The movie The Witch was not only a thrilling tale about a puritan family, but also gave key insight into the life and values of early American puritan settlers. The movie starts by showing us a puritan family being banished from the local group due to differing religious interpretations. After the family is banished, they decide to create their own homestead were everything at first appears to be going well. However, as the eldest daughter in the family is playing with the newest born son, he is taken away. The family blames his disappearance on a wolf, but the true reason for his disappearance is because a witch living in the nearby woods kidnapped him and used him in a ritual. This ritual makes the witch young so she can later in the movie capture the eldest boy in the family and just like the youngest son, kill him. The tragedies this family experience show us key values about American puritanism in the early days of American settlement. The family as a whole is heavily religious and the reaction to these horrible events the family experiences is intense prayer and the consistent acknowledgment and guilt for the original sin they are born with. The importance of religion in their lives was clearly a part of early American life and the dedication to avoiding sin was prominent as well. One of the most interesting aspects of the movie in relation to the lives of early American settlers was the fact that the family was excluded from the local group due to a religious difference. Since most of these settlers left Europe to escape religious persecution it is interesting to see that there are still consequences in America for not conforming to the typical religious views. The relation between religion and identity is then interesting to look at in early America. Since we are reading Who are We? we have learned that religion can often play a role in both individual and group identities. Clearly religion was intricate to group identities in early America, is religion still a part of American identity? How can religious persecution be explained in a society that was meant to avoid this? Lastly, how did intense religious beliefs shape the lives and decision of early American settlers?
Tag: Religion
It has long been known that Hollywood and ‘big entertainment’ producers often have a significant bias against religious people. One classic example is Fox cartoons, in which the religious people, Ned Flanders from the Simpsons, Mort from Family Guy, and so on are portrayed negatively. Whether they are made to look unsophisticated, unrealistic, unintelligent, “pie in the sky,” or whatever, this trend is so prevalent as to infer that in some cases it is being purposely done.
The Witch is a far cry from any of the cartoons I mentioned previously and most other films coming out of Hollywood in terms of its characters and subject matter. These religious dissidents in the new world are very different from the religious people of today or 50 years ago who are frequently lampooned in popular media. I tend to think that the film did a good job for the most part of not making the characters with a bias. The belief in witches, demons, curses, and other such things were quite normal in the time period this movie was about, especially amongst the less educated. I also think the film portrayed the characters as religious visionaries similar to thousands of other real families who came to the land that would become America seeking “the kingdom of God,” even down to the ‘dialect’ of English the characters speak.
There is, however, one element of this film that stood out to me when I watched as potentially likely that someone at some level of the creation of the plotline put in this detail to cast the religious in a negative light. I am specifically referring to the perverse sexual attraction of the younger boy to his older sister. There are two times where the focus on the screen is the brother admiring his sister’s body in an explicitly sexual way.
The reason why I am suspicious about the motives for these scenes is that they do not fit in with the broader plotline of the movie at all. There is never an insinuation that the parents were brother and sister or close cousins or something of that nature. If the child is has a sexual desire for his sister, it had to come from somewhere, and I believe there is definitely the chance that this scene was designed to accomplish the goal of casting religious people as creepily inclined towards incestuousness, or at the very least, extremely morally backwards relating to sexuality.
While this is my hunch, I’m not about to bet my life savings on this theory. It could have simply been an element to freak audiences out to prime them for more horror to come, or it could have been tied to the plot in a way I missed. If you picked up on this too, even if you didn’t, and you think I’m dead wrong or dead right, feel free to comment.
Democracy in America was written in 1835, before philosophies such as Marxism, Nihilism, Scientific Materialism, biological determinism/sociobiology, moral relativism, moral subjectivism, began to become prominent influences in shaping people’s worldviews from the mid-late 1800s about to the present. A recent WSJ poll found that only 30% of Gen Z and Millenials describe religion and belief in God as important values, demonstrating just how far most of us are from how Tocqueville would have understood reality.
*article link WSJ Poll Article
The reading on the Origins of America caught my attention because it demonstrates an “Old World” perspective on how the world came to be. Centuries of scientific materialism have made the idea of divine providence being at work in nature seem almost laughable in the eyes of many modern people. Couple this with the understanding that people 150+ years ago comprehended so little about the physical sciences compared to where we are today and the argument for why a modern man may scoff at an 1800s man’s description of geography and natural history. I believe that this passage is noteworthy because it is a great example of how Toqueville’s discussion of American geography flies in the face of this modern interpretation.
Tocqueville demonstrates his true understanding of this country’s physical reality by explaining it proficiently and concisely. He, a Frenchman, knows America’s geography better than any American I know personally, even though any of us could be on Google Earth in a matter of seconds and have access to more and better information than Tocqueville could have ever dreamed of.
Another way he demonstrates his understanding of the natural world is through accurate and informed descriptions of the forces of nature at play. He mentions the “convulsions of the globe” that formed the Mississippi and the effect of frequent flooding on Northeastern soil as it relates to agriculture. There are many other examples of similar analysis throughout the text as well.
Yet, right after he discusses the Mississippi river, he writes “the valley of the Mississippi is, on the whole, the most magnificent dwelling-place prepared by God for man’s abode.” A phrase like this would stop a secular-modern-materialist person in their tracks. To them, the ideas of the valley of the Mississippi was formed by geological forces, not God. What they would find truly baffling is that Tocqueville’s position is not that they were not formed by natural forces. He fully acknowledges that and understands it as well as anyone with 1800s science can. What I believe to be most confounding to a secular modern thinker is that Tocqueville offers both explanations, that it was formed by natural forces and it was formed by God. He is saying that it was God’s intention for the valley to be this way, and natural forces were the means he used to make it so.
In the modern secular paradigm, a notion such as this causes countless philosophical problems and is utterly irreconcilable with the secular materialist view of reality. What boggles my mind is that in 1835 when this was written, there was hardly a question about it. And I don’t mean a question about whether God intended the Mississippi valley for the American people or for the native Americans or for some other nationality, I mean no one would question that natural forces are controlled in some part by God to accomplish his ends.
To any religious members of the class, maybe this passage did not stand out to you in this way, but for any agnostic or atheist or even polytheists reading this, did this stand out to you like it did to me? Did you find the same problems with it that I did, or find something completely different? If your interested in responding to my post, I’d be happy to discuss this topic more.