THE MORNING RANT: “Church Ladies of the Left” – AWFLs Are the Fallen Angels of Puritan Christianity

I have periodically started to write a piece discussing how woke, white women (AWFLs) are the “Church Ladies of the Left.” More specifically, my thesis was going to be that when this type of judgmental harridan was involved in a local church and imposing her righteousness on just one congregation, it might have been rough on the pastor and her co-parishioners, but at least society as a whole wasn’t being tormented by this class of person.

From my own childhood circle of church friends, there are several real-life examples of girls who were prissy “Junior Church Ladies” back then, but who left the church and grew up to be anti-Christian woke-scolds for whom politics is now their religion. Their driving purpose in life is to excoriate the rest of us for our sins, which range from the “bigotry” of disallowed opinions, to “Christian hypocrisy,” to the use of leaf blowers. They live in a perpetual state of outrage because some people are leading a life with different values and priorities.

But I would always abort on this piece, because I couldn’t develop it much beyond an assertion that “a certain percentage of white women are just natural-born church ladies, be they Christians or AWFLs” without expanding on possible reasons why.

Before going further, this is also probably a good place to make the disclaimer that there is not a more conservative sub-demographic of women than white women, and at times it gets a little tiresome hearing very online people snarking about white women in general, just because the subset of AWFLs are so annoying. My wife is a mirthful, conservative, white, Christian woman who has patience for neither “church ladies” nor AWFLs, and pretty much the same can be said about all of the women in our circle of friends.

Returning back to the question of why “church ladies” have transitioned into AWFLs, Christian Heiens has offered a partial explanation in a recent series of tweets, as part of a discussion as to why New England is so liberal despite being very white, a demographic that is otherwise very conservative.

Mr. Heiens notes that there is a super-concentration of AWFLs in New England because these women are culturally still puritan church ladies. They traded their forebears’ Christianity for woke secularism, but they never forsook their puritanical intolerance and righteousness.

It’s so liberal precisely because it’s so white. Whites, and specifically Anglo-Saxons, were the world’s first liberals. When we consider that New England is one of the most ancestrally Anglo part of the country and remains very heterogeneous compared to the rest of America, it’s no surprise that places like Vermont or Massachusetts would be so liberal. Things like Progressivism and Wokeism are what happens when Anglo Puritans secularize their theology and universalize their unique cultural way of life. New England did both of these things long ago, which is a huge reason why it’s one of the largest left-wing bastions in America.

I am going to repeat this line outside of the blockquote because it brilliantly and concisely explains one reason why there are Church Ladies of the Left: ”Things like Progressivism and Wokeism are what happens when Anglo Puritans secularize their theology.”

Mr. Heiens went on to speculate as to why Appalachian whites, who are also descended from Anglo protestants, did not become such woke evangelists.

This got me thinking about why Appalachia didn’t follow suit as it was also settled by Anglo Protestants. I think a big reason why is because while New England went down the puritanical/reformist communitarian/institutional oriented route that eventually ended in Wokeism as a sort of secular theology, the Anglo settlers who moved into Appalachia went down the “rugged individualist” path of Liberalism.

While it’s true that Appalachia is more “rugged individualist” than New England, I think this difference is rooted in the provenance of the settlers. Puritans settling in New England tended to be from East Anglia, whereas Appalachia was settled in large part by Scots-Irish. The Scots-Irish were the rednecks of Great Britain, and although they may have been protestant, they certainly weren’t puritan. This difference in protestant lineages actually supports the hypothesis that today’s woke AWFLs are linear descendants of 17th Century puritans.

Overwhelmingly, the accusers in the Salem witch trials were puritan women. Today’s AWFL woke-scolds are heirs to their legacy.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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