Marilynne Robinson is a distinguished literary novelist (e.g., Housekeeping) and English professor from Idaho who converted from Presbyterianism to Congregationalism (i.e., the Protestant sect most descended from Puritanism). She has conventional left-of-center views, except that she’s very proud of her New England WASP ancestors and their left-of-center views.

In the New York Review of Books, she laments that nobody in America appreciates anymore the vast Puritan contributions — as embodied in formidable figures like John Wycliffe, Oliver Cromwell, John “Shining City on a Hill” Winthrop, John Milton, Jonathan Edwards, William Blake, Henry Ward Beecher, and John Brown — to modern American liberalism.

Which Way to the City on a Hill? Marilynne Robinson JULY 18, 2019 … Why are we alienated from a history that could help us find a deep root in liberality and shared and mutual happiness? Those who control the word “American” control the sense of the possible.

Well, because your heroes, Professor Robinson, tend to be straight gentile white men, and in the Current Year nobody cares about differences in ideas among straight gentile white men. Caring about intellectual differences as opposed to identity differences is Not Who We Are (anymore). The Diversitariat have reduced all thinking to the equivalent of “Four legs good, two legs bad.”

[Comment at Unz.com]