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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

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I strongly disagree with laying blame on the Catholics, and I'd actually lay the fault at the feet of culture of the Chesapeake pointing fingers elsewhere. While you could view the Virginia and Maryland colonies as high trust through the eyes of the planter class (in their intereactions with members of the same class), it was absolutely a low trust, chaotic mess in every other regard, and much of modern American low trust culture has its roots here.

From the everpresent threat of rape looming over every woman by men of a higher class than her, to the significantly higher crime (and especially property crime) rate compared to the other colonies, to the absolute reverence for individual freedom (including the freedom to enslave), to the near worship of fortune and luck as a prognostication of God's general favor, to the gentry asserting themselves as arbiters of what messages the clergy can deliver, to the most popular lesiure activies of all classes and ages being the slaying of some sort of animal (in porportion to their rank in society), to prohibitions on education of both the slave and servant classes, to the ubiquity of class condescension, to the general preference for violence and permanent disfigurement as means of punishment for transgressions, the entire society was structured to create about as little trust as a highly decentralized society could ever managed.

Anyone of a higher class interacting with one of a lower had to rightly worry that they were dealing with a violent savage with a short fuse that could snap at any moment. Anyone of a lower class intereacting with one of a higher had to rightly fear that they'd be subject to any and all forms of abuse with no possible form of redress.

Another driving consideration is that of all the original colonies, the bay colony, and later the south as a whole, saw the largest geographic redistribution to the greater west of any of the original colonies, and largely brought their culture with them. In most cases of 19th century inland immigrant migration, the immigrants were moving to places already well tread by Anglican diaspora, and were subject to their existing practices. As elsewhere, the first settlers have a massive, disproportunate impact on the culture well beyond their size (as @quiet_NaN also correctly points out about the Quakers, who might have the greatest impact:population ratio of any American migrant wave).