The Holy Experiment

This famous painting, by Bucks County folk artist Edward Hicks, is known as "The Peaceable Kingdom." It depicts an encounter in the 1680s where William Penn is talking cordially with the Lenni Lenape, the indigenous people from whom he purchased much of the colony of Pennsylvania. Penn is a Quaker. He believes that there's a fragment of the Divine in every human being, and so he is duty-bound to treat everyone with respect, and to honor his agreements with the original inhabitants of the land. The river in the background is the Delaware.

In the foreground, you see the fulfilliment of the words of the Hebrew Prophet Isaiah:

"The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf, and the lion, and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall feed; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox... They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain." Isaiah 11:6-9

Penn and his followers called Pennsylvania a "Holy Experiment." His was the only colony that guaranteed absolute religious freedom for anyone who claimed to believe in some version of the Christian God. That's narrow by modern standards, but it was pretty liberal back in the day. In fact, the Quakers were so tolerant that they were soon outnumbered by people far less tolerant than themselves. And in time, those "less tolerant" folks rose to power, where they sit entrenched these 300 years later. But as long as Penn lived, the land was never "taken" from the indigenous peoples, only "purchased." That's pretty fair, since Penn could have behaved like other European settlers, laying claim to the land and purchasing it only with musket and sword.

This second picture, of course, lampoons "The Peaceable Kingdom." It depicts a ruinous place where respect has been supplanted by the shameless and shortsighted drive for material gain.

I know--as you do--that there's no returning to innocence once it's been lost. And all the Utopian experiments in the history of the world have failed. Wisdom cannot be legislated, but only acquired through pain and openness. Respect will never be as glitzy and glamorous as raw material gain. But how did we get so far from where we started? I don't mean "How did we get so far from our religious roots?" God knows religion has been a huge part of the problem! I mean, how did we go from a society based on respect to a society based on individual gain? And what can be the future for people who make such a shift?