I’ve recently finished a book called American Myths, part of which suggests that the much-maligned Puritans were really as repressive and closeminded as they have often been accused of being. Is there any evidence to support this idea? I’ve often wondered if it wasn’t just bad press that built up as an easy label to use on people that you disagree with and want to portray in a negative light.
It depends what you mean by “puritannical”. They drank (and brewed) beer, and I’m pretty sure they didn’t ban music and kite-flying a la the Taliban. On the other hand, they Puritans were pretty repressive when it came to religious dissidents, up to executing people for preaching Quakerism, and they notoriously had and sometimes enforced laws making “witchcraft” a capital crime. The New England colonies tended to have laws on the books making such offenses as idolatry, blasphemy, bestiality, and cursing one’s father or mother punishable by the death penalty, complete with proof texts from Leviticus, though I don’t know how often such were enforced.
On the other hand, the Puritans did recognize the need for healthy sex in a marriage, and once chastized a man for denying his wife “the marital bed”.
The Taliban banned KITE FLYING???!! That’s it - I’m off to enlist.
Part of the problem with judging the character of the Puritans is that we will have a different perception of what should be forbidden by a dour group.
As noted, the Puritans had no trouble with beer–which would upset some of their teetotalling spiritual descendants.
On the other hand, they did, indeed, forbid the celebration of Christmas and several other holidays. They prohibited dancing and several other forms of entertainment. They frowned on non-religious music and reading materials.
However, to paint them as opposed to all laughter, presenting them as sour, humorless creatures with most of their humanity removed is an error. They were people who felt that too much of “the world” distracted from a person’s goal of honoring God and they took steps to ensure that “the world” did not impinge on their society.
The Puritans were less puritanical in the area of sex than their stereotypes. They considered sex to be an important part of marriage and when a man refused to sleep with his wife for two years running, the matter was freely discussed in church.
In addition, the Puritans considered any child born six months after a wedding to be legitimate, which showed an understanding attitude to premarital sex.
Finally, the Puritans originated the practice of “bundling” – allowing two people of the opposite sex to share a bed. They knew what could occur (it was hard to hide the facts of life when you lived in a one-room cabin), but were unbothered by it.
The Puritans also did not wear black, severe clothing. Their clothing was in all colors, and fancy embroidery was a prized skill (hence, Hester Prynne’s occupation in The Scarlet Letter).
The groundbreaking history on this subject, which helped dispel centuries of misinformation about the Puritans, was the book The Puritans by Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson, published in 1938. Almost any general library should have a copy in its American history collection.
The word “puritan” didn’t imply what our “puritanical” means. The sect was referred to as Puritan because their goal was to “purify the Church of England from those horrible Popish influences.”
But our word “puritanical” does come, rightly or wrongly, from modern perceptions of what the Puritans were like.
In Dictionary of Misinformation, Tom Burnam also dispels the “somber killjoy” myth about the Puritans.
He noted that excavations on the site of the home of Reverend Samuel Parrish, a main figure in the “darkest” (presumably meaning “most repressive”) period of Puritan history, revealed countless "broken wine-bottle fragments, one with Parrish’s initials on the seal; many beef and pork bones; and clay pipe bowls and stems.
“The Puritans drank–drank a great deal, from contemporary accounts; they ate well when they could; and certainly they had no objection to smoking.”
He adds that, at the time the Puritans settled in the colonies, the religious Establishment in England was far more repressive than that across the pond. As a case in point, he noted that while Roger Williams was banished from Massachusetts, “he could have been summarily beheaded in England for saying less.”
I think that the popular image of Puritans was concocted in part by Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter (rather ironic, considering Waloon’s posting above) and in part by H. L. Mencken, notorious for pouring so much literary garbage into the mind of the American public.
I also find it interesting that, when the U. S. Constitution was drafted, a clause prohibiting any kind of “religious test” was included–that is, in the original document. (And as late as 1961, Congress passed a law banning a “belief in God” requirement, as a condition of employment, in eight states.) Such a clause would ensure that no repressive religious element could hold sway in secular aspects–as it has elsewhere in the world. 
A good, short, well-written book on this subject is The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop by Edmund S. Morgan (Little, Brown, 1958). His thesis:
“Puritanism required that a man devote his life to seeking salvation but told him he was helpless to do anything but evil. Puritanism required that he rest his whole hope in Christ but taught him that Christ would utterly reject him unless before he was born God had foreordained his salvation. Puritanism required that man refrain from sin but told him he would sin anyhow. Puritanism required that he reform the world in the image of God’s holy kingdom but taught him that the evil of the world was incurable and inevitable. Puritanism required that he work to the best of his ability at whatever task was set before him and partake of the good things that God had filled the world with, but told him he must enjoy his work and his pleasures only, as it were, absent-mindedly, with his attention fixed on God.” (7-8)
(Sorry for quoting extensively from a print source; hope that’s kosher. I’d have provided an Internet cite instead, but I’ve found that the Intertet is mostly a lousy place to find historical info.)
I think it might very well be true that Puritans didn’t enjoy life all that much. There is a sarcastic joke that they opposed bear-baiting not because it was cruel to the bear but because it gave entertainment to the spectators.
Well, that may be true, for the most part. Morgan portrays Winthrop as a man who must daily curb his “exuberant worldly spirit,” but if that’s accurate I imagine he was an exception to the rule. Who is likely to passionately devote his life to a religion that allows him to enjoy life, but not too much? Someone who doesn’t enjoy life too much anyway, maybe.
No, our word ‘purtanical’ comes from the perceptions of their contemporaries of what the original ‘Puritans’ were like. David Simmons is correct in saying that the word originally meant those who wished to purify the Church of England, with it being used in that sense of themselves by some of the Protestant critics of the religious policies of Elizabeth I. However, it acquired its modern meaning almost immediately by being used by their opponents as a term of ridicule. The Puritan as a hypocritical killjoy was already a stock character in English drama by the early seventeenth century. The distortion thus actually predates most of those figures who are now popularly regarded as ‘Puritans’.
The bearbaiting joke was coined by Macaulay in the nineteenth century and probably tells us more about Victorian preconceptions about seventeenth-century nonconformity.
Asceticism was hardly a novel feature of Christianity in the early modern period nor, even then, was it confined to Protestantism. There were parallel trends within Counter-Reformation Catholicism.
The Puritans were not without a sense of greed that would be familiar to (and perhaps even admired by, if one believes in Geckos) many today. In less than fifty years virtually the entire coastline of New England from Boston to New Haven was swindled away from the original Indian inhabitants–and each other–in flagrant violation of their own laws.
One of the most notorious land-grabbing operations of the Seventeenth Century was headed by a fellow named Humphrey Atherton. He and his group of associates, collectively known as the Atherton Company, at one point managed to gain title of virtually the whole of Rhode Island west of Narragansett Bay. The mechanism of the swindle is fascinating, involving the bilking of the Narragansett Tribe and the King of England himself. Prominent civil and religious leaders were deeply involved.
Probably the most popular study of the practice is John Frederick Martin’s Profits in the Wilderness. One can also look to Francis Jennings’ The Invasion of America, but take that one with a grain of salt–many of Jennings’ assertions have not been conclusively proven. I personally have conclusively proven some very interesting things about some of the Puritan leaders mentioned in this very thread, but I cannot go into detail for proprietary reasons.
As an interesting aside, if you ask around in the Connecticut archives, you will discover that the historical record of the Seventeenth Century was meticulously censored during the Victorian Era in order to remove most references to criminal proceedings for rape as well as records of interracial marriage. The originals still exist, but are still very difficult to see. It looks like the Puritans were actually less uptight about such things than their mid-Nineteenth Century progeny. I can’t help wondering if the revisionism of later generations has helped to shape our modern perceptions of the earliest colonial period in New England.
In addition to the sources cited above, see Richard Shenkman’s books Legends, Lies, and Cherished Myths of American History annd I LOve Paul Revere Whether He Rode or Not, especially the references cited (and especially the sections on “Sex”).