Old Canaan

Calvinists named "New Canaan", the town I grew up in. As a lad I read the New Canaan Advertiser. Every week at the top of the front page, it called our town "the next station to heaven"—a local spiritual mythology that thrives today, as in this piece from 9/18/20: **Herr, the new pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of New Canaan, arrived in town last week, after a career that has taken him from Mexico and Colorado to Zurich and Paris, before “The Next Station to Heaven.”

“We were in Paris for 12 years,” Herr said. “Mexico City for six, Zurich for six, Fort Collins in Colorado for nine years. It’s been a wonderful life.

“I feel like God somehow saved the best for last,” he added.** New Canaan was a name that, when I wrote it out in forms and return addresses, made me wonder what old Canaan was. From the years spent as an acolyte at St. Mark's, I knew the name came from the Bible. When I looked into it, I found 2 things. First, Canaan was paradise: Exodus 3:8

So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey—the home of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. Second, Canaan was inhabited by natives, and the deity and his minions exterminated them: Joshua 3:10

This is how you will know that the living God is among you and that he will certainly drive out before you the Canaanites, Hittites, Hivites, Perizzites, Girgashites, Amorites and Jebusites. I can't remember ever discussing the provenance of our town's name while in high school. Things were not so deep. But lately, as I mentioned, I've wondered. How it could be that the land of milk and honey, which New Canaan most definitely was, could also be a place of ethnic extermination, genocide?

I could not even put in words how strange it was: the source of my parent's religion was an abomination. And ... the name of my town was ... a strange story I lived in. Paradise was the privileged white-male late-industrial-capitalist childhood I enjoyed—by accident bc I did not choose to be born, much less be raised there. I was lucky. What I learned there was that life is abundant (bc that's how it was laid out in front of a child who had no clue, and who was not taught to care about, where anything came from) , and paradise is a commonwealth of abundance. Since then my life's been spent keeping that feeling of paradise—that life is a miracle—alive. My town was not the next station to; it was heaven. I tried, in my own unguided way, to be an "angel". For Ann Coulter, New Canaan was story #2—of extermination—of a paradise that, if a deity's presence is to be revealed and embodied, must be the site of genocide. Her paradise and her "New Canaan" was not mine.

Her version of paradise as a place of racist genocide is popular and she's made a successful career being its "Martha Stewart".