I find it harder than Amanda does to identify a conflict in my own life between two nonexistent abstract personifications. (Being neither a Christian nor a man with a family may of course also be relevant.)

Regardless of the extent to which we identify with these abstractions, we might take your argument the short way across by saying that Christianity is a universalising faith, which seeks to explain that all people are children of one common Creator, redeemed by the sacrifice of his only begotten Son. But people take their identities most easily (perhaps a sociobiological argument would be helpful here?) from a family, a clan, or some other small community, whose creeds explain not universality, but particularism.

Yours, then, becomes, or wishes to become, a normative argument for particularism: Judaism or Hinduism (the religions that explain not why people are the same, but why they are different) writ small.

In truth, I would expect this to seem to many readers, as it seems to me, very small game not worth hunting. "Whatever floats your boat," is surely the answer, even if one has an opinion of one's own. As for whether John Brown is the universalist he thinks he is, or the particularist you find an ingenious way to claim him for, seems to be of no moment whatever: he has made clear what he means to do and why he means to do it. The rest, as Thoreau is the first to admit, is not even commentary.

So what seems to me most useful in the revision of this essay, besides the elimination of all the various little distractions that could be pruned away, is a clear statement of what's at stake. If this is a fight between straw men, readers will do right to withhold their attention.