The Puritan Inheritance in American Politics or our ancestors near and far gave us a roadmap but it still up to us which road to take--theirs or ours.
Essay by Thomas Shess, Chairman of the Board, PillartoPost.org--I never met my great-grandparents--all eight of them. Yet they seem close to me. Only a few generations separate their lives from mine, and something of them made the journey.
Their faces may have disappeared from living memory, but their descendants still walk around wearing features they would recognize.
DNA is an ancient road map, assembled long before anybody thought to draw a road. It records something of where we came from, although it cannot tell us everything about the people who brought us here. It leaves me wondering about another kind of inheritance. How much of what I believe began with somebody whose name I do not know? Every human population has an ancestral inheritance.
This is no special property of white people, nor does each ethnic group possess a single genetic character. Genetic ancestry crosses the boundaries we draw around race and ethnicity. People everywhere inherit DNA, while families and communities also pass along languages, loyalties, stories, and expectations.
Those transmissions overlap in our lives, but they are different processes. There is no gene for voting Republican, no chromosome that remembers the Mayflower, no biological instruction requiring us to distrust somebody else's religion. Whatever influence biology has on human temperament, it does not supply a seventeenth-century political platform. We learn particular beliefs in particular circumstances.
Still, a belief can survive its original believer.
It can travel through a household, enter a church, become a lesson in school, and eventually acquire the authority of something everybody supposedly knows. By then, its beginnings may be forgotten. That is the inheritance I want to examine.
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For the sake of following one recognizable American thread, let us begin with the Puritans.
The distinction matters.
The Pilgrims who established Plymouth in 1620 were Separatists who had broken with the Church of England. The Puritans who began establishing Massachusetts Bay in 1630 sought to purify that church. Their religious worlds were related, but the two groups were not interchangeable.
The Thanksgiving version of our beginnings tends to crowd them into the same picture. Neither group arrived in an empty country. Indigenous peoples already had communities, histories, and claims to the land. Any examination of the settlers' ideas about belonging has to remember the people whose belonging preceded theirs.
What interests me about the Puritans is a contradiction that still has an uncomfortable familiarity: people seeking relief from religious coercion could establish a community that coerced others.
They wanted room to practice their faith. That did not mean they wanted a society in which every faith, or every interpretation of their own faith, stood on equal ground.
Massachusetts authorities banished Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson when their convictions challenged the prevailing religious order. The settlers' experience of persecution did not automatically teach their leaders to tolerate dissent. They understood the importance of liberty from the receiving end. Extending it was another matter.
Here is where I begin to hear an echo.
Whenever we insist on freedom for our own convictions while seeking to restrict someone else's, we should ask what we mean by freedom. Is it a principle we are willing to share, or permission for our side to prevail?
That question can be put to a congregation, a political party, a neighborhood association, or the person staring back from the bathroom mirror. Its usefulness depends on our willingness to answer it when the answer is inconvenient.
I am not suggesting that today's Americans are Puritans wearing sneakers. Four centuries contain too much change for that. Nor does resemblance establish a direct line of descent. People in many societies have enforced conformity without assistance from Massachusetts Bay.
But the Puritan example gives us an early American expression of a recurring temptation: to turn a deeply held conviction into a qualification for belonging. The dissenter then becomes a danger to the community. Disagreement takes on the appearance of disloyalty. A person who asks a troublesome question is treated as somebody trying to destroy the whole enterprise.
That is a useful possibility to consider when political arguments move beyond policy and become judgments about who deserves to call the country home.
We can debate taxes or immigration law. Once we declare that our opponents are incapable of being real Americans, we have changed the subject. We are deciding who belongs before deciding what should be done.
I originally thought of this as a question about “whitebread America.” The expression catches something familiar, but it needs definition. White Americans have widely different ancestries, religions, regional experiences, and politics. They cannot reasonably be assigned a common mind. What I mean is the old Anglo-Protestant image of mainstream America: the idea that a particular set of customs represents the country's natural condition, while everybody else's customs require explanation.
In that picture, one tradition becomes the standard against which other people are measured. We ought to ask how that standard acquired its authority. Was it accepted because it was fair? Because it was familiar? Because the people who favored it had the power to make it official? Ah, the latter most likely.
Someone whose ancestors never lived in New England can still encounter that tradition through American institutions.
An inherited national habit does not require a matching family tree.
We can absorb assumptions from a society we enter just as readily as from a household into which we are born.
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There is another Puritan idea worth examining: the belief that a community has a special mission before the world. In his 1630 text "A Model of Christian Charity," John Winthrop described the proposed community as a “city upon a hill.” His people would be watched, and their conduct would matter beyond themselves. We can recognize an affinity with the continuing American desire to serve as an example. That is an interpretation of the resemblance, not proof that every expression of national purpose descends from Winthrop.
The aspiration can encourage honorable conduct. If other people are watching, perhaps we should give them something worth seeing. It can also become an exemption from criticism. A nation convinced of its special virtue may find it difficult to admit that it has behaved badly.
The distinction lies in whether we consider goodness an obligation or a possession. An obligation requires work. A possession can be announced from a podium. But we do the Puritans an injustice if we take only their sternest features.
Winthrop's text also calls for mutual care and assistance in hardship. He regarded individual welfare as bound up with the welfare of the community. Those demands complicate the familiar picture of an American tradition concerned only with each person looking after himself.
A politician borrowing the image of the shining community ought to read the portions about what its members owe one another. The neighbors were part of the undertaking. That leaves us with an inheritance containing both an impulse toward solidarity and an impulse toward control. A community can take responsibility for its members while allowing them freedom, but keeping that balance requires attention.
Care becomes coercion when the assistance comes with a demand that everybody think alike. We should also remember that the dissenters belong to our history. Roger Williams was a religious man whose commitment to conscience helped put him at odds with Massachusetts authorities.
Anne Hutchinson challenged religious leadership from within the world those leaders governed.
Resistance did not have to wait for a later century to arrive. If we are looking for American ancestors in thought, we have choices. We can recognize the officials defending conformity and the people who refused it. The argument over conscience is itself part of the inheritance. And Puritan New England is only one thread.
Indigenous traditions, the experiences of enslaved Africans and their descendants, other colonial societies, successive immigrants, and generations of reformers also belong in any account of how this country learned to think.
Following the Puritan thread does not make it the whole fabric. For that reason, I would hesitate to say that political thought today is very similar to Puritan thought.
Similar in what respect? Among which people? Under what conditions? The narrower questions are more revealing. How do we treat dissent? When do we confuse our own customs with universal standards? What happens when certainty about our virtue excuses indifference to another person's rights?
Those questions allow us to explore a resemblance without pretending we have discovered its only cause. My great-grandparents may have handed down features I could recognize in a photograph. Their influence on my thinking is harder to trace.
It might have passed through something my grandparents taught my parents, and my parents taught me. It might have survived in a warning or a judgment repeated so often that nobody thought to ask where it originated.
I cannot responsibly assign them opinions I do not know they held. But I can examine my own. When I find a belief that feels automatic, I can ask whether experience supports it or whether familiarity has been doing the work.
The same examination is available to a country. We can respect the courage of people who crossed an ocean and question the rules they imposed after arriving.
We can value their concern for community and reject their treatment of dissent. Historical honesty permits both. The practical value of knowing our inheritance is that it gives us something to consider rather than merely repeat. An old belief deserves neither automatic obedience nor automatic dismissal.
It deserves a hearing, followed by judgment. I never met my great-grandparents. I cannot ask them why they thought as they did. The Puritans left a fuller record, and their contradictions offer useful company as we examine our own. The road map brought us here. We still have to decide where to go.
End.
Research sources
Genetic ancestry and ethnicity https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/policy-issues/population-descriptors-in-genomics Pilgrims and Puritans https://www.pilgrimhall.org/separatist-religious-beliefs/ Religious conformity and dissent https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel01-2.html John Winthrop A Model of Christian Charity 1630 https://history.hanover.edu/texts/winthmod.html Indigenous context https://www.nps.gov/rowi/learn/historyculture/wampanoag.htm
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