The supposition that Puritans, on both sides of the Atlantic, were party poopers and fun suckers, ashen-faced and humorless, is an image constructed by theater and novels. This caricature developed early in the 19th century and has endured to the present with rare exceptions, like the Catholic convert Orestes Brownson’s periodically coming to their defense. Like many monikers, “Puritan” began as a pejorative, was eventually embraced by its recipients, and now serves, once again, as an insult for someone who is hyperactively moralistic and censorious—the type of person you do not invite to parties. Notably, it is typically hypocritical of our own day to preachily condemn alternative, foreign ways of life for being too preachy and particular, but I digress.
Believe it or not, they drank, they smoked, they enjoyed recreation and even, in keeping with their station, fancy dress. And they loved their spouses. Even in their severe piety, the Puritans were more like Christians of earlier eras than outliers. If they seem harsh or superstitious today, perhaps it’s because we’re the weird ones.
Of course, stereotypes are always overinclusive. For every Puritan that shunned any holiday not commanded in Scripture, there was a Matthew Hale, the great jurist of Puritan stock, who maintained his love for Christmas throughout his life. Although less than Calvinist in his soteriology, he remained staunchly Sabbatarian, reserving the Lord’s Day for worship and rest.
For every critic of theater and lavish waistcoats, there was a Bulstrode Whitelocke, a Puritan parliamentarian, who while dismayed by the loose morals of some of his friends nevertheless composed music, directed plays, and even let his servants play cards provided the stakes were kept sensibly low. Whitelocke was a notoriously ostentatious dresser, but even his cinnamon-colored suits and vibrant capes did not create the stir that John Owen’s thigh-high boots of Spanish leather did. As proponents of traditional hierarchy, a sentiment found most notably in John Winthrop’s Model of Christian Charity (1630), the governing rule for Puritans was not so much that colorful clothing was sinful but rather that dressing according to one’s station was paramount for social order and due modesty. Puritans are remembered for being rather drab, but that’s because most 17th-century middle-class people were comparatively drab in appearance.
For every one of the “hotter sort” of English Protestant who rejected the Elizabethan settlement, especially as perpetuated by the Stuarts, and most especially in its Caroline expression, as insufficiently reformed, there was a nonconformist like Richard Baxter who never missed service at his conformist parish. Or there was a Richard Sibbes, who remained within the church while prioritizing Puritan emphases in his devotional writing and preaching.
What is a Puritan then? Definitional battles occupy much of the secondary literature on Puritanism. At bottom, a Puritan is simply a 16th- or 17th-century English reformist Protestant. If further distinctives are added, the water becomes muddied fast. For instance, the Puritan label is typically ascribed to John Milton. As a reformist, indeed nonconformist, English Protestant, the label is deserved. And yet Milton expressed, shall we say, dissenting views on divorce and, more concerningly, a heterodox Christology—as did John Locke, himself of Puritan origins, familial and educational. The Puritan tent is rather big, it turns out, and must therefore account for varying opinions. Like any ism, Puritanism evades exhaustive, monolithic description.
What about recreation and fun? Puritans capitalized off the reissuance in 1633 of the Book of Sports, originally published in 1617, as a threat to Sabbatarianism, but this was primarily political, representative of further jurisdictional incursions from the arch anti-Puritan Archbishop Laud. In any case, sport as such was not considered an invention of the devil. Many nonconformist ministers openly advocated exercise and recreation. Such things, rightly ordered, were not necessarily tantamount to laziness and frivolity.
John Cotton’s Practical Commentary upon John refutes the popular impression of this Puritan attitude toward rest and relaxation. God was to be glorified in “eating and drinking, sleeping and recreating.” Cotton himself was a friend of good food and good drink, as were most of his compatriots. When the synod was called at Cambridge in 1647–48, the Massachusetts General Court rewarded attendees with barrels of wine and kegs of beer to aid their labors—more than enough for each minister to be thoroughly inebriated if he so wished. Many Puritan ministers are remembered for their work ethic and neglect of sleep; some, like William Bridge, literally worked themselves to death. But Cotton acknowledges that rest was for the good of the body and spirit. What was to be avoided was “love of Sleep and Ease” to the neglect of godly service. Likewise, recreation and play glorify God when they are properly enjoyed. That is, when pleasure and indulgence do not replace man’s highest end or violate God’s commands. What Christian would disagree with that rather innocuous claim, even today, and even if they are not Sabbatarian? Moreover, we might remember that it was Augustine who first criticized theatrical spectacles for corrupting the soul; Plato who had less than laudatory opinions about actors (and poets); and Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, who were iconoclastic well before the Puritans. Decent company all around.
Moving to the domestic front, in his The Puritan Family (1944), Edmund Morgan describes the remarkably relatable bliss and normalcy of Puritan family life, a study intentionally ignored, it seems, by popular sentiment today. Caricatures are much easier to maintain. As with Luther’s doctrine of vocation generally, the Puritans sought to uphold marriage as desirable, contra Catholics who “speak reproachfully of it,” to quote Samuel Willard’s Compleat Body of Divinity. Marriage was no longer a sacrament, but neither was celibacy ideal. Marriage, rather, was a necessity for gregarious creatures. Without women, said John Cotton, “there is no comfortable living for man.” Morgan adds that “in celebrating the wedding after the ceremony the Puritans were no kill-joys.” The early New Englanders did not allow “riotous merry-making” on any occasion, but a wedding was indeed a time when feasting was appropriate. Neither were they prudes about sex. As Leland Ryken rightly explains in Worldly Saints (1986), chastity did not apply to the marital bedroom, nor was the Augustinian view of sex as purely procreative in its ends embraced. Most often, premarital sex was addressed by performing a marriage between the two parties.
Divorce was certainly frowned upon, as we might expect, but provisions for divorce in the case of “malicious desertion,” infidelity, and the like were recognized, as they broke the marriage covenant. Inside the marriage, as Benjamin Wadsworth described in The Well-Ordered Family, the “duty of love is mutual.” Husband and wife were to “endeavour to have their affections really, cordially and closely knit, to each other. … They should (out of conscience to God) study and strive to render each other’s life easy, quiet and comfortable; to please, gratifie and oblige one another.”
The Puritans were like their contemporaries, patriarchal and anti-egalitarian. But this was no license for tyranny. As Wadsworth instructed, a good husband was to rule “as that his wife may take delight in [his headship], and not account it a slavery but a liberty and privilege.” The laws against wayward or disobedient children in New England are often cited for shock value by modern historians. These laws were, in fact, never enforced. More actionable were laws in the same jurisdiction against child neglect, spiritual and physical. The family was frequently described as a commonwealth in miniature. Its disorder would spell disaster for society; failure to raise children well would spell its death. Regarding discipline of children, Anne Bradstreet and Samuel Willard both advised “gentle discipline” befitting the particular personalities and inclinations of individual children, with the use of “severity as the last means.” Most important was that parents served as good examples for the character and conduct of their children, otherwise any instruction or discipline would fall flat.
Bulstrode Whitelocke, a Puritan parliamentarian, composed music, directed plays, and even let his servants play cards provided the stakes were kept sensibly low.
But even if we set aside the aforementioned diversity, stereotypes usually exist for a reason. On the whole, the censoriousness and strict moralism applies to most if not all Puritans in most ways. What we find, however, is that what is mocked or ridiculed in the Puritans was simply a feature of the time. In other words, most of what supplies the modern stereotype is descriptive of Christendom in the 16th and 17th centuries generally.
A reformation of manners, a second reformation, was not unique to Puritans—those who desired further liturgical correction in the Church of England—nor was it shared in all particulars. Protestants in the Netherlands similarly called for the socio-political extension of the reformation. Even there, however, we do not locate the origins of the Puritan mood.
Drive for social and moral reform, intense piety, and biblicism did not spring from Puritanism or Protestantism. When people today criticize Puritans for being moralistic killjoys, they are really criticizing early modern Christianity—its morality and priorities.
Moreover, the aspiration of moral reform, piety, learning, and self-improvement, championed by the hotter sort of English Protestants, was not of their own invention. It was the movements of the prior century that delivered it to them. If people today dislike the Puritans so much, they should blame the Renaissance, which is most commonly remembered for supposedly unleashing modernity, a repudiation of all that proceeded it.
Indeed, Renaissance humanism offered many correctives to received medieval dogma, and this was in part the impetus for the Reformation itself. Luther stands out as one of the few non-humanists amongst the magisterial reformers. By contrast, Calvin was a trained humanist lawyer, educated in the New Learning, who first gained attention for his commentary on Seneca. The humanist influence on early modern theology itself is evident in both Reformation and Counter-Reformation texts, with its eclectic synthesis of scripture, the church fathers, and the great pagans of antiquity.
But, in fact, it was specifically the Erasmian strand of the northern renaissance that inspired the Puritan posture in late 16th- and 17th-century England and New England.
Margo Todd expertly recounts in Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (1987) how the Puritan ambition for a reformation of manners and social improvement was not a product of either Protestantism or its Puritan expression but of the advent of the vita activa coupled with a Christian humanism. The Puritans were no innovators in this regard.
Puritans, like their more conformist counterparts, were reared in an intellectual milieu that prized Erasmus’ Enchiridion and Cicero’s De Officiis no less than Calvin’s Institutes. It was the “Greco-Roman and patristic Golden Age,” says Todd, that inspired them, in both the recovery of Christian doctrine sanitized of late medieval innovations and the reformation of society, the elevation of the active life and the suppression of licentious laxity. None of this was at odds with an “overriding biblicism,” as stated, but rather informed by it. If a Stoic asceticism was discernable, the morality in view was informed by the Bible. The “pagan classics were servants of Christianity.” In the Stoics, doctrine that rhymed with or was supportive of Christian convictions, like human depravity, were found and employed for both social criticism and moral programming. A populist, so to speak, outlook also ensued, contra what Erasmus had satirized in Praise of Folly as the “argumentative Scotists and pigheaded Ockhamists” who were so preoccupied with theory to the neglect of the apostle Paul.
Self-improvement manuals, in the Erasmian vein, were hot commodities. All prescribed a self-discipline, for the individual and society, that was “at least as ‘puritanical’ as that of the followers of Calvin or Perkins, including a demand for daily self-examination.” (And we might add that the same tradition, one begun most obviously with Augustine’s Confessions, endured in the works of the deist Benjamin Franklin and the Stoic Thomas Jefferson.)
The result?
The new biblicism, conditioned by revived classical moralism, defined a new social type: a pious, self-controlled, industrious lay person, active in civic and ecclesiastical affairs, seeking always the common good. This combination of good citizen and Christian soldier was to be the essential building block of the new society. (Todd)
Winthrop’s “city on a hill,” the new Israel, does not seem so outlandish and unique in this light. It was grounded in this new optimism of Christian humanism. Again, this was not distinctly Puritan. Thomas More’s Utopia is a paradigmatic case. As J.H. Hexter surmised in The Vision of Politics on the Eve of the Reformation (1973), “so many things that a good many people want are banned in Utopia that Calvin’s Geneva looks a bit frivolous by comparison.” Drunkenness, gluttony, gambling, blasphemy, and Sabbath breaking were, at the time, universally recognized as grave social ills, not to mention sinful, destructive to any godly society—the aspiration of all Christendom.
In other words, Puritans simply believed what other English Protestants (and other Christians besides) believed, if sometimes “more intensely.” That these emphases extended into ecclesial life is no surprise, but the expression thereof is often exaggerated. Descriptions of membership examination in New England, in particular, often reflect later revivalistic practices of the “anxious bench” more than historical practice. Increase Mather and other ministers wrote frequently to their fellow clergy to be gentle with the consciences of communicants. Many times, personal testimonies for membership took the form of simple affirmation of confessional doctrine. Church discipline, too, has been exaggerated for theatrical effect by later observers. On one occasion, it took the ministers of Boston 12 years to enact discipline on a congregant who openly and notoriously rejected infant baptism. The delay was not owed to difficulty in locating the man but rather the result of pastoral patience. Even the famed Anne Hutchinson Affair is overblown today. Prior to any civil action against the Antinomians, due to their increasingly disruptive public behavior, Boston clergy went to great lengths to convince and convert via theological disputation. In the end, as with the Quakers and Anabaptists, however, open and disruptive dissent presented a socio-political problem requiring attention from the magistrates of any godly commonwealth. Up through the 19th century, American common law continued to recognize blasphemy, reviling of Christianity, and Sabbath breaking as threats to peace and good order.
Puritans simply believed what other English Protestants (and other Christians besides) believed, if sometimes ‘more intensely.’
Regarding enforcement, we must recognize with Perry Miller (Errand into the Wilderness) that Puritans in Boston were no less tolerant than Jesuits in Madrid. That moderns are uncomfortable with the prospect of 17th-century Christian society is predictable; that discomfort simply cannot serve as a focused indictment of Puritans as killjoys and scolds. Modern critics must be accurate and fair. Condemn the morality of the whole of medieval and early modern Christendom or don’t condemn at all. That Christians should take sin, especially public sin, seriously should not be some earth-shattering revelation.
Before we leave the topic of enforcement, we must address the elephant in the room: witchcraft. The thing, oddly, Puritans are most remembered for, at least in America. As David Hall has described in Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment (1990), the Puritans believed in a real spiritual world, the home of a cosmic battle, which was intertwined with lingering folklore.
But then most Christians for most of history have believed in a real spiritual world, real spirits, real angels and demons interacting with this world, the one God made flesh himself visited. On Reformation Day, Protestants still sing with Luther, And though this world, with devils filled, should threaten to undo us—but they do not feel this cosmic reality in the same way that Heiko Oberman describes in his magisterial Luther: Man Between God and the Devil. The Puritans were nearer to Luther than we are.
It might seem quaint and folksy that, say, Richard Baxter relayed credible accounts he had received of poltergeists and the like. But what then do we make of the Desert Fathers? In any case, the superstitions of the Puritans were shared by most other Christians of their era, and that includes the existence of witches and the sinfulness of fraternizing with the devil or engaging in witchcraft.
James I/VI, who could never be mistaken for a Puritan, wrote the leading text of the day on witches. Similar instructions for prosecuting spiritual warfare were abundant in that era, as were accounts of witch trials and exorcisms. The only remarkable thing about Salem 1692 is how few people were accused, tried, and executed, and that thereafter public remorse was expressed by clergy and magistrate alike for improper procedure—specifically, the reliance on spectral evidence.
Far more witch trials occurred in England than in New England, and on the continent than the other two combined. Over the course of the centuries in view, Roman Catholics executed far more witches than Protestants. All of which to say: Witch hunting is not a Puritan invention, nor were they all that passionate about it. To single out Salem as uniquely conspiratorial and hysterical is, again, the work of theater, not history. New England was more like old England in this regard, and no one in the motherland questioned the viability of colonial accounts of demonic occurrences.
In the scope of history, the only strange thing is that our moral and spiritual imagination has little room for what the Puritans believed—namely, that witches are real (as the Bible teaches), that evil spirits are involved in the affairs of men, and that natural disasters have providential import. We are the weird ones, censoring historical consciousness and castigating the same as improbable or immoral. Moreover, it is our disordered public morality, one that aggressively protects licentiousness according to individual taste, that is, in a sense, a “puritanical” anomaly.
