in Professor John Winthrop, who began to teach in 1738). In the most controversial and stirring of all scientific questions of the day, that of the adoption of inoculation for smallpox, outstanding clerical intellectuals once again took the lead in defending innovation.

He then goes on to discuss the Great Awakening, which I won't recap in depth. But at the end of the chapter he gives the following overall appraisal of the clergy over the centuries, and how they dealt with an illiterate frontier nation:

They would have been ineffective in converting their moving flocks if they had not been able to develop a vernacular style in preaching, and if they had failed to share or to stimulate in some degree the sensibilities and prejudices of their audiences--anti-authority, anti-aristocracy, anti-Eastern, anti-learning. The various denominations responded in different ways to this necessity: but in general it might be said that the congregations were raised and the preachers were lowered. In brief, the elite upon which culture depended for its transmission was being debased by the demands of a rude social order.  If our purpose were to pass judgment on the evangelical ministers, a good case could be made for them on the counts of sincerity, courage, self-sacrifice, and intelligence.  But since our primary purpose is to assess the transit of civilization and the development of culture, we must bear in mind the society that was emerging. It was a society of courage and character, of endurance and practical cunning, but it was not a society likely to produce poets or artists or savants.

I think that much the same could be said of those who teach at non-elite state schools.  We're teaching the (cultural, if not always genetic) descendants of the unlettered frontiersmen whom the evangelical denominations desperately tried to civilize. It is inevitable that some of us will "go native"* and lower our standards. Perhaps by spending too much time reading and thinking about human issues, and not enough time thinking about physics, I have "gone native" in my own paradoxical way.

I won't recap the next two chapters in any detail except to note that evolutionary biology was a big sticking point in the fight between intellectuals and the public.  It's ironic that biology has done so much to cleave us from the public, even while the "Two Cultures" phenomenon among intellectuals makes so many educated people unashamed to confess their ignorance of science.  Academics will gladly look down on a public that doesn't understand science, yet also unashamedly admit their own ignorance.

*And yes, I'm aware of how awkward that metaphor is in regard to ministers joining and emulating European colonists taking land from indigenous people.