I was reading Peter Coviello's introduction to a recent edition of Walt Whitman's Memoranda During the War, the poet's account of visiting wounded Civil War soldiers in Washington DC, and came across an interesting quote from John Winthrop's famous "City on the Hill" sermon, "A Model of Christian Charity," you know, the one that Ronald Reagan liked to quote so much. It was written in 1630 on board the ship Arbella bound for the Massachusetts Bay to establish a Puritan colony there.
Winthrop wrote that, in order to please God and be true Christians:
Wee must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of other's necessities.
Sounds like old John Winthrop was advocating redistribution, that he wanted to "spread the wealth," as John McCain and Sarah Palin and a host of Republican propagandists would say. He sounds like a "Socialist." This statement is almost the Marxist "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," isn't it? Absolutely un-American! And Winthrop pretended to be a Christian too!
Full context:
Now if the Lord shall please to heare us, and bring us in peace to the place we desire, then hath hee ratified this covenant and sealed our Commission, and will expect a strict performance of the articles contained in it; but if wee shall neglect the observation of these articles which are the ends wee have propounded, and, dissembling with our God, shall fall to embrace this present world and prosecute our carnall intentions, seeking greate things for ourselves and our posterity, the Lord will surely breake out in wrathe against us; be revenged of such a [sinful] people and make us knowe the price of the breache of such a covenant.
Now the onely way to avoyde this shipwracke, and to provide for our posterity, is to followe the counsell of Micah, to doe justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, wee must be knitt together, in this worke, as one man. Wee must entertaine each other in brotherly affection. Wee must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of other's necessities. Wee must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekeness, gentlenes, patience and liberality. Wee must delight in eache other; make other's conditions our oune; rejoice together, mourne together, labour and suffer together, allwayes haueving before our eyes our commission and community in the worke, as members of the same body. Soe shall wee keepe the unitie of the spirit in the bond of peace.
These paragraphs appear at the very end of the sermon and are thus the conclusion and culmination of Winthrop's model of Christian charity (something I gather from what little else I know of the man that he did not altogether live up to).
Of course, by the middle of the 19th century, such ideas were in bad repute and the founder of the Children's Aid Society, Charles Loring Brace, could note in 1852 with suspicion the "socialism" of the Hungarian herdsmen on the Puszta with their communal herds of horses, cows, sheep, and swine and the communal vineyards in their villages, what may very well have been remnants of the ancient Magyar tribal ways.
Today, as Margaret Thatcher so proudly stated
...there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.
This is the Conservative Credo and don't you dare forget it!