If the Foundations Be Destroyed: Puritanism as the Fountainhead of American Greatness
Puritanism created principles of justice and individuality so convincing that generations of “enlightened” scoffers would assume they were “self-evident.” They were so sure of the self-evident nature of the dictates of “nature and nature’s God” that they proceeded to cut off the very limb on which they were sitting. Certainly, they believed they were radically improving the theocentric worldview of Puritanism by synthesizing it with humanistic sensitivities. But they could not see that their incessant scoffing at the transcendent authority of faith would eventually make all declarations of right and wrong seem absurd.
The Puritan statue in Springfield, Massachusetts. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
America’s semi-quincentennial approaches. On our next July 4, the United States will have survived for a quarter of a millennium. But we wonder whether future generations of Americans can last as a peaceful, just, and prosperous nation on the foundations of our culture. Even many conservatives who now breathe a sigh of relief that sane, practical policies have come from our White House, puzzle over whether the personality driving them is consistent with republican values. Sure, he muses that “God” and “religion” are even more beautiful words than that other of his favorites—“tariff”—but, respectfully understating the case, he doesn’t appear to embody Christian virtues. Conservatives might comfort themselves that the apparently increasing leftist insanity of the opposition party—complete with a literal socialist nominee for mayor of New York—makes the prospect of them recapturing the presidency any time soon remote. But that is hoping in a mirage. Any nominee of one of the two major parties has a legitimate chance to win, even someone as vacuous as AOC. Besides, what does it say about our current state when our best hope is that, since nearly a third of the country has fallen into the grip of a demented ideology, the middle third—the vital center—will be unlikely to follow it? And what if they do? As the psalmist pondered, “if the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?” (Psalm 11:3).
Karl Marx sat in the British Library and wrote, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” If he had only bothered to pick up a volume on seventeenth-century English history, he would have learned what an absurd proposition that is. Though Marx’s economic prescriptions are largely discredited, the general attitude of the Western academy is still deeply, if ambiguously, influenced by his dismissal of religion. We now have a “cultural Marxism” to grapple with. Milt Rosenberg (1925–2018), University of Chicago professor and long-time WGN radio personality, diagnosed today’s American culture: “We have arrived at the virtual nadir point in a process of socio-political regression. That regression was led by supposedly left-wing intellectuals (actually derivative Marxist manqué) who elevated ‘equality’ over ‘liberty’ and grievance over merit […]. From Freud to Foucault our ideational culture has featured a revival of basic nihilism, denying the possibility of absolute truth whether in religion, ethics or science itself.”[1] One such Western academic was Robert W. Fogel. But Fogel studied history. As I chronicled previously at The Vital Center, Fogel concluded that it was not economic forces that brought about the end of slavery, but a revolution in morality with its roots in Puritanism.[2]
In his Nobel Prize-winning work on slavery, he documented how devoutly religious people campaigned to end an oppressive practice that mere economics would not have. He confessed to me his great surprise at this discovery. He recalled that he, like much of his generation, had absorbed Marx’s attitude toward religion with little thought. He said he was in his fifties, a leading scholar at some of America’s leading academic institutions, and yet he had never known the truth about what forces put an end to the greatest assault on liberty ever devised: slavery.
“The evidence of history shows that it was anything but a mind-numbing opiate. It is not a coincidence that the freest nation in the world was also the most Christian.”
The lesson, then, is that progress is not inevitable. Only those who looked beyond “what works” and the status quo for millennia could move society to aspire to ideals of universal freedom that a transcendent authority beckoned them to. That vision, that transcendent authority, is found in religion, and not just in any religion but in Christianity. It was not Islam that ended slavery.
Professor Fogel came to a greater appreciation of the contributions of Christianity to America not because of the careful apologetics of winsome Christians like C. S. Lewis. Rather, the facts of history won him over. That history, I believe, is our greatest asset in a philosophically confused, logic-weary generation. As Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said, in another context, “Upon this point a page of history is worth a volume of logic.”[3]
Religion is central in American history, particularly colonial American history, but through the whole of the nineteenth century as well. We must get this history right. The Puritan brothers, for example, did not come to New England just to get away from religious tyranny in their homeland. Rather, they crossed “the rude waves” to be free to live out their own religion to its fullest. Too often, their motivations are thought of as only a one-dimensional quest to be free from religion when they longed to be free for religion.
Increase Mather, the leading Puritan of the second generation of New England, wrote reverently,
It was a great and high undertaking of our fathers when they ventured themselves and their little ones upon the rude waves of the vast ocean that so they might follow the Lord into his land. A parallel instance not to be given except that our father Abraham from Ur of the Chaldees or that of his seed from the land of Egypt.[4]
It was in respect to some worldly accommodation that other Plantations were erected, but Religion and not the World was that which our fathers came hither for […]. Pure Worship and Ordinances without the mixture of human inventions was that which the first fathers of this colony designed in their coming hither. We are the children of the good old non-conformists. [5]
John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts, told the settlers while crossing the Atlantic that they were going to plant a “City upon a Hill.” The entire world was to be awed by the model of Christian charity they were going to build. And let our public schools leave no doubt that this new society was to be built, brick by brick, on the principles of Puritan faith. The historian Perry Miller called Puritan Massachusetts a “Bible Commonwealth.”
Admittedly, even many devout believers today may be cool to the intimate relationship church and state enjoyed in seventeenth-century New England. The Southern Baptists, for example, have their roots in Puritanism, but in a wing of Puritanism that criticized the way mainstream Puritans used the state to enforce doctrinal orthodoxy. These Baptists are ardent defenders of the “separation of church and state” to this day. But enlightened Baptists do not mean by that phrase what it came to mean in the second half of the twentieth century: an active policy by all levels of government—federal to local—to force all expressions of religion, even the most ambiguous, out of public life.
This was not what the First Amendment—supported by most Baptists—was intended for. Rather the whole Puritan heritage, later to coalesce roughly into what we today call evangelicalism, sought to preserve government neutrality toward specific denominations.
Simultaneously, they assumed the government, especially on the state and local level, would have a role to play in preserving public morals and encouraging religion generally.
The famous New England revivalist of the early nineteenth century, Lyman Beecher, at first lamented the disestablishment of Connecticut’s Congregational church in 1818; but as he mastered the voluntary society, he saw the great possibilities for “influence.” Beecher was determined that these societies would bring to bear as closely as possible the influence once exerted by the old establishment. Eventually, he came to believe that disestablishment was “the best thing that ever happened to the state of Connecticut” and that the ministers had gained influence.[6]
This meant that the Biblical heritage that drove the Puritans across the Atlantic continued shaping the American character after the Revolution and through the first third of the nineteenth century, at least. When a society is shaped by these values, even those who are not particularly devout or orthodox, like Benjamin Franklin or Abraham Lincoln, may be said to have been broadly shaped by them. Lincoln, though a skeptic as a young adult, was raised as a “Separate Baptist,” the Baptists who sprang directly from the New England Puritans after the Great Awakening. One such Baptist was Francis Wayland (1796–1865), president of Brown University and an influential writer. Lincoln “ate up, digested, and assimilated” Wayland’s works, especially The Elements of Moral Science (1835) and The Elements of Political Economy (1837). Lincoln adopted from Wayland a belief in economic opportunity and social mobility as essential ingredients of a free society, and antithetical to the static, hierarchical nature of slavery. Lincoln’s role as a founding father, “untimely born” like the Apostle Paul to the other apostles, is due, in large part, to the Puritan values filtered through the Baptists.
When a weighty “system of ideas,” noted sociologist Talcott Parsons, is pressed down onto a society over a lengthy time and “at strategic points,” it digs its way into the culture, like a river carving a canyon, especially when the ideas are strongly held beliefs. It is “meaningful.”[7] Puritanism gave to America much of its meaning: a city upon a hill.
First in New England, then, after the Great Awakening, in the rest of America, the ethics, habits, and worldview of Puritanism was arguably the dominant cultural force. The evidence of history shows that it was anything but a mind-numbing opiate. It is not a coincidence that the freest nation in the world was also the most Christian.
In our own century, echoes of this Puritan moral vision still inspire broad coalitions to defend the pre-born, challenge human trafficking, defend freedom of conscience in law, or confront global persecution of minorities. The heritage of Puritan biblicism, its covenant theology that insisted on continuity between the Old and New Testaments, and the practice example of its “liberal” colony—Rhode Island, complete with its own Jewish community by 1677—all helped create America’s peculiar philosemitism, which in recent years inspires its support for Israel. Its inherent charitableness and reflexive support for the victims of aggression—like Ukrainians—mirrors earlier moments when transcendent moral conviction overrode mere political convenience.
These strides forward in justice and peace were not the fruit of secular European Enlightenment philosophy but of devout Puritanism. Nearly a century and a half after the Puritans’ Great Migration, it was no accident that it was New England that agitated first to throw off Britain’s heavy yoke. The “City upon a Hill” was not an infantile stage of religious oppression but the foundation of American ideals—the wellspring of its best principles.
Timothy Dwight (1752–1817), a grandson of the last great Puritan, Jonathan Edwards, believed the Puritan era was “a normative era during which the American character and nation were formed.”[8] Some of Dwight’s poems, such as Greenfield Hill, were written to prove this point. Literary scholar William C. Dowling believes that Dwight, under the influence of the poets of Augustan England, saw an essential equivalence between the languages of classical republicanism and covenant theology; the godly Puritan state remained as a model that the fledgling republic should strive to emulate.[9] Dwight’s cultural leadership helped cultivate a national ethos that became known as “Whigish,” then Republican: individual responsibility, moral improvement, and the pursuit of a just society. These ideas, deeply canalized into American values, shaped Lincoln’s moral and political development.
The Great Awakening, breaking out over a century after Winthrop’s Great Migration and only a generation before the American Revolution, was a reassertion of Puritan ideals. Many historians, such as Harvard’s Alan Heimert, have, in the last generation, seen that the Puritan revival commonly called the “Great Awakening” was pivotal in preparing the ground for the Revolution.
Subsequent history was a progressive application of Puritan ethics, as revived and dispersed through the Great Awakening. Take slavery, for example. While early Puritans did not necessarily object to the odd household slave, they based this regrettable institution on economic necessity—not racism. An African slave may be one of the elect; they should not be treated as if they do not have souls that can be chosen by God. Puritan leader Samuel Sewall wrote (in 1700), “These Ethiopians, as black as they are, seeing they are sons and daughters of the first Adam, the brethren and sisters of the last Adam, and the offspring of God, they ought to be treated with respect agreeable.”[10] In 1698, Cotton Mather baptized two African adult slaves and two African children. On the other hand, Charles I, King of England, may be so lost as to deserve decapitation. A theology that teaches that slaves may be elect and kings may be reprobate is not a theology that becomes the opiate of the masses.
Puritanism created principles of justice and individuality so convincing that generations of “enlightened” scoffers would assume they were “self-evident.” They were so sure of the self-evident nature of the dictates of “nature and nature’s God” that they proceeded to cut off the very limb on which they were sitting. Certainly, they believed they were radically improving the theocentric worldview of Puritanism by synthesizing it with humanistic sensitivities. But they could not see that their incessant scoffing at the transcendent authority of faith would eventually make all declarations of right and wrong seem absurd.
The result of the advance of secularism and the laughing question “Sez who?” to even the most reasonable ethical prescriptions, like the “Golden Rule,” was not more freedom. It has not led us to an “end of history” in which egalitarianism has triumphed, but to transsexual child mutilation and states’ enshrining the right to kill babies up to the moment of birth, if not beyond. The question “By what standard?” hovers unspoken over every shouted slogan, because the foundations have been destroyed.
Today, Americans are feeling the unsteadiness that the foundation of their republic is cracked, if not crushed. In an age when artificial intelligence can draft legislation in seconds but cannot tell us why we ought to care about justice, ethics of any kind—including egalitarianism—make no sense, hold little compelling power, create no allegiance, and elicit little devotion without some kind of transcendent authority. Thomas Jefferson notwithstanding, no truths are “self-evident.” The illusion of a self-evident egalitarianism was created by an ideational system so powerful that it was able to permeate a culture and create social momentum that continued for generations—even centuries—after it, itself, had died. But the momentum is not perpetual. Even Max Weber could feel the air leaking from the Enlightenment bubble: “The rosy blush of [religious asceticism’s] laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading.”
As it continues to fade, various ideologies are fighting to fill the void. The great myth of religion as an opiate continues to keep sincere, intelligent Americans from looking to it as a source of hope. But rather than boldly go to brave new worlds that promise, but fail to provide, new heights of egalitarianism and autonomy, America would do better to draw from the well of its own City upon a Hill. The Puritan fountainhead offers something the sensate and pragmatic will never supply: moral purpose rooted in the transcendent.
ENDNOTES
[1] Milton Rosenberg, electronic correspondence, May 1999.
[2] John B. Carpenter, “How Christians Ended Slavery in America,” The Vital Center 3, no. 2 (2025): 24–29.
[3] According to E. Digby Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia: Two Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Class Authority and Leadership (Free Press, 1979), 1.
[4] Increase Mather for the 1679 Boston Synod, The Necessity of Reformation (1679), i.
[5] Original emphasis, 16–17; according to Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants of the Seventeenth Century (Harvard University Press, 1955), 140–41.
[6] Allen C. Guelzo, Edwards on the Will: A Century of American Theological Debate (University Press, 1989), 239.
[7] Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (McGraw Hill, 1937), 537.
[8] John R. Fitzmier, New England’s Moral Legislator (Indiana University Press, 1998), 131.
[9] Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary Connecticut (The University of Georgia Press, 1990), 72–74.
[10] According to William Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England (Houghton Mifflin, 1891), 1:429.
