The revisionist view of PURITANS
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Cromwell
jeffyoung1 — 16 years ago(December 31, 2009 10:58 PM)
In America the historical view of the English Puritans is more controversial today than it once was. Gone are the days of paintings and illustrations of neat, well-dressed in black and white clothing, happy English white people sitting down outside at large wooden tables with Native American Indian guests to celebrate a sumptuous feast of roast turkey and pumpkin pie. That was all proven a fabrication of history for we Americans.
The Puritans are known more today for their negatives rather than their positives. This might be more an effect of the left-wing liberalism effect on American history, but it's darn hard to refute even by the conservatives. The Puritans, once regarded for their passionate devotion for God, are now understood for their sanctimonious righteousness and extreme religious intolerance. Despite their self-proclaimed religiousnss, they were highly superstitious which led to witchcraft persecutions. The origins of the deadly conflicts between European settlers and Native Americans found their seeds with the Puritans.
One history magazine likened the Puritans to a Christian Taliban. That is extreme revision even today.
The Puritans bequeathed their sexual hangups to us Americans today. We glorify sex throughout our culture yet cannot get over our squeamishness with it. And we are quick to condemn leaders for sexual indiscretions. We Americans have the best and the worst of the sexual revolution. -
Petronius Arbiter II — 16 years ago(February 09, 2010 12:05 PM)
These extremely negative views of both the English Puritans, and their American counterparts, certainly exist, but they are both severely distorted from the way things really were.
The English Puritans were far more concerned with the politics of money and power than with sexual and cultural decorum, especially among the lower classes. They were democratizers and "levellers" at heart; if they are to be faulted, they would best be faulted for their most violent and warlike activities, especially Cromwell's army's brutal assault on the Irish.
As for having bad relations with American Indians, the people known to us as the "Pilgrims" of Plymouth Plantation were noncomformists, not Puritans as such, who were a sometimes-radical reform movement
within
the Church of England, not a noncomformist i.e. separatist group. The first generation of Plymouth-area settlers were indeed kindly and peaceful, for the most part, with the New England tribes; though there was a bit of thievery and combat in the very beginning of the settlement of Massachusetts, our common picture of "the first Thanksgiving" as a rather noble affair is actually very accurate. The first settlers had by then made their peace with the natives.
However, once the first generation of Plymouth-area settlers had died off, their descendants usually fell into stealing land and slaughtering various and sundry Indians, just like almost everybody else in the English colonies.
The infamous Salem Witch Trials were also a product of Massachusetts Colony's noncomformist religionists, who continued to dominate life in the colony for a rather long time; but they were not Puritans as such, and almost all of them were descended from later settlers. As I see it, the whole Puritan tradition as it existed in England never really took hold in America anyway; once you understand that Puritanism was really mostly about combatting "sin in high places" as, arguably, so was the ministry of Jesus the Puritans then appear more as they really were: liberal populists, not stiff-necked social conservatives. More heroes than villains, all in all.
Not that the Puritans didn't behave rather badly at times; but at least for poetry, they gave us John Milton and the wonderful Andrew Marvell. And when it came to being bloodthirsty, they were certainly no worse than Charles I and his Royalist buddies, or the Presbyterians of Scotland, or the Lutherans, Calvinists, and Catholics of continental Europe, who had so recently finished up the long and massive bloodbath known to us as the Thirty Years' War.