[The following essay was written for the American Spectator Online. I recently got a piece published there, and thought (mistakenly, it appears) that the market was open to me again. But I’ve had no further luck. It’s possible they rejected it because it’s rubbish — you’ll have to be the judge.]
“You live in Minnesota?” my new acquaintance asked. “What’s with you people? How do you explain your politics? Aren’t you supposed to be a bunch of passive-aggressive Norwegians who just work hard and never make a fuss?”
My answer is that it goes back to religion. Norwegian religion, in particular.
Which is odd, because Norwegian-Americans have never actually made up a majority of Minnesota’s population. That distinction goes to the Germans (so far, anyway). But in small town Minnesota, it was a Lutheran religious upheaval, imported from Norway, that set its stamp on the state’s spiritual character.
That upheaval was known as Haugeanism. (I wrote about its leading light, Hans Nielsen Hauge, here in the Spectator some years back.) Hauge was a lay preacher, writer, and entrepreneur who altered his country’s social order by accident, merely because he wanted to hold small meetings and share his born-again Christian experience. Private religious meetings were illegal, so he eventually landed in prison, which broke his health. But before he died, he was able to see his followers – ordinary peasants, most of them – beginning to exercise outsized influence in Norwegian politics and society.
Hauge’s successor was John Haugvaldstad. An ambitious young man, Haugvaldstad left his farm and went into business in Stavanger, eventually becoming the richest and most respected man in the town. After Hauge’s imprisonment, the majority of the Haugeans looked to him to lead them. He was, by all accounts, an honest, charitable, and decent man.
But he changed the movement. Hauge (in my opinion, based on my reading of his [fairly clumsy] writings), was a man primarily motivated by ecstatic love. (St. Francis of Assisi was a kindred spirit.) Hauge took it for granted – naively, I fear – that anyone truly converted to Christ would find holy living easy. Because it was easy for him. He was a sunny, smiling man, always eager to help others, singing as he did so.
Haugvaldstad was another kind of character. The Christian life was not easy for him. He seems to have struggled with temptation in ways Hauge never had to. His accommodation was the classic one – he became a rule-follower.
It’s the ancient Pharisaical pattern – if you want to be seen as one who loves God, you must avoid sin. The easiest way to avoid sin is to “build a hedge about the law.” It’s not enough to refrain from drunkenness – better never to drink at all (Hauge himself was not a teetotaler. Haugvaldstad introduced that rule). Rather than merely refraining from adultery, you avoid any activity that might lead to it – such as parties and dancing. The Haugeans became famous legalists.
The problem is eternal – there are those who just get the point, and live it out naturally. And there are others who don’t get it, but admire those who do, and so try to mimic them. In Christian terms, it’s called dying to self – but while the first group dies to self out of love for Another, the second group just dies. Death to self, in itself, becomes their religion. Self-denial is their methodology and their credential. Today we call it virtue signaling, and it’s the very heart of leftism.
The thing to note here – and it goes for the whole history of pietism and evangelicalism – is that this strategy worked. In temporal terms, at least. Haugeans went to work. Their industry and self-denial bought them a leg up in society, and society was forced to make room for them.
The United States attracted Haugeans. They were never in the majority among Norwegian-American immigrants, but even their opponents respected them and tried to emulate them. Hence the stereotype of the Norwegian-American – sober, a little dull, hard-working, honest. These were the qualities we valued in our community. They informed our politics.
And those politics were liberal. In the mid-19th Century, liberalism was not about sexual identity, or the size of government. The issue was the place of the common people in society. The Haugeans in Norway (in uneasy alliance with French-inspired humanists and radicals) formed a central pillar of the rising “Venstre” (Left) party.
The immigrants did not find things so very different in the U.S. Those were the heady days of Abolitionism, when evangelicals marched side by side with Quakers, Unitarians, and freethinkers to fight the social evil of slavery. Haugeans (most of them) happily joined this alliance, and many volunteered to wear the blue when the war came.
With the abolition of slavery, anything seemed possible. “Today slavery,” the liberals thought, “tomorrow all evil.” They quickly embarked on their next crusade, the prohibition of alcohol. Prohibition was a social justice cause, a women’s rights cause. The liberal coalition looked forward to a world remade. For humanists, the ideal was Rousseauean. For Christians, it was the imminent Kingdom of God.
It fell apart, of course. Prohibition didn’t deliver as promised. It became, in fact, an embarrassment. For the humanist liberals, their evangelical allies were now beyond the pale, and the movement broke up.
But the coalition lasted longer out here in farm country. Even as the Minnesota Democrats merged with Socialists to form the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party (still their official name), the Haugeans and their like harkened back to the Venstre in Norway. A pastor I know recalls an old Haugean friend who got elected to the North Dakota state legislature as an Independent. “I was given the choice of parties to caucus with,” he said. “I asked myself, ‘Which party best represents the values of my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ?’ And I went and caucused proudly with the Democrats.”
Then came the great upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s. The old pietist rules went by the board – the grandchildren of Haugeans were now smoking marijuana and fornicating proudly. Yet the habits of the heart remained pietist. The new, groovy Jesus these Boomers believed in was cool with sex, drugs, and Superstardom, but He still demanded death to self.
So the Boomers decided to die.
It’s a little like anorexia. The young person (usually female) who starts out just wanting to lose weight for the sake of health and appearance, grows increasingly obsessed with starvation for its own sake. Jesus rebuked the Pharisees of His time, telling them (Matthew 23:23) that they “tithe[d] mint and anise and cummin” while “omitting the weightier matters of the law.” The original point of the law was loving God. The Pharisees just loved the law, becoming “whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness” (Matthew 23:27).
Or to put it another way, “If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!” (Matthew 6:23)
A sterile solar system, orbiting a cold star.
The grandchildren of the Minnesota Haugeans likewise became whited sepulchers. Impressive to look at, but all about death. Their entire present program is devoted to the beauty and virtue of death. Contraception as a default. Unrestricted abortion. The sexual neutering of children. Assisted suicide. And to top it off, our very civilization must be smothered through the mass importation of cultures that not only hate it, but celebrate terrorism. Death has become salvation.
Proverbs 8:36 portrays Wisdom as a woman shouting in the streets (one can imagine her picking her way through needles and human excrement along a Minneapolis sidewalk), shouting, “But he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul: all they that hate me love death.”
And that’s my diagnosis of Minnesota, my home state: It has fallen in love with death.