The real Puritans

Quaker Mary Dyer led to execution on Boston Common, on June 1, 1660, by an unknown 19th Century artist. The Puritans denounced Quakerism from the start.

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

Sarah Vowell’s  chatty (and sometimes a tad vaudevillian and snarky) and well-researched book The Wordy Shipmates is a remarkable combination of drollery and serious, if popular, historical writing. She gets into the heads of the  New England Puritans, some of whom were brilliant, such as John Winthrop,  Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, and virtually all of whom were literate and wrote a lot, and analyzes how their actions and beliefs help lay the religious, civic and political foundation of what became the United States. Indeed, as the late Anglo-American journalist Alistair Cooke once observed, “New England invented America.’’

She says in the book that “the most important reason I am concentrating on {Massachusetts Bay Colony leader John} Winthrop and his shipmates in the 1630’s is that the country I live in is haunted by the Puritans’ vision of themselves as God’s chosen people, as a beacon of righteousness that all others are to admire.’’

But in Winthrop’s famous and sometimes misquoted and misunderstood line, the colony would be "as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us,’’ he was warning that its members would be judged for how they lived there. And he never called that city “shining.’’

Her book is  a very entertaining place to start to learn about the creation of New England and the myths and facts around it. Then you can go and read the much more scholarly work of such academic historians of the region as Harvard’s brilliant Perry Miller (1905-1963).

My father’s ancestors were Massachusetts Bay Puritans, though some fairly early on became Quakers and then were advised to get out of town fast. My only physical things from 17th Century New England and Olde England are some musty religious tracts, which those characters cranked out in large numbers. Worth little but useful reminders of how far away, and near, those people were.

Interior of the Old Ship Church, built in 1681 as a Puritan meetinghouse in Hingham, Mass. Puritans were Calvinists, so their churches were unadorned and plain. It is the oldest building in continuous ecclesiastical use in the United States and today serves a congregation of Unitarian Universalists, whose theology Puritans would have condemned. But Unitarianism evolved from the Puritans via Congregationalism.