David Breeden is speaking all week about Church/State Separation.

Transcription:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the Senior Minister, First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. This is Coffee and Wisdom. This week we have been looking at that “Wobbly Wall: Separation of Religion and State.” I was mentioning yesterday where the word secular comes from, Latin: saecular, meaning a “generation or an age.” It was used in Church Latin to mean “the world (as opposed to the Church),” really meaning that it’s “in time” rather than “beyond time,” (the churchly kind of thing of) “eternity.” A little bit odd to make a huge distinction in the world anymore that way. But we are kind of stuck with this terminology in European languages. Yesterday I was asking the question: “Is it even possible to be secular?” Or, as many philosophers argue, most or many of secular people are simply inverted religious people, that is, they merely stop being religious and use that then as a religion. We were talking about the outcomes of that kind of assumption. I mentioned yesterday, an April 2021 article called: America Without God. “As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen. Will the quest for secular redemption through politics doom the American idea.” You can catch that online or in The New Atlantic Monthly by Shadi Hamid. He has this to say. very quickly: “…what was once religious belief has now been channeled into political belief. Political debates over what America is supposed to mean have taken on the character of theological disputations. This is what religion without religion looks like.” Again, that argument of the inversion of secular and religious as being what most secular people are doing. This is a debatable point. But his main focus here is about the extremes in American politics now being religious in nature. Yes, we we think of the Christian Nationalists on the right as being about religion. We don’t, however, think about the secular folks on the left as having developed religious attitudes about these issues, so that we demonize, just as religious people do, each other on the two extremes of American politics, and that those extremes are increasing and the numbers on both sides of that chasm then are increasing. Very interesting article to take a look at. All of this is about something called the Establishment Clause from the First Amendment, which was ratified December 15, 1791. You’ve heard it all your life, probably. But here, let’s take a peek at it. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….” (That is the Establishment Clause.) It goes on to say “…or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” These are the things that Congress, that would be the Federal Government will not do, make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. “When the First Amendment was adopted in 1791, the establishment clause applied only to the federal government.” (This is something we too easily forget in American history,) “…prohibited the federal government from any involvement in religion. Only by 1833 had all the states disestablished religion from government providing protections for religious liberty in those state constitutions.” This book on: “Disestablishment and Religious Dissent.” It’s a scholarly look at how the 13 colonies developed in religious traditions.

David Breeden is speaking all week about Church/State Separation.

Transcription:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation, humanist since 1916. This week I’ve been talking about “The Wobbly Wall: Separation of Religion and State.” This is what the Freedom From Religion Foundation thinks about that: “The only wall we need is between church and state.” That’s certainly one way to argue the question. Quick review. Yesterday I went over that really that term. Judeo-Christian needs to go out of our vocabulary. It isn’t Jesus versus Moses. That might make a good video game, but it doesn’t make for good politics or good theological thinking. Judeo-Christian was a term that came out of the early 1930s when the Nazis began to crack down on people who …had converted to Christianity but who were culturally Jewish or had been born in Jewish families. It comes into the U.S. through U.S. rabbis who knew what was going on in Europe, and we’re trying to talk about getting beyond anti-Semitism by considering Judaism as a part of Western cultural theological thinking. But after the war, this began to be used by McCarthyite right wing conservative type people to talk about something that really doesn’t exist. I’ve also been talking about non-secular, the meaning that government and a religion are very closely aligned. The United States is not like that, but it is good to think about countries that are. The U.S. is specifically not like that, probably because we were a colony of England at one time and the people who formed the U.S. government were rebels against the U.K. government. The public opposes bishops in the House of Lords, by the way, by more than three to one because it is a non-secular state. We have the monarchy and the Anglican Church, the Church of England, right together, side-by-side, from the time of Henry VIII. In the House of Lords, that is the Senate of the U.K., if you will, not exactly but kind of, we have people who automatically sit in the House of Lords because they are bishops in the Church of England. That is a non-secular way of doing it. More than three to one of the British public says, no, that’s not a good idea. But guess what? “It’s a non-secular nation, so you don’t get to vote on it, subjects. You just have to listen to what your religion and your government have to say to you.” Secular is an interesting term that we do need to define a little bit it, because it’s thrown around. But what is it really? Well, it comes from a Latin root: saeculum, meaning “a generation or an age,” a generation or an age, a time. Secular. But then it began to be used in Church Latin, Latin used within the Roman Catholic Church to mean “the world” (as opposed to the Church). Basically the idea there and how this came to be was that secular is “in time”, that would be on the planet in history, rather than “beyond time in eternity.” Well, guess what? Politics is done, yup, in time on the planet, not in the beyond time of eternity. So secular has an interesting meaning in the Western world. One question is, is it even possible to be secular? That’s not a settled question, as a matter of fact, because this month The Atlantic Monthly has an article called America Without God. It is written by Shadi Hamid, who is a contributing writer for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a founding editor of Wisdom of Crowds. The subtitle of America Without God is “As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen. Will the quest for secular redemption through po...

David Breeden is speaking all week about Church/State Separation.

Transcription:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, and this is Coffee and Wisdom. This week we’re talking about the “Wobbly Wall”, the separation of religion and state in the U.S….that’s called the Establishment Clause…,thinking through what secularity means, what being a theocracy means, and those kinds of issues. Yesterday I mentioned there are 195 nations on the earth, including a couple that we don’t always count as nations, including the Vatican and the state of Palestine. Among those, there are 51 that are officially non-secular states. That is, states that say, yes, we do indeed honor one religion over other religions. This means that the government and the religion is very closely aligned. Probably the best known case of this, in the U.S. anyway among Americans, is England, the United Kingdom and how the Church of England has become a part or been a part of the government since Henry VIII’s days. Here we have Prince Charles and the Archbishop of Canterbury, the leader of the Anglican tradition, shaking hands, glad-handing around. This is the kind of relationship that’s going on when we have government and religion as bedfellows, as it were. I should mention quickly that George Orwell looked at this closely. You remember George Orwell from past discussions, very much into the idea of what is actually the truth. His book from 1937, called The Road to Wigan Pier, looked at the British working class. He went to Wigan Pier, a very poor part of town, and began to talk to the laborers there, asking them about what they were interested in, what they were not interested in, etc.. What Orwell discovered is that these working class people had no religion at all, nor were they interested in religion. Now, his speculation on that is that the working class of England had already decided that religion was all about the ruling class. It was a game among the rich and they had no interest in it whatsoever. And this is one of the things that does appear to happen very often when you have a government and religion very closely aligned. The people who feel outside, those who feel oppressed, don’t want to have anything to do with that religion. The most famous quote from Wigan Pier is probably this one from Orwell: “As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for socialism is its adherents.” From 1937. Now, one of the things that’s a kind of a sleight of hand when we look at American history then is the poor British who were coming to the colonies here were not religious for the most part. We look at Massachusetts and say, Oh, look at those Puritans, they were coming here for religion, etc. But we don’t look at the other 12 colonies, which were not about religion for the most part. The poor who were coming here for the most part, had no religion. We know that by simply looking at what went on afterward with the Methodist circuit riders, (and) Baptist circuit riders. The poor in America, the oppressed, the rural people were Christianized later by the effects here in the United States, but it didn’t come from the state religion of the United Kingdom. So one of those oddities that we don’t really think that much about. What is a government when it is in bed with religion? Well, the government financially supports religion that religion or sometimes, as in the case with the U.K. today, there was a pretense of, yes, we spend this amount of money on the Church of England for schools, for example, but we will also spend the same amount of money proportionally for Islamic schools, etc. Separate but equal is one of those things that doe...

David Breeden is speaking all week about Church/State Separation.

Transcription:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, and this is Coffee and Wisdom, starting out a new week and a new thing to think about just now. This week, we’re going to be thinking about various aspects of the question of the separation of religion and state. I’m going to call it that wobbly wall. We’ll see some ideas about how this shakes out around the world and then specifically about the U.S. There are 195 nations on Earth, including the Vatican and the state of Palestine. A total of 51 of those are officially non-secular states. Non-secular: some religion is in charge through governmental interference, participation, etc. Here’s a map of the country of the Vatican, the small city-state embedded in Rome traditionally. Officially non-secular states, well, the Roman Catholic ones: Costa Rica, Malta, Liechtenstein, Monaco, the Vatican again. And you go on Dominican Republic,…some you expect, some you don’t…Panama, El Salvador, Paraguay, Poland and Peru. Eastern Orthodoxy is the official state religion of Greece. In Protestantism we have England, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Tonga and Tuvalu. I don’t remember where Tuvalu is, so I had to look it up, and it is indeed a Pacific island. We can tell by the flag why it has a state religion. It is part of the British colonial system from days gone by.Part of the thing, however, with all of this is that when we do have a state religion, it does appear that there is some connection between the state religion and the fact of the church’s not being particularly well-loved. So, you know, what is… is there a connection? Is it only a European Christian connection? But I mention here the folkekirke, the state church of Denmark, which reports of 200 churches in the countryside, approximately ten percent of all their churches, do not have congregations of a viable size. Well, that is also what’s happening with United Methodism and Presbyterianism, etc. Within the United States the very rural congregations tend to be shrinking and aging and disappearing, consolidating, just like the high schools did a few decades ago. This shrinkage probably is going to lead to some very quick decay in the difference between these various denominations that are going on. But there also seems to be some correlation again between a state religion and how many people actually buy that state religion. Going on with the list, we have Islam in Bangladesh, Djibouti, Iraq, Pakistan, Palestine, and Tunisia. Also within Islam we have various sects of Islam. Sometimes countries are one sect, sometimes another, sometimes all of them, such as Kuwait, Yemen and Bahrain. But we have the Shia Islamic nation of Iran, the Ibadi Islamic nation of Oman (that’s a much smaller subset of Islam) and Sunni Islam, which is really the most popular branch of Islam: Afghanistan, Algeria, etc. So these are the nations that officially do these particular religions as national, as state religions. You also notice that we do have a couple of Buddhist nations, different kinds of Buddhism, but Cambodia and Bhutan, and Judaism is the official national religion of Israel. If you look over to the right religions of Cambodia, ninety percent of the people in Cambodia are Buddhist animist, and everything else is just very small, although you do notice something very interesting that does have an effect in the Outworld of U.S. Religion, and that is that there is Evangelical Christian traditions at 1.6 percent and “charismatic” Christian at 1.3. That would be Pentecostalism that I’ve talked about before that just keeps doubling over and over wit...

David Breeden is speaking all week about the psychological images that become embedded in talking about how the mind works..

Transcription:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. And this is Coffee and wisdom. This week we’ve been looking at dancing in the chapel, perilous at an old literary trope that has taken on all kinds of meanings. As we have discovered, it all begins, at least in the English language and as far as we know, because there may be some lost French texts that preceded this, but it all begins in fourteen eighty five with Lamport Dorotka by Thomas Mallery. A Night in Prison in London and the title of one chapter, Chapter 15, is How Sir Lancelot Came into the Chapel Perilous and Gachet there of a dead corpse, a piece of cloth and a sword. And I did share early in the week how this is written. It’s very flat. Not a lot of excitement going on in the in the text, but that is where it all starts in the English language. Nowadays, however, through an odd but traceable as we’ve done this week, a series of events, the Chapel Palace has become a meme tied to the hero’s journey, conspiracy theories, the occult and neo shamanism, and to the point that someone nowadays can ask for a lecture. Is society itself now trapped in chapel perilous? One of the things that I should point out about Chapel Perilous is that it is like that because that’s the way romance languages work.The adjective is nearly always after the noun. So chapel peerless in contemporary English, it would be peerless chapel. But that just doesn’t sound as cool, does it? And so it retains the romance language construction there. I went through Joseph Campbell very quickly, a constructivist from the midnight twentieth century, the hero with a thousand faces. His book from the nineteen fifties is very famous and still used as a textbook for teaching plot, not for a specifically spiritual, actual spiritual journeys, but for the idea of how to construct a plot. Joseph Campbell says this in that book, The Journey of the Hero is about the courage to seek the depths, the image of creative rebirth, the eternal cycle of change within us, the uncanny discovery that the seeker is the mystery which the seeker seeks to know. The hero journey is a symbol that binds in the original sense of the word to distant ideas. The spiritual quest of the ancients with the modern search for identity always the one shapeshifting, yet marvelously constant story that we find. So you see here that Campbell is conflating several ideas. The hero journey. But the hero journey, in his estimation any way, also is a spiritual journey. And this becomes part of the chapel. Perilous story, one of the works of art that comes directly out of the hero with a thousand faces.Joseph Campbell was a consultant on the film, was the original trilogy of the Star Wars cycle. And specifically, we can see this in the Planet Digable Sequence in which Luke goes down into a very, very scary cave, fights with Darth Vader and kills Darth Vader, only to find that he has decapitated himself in a single combat. That, of course, is very much part of the chapel. Perilous story that you had, that your real fears are what you create in your own mind. And so very it looks perhaps strange to people who don’t understand or haven’t read about the Chapel Palace motif, but it makes perfect sense for those who know how this works. I should mention the Dego about a cave snake, the plans for this down at the bottom. Right. It looks a lot like a medieval dragon. The only thing it’s lacking there and from medieval dragon illustrations is legs. So it’s it’s a dragon with that left,

David Breeden is speaking all week about the psychological images that become embedded in talking about how the mind works..

Transcription:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the senior minister, First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, and this is Coffee and Wisdom. This week we’ve been looking at a literary trope that has become kind of a spiritual journey trope, and that is the chapel perilous and I’m calling it this week, dancing in the chapel, perilous and tracing how this idea really has developed from something in French literature. Probably it probably originates in France and the romances. It comes into the English language and understanding with a trope from L’Amour Dorotka by Thomas Mallery and fourteen eighty five. He was very open about the fact that he was compiling old Autherine stories from both England and France, and he was translating many of those out of French at the time. How does that then go to a more shamanism? Getting into American movies, books, et cetera, et cetera, is a bit of a journey here. Little reminder that this is the round table from a 14th century painting. And here on the middle of the round table of the Austrian Knights is this glowing chalice. So this is part of this idea of search. It’s part of the idea of of spiritual journey. And that’s part of what’s going on here, is it’s kind of getting a little bit confused as to what we’re talking about. Are we talking about a story or are we talking about spirituality? What what are we talking about? And now it is a meme that’s tied to conspiracy theories, the occult and neo shamanism.And that’s what we’ve been looking at. What is happening with that? And as you can see from this particular one. Yeah. Is the is are we now trapped in the idea of the chapel? Perilous in general? That’s the claim of Eric Davis, who is a cultural critic and does look at as sort of fringe religions across across the US culture, especially California. Yes. Well, part of the idea of how this gets into the popular imagination is through Joseph Campbell. And something from the nineteen forties and fifties called The Hero’s Journey. It becomes well known as a literary trope. Hero ventures forth from a world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder. Fabulous forces are encountered in a decisive victory is one. The hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man. And from that comes all kinds of plot devices in American movies trying to be mythological in character. And also you do see a region of supernatural wonder. I mentioned that Joseph Campbell was hired for the original trilogy of Star Wars. And so this has become very much a part of Hollywood in developing these kinds of ideas as we go along. Also, then, from the Hero’s Journey, we go into Robert Anton Wilson, who says in researching occult conspiracies, one eventually faces a crossroad of mythic proportions called Chapel Perilous in the trade. There we have chapel perilous appearing in the occult. You come out the other side of this this interaction with this idea, either stoned, paranoid or an agnostic.There is no third way, he said. And I came out and agnostic. So here we get the idea from the Illuminatus trilogy, which is very upfront about being science fiction. Or is it? It’s also talking about various American conspiracy theories based on a parody religion that I’ve talked about before called a discordant ism. You see how all of these things are getting a bit jumbled over time. So how are we working through this? Well, the hero’s journey is a description of plot, not human lives, which have no plot. Of course, if you start thinking your life should have a plot,

David Breeden is speaking all week about the psychological images that become embedded in talking about how the mind works..

David Breeden is speaking all week about the psychological images that become embedded in talking about how the mind works..

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. This is coffee and Wisdom. And this week we have been looking at some ideas from depth psychology, if you will, that at least go in to that direction after coming out of various literature and mythology. And I’m calling it dancing in the Chapel Palace. Now, yesterday, I did cover the idea that this idea of the chapel perilous has gone on into some new areas. And I want to trace how that got there. In occult terminology, Chapel Perilous is a psychological state in which an individual cannot be certain whether they have been aided or hindered by some force outside the realm of the natural world, something supernatural or whether what appeared to be supernatural interference was a product of their own vivid imaginations. Now we know where the the humanists among us are going to come down on this. But for a lot of people, this is a very difficult thing to kind of suss out. And so we want to look at how this works. So how did this a cult and, you know, looks kind of scary.How did that develop out of something that looks fairly mundane and kind of peaceful and even pastoral? Here are pictures from the original Assyrian tales as redone during the Victorian era. Sir Lancelot and the Witch. There’s the Holy Grail here. We have the round table and here is the Holy Grail in the middle of it with some kind of halo rainbow effect going on there. As I mentioned yesterday, all of this is developed out of a book called Limor Darker by Thomas Mallery. And it’s a compilation of French and English theory and tales from the early to late medieval period. The book coming out in fourteen eighty five. So how did we get from there to here in which the chapel perilous occurs in all sorts of science fiction and fantasy? Why did it cross that line, which doesn’t at first appear to be a very logical leap? Well, the first step was to say Eliot’s the wasteland at the chapel, pyrolysis mentioned in the wasteland. And we know that because T.S. Eliot told us so in the footnotes to the book, he says this.These blinds are from his idea of the chapel, peerless in this decayed hole among the mountains in the faint moonlight, the grass is singing over the tumbled graves. About the chapel, there is the empty chapel. Only the wind’s home. It has no windows and the door swings. Dry bones can harm no one. Well, now, that’s kind of cryptic if we want to talk about it. But we do see the outlines of the chapel perilous appearing in this. So how do we get there? Well, we have to trace it back to Eliot’s source. And he has this to say in his footnotes, not only the title, but the plan. And a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem. The Wasteland were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend from ritual to romance, indeed, so deeply am I indebted? This Westons book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do, and I recommend it apart from the great interest of the book itself. To any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble to another work of anthropology, I am indebted in general, one which has influenced a generation profoundly. I mean the Golden Bough I have used, especially the two volumes Adonis, Attisso, Syrus, anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognize in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies. So vegetations ceremonies is where Elliott is going with this. We’ll get there. But first off, let’s stop off to look at Jessie LWR book.

David Breeden is speaking all week about the psychological images that become embedded in talking about how the mind works..

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. And this is coffee and Wisdom. We’re starting a new theme this week called Dancing in the Chapel Perilous. What is that? This is a series of images that occur in literature, but they become psychological images that are then in some way embedded in talking about how the human mind works. The chapel perilous being one of the older ones that occurs back in the fourteen hundreds. So we’ll take a peek at that first. Here’s something you can find on the Internet. Lewis says, by my chapel, perilous insurance it insures against unsightly psychic scars, character armoring, reality tunnels, superfluity, involuntary free association, fraudulent insurance and excessive force of Feyenoord. Should give you a clue. Those of you who were joining in when I was talking about religions that are maybe kind of joking and there is one called Scorpion ism and indeed for does occur in discourse pianism. A final word is a word that makes you forget that you’ve ever seen that word. So something is up with this, but we’ll have to wait to see where it goes. But we do have a definition of what Chappell perilous means. As a matter of fact, Chappell Peerless is an occult term, referring to a psychological state in which an individual cannot be certain whether they have been aided or hindered by some force outside the realm of the natural world, or whether what happened to be appeared to be supernatural inference was a product of their own vivid imagination.So it’s a moment at which we reached this point and say, wait a minute, was that supernatural or is that just a product of my own imagination? And so you can see how the the the Chappell idea could be wrapped up in some other kinds of ideas that then become all, you know, Dan Brown ish in some way. But we’ll have to wait and see about that. But, you know, there we got all this occult stuff going on and then there Sir Lancelot and the witch Healthways. That doesn’t look very scary, does it? And of course, the chapel perilous is part of the Grail legend, the Holy Grail. That’s not scary and that’s not a cult. Or is it? And that’s what we need to look at this week. Now, chapel, perilous as a term, first appears in Lammert Darter, written and compiled by Mr. Thomas Mallory. And it was published by London’s first printer, William Caxton, in fourteen eighty five. Did the image exist in earlier manuscripts? We really don’t know. Thomas Mallory, the author, is very upfront about the fact that he is looking at manuscripts that came out of older traditions, most of them from France.And so it could be that the chapel perilous exists somewhere else. And he did get it. But we don’t know that because we don’t know any other sources that still exist, although they may have been around in fourteen eighty five. Now, who was there, Thomas Mallory? There are several candidates for him. There were several Sir Thomas Mallory’s living at that time, but the most likely candidate is a guy who lived from fourteen fifteen to fourteen seventy one. So right in that time period he fought in both on both sides of the War of the Roses and he was imprisoned at Newgate Prison in London. Therefore, we know that this author is writing out of the prison. He says so Caxton says so. So this is probably the guy, although we really don’t know. He was a member of parliament at one time, again, going back and forth during this civil war that’s going on.

David Breeden is speaking all week about writing from prison.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden on the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, and this is Coffee and Wisdom. This week we’ve been looking at epistles and writings that occurred in prison. And today I want to talk about the most popular book in English after the Bible and how it happened to be written in prison. So John Bunyan, sixteen twenty eight, sixteen eighty eight, was born in Bedford, England. He had almost no formal education at all. His father was a tinker and so he became a tinker by trade. That is an itinerant person who goes around fixing pots and pans. This is Bedford, England, today on the River Ouse o. U s e. So he became a Christian after hearing a voice say, well, tell leave those sins and go to heaven or have thy sins and go to hell. As soon as he heard this, he joined the Bedford meeting, which was a nonconformist group. The building is still there today. Now, we call them Puritans in the US. In England, they were called nonconformists. And in the United States, we know who the Puritans are. They were the people around Boston. But in England, the story is much more complicated. Various regions of the country having different kinds of nonconformist movements. Bunyan was never ordained. The sixteen sixty two act of uniformity required preachers to be ordained in the Anglican Church of England tradition and required the use of the Book of Common Prayer in any kind of meeting that might be considered religious in nature.The charges against Bunyon were that he, quote, devilishly and perniciously abstain from coming to church to hear Divine Service and spoke at several unlawful meetings and Kevin articles to the great disturbance and distraction of the good subjects of this kingdom. Here we have a wax figure of Bunyon in the John Bunyan Museum in Bedford, UK, and a tradition there is to dress him up, according to the holidays, the wax figure there. So you see what’s going on. He was a good puritan in that he joined the parliamentary army during the English revolution, fought on the side of parliament, which was the Puritan side of things against royalty. Then the restoration occurs. The monarchy comes back in sixteen sixty, and these laws begin to be passed against nonconformists because they are clearly the people who are revolutionary and are resisting government interference in their religious traditions. So he’s going to become a preacher and preacher’s unlawfully because he has not been ordained within the Church of England tradition. This would be a way of controlling the kind of speech that’s coming out of the preachers mouths, and thus he was imprisoned for twelve years. Now, I should hasten to add that his imprisonment is a bit interesting in that the real terms of imprisonment for his offense was three months. But he continued to say over and over again, they would say, John, are you going to preach again? And he would say, heck, yes, I am.And so they couldn’t let him out of jail for twelve years. It was he was a prisoner of conscience in that way. He said, I will stay in prison until the moss grows on my eyelids rather than just obey God. However, interestingly enough, in Bedford, he was released occasionally. He did preach during that twelve year period and his last child was conceived during his imprisonment and he wrote the book. The Pilgrims progress was written during Bunyan’s imprisonment, but not published until sixteen seventy eight. Six years after his release. It’s been translated into more than two hundred languages and has never been out of print since its publication in sixteen seventy eight. The estimates are that it is the most read book in English.