[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.
Continue reading Minnesota’s problem is religious
