By understanding what Puritanism did right, Americans can see more clearly what they lack. Puritanism set up a creative tension between personal autonomy and communal obligation, impassioned conscience and sober humility, and vigorous enterprise and collective obligation, each side of these apparent antimonies spurring the other.

Americans can learn a lot about themselves and their society by revisiting—but not by reverting to—their republic’s distinctive Puritan origins, which anticipated its present dilemmas and strengths far more acutely than is often acknowledged. Puritan premises and practices gestated and channeled some of the liberal-capitalist premises, practices, and paradoxes that are now embraced and reviled the world over. They shaped much of the American republic and, arguably, sustained it through the New Deal and through the civil-rights, anti-Vietnam War, and Watergate confrontations. Puritan conceits and hypocrisies certainly seeded some of these messes, but Puritan principles and virtues clarified and rescued the republic from the very worst of them, as they had done in the Civil War.

The Puritans were America’s first Very Serious People. Having decided that the Church of England was betraying the Protestant Reformation and falling back into popish, Roman Catholic ways, they fled official persecution to found biblically grounded communities “for the exercise of the Protestant religion, according to the light of their consciences, in the desarts of America,” as one of them, Cotton Mather, wrote later. The first band of about a hundred “Pilgrim” separatists fled Yorkshire to Holland in 1608 and then to Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620, on the Mayflower. In 1630, led by John Winthrop, a well-financed, somewhat less separatist group of about 1,000 people founded Boston, their “city upon a hill,” in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Puritans in England soon surprised their American brethren by beheading the autocratic King Charles I in 1649 and by founding a republic under the iron-fisted Oliver Cromwell. Its ignominious fall in 1660 and the restoration of an openly Catholic monarchy for a time only deepened Puritans’ isolation in New England. Some of them intensified their mission there, becoming both more sanctimonious and more prosperous. How they handled that deepening contradiction has marked the American republic and society. For example, in founding Harvard in 1636 and Yale in 1701, they gave rise to strains of intensive, elite leadership training that have continued right up through Franklin D. Roosevelt and George W. Bush. Like contemporary Americans, Puritans faced a world increasingly connected but flattened by commerce. Unlike some today, they believed very deeply in something better and stronger than markets. What, then, did they rely on? What were they about?

First, in attempting to emulate the earliest Christian communities, they turned their backs on the golden thrones of popes and kings and countenanced neither aristocracy nor destitution—a revolutionary innovation in the early seventeenth century. Although they were often shrewd businessmen, they never argued openly that prosperity brings freedom and dignity, preaching instead that it carried communal obligations. Second, they weren’t out to “make history” through scientific planning or by discerning great movements of Hegelian Reason in their strivings, but by fulfilling the pre-established biblical typology of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt on a sacred mission to a Promised Land. (Hence their naming some New England towns Salem, Goshen, Bethlehem, Sharon, and Lebanon; hence the Hebrew on the seals of Yale and Dartmouth.) What might seem a worldly enterprise financed by English entrepreneurs was, in the Puritan reality, a mission for “The General Restoration of Mankind from the Curse of the Fall” that would bring a blessing upon all the nations of the Earth.

Third, the Puritans’ biblically covenanted, congregational communities combined public purpose with personal integrity in ways that survive in present-day understandings of the interplay between individual conscience and rights on the one hand and civic obligation on the other. Their covenant wasn’t a legal contract, yet it relied on each individual’s willing confirmation of readiness to keep the commitment. “So far as I am aware,” notes the historian George McKenna, “the Puritans in America were the only founders of any polity to make political participation dependent on the authenticity of an inward experience.” They seeded what the sociologist Philip Gorski, author of the forthcoming A Nation of Prophets: Civil Religion and Culture Wars from Winthrop to Obama,characterizes as “the complementarity of personal and social accountability and freedom and responsibility. The old languages of covenant and republic can give us some of the vocabulary we need.” In the historian Mark Noll’s judgment, it’s thanks to the Puritans that early Americans’ “central republican conviction was belief in the reciprocity of personal morality and social well-being. Changes did take place over time in what personal morality and a healthy society meant, but underneath those changes endured a remarkably fixed alliance between a language of liberty and a language of virtue.”

The original Puritan community could summon death-defying strength in individual bearers, valiant against all disaster. As the early-twentieth-century historian R.H. Tawney put it, the Puritan “drew from his idealization of personal responsibility a theory of individual rights, which, secularized and generalized, was to be among the most potent explosives the world has known.” (The more secularized and generalized, the less potent: Bill Clinton and Al Gore called their 1992 campaign a “New Covenant,” but by then it was only a hazy metaphor.)

Fourth, as Puritans thus struggled to ground their salvation-hungry faith in covenanted, earthbound communities of law and work, they catalyzed the broader, distinctively American conviction that individual liberty and religious commitment reinforce and even need each other, instead of opposing each other. That notion was revolutionary enough for Alexis de Tocqueville, writing in 1835, after his long sojourn in the young republic, to judge, “The foundation of New England was something new in the world” because Puritanism “was almost as much a political theory as a religious doctrine.”

Imperfect keepers of their faith though the Puritans were, they held convictions by which they could be called to account in ways liberal bureaucratic nudging can’t replicate in a society that shares few convictions even when it faces enemies defiant of worldly power and death. Those new enemies are nihilistic, but when they behead liberal captives on video, they reflect what has become abysmal in America’s putatively liberal democracy—from unspeakable horrors like Abu Ghraib, extraordinary renditions, and, as tellingly, school and police shootings on down to road rage, cage fighting, and nihilistic entertainments in certain video games and movies such as Zero Dark Thirty and worse. Puritan hellfire sermons and witch hunts—the latter few and far between in America, killing at most a few dozen people in a century—weren’t as widely, relentlessly destructive or terrifying as the media or conduct in contemporary America.

All the more reason to know more about what this republic emerged from and abandoned, not because it can or should return to Puritanism—it certainly was repressive, though in some ways saner and more peaceful—but because, by understanding what Puritanism did right, Americans can see more clearly what they lack. Puritanism set up a creative tension between personal autonomy and communal obligation, impassioned conscience and sober humility, and vigorous enterprise and collective obligation, each side of these apparent antimonies spurring the other. Here I can only sketch how I think it worked and what we have lost because it failed.

Before doing that, though, I want to consider why Americans resist feeling their way back into Puritan reckonings that seeded some distinctive, resilient strains in the American liberal capitalist republic. Then I’ll make a few more observations about what the Puritans’ example still offers. These illuminations aren’t prescriptions. There are no “takeaways” for policy-makers, not least because Puritan wisdom scrambles the binaries hobbling so much of contemporary politics. As Tawney put it in 1926, “There was in Puritanism an element which was conservative and traditionalist, and an element which was revolutionary; a collectivism which grasped at an iron discipline, and an individualism which spurned the savorless mess of human ordinances; a sober prudence which would garner the fruits of this world, and a divine recklessness which would make all things new.” Modern conflicts such as left and right disappear next to vertical ones such as heaven and hell. Understandings of personal “upward mobility” pale next to yearnings for a salvation that cannot be plotted or earned.

One reason Americans resist Puritan reckonings is that they remember only that Puritans were hypocritical and brutally—dare one say, Puritanically—repressive. Puritan presumptions about everyone’s innate depravity and everyone’s unknowable predestination for damnation or salvation, and the prurience and general nosiness that this prompted, stick like bones in contemporary throats.

But a second reason why Americans resist looking back is that the Puritans failed so candidly that they foretold with startling clarity how Americans are failing now. Winthrop told Boston’s first settlers, still aboard the Arbella, that their “commonwealth” couldn’t coexist with unbridled individualism, no matter how sacred the individual soul. “It is a true rule,” he said, “that particular estates cannot subsist in the ruin of the public.” No other leader of a polity was saying this in 1630. When he said that “wee must be willing to abridge our selves of our superfluities, for the supply of others necessities . . . make others Condicions our owne . . . allwayes haveing before our eyes our Commission and Community in the worke,” he wasn’t propounding what we’d call socialism; he was plenty attentive to his own “particular estate.” But his conception of the proper balance between “particular estates” and “the public” anticipated a central conundrum for a liberal, contractual capitalism that has no covenant but a Constitution that’s not as strong as the swift, dark undertows that today’s capitalism has unleashed.

A third reason why Americans avoid feeling their way back into Puritans’ premises and practices is that, in the 1870s, long after the Puritans had lost their ecclesiastical and juridical grip, a new Gilded Age plutocracy revived a semblance of Puritan rigor and sanctimony in an effort to cover its own naked greed and toughen its children. This revival of Puritanism reached full force in the 1880s, with the establishment of strict boarding schools such as Groton (which FDR and, later, the diplomats Averell Harriman and Dean Acheson would attend) and of admonitory public exemplars such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s commanding bronze sculpture, “The Puritan,” displaying the firm countenance and assured tread of Samuel Chapin (1595-1675), a founder of Springfield, Massachusetts.

Soon enough, though, economic panics and strikes and a failed crusade to make the world safe for democracy discredited the grand sham of Calvinist rectitude, Victorian gentility, and crony-capitalist bombast around John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan with a deluge of debunking by H.L. Mencken, Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, and James Truslow Adams, for whom “Puritanism stalked the country, a curse from the past, the original sin that left everyone guilty and repressed,” as the late historian John Patrick Diggins put it. Mencken famously defined Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy,” and it never recovered.

A fourth reason Americans resist looking into their Puritan origins is that at least half of even the earliest Massachusetts settlers weren’t Puritan congregants; some were adventurers of a different sort, others indentured servants, and, soon enough, even the land-starved second and third sons of the settlers drifted away. Since then, the vast majority of Americans have been carriers of traditions at odds with Puritanism even when they are Christian—as, increasingly often, they are not. Most immigrants have come mainly to improve their material fortunes and their children’s prospects and to enjoy certain liberties, but not to take up the Puritan rigors of renewing those liberties that founders of the American republic such as John Adams and James Madison hoped they would take up when they wrote about what republican citizenship requires. But that doesn’t mean that they couldn’t reassume those rigors with the right institutions and instruction. In this, I argue that the Puritans can still offer some guidance.

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