Puritanism – the very word has a musty, slightly pernicious ring to it. And yet there’s room perhaps, for a resumption in our culture of certain puritan values and virtues, which in some ways helped give America its character right down to the late ‘50s or so.
Starting of course with the City on a Hill concept in a still primitive, difficult, but free New England, where British Puritans had come to escape the tyranny of established religion and the luxurious ostentation of King James I and his son Charles; and to form a purer New Jerusalem in the forbidding (and in winter, freezing!) American wilderness.
And you’re saying that at least part of that outlook persisted into the ‘50s? In some vestigial ways, yes – i.e., when “clean-cut” was still an American ideal, and when songs like Frankie Laine’s version of “I Believe” still hyped the sacred quality of life, and when people dressed and spoke decorously: yes, yes, and yes. Donna Reed puritan. Ward Cleaver and wife puritan. Perry Como even somewhat puritan…
At its worst could this outlook be self-righteous, cramping, prejudicial, and even hateful? No question. Types like John Calvin who in Europe had spawned what became transmuted into the American varieties brooked no competition in his bailiwick – no use for Catholics, Anabaptists, even Lutherans, though the latter’s Martin Luther had really begun the Reformation. Many such got it in the neck for being “different.”
Fast forward again to America’s ‘50s and the last of “clean cut” and “virtuous”… And then? Then you have the Hugh Hefners and a bunch of rock n’ roll pioneers and the Beats and New York intellectuals helping the country throw off this heritage, big time; all coming to full fruition in the riotous, hirsute, hippie-filled late ‘60s. Which ironically became as extreme a movement, if not more so as, well … what puritanism had once been!
From that point on puritanism got entirely turned on its head in America, not least in daily dress. To the point where vestiges of that old “geist” now seem downright silly to us. Few even want to be bourgeois anymore, said John Updike a few decades ago. Go into town after town, and it seems even truer today, especially in those under 50 or so. Ripped jeans have become standard, ratty teeshirts, and on it goes.
“Do your thing” got enshrined long ago, and still has pride of place, and is anything but a puritan philosophy. But it’s not simply philosophy that makes a puritan.
It’s also the absence of many technological devices that have also helped erode that phenomenon in American life. The remote TV flipper, for one; the computer for two, and on it goes.
Puritans, the real variety, kept their money from going out the door in vain, materialistic expenditures. They were downright tight and careful with a buck. Now many of us feel we just have to have the latest in comforts, tech toys, you name it. Puritanism got eroded by the very facility in America of buying such items (through to the online, Amazon revolution).
Would it therefore be difficult to put this particular Humpty Dumpty back together again? I think we could all agree that it would.
Unless of course some severe religion takes us over and hands it all down from above? Or an ideology (think of trying to do your own thing in today’s North Korea or even Communist China!). Launching a new puritanical wave? One that might exceed the old one of John Winthrop et al. in New England, and would feel like a real jolt?
But of course stranger things have happened in this cyclical thing called history, with all its jeering ironies. Resumption of puritanism in one form or another can’t be counted out as an eventual and maybe even imminent possibility…
Of course when I started this article, I think I was preaching the virtues of a MODERATE return to that mindset, yes, of a certain squareness and traditionalism; but not of an extreme variety imposed from above.
The latter would be more tragic and much more of a shock to us all after the hang-loose decades following the late ‘60s. But again, history keeps showing and telling us: never say never!