The Space Puritan Vision

The purpose of this website is to stimulate the creation of a Christian nation in space which uses as its philosophical starting point the historical puritan colonies of New England in North America and the city of Geneva under Calvin. In other words, we want to stimulate the creation of a modern puritan nation in space. I am starting as a lone individual, but, Plymouth, the first New England colony, was the effort of one or two men who were the principal leaders of a single medium sized church in Old England.

We are living in both dangerous and exciting times. As I write this, a world pandemic, the result of the first accidentally released artificially modified virus, is in the last stages of wreaking havoc on the planet and the forces of globalization and power concentration have taken this opportunity to consolidate power in the hands of fewer and fewer people. As a reaction, socialism and secularism has strengthened as a bad alternative to oligopolistic capitalism.

Global socialism has been challenged by nationalistic socialism and these forces have gone to war leading to devastation in Ukraine. The church has been caught in the cross fire and the threat of open persecution and civil war in developed western nations looms as a possibility in the not too distant future.

However, we are also in the early stages of mankind’s ascent into interplanetary space. This gives us access to the vast resources of the rest of the solar system. These resources are like an inheritance in a trust account which becomes available when the child reaches an age where s/he can use it responsibly. It seems as if God knew that this is the time when the kingdom of God needed these new resources to continue its spread. A similar argument could be made of the discovery of the Americas by the Europeans right before the advent of the protestant reformation. Some have tried to minimize the impact of this discovery, since the native Americans had already discovered America. However, in the same way that the Europeans, Asians and Africans did not know that the American and Australian continents existed, so too, the native Americans did not know that the rest of the world existed. On that day, for the first time, people from the old world first met people who had already arrived at the new world and both began to understand that the world was bigger than they realized. That mutual discovery, initiated by Christopher Columbus, transformed the world and fueled the processes, both good and bad, which have created the modern world.

However, like the Israelites when they were about to enter the land of Canaan, we are ordered to fight and conquer. The kingdom of God does not spread automatically, it involves arduous, coordinated effort and sacrifice. The new world, in the form of the Americas, was both a land of the free and the land of the oppressed. Freedom took root in Puritan New England, but Catholic South America still had the same oppressive system found in Europe and the Anglican colonies of the North American South, starting with Jamestown, helped create an even worse form of slavery than that which already existed in Europe. In both continents slavery took hold and native peoples were displaced, sometimes slaughtered, sometimes absorbed. It was a land of the good, the bad, and the ugly. What made some difference in the United States was the influence of the Puritans, the Presbyterians, the Baptists and the Methodists. Most of these were Reformed Calvinists. Otherwise the United States would be as poorly developed as Argentina is now, a country with a similar geography and a similar ethnic demographic, but a different majority religion.