Another good day writing, thank you for asking. It was more “one step at a time” composition, finding myself often in the situation where I had no idea what the characters would be doing next. So I asked myself, “Well, what’s the emotional reaction? How does the other person respond? Do they stand up or sit down, or just scratch themselves?” And one thing led to another, and I ended up putting down 1,500 words, and ended with a line that (it seemed to me) not only capped the last scene perfectly, but opened up possibilities for later plot points.



Ori asked about my statements on Pietism and legalism on Monday. I’ve actually written about this before, but I’m pretty sure it was back on the old blog site, so I’ll try to re-cap the thing again here.

One element of social change that strongly affected the tumultuous 18th and 19th Centuries was the rise of Pietism. It’s difficult for us, with the preconceptions we’ve absorbed all our lives, to understand what profound changes Pietism wrought.

I’m not sure if there’s actually one generally accepted definition of Pietism. I define it as a religious movement involving radical Protestantism (in its appeal to Scripture as the final authority, and to Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers) and an emphasis on a personal, life-changing encounter with Jesus Christ, one which must produce concrete changes in one’s conduct of life (and which would be judged on the evidence by the other Pietists). Pietists were strenuous in their calls to both private devotion and gatherings for “edification.”

The Pietist movement did not arise out of any vision of a democratic world. Its roots were purely theological (and, a lot of people may be surprised to know, Lutheran). But as people were converted and set about living a Christian life as defined by Pietism, two remarkable consequences arose, as almost unintentional byproducts.

One was literacy. People who believed that “life abundant” arose from a personal relationship with Christ were hungry to have Bibles of their own, and to study them. This necessarily meant increased literacy. The more intelligent Pietists eventually began to show themselves, at least in some areas, equal in knowledge and wisdom to their expensively educated “betters.”

The other consequence (and a related one) was improved personal morality. The Pietists felt personally responsible to Christ for their actions, and had to justify their choices and actions to their “brothers and sisters.” Remember what I said the other day about how “villain” originally meant “a villager; a peasant?” It was the Pietist movement, more than anything else, that changed that perception. When Oscar Wilde, in “The Importance of Being Earnest,” asked, “If the lower classes aren’t to serve as moral examples to the upper classes, what’s the use of them?” he was expressing the cognitive dissonance echoing through a class-based society where the myth of the “best people” was being systematically demolished by the simple, honest lives of the chapel Methodists and others.

But there was a downside, as there always is in human affairs. The Pietists recognized that they were living far better lives than their ancestors precisely because of their moral strictness. They gave up drunkenness and gambling, and emphasized the godly value of honest work. This put more money in their pockets and inevitably improved their living standards, so that within a few generations some Pietists had become a new kind of gentry. (“I can’t keep these people poor,” Wesley is supposed to have complained, half-seriously.)

There came to be an extensive system of extrabiblical rules that characterized Pietist groups, distinguishing them from their neighbors. Pietists did not drink—not even in moderation. Pietists did not gamble (or play card games at all). They did not dance. They did not attend theater or attend frivolous entertainments. Views on smoking varied from time to time and place to place. But all the groups had this in common—these extrabiblical rules were held to be, for all practical purposes, equal to the Ten Commandments and other scriptural commands. It’s written in the history of my home church that, in the early years, one member insisted on his right to frequent a billiard hall. He was expelled from the congregation.

It’s easy to see how this sort of thing comes about. The first generation of the converted do these things out of zeal and love. They are transported by their experience of conversion and sanctification, and go the extra mile out of love and gratitude. They attempt to pass on that experience to their children.

But for the children, all this is often just rules. For many (not all) of them, they are able to “get along” in church by acting like their parents, just following the list. But their hearts aren’t in it. In fact, their condition is worsened, because their rule book religion frequently leads either to despair (because they can’t keep all the rules perfectly), hypocrisy (out of shame and a desire for approval) or apostasy (because they can’t take the pressure anymore).

So it’s a mixed bag, like all human phenomena. But all in all I’m happy to be a Pietist, and have no time for the people to write contemptuously of the movement.

(Picture credit: Getty Images)