The Puritans’ dilemma
ALEC RYRIE considers a study of Puritanism that focuses on how its adherents wrestled endlessly with the idea of saving their compatriots
Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America by Michael P Winship In 1646, a Puritan preacher in Massachusetts told a group of Native Americans that, unfortunately, they were mired in barbarism, sin and ignorance. They digested this news and then asked “whether English men were ever at any time so ignorant of God?”
We might expect the preacher to have reached back to Roman times for an answer. But instead, he replied that even in 1646, “There are two sorts of Englishmen: some are bad and naught, and live wickedly… in a manner as ignorant of Jesus Christ as the Indians now are.” Even after travelling across 3,000 miles of ocean, and finding themselves balanced on the edge of a wild, unmapped continent, the Puritans were still obsessed by their perpetual, irresolvable conflict with their own kin.
The Puritan dilemma, according to this authoritative book, was a cruel one. These self-described “hot Protestants” had, since the 1540s, been yearning impatiently for further Reformation. Yet they insisted that they could not make that journey alone, but must take their whole nation with them.
At first, they were simply defeated by popular indifference and royal hostility. Then, worse, they began to succeed. In New England in the 1620s and 1630s they created godly cities “upon a hill”; found that no purity could ever be pure enough; and discovered that their children, born and raised in the colonies, could never be as godly as the generation who had chosen to leave everything to emigrate.
Meanwhile, in old England, victory in the Civil War brought Puritans to power but did not solve their problem. Should they drag the whole unwilling country into godliness with them, or strike out alone and abandon the idea of a national church? If they had been able to answer that, their republic might still be with us.
Michael P Winship tells an oceanspanning story with a light touch and an ear for compelling vignettes. He integrates the old and New England narratives powerfully, and keeps a sharp eye on the English Caribbean, but he might have given us more of other contexts where parallel dilemmas were resolved. Scotland, for example, embraced a much more unified Presbyterian national church.
The risk here is that we fall for the Puritan myth of the persecuted minority. In this context, the book bypasses emollient, unifying figures such as William Perkins, the giant of Elizabethan Puritanism, who worked with the grain of the establishment. Instead, Winship is drawn to the sirens of self-conscious division.
His story ends with the Glorious Revolution, and New England’s retreat from theocracy – a transition that he blames for the Salem witch trials of 1692–93, a “horrific fluke” in which secular magistrates tried to use rough tools to solve the preachers’ traditional problems. As old England had already discovered, the ideals the Puritans were pursuing may have been illusions, but the costs of the effort were all too real.
Puritan ideals may have been illusions, but the costs of pursuing them were all too real