hhIs it just me being weird or is it in fact weird that the Meck Dec hoopla steadfastly avoids the religious angle to Mecklenburg’s history?

The Scots-Irish Presbyterian colonists had a beef with the Anglican church — the official church of England — going back to the Ulster migration. (The English enticed Scots to settle in the tip of unruly Ireland.) The state and the Anglican church were officially one, and if you stood outside that church, you were a second-class citizen in ways great and small.

In fact, entire Presbyterian congregations up and moved to America — some to the Carolinas — for precisely that reason. In a Piedmont with perhaps 150,000 people in 1770, a couple of fire and brimstone preachers could make an unholy racket. George Will, of course, noted Presbyterian upset with the Vestry and Marriage Acts of 1769, which fined Presbyterian ministers if they performed a marriage.

If you dig deep enough, you can find references in the official Meck Dec timeline to how such laws grated on Mecklenburg’s earliest colonists, and eventually spurred them to action. But this seems to me to be a case of burying the lede. Why?

Could it be that recognizing a legitimate grievance arising from a state imposing its value system on citizens via laws of social control and taxation — always taxation — strikes a little too close to home for fans of activist and robust government?

You tell me.