american-holocaust

SEX, RACE AND HOLY WAR 231serves Slotkin: "He was, in fact, a figure out of the American Puritannightmare . . . Indian-colored, dressed in a Christian's hat, with a beast'sfoot-a kind of Indian-Puritan, man-animal half-breed." 100In the preceding chapter we explored at some length Catholic doctrines ofasceticism, purity, and religious self-righteousness and intolerance-as wellas the Church's murderous treatment of those it regarded as unchaste andimpure non-believers. But Protestantism deserves some scrutiny in its ownright. For even though most of England's Protestants had shunted asideasceticism of the specifically contemptus mundi variety (the anti-Romanelements of the faith condemned monastic withdrawal from the world andinsisted that Saints partake-albeit in moderation-of the earthly gifts thatGod had provided for men and women), asceticism in the larger senseremained alive and well for centuries. Indeed, probably never before inChristian history had the idea that humankind was naturally corrupt anddebased reached and influenced the daily lives of a larger proportion ofthe lay community than during New England's seventeenth and early eighteenthcenturies. New England Congregationalist Susanna Anthony wasonly one among many thousands of Protestant divines who as late as the1760s delighted in examining her soul and-in phrases reminiscent of hersaintly Catholic sisters from four and five centuries earlier-discoveringthe sinfulness of my nature, the corrupt fountain from whence proceededevery sinful act. . . . My heart has looked like a sink of sin, more loathsomethan the most offensive carrion that swarms with hateful vermin! My understandingdark and ignorant; my will stubborn; my affections carnal, corruptand disordered; every faculty depraved and vitiated; my whole soul deformedand polluted, filled with pride, enmity, carnality, hypocrisy, selfconfidence,and all manner of sins. . . . Woe is me, because of the leprosyof sin, by which I am so defiled, that I pollute all I touch! ... Good God,what a leprous soul is this! How polluted, how defiled! What a running sore,that pollutes all I touch!" 101Unlike her medieval Catholic forebears, Miss Anthony did not (as faras we know) accompany this torrent of self-hatred with self-inflicted physicalabuse. But like them before her, the more she expressed her loathingfor the rottenness of her heart and will and all her sensual affections, themore admirable and godly a person she was in her own eyes and in thoseof others. Such sanctification of what one commentator has described asthe "furtive gratifications of an ascetic sadism" was, after all, the evangelicalway. And as Philip Greven clearly has shown, in the fanatical andobsessive efforts of people like Miss Anthony and her spiritual kin "toplacate implacable consciences and in their systematic efforts to mortifyand subdue the body and the self," along with their consequently heightenedperception of the world "as a dangerous and seductive place," the