Tonight PBS shows the first episode of Colonial House, a documentary about people who agree to live for several months on the coast of Maine in the manner of 1628, but with cameras present. (Bob’s Red Mill, of Milwaukie, was the lead corporate sponsor and provided the flour and grains.) The colonists follow an adaptation of 17th century colonial rules, including mandatory Sunday church attendance.
Saturday I previewed the first four episodes. In one of them, one family skips church on Sunday to go skinny-dipping. The next week other colonists skip church. The minister says that the Sunday church meeting is an important part of holding the community together, not so much for the religious purpose but because the community physically gets together only for church.
Tomorrow is Election Day. It’s certainly more efficient for us to vote by mail, and voting by mail means that candidates can’t effectively use Election Eve smear tactics. But I miss going to the polls because it was an act of community, and nothing’s come along to replace it.
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Heh. My father (Congregational minister, historian) flipped past the minister and had a fit over how inaccurate he was. He would have skipped church, too.
I like vote by mail. I can feel smug about having voted for weeks before election day!
The minister in real life is a very liberal professor of religion, the antithesis of the Cotton Mather type. I suppose he hit some personal limits when he was left in charge of the colony and had to deal with the Sabbath-breakers, because (I sensed) his heart wasn’t really in it. When one of the skinny-dippers is staked out in the field (her husband gets to do the honors), she seems amused by the whole thing (perhaps thinking that the punishment is something of a joke), but as her hours in the field pass, she is less and less amused and doesn’t look as if she’s enjoying the joke. The colonists of 1628 would not have thought it a joke from the start, and we can’t as 21st century inhabitants get into their mind-set.