There are certain common historical misconceptions that really drive me round the bend. I know they shouldn’t, but they do. One of them is that the antecedents of the modern American religious right are New England’s seventeenth-century Puritans. The supposed existence of this lineage was recently repeated, almost, in The Observer last Sunday in an article by Paul Harris about recent rows about sexual politics in the United States. This latest battle in America’s tedious yet terrifying culture wars kicked off when notorious radio shock jock and sick prick Rush Limbaugh called Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute” for testifying in Congress in favour of government-backed birth control. Limbaugh also apparently said that “If we are going to pay for your contraceptives and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something. We want you to post the videos online so we can watch.” On the face of it, that seems pretty appalling, and everyone said so at the time, so much so that Limbaugh actually apologised. On the other hand, there is a kind of doth-protest-too-much case to be made that Limbaugh actually likes sluts and prostitutes a lot more than he’s trying to lead us to believe. Or likes college students but also gets off on calling them dirty names. Whatever floats your boat, Limbaugh, but how about you keep it to yourself next time? Anyway, satisfying as the subsequent advertisers’ rush-from-Rush has been, his insults should be seen, as the article says, in the wider context of a wave of state legislative attacks on American women’s sexual health, and the fact the these attacks are backed by the bunch of barrel-scrapings that constitute this year’s Republican presidential candidates, competing as they are to be the most swivel-eyed Armageddonist to have his hands on America’s massive arsenal of nuclear weapons. And we’re not only talking about abortion here. Nope, we’ve moved beyond that now. We’re talking, as was Fluke, about contraception. And some of the institutions threatened with loss of funding deal with such illnesses as breast, cervical, and ovarian cancer too. This is not just a war on sex, then; it’s a war on women. Anyway, below is a link to the Harris Observer article, and below that is a link to the Emily’s List website of the ten worst such attacks on women going on in the US at the moment.
Now, there are plenty of people far more qualified than me to talk about the modern sexual politics of all of this, so after linking you to the sites below so you can see what I’m on about, I’m going to pass over that matter and move back to what the supposed historical origins of these shenanigans are. Back to the Puritans mentioned above, who almost always, but should never, get blamed for giving birth to the monster that grew into the modern American religious right.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/10/america-war-on-sex-hots-up
http://emilyslist.org/blog/Top_10_Terrible_Horrible_No_Good_Very_Bad_Attacks_on_Womens_Rights/
To be fair to Paul Harris, he’s personally non-committal about the figurative ancestors of Rush Limbaugh, Rich Santorum, Mitt Romney, and the rest. He says that “Many commentators” blame (or praise) the “long shadow of the “hardline Protestantism of 17th-century settlers”. He then says “Another theory” supposes that the supposed impeccable personal qualities of the Founding Fathers have led many Americans to expect similar moral probity from their leaders since. And “A final theory” explains modern sexual Puritanism as an outcome of America’s peculiar kind of “modernism”, which, unlike centuries-worth of “organically evolved social mores” in Europe, is part of an on-going American history of “self-invention.” As I say, Harris comes to no conclusions. Fair enough, if that’s what he wants to do, or doesn't want to do, although he does make an error of omission, which I’ll come back to in a minute. I, however, have opinions about this, and a blog, so here we go. In reverse order, and speaking of the final theory first, I can only say WTF? Why would constant self-invention lead to modern sexual Puritanism? It can also lead, and as Harris equivocally says it might, to sexual liberalism and even libertinism. Indeed, he says, they may be in a dialectical relationship with each other. In other words, then, the theory can explain everything and its opposite--and therefore can’t really explain anything. We’re still left wondering what makes some go one way and others the other. In any case, Harris without warning has by this point in his article moved away from explaining misogyny and on to explaining more general sexual prudery. These two things are not necessarily related, much as they might be and indeed in this instance are, but they needn’t be and so the explanations for one do not necessarily explain the other. And it’s certainly not the case that cultural reinvention leads directly to misogyny, or its opposite, or in fact to anything in particular at all. The middle theory, admittedly, is more interesting, at least in as much as Founding-Father filiopietism might contribute to general sexual Puritanism, at least as regards Presidents since. But pretty much by definition therefore it doesn’t address and thus doesn’t even begin to explain the modern American right-wing war on women. Again, then, Harris is answering a different question from the one he started out with, one about general sexual prudery rather than one about misogyny. But, anyway, there is still the question of the first theory—that the problems the modern religious right has with sex and with women (let’s give up on Harris’s failure to distinguish and just think of the two together) goes back to those seventeenth-century Puritans.
On the face of it, it seems plausible enough to blame the Puritans for the puritanical and misogynistic in much of modern American right-wing religiosity. There exists a popular notion, even entertained by non-specialist historians, that the Puritans founded America and their legacy pervades US culture to this day. This idea is echoed in American political discourse in our time. Ronald Reagan, the founding father of modern neo-conservatism (okay, in my time—readers of a younger persuasion may not feel the same about what “our time” is), called America a “city upon a hill” and “a beacon to the world,” recalling the words of John Winthrop aboard the Arbella as he and his Puritan followers were preparing to disembark on the shores of Massachusetts. Then again, Reagan also said “It’s morning in America,” whatever the hell that was supposed to mean, and “A tree’s a tree. How many more do you need to look at?” But, anyway, the Puritan thing, it’s still wrong. The Puritans did not found “America.” A small group of Puritan separatists who had broken away from the Church of England, and who were led by William Bradford and are commonly called the Pilgrim Fathers, settled Plymouth Plantation in 1620, although the colony was absorbed into Massachusetts in 1691. Another larger group of this time non-separatist Puritans, under John Winthrop, began settling Massachusetts in 1629, beginning the Great Migration that lasted throughout the 1630s and leading to the settling of that and other New England colonies. Yet not even all New England settlers were Puritans. The original settlers of New Hampshire were fishermen who basically told Puritan Divine Cotton Mather to bog off when he tried to preach at them. Many of the settlers of Connecticut were New Yorkers. Rhode Island was settled by people who dissented from the Congregational church of Massachusetts. Moreover, few of the settlers of other colonies were Puritans. The first English colony settled in North America, in 1607, was not Plymouth or Massachusetts, but was Virginia—and the settlers there were mostly Anglicans, although their behaviour was largely distinctly irreligious. Maryland was founded by the Calverts, who were Catholics, and other settlers there were a mixture of Catholics and Anglicans, with a few Puritans among them. Pennsylvania was founded by William Penn and settled by fellow Quakers, but, again, there was religious diversity. None of the other colonies, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, the Carolinas, and Georgia, was settled primarily for religious reasons, much less for Puritan ones. The Puritans were a tiny minority among the English, European, and African settlers of colonial British America. The Puritan-origins-of-America thesis is in fact a post-Civil War founding myth. After that conflict, and the emancipation of the slaves that it accomplished, it seemed unseemly to associate America’s origins with the ancestors of the rebel slaveholders of Virginia, even though they were the first settlers, even though they were quite typical of settlers generally, unlike the Puritans, and even though Virginia was such a dominant force in early America that it produced four out of the first five Presidents of the United States. It was much more fitting, or rather much more comfortable, to associate America’s origins with the pious refugees of Massachusetts who were seeking religious freedom—although in fact they only wanted religious freedom for themselves and they were literally damned, so they believed, if they were going to grant it to anyone else.
Furthermore, as noted above, the Puritans settled New England, in the north-eastern corner of what is now the United States. Modern American evangelism does not come from there—the bible belt stretches across the South and West. Paul Harris’s aforementioned error of omission is in his failure to mention this signal fact about the religious right today. Also, the religious right today is evangelical, usually Methodist and Baptist, although, as the article points out, Rick Santorum is a Catholic and Mitt Romney is a Mormon. Now, first, can you imagine what the Puritans would have made of these guys? They were deadly enemies of Catholics and, if Mormons had been around in the seventeenth century, the Puritans would probably have done to them what they did to Quakers: that is, they would have expelled them on pain of death. But, second, the Puritans were not evangelicals. They were Calvinist Congregationalists. That is, they believed in predestination, and that only Visible Saints, only those who could demonstrate they had Grace and were chosen by God to go to heaven when they died, could be members of the church. In other words, they were the opposite of evangelicals. So if you can draw a line backwards from our modern American evangelicals it would not be to the Puritans of New England. It might be to the Baptists and Methodists of the mid-eighteenth-century Great Awakening, a revival movement stretching from New England to Georgia, or it might be to those of the early-nineteenth century Second Great Awakening, stretching from New York and into the West, all of whom aimed to convert others and bring them into their churches. But it would not be to the Congregationalists of New England, who believed you were either born a true believer or you weren’t. There is, then, no line to be drawn between the seventeenth-century Massachusetts Meeting House and the Mega-churches of the modern-day bible belt.
Puritanism was pretty much a spent force before the first Great Awakening anyway. As Puritan preachers constantly complained, religious ardour diminished as people spread out from the original New England town settlements into the countryside in search of land. And Puritanism pretty much killed itself as a serious social, cultural, and political force through the manifest insanity of the Salem witch trials of 1692, as if people in general suddenly said to each other, “Holy shit, Ezekiel, our leaders are completely fucking batshit” and no one took them all that seriously anymore. Even some of the Puritans themselves woke up from their own nightmares. One of the judges at the trials was Samuel Sewall, who later apologized for his contributions to the hideousness, and in 1700 he published The Selling of Joseph, one of the first anti-slavery tracts ever written. In this witch-finder turned liberator, you can almost see the entire Enlightenment unfolding in one man’s lifetime. That’s certainly not something you can say about Rick Saintorium, who hasn’t even reached the Reformation yet, or Newt Gingoutan, yet to clamber down from his tree and walk upright on the savannah, or Rush Limpanzee, still making primal screeching sounds in his radio studio/zoo cage while violently masturbating with one hand and with the other furiously hurling his own excrement at anyone who comes within range. Really can’t see Samuel Sewall doing any of that.
