Debunking the myths of the Puritans

A revisionist argues that historians have turned the authoritarian, conformist puritans into reflections of their own complex, Harvard-educated selves.

By Maria Russo

Nov 25, 1998 | With so little history to wrap our imaginations around (no Ming Dynasty, no pharaohs, no philosopher kings), it's no wonder Americans have made the Puritans the subject of so much cultural mythmaking. On the face of it, they're hardly compelling material: a smallish group of ascetic-minded religious malcontents who tried to hammer out a theocracy in the wilderness. Yet the Puritans star in some of our most enduring national fantasies, starting with the one about white-Indian cooperation that we dust off every Thanksgiving. Even academics who study the Puritans have found surprising dramatic possibilities in those 17th century New Englanders. The last half-century of American Puritan studies has been dominated by a succession of scholars who looked at their subject with an auteur's eye. Perry Miller's 1939 "The New England Mind" came first, recasting the fusty Puritans as players in a high-minded, soft-around-the-edges drama of our national origins. Miller's story had an uplifting, Frank Capra-esque feel to it. He presented the Puritans as a "chosen people" who felt they were called on an "errand into the wilderness" to escape the corrupted Old World religious landscape. Miller looked at the Puritans' writings -- sermons and tracts, and some poetry -- and saw not Christian boilerplate marked by petty theological disagreements, but a sparkling, highly literary repartee. A distinctly American way of thinking, Miller proposed, grew out of the Puritans' intellectual legacy. This jaunty account stood fast until 1978, when the roguish Sacvan Bercovitch came up with a postmodern alternative in "The American Jeremiad." Bercovitch had the Puritans staking out predetermined positions in a sly game of power plays worthy of David Mamet. Tired of being kicked around in Europe, Bercovitch's Puritans sought the chance to run their own show in the New World. Soon, however, a hegemonic religio-political center emerged and began oppressing dissenters and cultural outsiders, who in turn tried gamely but unsuccessfully to subvert the center. In the internecine Puritan conflicts, Bercovitch held, the stagnant, intellectually repressive, peculiarly American two-party system was born.

By the 1980s, this starkly political rendering was soundly rejected by a group of scholars led by Alan Heimert and Andrew Delbanco, whose "The Puritan Ordeal" gave us a more sympathetic restaging. This account of the Puritans had a Woody Allen quality: They were an anxious, uncertain band of religious misfits, put to the test by the "howling wilderness" they found here, frustrated by their own intractable theological disagreements. Delbanco's Puritans wrestled idealistically among themselves in hopes of a consensus they never managed to achieve, sowing the intellectual seeds of our conflicted but freedom-loving nation of immigrants.

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