Round and round and round we go

Reading "The Democracy of Christianity and the Character of American Politics" I was able to make a LOT of connections to so many other things we've studied in AmCon and other subjects I've had the opportunity to study. Thinking about this article in relation to other subjects I've studied, I was struck my the cyclic nature of so many different areas. We're told we study history so we "don't repeat the past" but when you look at it, we repeat the past all the time.

In Hatch's article we see this cycle of dissidents wanting to break away from the restrictive complexities of religion to simplify their spirituality and from those who break away we have more groups who break away from that. It seems almost never ending. Amy Johnson Fryholm spoke a bit about this during her lecture on apocalypticism and the differences in interpretations amongst those stories.

What was new to me in this whole ideal of cycles was how democracy and religious reforms where so interconnected. Its almost too difficult to see which came first. It makes perfect sense to me. If you have a whole nation of people with this intoxicating and invigorating energy its inevitable its going to spill over into other areas of life. Its kind of like when we talked about the abolitionists paving the way for women's rights. The nation rallied together and once they settled the issue (or started to) of slavery they had all this bundled up energy and motivation to do something else; so on it was to women's rights. It would be very interesting to see how else "energy" flows through American society. Can we link the energy and the movement all the way from the days of the American Revolution to today?