The subject of Religion & Civics is important to understanding the Republican Tradition.
What is Covered
CIVIC REPUBLICAN VIRTUE: Many early American thinkers argued that republican self-government requires a virtuous citizenry, and they believed religion supported that virtue.
FOUNDING-ERA POLITICAL THEOLOGY: Sermons, covenant theology, and Protestant political thought influenced ideas about liberty, authority, and rights.
CHURCH-STATE DEBATES/SECULARISM: The First Amendment, disestablishment, and religious liberty are central to the American republican tradition.
RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS AND REFORM: Abolitionism, temperance, civil rights, and other movements often blended religious and republican arguments.
PLURALISM: American republican tradition was not shaped by a single doctrinal worldview but by a mix of spiritual, philosophical, pagan revivalist and fraternal currents from dissenting Protestant sects to eclectic Freemasonry that prized civic virtue over dogmatic uniformity. This history is widely distorted, understudied, omitted or ignored because the fact is hated. It’s precisely this intellectual and spiritual diversity that allowed the founding era to resist literalism and authoritarianism, making space for a civic order grounded in reason, conscience, and voluntary association rather than enforced orthodoxy. It has declined, and the expressions dominated by literalism and authoritarianism have gained ground. Atheism is not sufficient to challenge this force.
WHY FOCUS ON THE UNITED STATES
Being American, the affairs, potential and conditions of my own country, its abuses, its history and future is of vital interest to me. I am motivated by the fact, that in our day, many sides, groups and political ideologies, including those taking advantage of religious conflicts and racial animosities have gained influence, and to great consequence.
MOVING AMERICAN CULTURE
We seek to cast away materialistic excesses and distractions, to mold ourselves through spiritual exercise and action into the civic voices, theologians, protectors, exemplars, scholars, literary writers and philosophers of our era and beyond. The idea is to not give rise to the creation of new religious innovations, but to provide strength.
The creation of republican-minded, or civically informed citizens is a struggle of necessity and for the Truth, and a plea for Wisdom in governance based on a knowledge of its foundations. We are capable of producing a devastating counter to the various forces of Christian Nationalism and should be ready to do so.
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APPROACH TO STUDY OF THE HISTORY OF RELIGION IN THE UNITED STATES
The approach to the study and advance of Religion and Theology in relation to Civics in the U.S. is expressed by the nineteenth-century American esotericist, Alexander Wilder.
THE BIRTH OF A CONSPIRACY IN AMERICA
The idea of The American Minervan was initially born from an explanation period into the history of America and origins of American political tradition, as a critical reaction against Manly P. Hall’s “The Secret Destiny of America,” that mirrors the views of William Q. Judge. Both Hall and Judge argue that America was not an accident of history, but the deliberate result of a “Great Plan” carried forward by secret enlightened philosophers. Utilizing the correspondences between Theosophists Helena P. Blavatsky, William Q. Judge and Chhabigram Dolatram in the nineteenth-century on whether clandestine individuals (known as adepts or “secret chiefs” in Masonry) were involved in the American Revolution, Blavatsky rejected this enthusiastic belief of Judge. She replied that the Revolution partly owes itself to independent liberating efforts of Freemasons and Rosicrucians acting from their own ideals, not as a command from a singular order.
For Judge and Hall, America was directly founded by adepts or guided the Founders through occult means. Blavatsky pushed back, claiming, that adepts do not directly interfere in political revolutions; and that the political revolutions were shaped by human initiates, such as Freemasons, Rosicrucians and Enlightenment radicals, acting on their own philosophical commitments.
This symbolic-mythic framing points also to preceding influences from Europe and converging interests, from which was born a providential republic, and not a monarchy, or theocracy.
The aims of the German Rosicrucians and the historical Bavarian Illuminati, in addition to Thomas Jefferson’s brief thoughts about them and the French Revolution led to my papers I have written about these issues.
The political history side of my research always began with the World War I and II era towards the defeat of Fascism, and investigating the political mythos of the Third Reich (Drittes Reich). The intent in studying Fascism is mainly to a) compare with American Republicanism — both being or claiming the Heritage and Legacy of Rome; and b) resolve and neutralize outdated and conflicting conspiracy that relate Gnosticism, Occultism or Theosophy to antinomianism, Communism and Socialism, Fascism or National Socialism. This investigation immersed me into a detailed study of the roots of the American Revolution and the philosophico-political influences underlying the foundations of U.S. government and back up through the entire history of Italian Unification (Risorgimento) into the philosophy and origins of Italian Fascism. There are key religious, cultural and philosophical dimensions and currents, that emerge within the research that need to be carefully explained.
SOCIOLOGICAL PARANOIA OF CONSPIRACY IN U.S. POLITICAL THINKING
The study and history of conspiracy theory (e.g., the New World Order conspiracy theory) is interwoven into the history and mass psychology of America, such as the anti-Masonic attitude that developed in the early history of the U.S. Stemming from this is the Illuminati conspiracy, which began at its basis as a convergence of Protestant and Catholic attitudes towards Jews combined with the anti-revolutionary retort of conservative-monarchist influences that were being built up during and after the time of Johann Adam Weishaupt and his Bavarian Order of the Illuminati in the eighteenth-century.
We must fight against these conspiracies, because they are obstructions to students learning the actual history and causes’ they ought to be able to defend and carry against political, corporate, business and institutional interests that do not serve the people and care for the land and republic.
The real history and ideas complement our history, rather than conflicts with it. The interests, religious skepticism and positions of some of the U.S. founders and framers, including the early spiritual movements of the settlers and esoteric currents possess knowledge that transcend race and political party. A people blinded by an anti-philosophical, bigoted and infantile Christian cultism who fail to express and embody this knowledge before the nations of the world cannot truly claim the legacy of American Republicanism nor defend Secularism. They would not be strong mentally to overwhelmingly push against despotism and theocratic visions. This ignorance degenerates the American experience, stifling our creativity for solution in approaches and answers, which exist abundantly to better guide us.
THE HIDDEN WEST
With reverting Protestant intolerances, irrelevance of shallow political mottos, deceitful platitudes of the Politician, and the advent of neo-traditionalists and sympathetic White ethno-nationalists, I want to show how an expansion or incorporation of complementary elements to the foundational political system in Republicanism can enhance American Identity, Knowledge and Culture in our day. Those that will represent this vision must help to divert the force of the people, rather than contribute to the racial obsessions and “culture wars” that define our age. Radically departing from these attitudes, we want to challenge a people who terribly labor under limited views about its Identity that try to center it in either a post-War superficial multiculturalism, Christian pluralism, Southern tradition or the “Lost Cause” Confederate tradition, or the heritage of the legacy “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.”
You will find me delving into the relation of the history of Theosophy and the importance of developing an eclectic approach to the Study of Religion. Naturally, this leads us into the history of Magic, Alchemy, Science, the Mysteries, to Iran, Mesopotamian religions and Central Asia, Folklore and Mythology interpretation. This involves studying the history of “The Hidden West” (Gnostic movements and connection of esoteric currents in the Americas, Europe and Asia), with biographies of prophets, adepts and mystics. In most recent periods, this goes through the Medieval Alchemists, Renaissance Platonists, Freemasons, German Rosicrucians, Templars and more (see Crusades to Late Renaissance Occultism to Enlightenment Timeline (1075-1680).
Therefore, I write about Religion partly to dissect and challenge the ill-informed and malicious tactics of Christian and monotheist religion polemics and propaganda in their exclusivist claims to truth over the “pagan world.” These claims and approaches have led to ever-gradual degeneration of religious thought and bloodshed since their clever constructions. Dismantling core notions and positions within the subject of Christian ecclesiasticism and heresiology — the religion, that has been the dominating influence in the U.S. and in Western Civilization for two millennia is actually key to the advancement in our understanding of Religion, and the repute of Religion, Theology and Esotericism. As long as this is ignored, there will be no true progress.
We are explicitly against the corrupting and degenerating effect of simplification, which also contributes to treating the People like infants out of distrust in their capabilities, or belief in what the People lack. This is not opposite of the democratic spirit. Readers are encouraged to be eager to learn.
CONNECTION TO CRITIQUES OF THE SECULAR ENLIGHTENMENT
The About, briefly, explains how the U.S. constructed its tradition of representative democracy and constitutional republicanism, and the origins of republicanism as not only a form of government but a long lineage of thought, theory and philosophy of civic life, human conduct and governance. Democracy before liberalism in classical Greece, challenges the illusions of the modern world as born from a secular Rationalist Enlightenment, and the foundations of Western Civilization.
The American Minervan 