THERE ARE MORE EARLY PREACHERS BESIDES GEORGE WHITEFIELD

(h/t Andrew Sullivan)

That's Glenda Beck's favorite pre-Revolutionary fundie preacher.  Whitfield was a part of the Great Awakening movement but not as important as homegrown preachers such as William and Gilbert Tennent.  In an appreciation of the historian Richard Hofstadter, I found a quote by Jeremy Belknap (1744-1798) that Hofstadter used in The Founding Fathers: An Age of Realism:

There was no better expression of the dilemma of a man who has no faith in the people but insists that government be based upon them than that of Jeremy Belknap, a New England clergyman, who wrote to a friend: “Let it stand as a principle that government originates from the people; but let the people be taught…….that they are not able to govern themselves.”

The quote comes from a letter Belknap wrote to his friend Ebenzer Hazard in 1784:

Let it stand as a principle that government originates from the people ; but let the people be taught (and they will learn it by experience, if no other way) that they are not able to govern themselves.

This is certainly far removed from Glenda's goofy glibertarian populism.