The Puritan Origins of the American Self

"Finding five books to boil things down was really difficult. The reason why I picked this one was because oftentimes, people will talk about the United States and say, ‘Oh, it has a Puritanical streak to it’. That was what Berkovitch was partly responding to when he wrote this book, asking whether that was true, whether we Americans did have a knee-jerk puritanical response to things. There’s this mythos about America that is grounded in the country’s Puritan origins in New England—the first Thanksgiving and everything. There is a romance attached to that story. You don’t have anything comparable related to the origins of Virginia, or the beginnings of colonial New York, or the deep colonial South. There’s nothing there that people use as a cultural or historical touchstone—just Plymouth Rock. It’s the idea that we have religious liberty in this country and it started with the Pilgrim Fathers. And I teach my students all the time that those guys are not what you thought. They wanted religious freedom but only for themselves. They were absolutely incapable of extending it to others. That’s part of it. But the biggest part of it is this idea of Puritan exceptionalism, to which I tie in the millenarian aspect, because what those Puritans thought in Massachusetts Bay, or Plymouth, matters less. More important is their belief that what they were doing was a crucial part of the progress toward the millennium, that they were fulfilling biblical prophecy. These Puritans in New England thought of themselves as a people set apart, God’s true chosen people. And while that New England exceptionalism gradually wanes, it transmogrifies into this idea about the cohesion of Americans during the Revolution. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter When you think about the great events of the Revolution, George Washington was a Virginian. But the rest of it is Paul Revere, John and Samuel Adams, it’s Boston, it’s the Tea Party, the Battles of Lexington and Concord. The beginnings of this idea of American exceptionalism is rooted in Puritan New England exceptionalism. In the Civil War , New England’s in the North, and the North wins the war, so they get to determine what the war was about, who won, why they won—all of these things. You end up with a narrative that is North-good, South-bad, everything good and progressive and innovative and forward thinking comes from the North and the South is irrepressibly backward and retrograde. The most important part for me is that Puritan exceptionalism gradually becomes American exceptionalism, and that exceptionalism is still there. It may not be as strong as it once was, but it animates our foreign policy. Reagan appropriated Winthrop’s words about a ‘city on a hill’ in his inauguration speech. Trump spoke about the beginning of a new millennium in his. We go around the world thinking that everybody needs to be like us and act like us. I think a lot of people look at United States these days and say, ‘Well, do we really want a society like that? I don’t know.’ When I talk about ‘Puritanism’, I don’t mean necessarily a stick-in-the-mud, prudish kind of puritanism, but more the puritanism of watch-your-neighbor, rat-out-your neighbor for infractions, large or small. And an insistence on a kind of moral perfectionism that is unachievable."