The Caricatured Puritan

One of the things I like to do is stick up for Puritans. If there is ever a contest for “most misrepresented” groups within the history of Christendom, the Puritans will certainly be in the final four, and would probably win the championship. Caricatured as stuffy, priggish, censorious, prim, prudish and more, the Puritans have long been type-cast as the sour brethren. I have written a great deal on how wrong this stereotype is, particularly when we are considering the early Elizabethan Puritans. At the same time, the caricature was not manufactured out of whole cloth — from Shakespeare’s Malvolio to Hawthorne’s Rev. Dimmesdale, the caricature was aimed at something. What was that something?

Here is a tentative suggestion for those who are willing to work with me for a bit. There are many parallels between the Puritans and the Pharisees, down to what their names meant. The Puritans wanted to purify the Church of England of its remaining popish tendencies. The word Pharisee comes from the Hebrew word that means to “set apart” or to “separate.” Even to this day, strict evangelical churches teach and insist on a “separated life.” The names of both groups therefore indicated their deep desire for holiness.

Both started as reform movements that were desperately needed in their time. The first Pharisee was probably Ezra, and, if so, this means that they had a long and honored history before they got themselves all tangled up in scruples. The Puritans were the same — at the beginning, their work was liberating, a breath of fresh air. But after a generation or so, something bad began to happen. That “bad” development was seized on by the Puritan’s enemies to provide material to taunt, and seized by certain Puritans within who decided to embrace the caricature.

This is related to the third point, which is that one of the central aims of the Pharisees was the goal of getting all Israelites to live in accordance with the requirements of the law for priests. One of the central aims of the Puritans was to take the consecration of the monastery and extend it to the entire commonwealth. The Pharisees wanted every Israelite to be as holy as the priests. The Puritans wanted every Englishman to be as holy as the monks . . . much holier than the monks, in fact. Think of the Puritan settlements in America as attempts to build monastic communities where sex was encouraged and permitted. But the problem is that where there is sex, there are children, and where there are children, there are subsequent generations. The old style monastery perpetuated itself by means of recruits, which mean that there was much slower organic development over time. But children accelerate the process of change. The Puritan project here was audacious, and for my money, they got farther with this ambitious aim than any other group in church history. But still, something bad happened.

What is caricatured as the “Puritan” mentality is actually a mentality that can be found in the church of all ages. You can find this mindset in some of the early fathers, you can find it with Syrian aescetics, you can find it in medieval monasteries, and you can find it (after the first generation or so) among the Puritans. This religious type translates every serious call to holiness into terms it can understand, which is that of being stuffy, priggish, censorious, prim, prudish and more. Not only does it translate every serious call to holiness into this legalistic straitjacket, but it is attracted to every serious call to holiness — with the intention of burying it under a rock pile of rules. If God raises up someone to call the Church back to serious devotion to Him in a particular area, and this call is characterized by all those things that ought always to characterize such a call — joy, peace, love, contentment, laughter, feasting, and more joy — then it can be guaranteed that the joy, peace, love books will be published and distributed, and within a very short period of time, the mirthless will show up prepared to take the whole thing to what they honestly believe to be the next level.

This is what happened to the Puritans. The first Puritans really were liberated. They were seriously joyful, which is a form of being serious, I suppose. And because they wanted their whole nation to experience this joy, and they were total Christians, they brought the words of Christ to bear on everything. Their joy was infectious, their talents prodigious, and their logic unanswerable. They carried everything before them, and before you could blink, they found themselves being represented by the first Puritans who were recognizable in the popular caricature. By the end of the 16th century, there were two kinds of Puritans, a mixed multitude. There were the free men and there were the gnat-stranglers. But the gnat-stranglers were not the Puritans’ unique contribution to the history of religious pathologies — rather, they were a garden variety religious weed that eventually began growing in the Puritans’ garden, just as they had grown in every Christian garden up to that point.