It is a general fact in human history, and one of the saddest, that no sooner has a persecuted community secured its freedom than it takes to persecuting its own.
— Frederick Pollock, Spinoza: His Life and Philosophy, 1880
Running from Religion is the story of a journalist’s search into his own past — into the lives and the lies of his forefathers. Don Lattin traces the two sides of his immigrant family back to the sixteenth century wars of religion and the nineteenth century diaspora of Russian Jews. Along the way, he offers a quick tour across five centuries of mystics and misfits. Lattin, a veteran religion reporter and the author of six books, then looks at how this ancestral trauma echoed across the centuries, exposing fault lines in a family that was not what it seemed and was always on the run. Running from Religion is not just his story. It’s an American story.
Chapters One through Six, along with the introduction, are posted for free on this website. Chapters Seven through Ten and the conclusion are available by purchasing a print or e-book edition of the entire work. Details on the (see above) “Buy the Book” page of this website.
Clockwise from top left: Hiram Lattin family in the early 1880s; Lattin family crest; map of Lattingtown, NY; Fanny and Arthur Kubey in 1918; Russian Jews in Kovno, Lithuania during the Holocaust.
Table of Contents
(Click titles below to read available chapters)
Introduction
In which the author challenges the mythos of “faith and family” and explains the origins of Skeptical Universalism.
Flemish Bureaucrats, American Colonists and Jewish Gangsters
A chart designed to help the reader keep track of fifteen generations of Lattin/Kubey ancestors.
Chapter One — Lattingtown
Dedicated to my eighth great-grandfather, Richard Lettin, who sailed from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1638, only to find a new theocracy chasing him further into the wilderness.
Chapter Two — Heretic
Dedicated to Anne Hutchinson, who stood up against the Puritans, the sect that puts the “p” in patriarchy.
Chapter Three — Netherlands
Dedicated to my eleventh great-grandfather, Jean Lettin II, who served for forty years as the secretary to the Grand Council of Malines, threading the theological needle during the most tumultuous decades of the Protestant Reformation.
Chapter Four — Margaret of Parma
Dedicated to my twelfth great-grandfather, Jean Lettin I, who lived in Malines, Flanders (Mechelen, Belgium) in the 1520s, an agent of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, and a man who may have crossed paths with Margaret, the king’s illegitimate daughter and future governor of the Burgundian Netherlands.
Chapter Five — Writer, Mystic, Prophet, Prince
Dedicated to Erasmus of Rotterdam, the first modern author and religion writer who sought a middle path between Catholic and Protestant extremism. Includes historical profiles of mystic Giordano Bruno, Prince Rudolf II of Bohemia, and Hendrik Niclaes, the Dutch prophet who managed to shock the guardians of faith and family on both sides of the Atlantic and on both sides of the Wars of Religion.
Chapter Six — Onto England
Dedicated to my tenth great-grandfather, Jean Lettin III, a lawyer chased from the Low Countries 1567 by the northern arm of the Spanish Inquisition, only to find himself living as a refugee in England enmeshed in more political and theological turmoil.
Chapter Seven — Jewish Gangsters in the Ancestral Closet
Dedicated to my maternal grandmother, Fanny Blumenthal Kubey, whose family of Russian immigrants had more to hide than their religious heritage. Buy the Book
Chapter Eight — Russian Pogroms and Spinoza’s God
Dedicated to Baruch Spinoza, the forerunner of the Enlightenment, whose philosophy, if followed, could have averted three centuries of genocide. Buy the Book
Chapter Nine — Grandpa, Great Awakenings and the Erie Canal
Dedicated to my grandfather, Big Al Lattin from Manhattan, an orphaned child who built my family’s bridge into the twentieth century. Buy the Book
Chapter Ten — Family of Origin
Dedicated to my parents, Warren Lattin and Muriel Kubey, who struggled with their own adversity and addictions but did their best to love and be loved in return. Buy the Book
Conclusion
In which the author traces the origins of Skeptical Universalism and the dysfunctional family back to an aging Nazarene carpenter, his young wife and her illegitimate son. Buy the Book