Comment by jandrewrogers

Comment by jandrewrogers 4 days ago

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Something like that. They believed it was important that everyone was literate enough to read and understand the Bible themselves, without it being filtered through a historically corrupt Church that engaged in selective representation and interpretation of the Bible for their own manipulative purposes. Basically, they wanted everyone to be able to go to the source to determine what was and wasn’t moral and Christian, instead of relying on assertions by self-interested third parties.

Regardless of if they achieved their religious objectives, that earnest mission to make every human soul capable of reading the Bible for themselves produced the social good of a literate population capable of reading prodigious amounts of non-Bible content.

It is an interesting consequence of how the religious wars in Europe spilled over into in the early Americas.

robertlagrant 4 days ago

Like most social breakthroughs, this was coincident with a major technological breakthrough: the invention of the printing press.

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throw4847285 4 days ago

I would argue the downside was that this perspective got secularized and morphed into the particularly American paranoid distrust of institutions that has caused at least as many problems as it has solved. In fact, I think the American obsession with homeschooling has those same Puritan roots.

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  • ch4s3 4 days ago

    I think you can more readily and correctly connect the American distrust of institutions first to the treatment of the colonists by the British Empire, and later to immigration of people fleeing authoritarian countries. One also cannot dismiss the distrust in authority among put upon minorities. The British Empire was no less brutal in its American colonies than in other places.

    The Puritans were always few in number and were demographically displaced by later immigration around the fishing industry in New England.

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    • throw4847285 4 days ago

      Displaced in terms of total population, but the aristocracy of the US was mostly Mayflower types will into the 20th Century.

      I think some overstate the influence of Radical Protestants on American ideology with offhand references to Max Weber or by calling whatever their pet cause is a fight against "secular puritanism." On the other hand, I do think there are some interesting parallels.

      For example, one could argue that the mistreatment of colonists by the mother country was overstated by a population already distrustful of the Crown. I'm no expert, but it would be interesting to read more about that dynamic.

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      • ch4s3 4 days ago

        I don't disagree, but the descendants of the Puritans stopped being Puritans pretty quickly. The Halfway Covenant was only about 40 years after they landed in Plymouth and there were virtually no Puritans by 1740.

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    • ElevenLathe 4 days ago

      IANAH but I'm not sure one can really separate "treatment of the colonists by the British Empire" from the struggle between Dissenters and the Established Church. Yes, Puritans were relatively few in number but they were influential. Later colonists would have had to fit themselves into the society created by the Puritans, if nothing else by constituting their own power base in opposition to the Puritan one. They are still part of our foundational myth and buckle-shoe-wearing caricatures of them /still/ go up all over the country every single November.

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      • ch4s3 4 days ago

        > Yes, Puritans were relatively few in number but they were influential

        They were influential in a narrow geography of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for about 50 years. Their own children and grandchildren largely rejected Puritanism resulting in the Half-Way Covenant and the eventual demise of Puritanism. I agree that they're part of the foundational myth, but it's just that myth.

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