This essay traces the deference the modern clinic commands upward from the examination room to a political-theological settlement two centuries old. The occasion is the convergence of four recent essays on these pages, each of which identified the medical apparatus as a religion through a different lens. None named the religion. Dr. Martin Erdmann, in correspondence that prompted this piece, pointed to Rousseau, Jackson, and Finney as the specific historical sources of the state-religious authority the apparatus now inherits. The frame throughout is his. Any errors of interpretation are mine. The medical terminology that appears in the opening scene and in the discussion of the Rockefeller apparatus (cholesterol, hypertension, guidelines, prescription) is used in the establishment register in which the patient encounters it. The analytical voice operates from the position that the authority commanding those terms is political and theological before it is medical. The shifts between registers are deliberate.
The Examination Room
The patient is fifty-four and feels well. The appointment has been scheduled on the schedule’s own authority: a year has passed since the last one, and the office computer flagged him for the next.
A vial was drawn for the lipid panel. His total cholesterol came back at 259. The physician reads the number against a threshold on a guideline paper issued by a committee in 2013. The number is above the threshold. The physician writes the prescription for a lipid-lowering medication, instructs the patient to take it every morning, and schedules the next appointment for twelve months hence.
The blood pressure cuff registered 134 over 82. The physician reads that against a threshold the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology jointly lowered to 130 over 80 in November 2017. The revision reclassified approximately thirty-one million additional American adults as hypertensive overnight; no body had changed, only the dial on which bodies were read.¹ The number is above the threshold. The physician adds a second prescription.
The patient goes home with two bottles he had not previously needed, scheduled to be refilled for the remainder of his life. He has not complained of any symptom and has not asked for a prescription. He has received, within thirty minutes, a formal reclassification of his body from well to pre-sick, backed by nothing he can verify and conveyed in a tone that invited no question.
What he has encountered is the deference the clinic commands. The deference is not a function of the specific numbers, which the committees revise, nor of the specific medications, which rotate as new molecules enter the market. It is structural. The clinic and the apparatus around it are not old enough to have generated it. The deference the physician commands is about two centuries old. It is the deference owed to a sacred office, which the physician occupies and the patient recognizes without either of them in a position to notice what is happening between them.
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The Claim
The medical apparatus is a daughter institution of a state religion that was established in American political life before scientific medicine existed.
That settlement is Romantic Democracy, in the sense Dr. Martin Erdmann has developed across The Triumph of Progressivism, his one-volume abridgment of a six-volume German work completed over nine years at the end of thirty-five years of academic research.²
Romantic Democracy is a political theology. Its central proposition is that the collective voice of the people, expressed through the democratic apparatus, is self-authorizing and ultimate, carrying the authority that was once attributed to divine command. The promise it makes is heaven on earth: a Kingdom of God pulled forward from the end of history into the present, to be built by human effort through democratic action. The state becomes the moral center of civic life, and the citizen’s devotion to the democratic order occupies the place that was once reserved for God. The outer forms of representative government persist, but the inner settlement they used to rest on has been replaced. In its modern form the religion is portrayed as religiously neutral, which is what makes it functional as a state religion.
The settlement was theorized by Rousseau in 1762, enacted into American political life by Andrew Jackson between 1829 and 1837, energized by Charles Finney’s revivals in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and institutionally consolidated during the Progressive Era between 1896 and 1921. By the time the Rockefeller apparatus took control of American medical education in the first third of the twentieth century, the state-religious authority the apparatus would command was already in place. The apparatus did not have to invent it. It inherited it.
Four recent essays on these pages have treated the medical apparatus through independent frames. The first, The 12 Rituals of Modern Medicine, worked from Robert Mendelsohn’s 1979 characterization of medicine as a church with physicians as its priests, and audited twelve clinical rituals against the Cochrane literature.³ The second, Faith in the Needle, applied Eric Hoffer’s six features of mass movements to the vaccination campaign.⁴ The third, The Immunity Bath, placed the childhood vaccine schedule inside Ernest Becker’s account of death-denial rituals.⁵ The fourth, The Tyrannical Father, applied Jordan Peterson’s archetypal account of the Great Father, protective and tyrannical in the same figure, to the pediatric apparatus.⁶ Each lens showed the medical apparatus commanding deference the medical claims could not generate on their own. None specified the religion the apparatus is a sacrament of. The present essay specifies it.
Rousseau, 1762
Jean-Jacques Rousseau published The Social Contract in Amsterdam in 1762. The book proposed a state in which the individual’s liberty consisted of his unquestioning assent to the general will, in which the state was the greatest manifestation of morality in society, and in which Christianity was marked as incompatible with civic virtue because its indifference to secular law would, in Rousseau’s view, destroy the unity essential to the state.⁷
Erdmann’s account of the book is unsparing. “Rousseau viewed the state as the greatest manifestation of morality in society. For Rousseau, liberty, morality, and society do not exist outside of the state; state and people are a fundamentally indivisible entity. The result is the combination of radical Individualism with uncompromising Totalitarianism.” What Rousseau called liberty was “essentially little more than an unquestioning willingness to do what the supposedly omniscient state has ordered as civic duty.”⁸
The civil religion Rousseau proposed in Book IV, Chapter 8 of The Social Contract was the mechanism by which the general will would hold the people together. “The primary purpose of religion was to serve the social and political aims of the government, above all by promoting the fundamental unity of the state.”⁹ Christianity could never be the optimal state religion, because its gaze was directed at the heavenly rather than the national. Its spirit of servility, as Rousseau called it, would prevent the development of the belligerent spirit the state required.¹⁰ Christianity needed to be replaced.
The replacement was a civil religion whose articles of faith would be stipulated by the sovereign. Belief could not be forced, but unbelievers could be banished from the state or punished by death.¹¹ Other religions would be tolerated only if they did not obstruct the civil religion. The authority to decide whether another religion was obstructive would rest with the sovereign.
Rousseau became the prophet of this new faith. “He upheld Romantic Democracy as the highest ideal attainable. He believed that the kingdom of God on earth was constituted by community as a whole and that social justice needed to be instated as the theme and aim of a new way of life. Rousseau saw this not only as the highest principle of a political system, but also as the sacred foundation of a general religious attitude.”¹² The revolution Rousseau envisioned was religious in nature. He sought “to reinterpret Liberalism in terms of religious categories, becoming the founder and prophet of a new faith, the religion of Democracy, and drawing up a new creed.”¹³
Rousseau’s political system and civil religion were briefly implemented in France shortly after his death. During the Jacobin phase of the Revolution they informed general policy. Their highest ceremonial expression was the Cult of the Supreme Being, established by decree of the National Convention on May 7, 1794 at Robespierre’s initiative, and its Festival of June 8, 1794, over which Robespierre, as President of the National Convention, presided on the Champ de Mars. Seven weeks later, on July 28, 1794, Robespierre was executed and the Terror ended with him. Jacob Talmon’s The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1952) remains the authoritative treatment of the episode as the first political implementation of Rousseauian civil religion.¹⁴
The Jacobin experiment ended on the guillotine that had served its administrators. Americans of the 1820s had it in living memory. What they did not have was the recognition that the settlement Jackson was consolidating was the same settlement pursued by different means. The second political implementation of Rousseau’s system would take root in a country Rousseau never visited, and it would persist, not for a few years but for two centuries and running.
Jackson, 1829 to 1837
On March 4, 1829, Andrew Jackson was inaugurated the seventh President of the United States. His supporters poured into Washington from Tennessee, Kentucky, and the frontier states to see him sworn in and to attend the open reception at the White House that followed. The reception became a riot. The furniture was broken, the china smashed, and supporters stood on upholstered chairs in muddy boots to catch sight of Jackson. Jackson himself was smuggled out of the building to his hotel while the reception continued without him. The staff eventually dispersed the crowd by setting out tubs of punch on the South Lawn. Justice Joseph Story of the Supreme Court, writing to his wife three days later, called it “the reign of King Mob.”¹⁵ What Story saw was the physical form of the settlement Jackson had just consolidated. The people had come to collect what they had been told was theirs.
For a time Jackson had been Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Tennessee.¹⁶ Over the course of his two terms he introduced a form of Democracy that displayed, in Erdmann’s phrasing, “more internal contradictions than there had been in the Republic under previous presidents.”¹⁷
Jackson preserved the outer forms of the Republican Democracy he had inherited from the Founders. The party system, the presidential elections, the House of Representatives all continued. Underneath, the settlement that gave those forms their meaning was replaced. The Founders had designed a republic in which political authority was limited and derived from the governed under a constitutional frame explicitly answerable to a higher law. Jackson’s innovation was to treat the voice of the majority as self-authorizing, as the ground of legitimacy itself.
Jackson’s own words supply the hinge. He stated that man was “even capable of divinity,” and that he wanted to continue institutional improvement until Democracy reached such a degree of perfection that “the voice of the people could be heard as the voice of God.”¹⁸ The displacement is captured in those two phrases. Where the Founders had understood political authority to derive from a frame that stood above the people and above the government alike, Jackson located that authority in the people themselves, and in the Democratic apparatus that collected and expressed their will. The frame that had stood above government disappeared into the government.
The outer forms were preserved. “Yet most Americans barely noticed the change or failed to perceive it at all: the Republican government remained unaltered in its outer appearance, retaining elements such as the party system, the presidential elections, and the House of Representatives.”¹⁹ The citizen voting in 1840 could tell himself that he was voting under the same system his father had voted under in 1812. The ground on which it stood had quietly been swapped out. The ballot now registered the will of a sovereign people whose will was understood to be, in Jackson’s own phrase, the voice of God.
Erdmann marks the moment plainly. “Since the 1830s, the term ‘Democracy’ has held two different but related meanings for Americans: a Republican and a Romantic meaning.”²⁰ The Republican meaning was procedural: elections, parties, representation, constitutional constraint. The Romantic meaning was theological: the democratic order as the sacred frame within which civic virtue was now defined, with the state as its moral center and the citizen’s loyalty to it as his highest form of devotion.
Alexis de Tocqueville, touring the United States in 1831 and 1832, described the settlement from the inside of the moment it was consolidating. His “Tyranny of the Majority” chapter in the first volume of Democracy in America (1835) is a sustained warning that American political life had reorganized itself around an authority to which no appeal lay. The majority, Tocqueville observed, controlled the legislature, the executive, the press, the courts, public opinion, and the jury pool from which the courts drew; the citizen who dissented had no court of appeal outside the majority itself.²¹ The regime he was describing was Jackson’s. He did not call it a religion. He described one in all but the word. “Under President Jackson, Romantic Democracy became the most important religious conviction in America.”²²
The ambiguity between the Republican and Romantic meanings was the structural feature that made Romantic Democracy politically viable. If the Americans of 1832 had been told that their republic had been quietly swapped for a Rousseauian civil religion with the presidential ballot box as its altar, enough of them would have resisted to defeat the project. They were told nothing of the kind. The forms persisted and absorbed the new content. The citizen who in 1832 voted for Jackson’s reelection was performing a sacrament he had been taught to call a civic duty. He was not told that the civic duty had become a sacrament. Most of his descendants have not been told either.
Finney and the New Divinity
A political theology without emotional force does not survive its generation. The theory and the political settlement were in place by 1837. What was not yet in place was the inner devotional substance that would carry Romantic Democracy across generations and down into the lives of ordinary people. That substance arrived through Charles Grandison Finney, operating in the revivals of the 1820s and 1830s and across the four decades that followed.
Finney’s revivals and the theological tradition they founded, known as the New Divinity, rejected the Puritan view of human moral depravity and total dependence on a sovereign God. In its place they put the divine individual, called by his own capacities to determine his own path, responsible to the demands of a social order he was now understood to be morally capable of perfecting.²³ The theological shift aligned with the political shift Jackson had already made. The divine individual of the New Divinity was the same citizen whose collective voice Jackson had declared to be the voice of God.
Erdmann puts it directly. “Finney contributed more than any of his contemporaries to the placement of the ‘divine individual’ at the center of the American state religion introduced by Andrew Jackson, in full awareness of its significance. As a result, Progressivism became a force of supreme importance in the period that followed.”²⁴
The New Divinity was not the whole of mid-nineteenth-century American Protestantism, and the revivals did not sweep every pew. The religious energy they did generate flowed into the political settlement Jackson had made, giving it the devotional substance it required to persist across generations. The citizen who had been taught by his minister that he was individually capable of moral perfection, that his conscience was his authority, and that the kingdom of God on earth was to be built by human effort in the present dispensation, was a citizen formed for a political theology in which the collective will was the voice of God and the state was the vessel of its working.
The transmission mechanism from Finney to the Progressive Era is the Social Gospel movement. Walter Rauschenbusch, Washington Gladden, Josiah Strong, and the figures around Jane Addams’s Hull House preached, taught, and organized under the conviction Finney had planted: that the Kingdom of God on earth was a task for human effort in the present dispensation, and that building it was the proper work of Christian citizens.²⁵ Rauschenbusch’s Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907) codified the position for the generation that would run the Progressive-Era administrative state. The economists and sociologists who formulated that state’s intellectual program, including Richard Ely at Johns Hopkins and later Wisconsin, and John R. Commons after him, were Social Gospel inheritors operating in secular institutional vocabulary. By 1910 the apparatus had its theological frame from Finney and its financial muscle from Rockefeller. The ground beneath both was Rousseau’s settlement as Jackson had made it.
The Progressive Era
Between 1896 and 1921, Romantic Democracy gained what Erdmann calls “uncontested supremacy in all key areas of society.”²⁶ The settlement that had been theorized, enacted, and energized across the previous century and a half was now built into the apparatus of government, the universities, the foundations, and the professions. The modern form of this religion, Erdmann observes, has immense power “precisely because it is generally portrayed as religiously neutral. It could scarcely have a more ingenious disguise to protect it from its rival faith, Christianity.”²⁷
The disguise is the central operational feature. The citizen of 1912 was not told that the state he was being asked to defer to was a religious authority. He was told that it was a scientific one. The Progressive argument was that the complex problems of industrial society required administration by experts trained in the social sciences, whose authority rested on scientific competence rather than on religious or constitutional claim. Lester Ward’s Sociocracy, as Erdmann summarizes it, was the proposition that “legislative power would therefore not be held by an elected Congress, but rather by specially appointed sociologists who would seek to create an ideal society on the basis of their scientific principles.”²⁸ The expert class took over the function the elected representative had performed, and scientific principle took over the authority constitutional constraint had carried. By the end of the Progressive Era the self-governing republic had become the administered society.
The theological core of this reorganization remained what Jackson had made it, and what Rousseau had proposed before him. The state remained the moral center. The citizen’s loyalty to it remained his highest form of devotion. What changed was the professional class administering the devotion. In 1832 the administrator was a politician who used the vocabulary of popular sovereignty. In 1912 the administrator was an expert who used the vocabulary of scientific competence. The underlying structure of state-religious authority was unchanged. The vocabulary was updated to track the educated citizen’s new reasons for deference.
By 1921, with the Progressive Era closing, the apparatus of expert administration was established in American life. The regulatory commissions, the research universities, the national professional associations, and the great foundations constituted a layer of authority that stood above elected government and that was understood, by educated opinion, to speak with the voice of competence rather than with the voice of politics. That layer carried the state-religious authority Romantic Democracy had generated across the preceding century, and it carried it under a disguise that made the authority harder to examine than it had been under Jackson. The citizen who in 1832 might have asked whether the voice of the people was in fact the voice of God had been replaced by a citizen who in 1920 asked, instead, whether a given policy was supported by the science. The question was the same question in a different vocabulary.
The Medical Layer
What Rockefeller money and Carnegie money then did to American medicine between 1900 and 1940 is laid out in detail in E. Richard Brown’s Rockefeller Medicine Men, which this publication summarized at length in July 2024.²⁹ The Flexner report of 1910, commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation, closed proprietary medical schools and consolidated medical education around the research-university model.³⁰ The Rockefeller General Education Board poured more than seventy-eight million dollars into recipient schools, imposing the full-time clinical faculty system against the resistance of private practitioners.³¹ In Brown’s analysis, the medicalization of social problems that followed functioned to legitimize the industrial order by locating the causes of social suffering inside individual bodies rather than in the conditions of labor and the structure of class.³² Rockefeller Foundation operations extended the apparatus internationally, displacing established medical traditions wherever the money went.³³
Brown’s argument places this apparatus inside the logic of industrial capitalism. The present essay is adding one layer upstream. The industrial-capital logic was real. The Rockefeller apparatus did serve the needs of a particular class in a particular economic order. What Brown’s account does not fully specify is why the apparatus commanded, from the beginning, a cultural authority that industrial-capital interest alone would not have generated. Capitalism has produced plenty of institutions that no one treats as sacred. The apparatus commanded sacred authority because it inherited sacred authority. The settlement that had placed the voice of the people at the altar had, by 1910, placed the scientific expert at the altar’s side. The physician trained in the research-university medical school and licensed by a state board whose standards the apparatus had itself written was a sacramental officiant of the Romantic-Democratic civil religion in its Progressive-Era form. His authority was state-religious before it was pharmacological.
The four recent essays on these pages traced the operations of that authority: twelve clinical rituals audited against the Cochrane literature in The 12 Rituals of Modern Medicine,³⁴ Hoffer’s analysis applied to the vaccination campaign in Faith in the Needle,³⁵ Becker’s death-denial frame used to read the childhood vaccine schedule in The Immunity Bath,³⁶ and Peterson’s two-faced Great Father applied to the pediatric apparatus in The Tyrannical Father.³⁷
The fourth essay carried the convergence a step further. Peterson’s Great Father is not only a description of the apparatus; it is an account of why the apparatus is defended by the people it harms. The protective face holds off the terror of chaos the parent would otherwise face alone, and the tyrannical face delivers the schedule and the diagnosis. The parent needs the protective face badly enough that she cannot afford to see the tyrannical one. That is the psychological substrate through which the political-theological settlement operates at the point of individual contact.
The reader who wants the operational detail of the medical layer can find it there. The present essay has specified the religion whose sacraments the apparatus administers.
Return to the Examination Room
The patient is still in the chair.
He has not been told that the deference he is extending to the physician is a form of civic devotion owed to a state religion that was theorized in Geneva in 1762 and enacted in Washington between 1829 and 1837. He has not been told that the physician is an officiant of that religion, or that the committees whose thresholds his blood was read against function in this religion as doctrinal councils whose authority is accepted without the examination that functioning church councils once attracted.
What he has been told is that the science is settled.
The settlement is older than the science. The science is the latest vocabulary the settlement uses to administer its sacraments. When the vocabulary is contested, as Mendelsohn, Hoffer, Becker, Brown, Peterson, and the broader critical literature have contested it, the settlement regenerates the apparatus under new institutional cover. A critique that stops at the pharmaceutical companies, the regulatory capture, the committee conflicts of interest, and the suppressed trials is a critique that stops at the apparatus. The apparatus is replaceable. What is not replaceable is the settlement itself: the Rousseauian proposition that the collective democratic voice is the voice of God, administered now by the expert class that the settlement produced to interpret that voice. The patient in the chair accepts the prescription because he is a citizen of Romantic Democracy, and the prescription is what Romantic Democracy, in his hour and in his examination room, has sent its officiant to deliver.
The office computer flags him for the next appointment. He thanks the receptionist. He walks to his car with two bottles that are the daily sacraments of a civil religion established in American political life before scientific medicine existed. He will take them every morning for the rest of his life. The settlement does not require him to understand what it has given him.
How to Explain It to a Six-Year-Old
A long time ago there were two villages next to each other. In the first village the people chose a council every year. The council made the rules. The council could not make any rule it wanted, because above the council there was a very old book of what the villagers believed, and the council had to obey the book too. If the council tried to make a rule that the book did not allow, the villagers would say no. Everyone understood this, including the people on the council.
A traveler came through the villages and he had an idea. The idea was that there did not need to be a book above the council. If everyone in the village voted together, the voting itself could decide what was right. The voting would be like the voice of the whole village speaking as one, and that voice would be the highest voice, higher than any book.
The second village liked the idea very much. The people there got rid of their old book. They kept their council and they kept their voting, so the second village looked exactly the same as the first village from the outside. Inside it was a different village. The council in the second village could make any rule it wanted, because the voting had replaced the book.
Many years passed. The second village got bigger and more complicated and the voting became harder. The people in the second village said we should have experts to help us decide. The experts went to a special school and they learned things the ordinary people did not know, and the experts told the council what the rules should be, and the council told the people, and the people did what they were told because the experts were very smart and had been to the special school.
One of the kinds of experts was called a doctor. The doctor had a special room where you went when you turned fifty, and he would take some of your blood and look at it and tell you that something inside you was wrong, even if you felt fine. Then he would give you a special pill to take every morning for the rest of your life. The people took the pills because the doctor was an expert and the voting had decided a long time ago that the experts were what the village did instead of a book.
In the first village, which is still over the hill, people do not take the pills unless they are actually sick. The second village does not know that the first village is still there. If you asked a person from the second village why he was taking the pills, he would say it was because of the science. He would not know that it was because of a book he had never read, written by a man he had never heard of, that his great-great-great-grandfather had chosen to put aside.
In Print
The Unbekoming library is available in paperback, printed to order through Lulu and shipped worldwide. The shelf begins with the paradigm question underneath everything else — No Virus, the isolation problem, the collapse of virology’s foundational claims, and a disease-by-disease reappraisal — and moves through the suppressed compounds mainstream medicine set aside: The DMSO Book, Chlorine Dioxide: The Forbidden Remedy, The Iodine Book, and The Hydrogen Peroxide Book. Two more recover what’s still on the kitchen shelf: Baking Soda and The Castor Oil Book. Two more recover the minerals modern soil, water, and processing quietly stripped from the diet: The Magnesium Handbook and The Boron Book. Sitting alongside these is No Contagion, co-authored with Jamie Andrews — the case against germ theory itself, catalogued through 258 failed contagion experiments.
The critique books cover what medicine, dentistry, psychiatry, and veterinary practice have become. The Unvaccinated treats the completely unvaccinated as a comparison group across twenty chapters and five appendices. Medicalized Motherhood follows a woman through 123 documented interventions from teenage pill to postpartum discharge. Drilling for Profit treats cavities, gum disease, and crooked teeth as the dietary problem they are. What Your Vet Can’t Tell You applies the same critique to pets. Escape from Psychiatry documents the fabrication of the DSM and the specific damage of every major psychiatric drug class. The Vitamin K Injection covers what happens in the first hours of a newborn’s life.
The full shelf is at lulu.com/spotlight/unbekoming. A physical book reaches the person a Substack post never will — the skeptical relative, the friend who won’t click a link but might open a book, the visitor whose eye lands on a coffee table. Buy one to keep, and one to give away.
References
Paul Muntner, Robert M. Carey, Samuel Gidding, et al., “Potential US Population Impact of the 2017 ACC/AHA High Blood Pressure Guideline,” Circulation 137 (2018): 109 to 118.
Martin Erdmann, The Triumph of Progressivism (abridged English edition, translated from the German Siegeszug des Fortschrittsglaubens by Hannah Munday); the German six-volume original and its one-volume German abridgment by Beate Gsell.
Unbekoming, “The 12 Rituals of Modern Medicine: An Essay on Confession, Divination, Sacrament, and Absolution in the Clinic,” Lies are Unbekoming, 28 October 2026, https://www.unbekoming.com/p/the-12-rituals-of-modern-medicine; see also Robert S. Mendelsohn, Confessions of a Medical Heretic (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1979).
Unbekoming, “Faith in the Needle: An Essay on Vaccinationism as a Mass Movement,” Lies are Unbekoming, 21 October 2026, https://www.unbekoming.com/p/faith-in-the-needle; see also Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: Harper and Row, 1951).
Unbekoming, “The Immunity Bath: An Essay on Vaccination as the Modern Form of an Ancient Death-Denial Ritual,” Lies are Unbekoming, 25 October 2026, https://www.unbekoming.com/p/the-immunity-bath; see also Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973).
Unbekoming, “The Tyrannical Father: An Essay on the Archetype That Keeps the Mother in the Room,” Lies are Unbekoming, 14 October 2026, https://www.unbekoming.com/p/the-tyrannical-father; see also Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (London and New York: Routledge, 1999).
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique (Amsterdam: Marc Michel Rey, 1762); English translation, The Social Contract or Principles of Political Right (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1948; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), Book IV, Chapter 8.
Erdmann, The Triumph of Progressivism, section 6.1.
Erdmann, The Triumph of Progressivism, section 6.1, paraphrasing Rousseau on the function of religion in the state.
Rousseau, The Social Contract, Book IV, Chapter 8, pp. 225 to 226.
Rousseau, The Social Contract, Book IV, Chapter 8, pp. 227 to 228.
Erdmann, The Triumph of Progressivism, section 6.1.
Erdmann, The Triumph of Progressivism, section 6.1.
Jacob L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker & Warburg, 1952; reprinted New York: Praeger, 1960; Boulder: Westview, 1985). Talmon’s analysis of the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution as the first political implementation of Rousseauian civil religion coined the term “totalitarian democracy” for the resulting regime.
William W. Story, ed., Life and Letters of Joseph Story, 2 vols. (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1851), Vol. 1, p. 563, letter from Justice Joseph Story to Sarah Wetmore Story, March 7, 1829. The scene at Jackson’s inauguration reception on March 4, 1829 is also recorded in the letters of Margaret Bayard Smith; see Gaillard Hunt, ed., The First Forty Years of Washington Society, Portrayed by the Family Letters of Mrs. Samuel Harrison Smith (Margaret Bayard Smith) (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906).
Eugen Lennhoff, Oskar Posner, Dieter A. Binder, eds., Internationales Freimaurer-Lexikon (Vienna: Amalthea-Verlag; Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1965; Munich: Herbig, 2015), p. 431, cited in Erdmann, The Triumph of Progressivism, section 6.2.
Erdmann, The Triumph of Progressivism, section 6.2.
Alice Felt Tyler, Freedom’s Ferment: Phases of American Social History from the Colonial Period to the Outbreak of the Civil War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1944; New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 22, cited in Erdmann, The Triumph of Progressivism, section 7.1.
Erdmann, The Triumph of Progressivism, section 6.2.
Erdmann, The Triumph of Progressivism, section 6.2.
Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique, Vol. 1 (Paris: Gosselin, 1835), Deuxième Partie, Chapitre VII, “De la toute-puissance de la majorité aux États-Unis et de ses effets”; English translations, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve (New York: Saunders and Otley, 1838 and subsequent editions), Volume 1, Part II, Chapter XV, section “Tyranny of the Majority”; or Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), Volume 1, Part 2, Chapter 7.
Erdmann, The Triumph of Progressivism, section 6.2.
William Gerald McLoughlin, Jr., Modern Revivalism: Charles Grandison Finney to Billy Graham (New York: Ronald Press, 1959), p. 21, cited in Erdmann, The Triumph of Progressivism, section 7.1.
Erdmann, The Triumph of Progressivism, section 7.1.
Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (New York: Macmillan, 1907); Washington Gladden, Applied Christianity: Moral Aspects of Social Questions (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1886); Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (New York: Baker and Taylor for the American Home Missionary Society, 1885).
Erdmann, The Triumph of Progressivism, section 6.2.
Erdmann, The Triumph of Progressivism, section 6.2.
Erdmann, The Triumph of Progressivism, cited passage on Lester F. Ward’s Sociocracy.
Unbekoming, “Rockefeller Medicine Men by E. Richard Brown: Unbekoming Book Summary,” Lies are Unbekoming, 10 July 2024, https://www.unbekoming.com/p/rockefeller-medicine-men; see also E. Richard Brown, Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).
Abraham Flexner, Medical Education in the United States and Canada: A Report to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Bulletin Number Four (New York: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1910).
Brown, Rockefeller Medicine Men, Chapter 4, on the General Education Board and the full-time clinical faculty plan.
Brown, Rockefeller Medicine Men, Chapters 3 and 5, on the ideological function of scientific medicine for corporate capitalism.
Brown, Rockefeller Medicine Men, Chapter 5 and conclusion, on the international extension of the Rockefeller medical program.
Unbekoming, “The 12 Rituals of Modern Medicine” (as cited above).
Unbekoming, “Faith in the Needle” (as cited above).
Unbekoming, “The Immunity Bath” (as cited above).
Unbekoming, “The Tyrannical Father” (as cited above).