Puritan Legacies JOHN COFFEY Published in John Coffey and Paul Lim, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (CUP, 2008), 327-45. Puritanism has been credited (and blamed) for bequeathing a puzzling set of legacies, including the spirit of capitalism, scientific enterprise, Anglo-Saxon sexual repression, companionate marriage, liberal democracy, American exceptionalism, and religious bigotry. Puritans have been hailed as midwives of modernity, and censured as reactionary foes of enlightened values. In the first half of this chapter, I want to introduce some of the grand theories about Puritanism and modernity, explaining how they have generated vigorous but inconclusive debate. In the second half, I will point to an alternative way of exploring the Puritan legacy, one that studies the reception and uses of Puritan religious texts from the eighteenth century onwards, and asks how later generations remembered and represented seventeenth-century Puritanism. I It is now more than a century since Max Weber published his seminal essay, ‘Die protestantiche Ethik und der “Geist” des Kapitalismus’ (1904-05), translated into English by Talcott Parsons as The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930). Weber’s general claim was that cultural factors play a significant role in economic development; his specific claim was that the predestinarian doctrines of the English Puritans fostered a ‘Protestant ethic’ that produced ‘the spirit of capitalism’ and contributed to the economic dynamism of England and the United States. ‘The Weber thesis’, as it came to be known, generated ‘the longest-running debate in modern social science’. D. Little, ‘The use and abuse of textual data’, in H. Lehman and G. Roth, eds, Weber's Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts (Cambridge, 1993), p. 245. Weber’s defenders, such as the Harvard economic historian David Landes, maintain that ‘culture makes almost all the difference’ when it comes to the wealth and poverty of nations. D. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (New York, 1998); D. Landes, ‘Culture makes almost all the difference’, in L. Harrison and S. Huntingdon, eds, Culture Matters (New York, 2000), pp. 2-13. But they emphasise that Weber had no intention of replacing a purely materialist explanation for the rise of capitalism with purely idealist one. He did maintain that the cultural factor played an essential part in the birth of the capitalist spirit, and that ‘the Puritan philosophy of life…stood at the cradle of the modern economic man’. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism, trans. P. Baehr and G. Wells (London, 2002), p. 117. His subtle and ingenious argument turned on the psychological effects of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. Weber correctly observed that Puritan preoccupation with God’s eternal decrees engendered intense anxiety about the individual’s elect status. He then argued that the godly sought assurance of salvation by living industrious, scrupulous and productive lives, saving and investing their earnings, and finding evidence of divine favour in their business success. Calvinist doctrine produced spiritual angst which bred ‘this-worldly asceticism’ which in turn nurtured ‘the spirit of capitalism’. These specific claims have divided students of Calvinism and Puritanism. For an introduction to the vast literature see the essays in Lehmann and Roth, eds, Weber’s Protestant Ethic. Some have been broadly convinced, and have defended and elaborated Weber’s historical sociology of Puritan religion. One enterprising social scientist even sought to vindicate the Weber thesis on the unpromising ground of seventeenth-century Calvinist Scotland. G. Marshall, Presbyteries and Profits: Calvinism and the Development of Capitalism in Scotland, 1560-1707 (Oxford, 1980). See also the neo-Weberian studies of D. Little, Religion, Order and Law: A Study in Pre-Revolutionary England (1969), and D. Zaret, The Heavenly Contract: Ideology and Organization in Pre-Revolutionary Puritanism (Chicago, 1985). A number of English historians rejected important elements of the Weber thesis, but retained the linkage of Puritanism and capitalism. The Christian socialist, R. H. Tawney, maintained that in the course of the seventeenth century, Puritans opened the way for rapacious capitalism by privatising their piety and abandoning their earlier economic moralism. Marxists like Christopher Hill inverted Weber by seeing economic change as the motor of ideological developments, but they also depicted Puritanism as the religion of the industrious middling sorts. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (London, 1926); C. Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (London, 1964); R. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (Princeton, NJ, 1993). More recently, the American historian Stephen Innes has made a vigorous neo-Weberian case for the decisive role of the Protestant ethic in the growth of New England’s market economy. S. Innes, Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of Puritan New England (New York, 1995). However, most economic historians seem perfectly capable of accounting for the early modern transition to capitalism without any reference to Weber, and those who do address his thesis typically consider it only to dismiss it. See R. S. Duplessis, Transitions to Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 134-36; R. Lachman, Capitalists in Spite of Themselves: Elite Conflict and European Transitions in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 2000), esp. ch. 7. Weber’s contrast between Protestant dynamism and Catholic stagnation is now considered overdrawn. His argument about Calvinism, which turned on the unintentional consequences of predestinarian doctrine, has not proved easily testable. Even if one could observe predestinarian anxiety and entrepreneurial success in the same persons, how could one demonstrate that the connection between the two was causal rather than merely contingent? Weber himself offered little in the way of hard evidence – his grand thesis was erected on a small sample of Puritan sources. Detailed case studies have cast doubt on the capitalist credentials of the godly. The London woodturner, Nehemiah Wallington, was a devout Puritan but not in the Weberian mould. His passion for spiritual things distracted him from business affairs, for which he showed little aptitude, and he never seems to have sought assurance in material success. The New England merchant, Robert Keayne, fits the model much better, but his Calvinist congregation formally rebuked him for charging unfair prices. In Winthrop’s New England, the Puritan belief in a disciplined moral community arguably inhibited the development of a free market economy. The Presbyterian divine, Richard Baxter, one of Weber and Tawney’s key witnesses, was in fact fierce in his denunciation of economic exploitation, leading one historian to call him ‘a seventeenth-century Tawney’. See P. Seaver, ‘The Puritan work ethic revisited’, Journal of British Studies, 19 (1980), 35-53; B. Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1955); M. Valeri, ‘Puritans in the marketplace’, in F. Bremer and L. Botelho, eds, The World of John Winthrop (Boston, 2005), pp. 147-86; W. Lamont, Puritanism and Historical Controversy (London, 1996), ch. 7, quotation at p. 128. Such examples are not unanswerable, but if the Weber thesis is still alive, it is looking less healthy than it used to. Despite its weaknesses, Weber’s famous text launched a thousand enquiries about Protestantism and modernisation. See S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., The Protestant Ethic and Modernization: A Comparative View (New York, 1968). For the American sociologist Robert Merton, writing in the 1930s, Puritan ideology provided a vital motive force behind the new science, leading Puritans to play a disproportionate role in the scientific enterprises of seventeenth-century England. Merton’s Puritan thesis attracted significant support from historians, including Christopher Hill. It also inspired the pioneering research of Charles Webster, who unearthed the labours of Samuel Hartlib’s circle from the 1630s to the 1650s, emphasising their eschatological confidence in a ‘great instauration’ of new knowledge in the last days. I. B. Cohen, ed., Puritanism and the Rise of Modern Science: The Merton Thesis (New Brunswick, NJ, 1990); C. Hill, The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (Oxford, 1965). C. Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626-1660 (London, 1975); C. Webster, ‘Puritanism, separatism and science’, in D. Lindberg and R. Numbers, eds, God and Nature (Berkeley, 1986), ch. 7. In the long run, however, the specifics of the Merton thesis have not worn well, even if his ‘externalist’ approach to the history of science is now widely imitated. He defined Puritanism so loosely that the term embraced almost all sincere English Protestants. Further research into the early Royal Society suggested that there was a greater correlation between the new science and religious moderation – figures like Robert Boyle and John Wilkins had many Puritan connections (Wilkins married Cromwell’s youngest sister), but they were latitudinarian by the 1660s, and early modern science was an ecumenical project. Major Puritan institutions like Emmanuel College, Cambridge and New England’s Harvard College were renowned for their religious output, not for their contributions to natural philosophy. Some Puritans did throw themselves into the new science, but most were indifferent, and there seems no good reason to accord Puritanism any special significance in England’s scientific revolution. See J. Morgan, ‘The Puritan thesis revisited’, in D. N. Livingstone, D. G. Hart and M. A. Noll, eds, Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective (New York, 1999), ch. 2; M. Hunter, ‘Scientific change: its setting and stimuli’, in B. Coward, ed., A Companion to Stuart Britain (Oxford, 2003), ch. 11; Lamont, Puritanism and Historical Controversy, ch. 9. If Weber and Merton generated the hottest debates, subsequent modernity theorists also assigned important roles to Puritanism. The political scientist, Michael Walzer, though sceptical of the claims of Weber and Merton, suggested that the Puritan Parliamentarians were the archetypal modern revolutionaries – forerunners of the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks. The Marxist literary critic, Ian Watt, cited Weber and invoked the Puritans’ introspective individualism in his account of the rise of the English novel. The philosopher, Charles Taylor, argued that Puritanism – with its positive theology of work and marriage – contributed to the modern ‘affirmation of ordinary life’. Edmund Leites found the origins of modern sexuality in the Puritan call for a lifelong integration of sensuality, purity and constancy within marriage. M. Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints (Cambridge MA, 1965); I. Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957); C. Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 221-35; E. Leites, The Puritan Conscience and Modern Sexuality (New Haven, 1986). Such theorists were not alone in allotting Puritans a key role in the drama of modernisation, for Whig historians had done the same. Since the eighteenth century, Dissenters had depicted the Puritans as heroes of freedom. See L. Okie, ‘Daniel Neal and the “Puritan Revolution”’, Church History, 55 (1986), 456-67. In subtler fashion, the great Victorian historian, S. R. Gardiner, had emphasised the advance of liberty in his account of ‘the Puritan Revolution’, and a distinguished group of American scholars (mainly Miltonists) took up where Gardiner had left off. Writing against the backdrop of European Fascism, these authors identified radical Puritans as among the earliest champions of toleration, equality and liberty. John Milton, Roger Williams and John Lilburne were hailed as progressives. The gathered church was presented as a laboratory of political democracy, in which the godly pioneered forms of debate, deliberation and decision-making that were subsequently transferred to the political arena. ‘The Puritan Revolution’ was depicted as a seedbed of modern liberal democratic politics. See S. R. Gardiner, The First Two Stuarts and the Puritan Revolution (London, 1876); W. K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England, 4 vols (London, 1932-40); Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution, ed. W. Haller, 3 vols (New York, 1933-34); S. Brockunier, The Irrepressible Democrat: Roger Williams (New York, 1940); Puritanism and Liberty, ed. A. S. P. Woodhouse (London, 1938); D. M. Wolfe, Milton in the Puritan Revolution (New York, 1941); R. B. Perry, Puritanism and Democracy (New York, 1944); Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution, ed. D. M. Wolfe (New York, 1944); The Leveller Tracts, 1647-53, ed. W. Haller and G. Davies (New York, 1944); W. Haller, Liberty and Reformation in the Puritan Revolution (New York, 1955). For a later example, see G. Maddox, Religion and the Rise of Democracy (London, 1995), ch. 7: ‘Puritan democracy’. Scholars like Woodhouse, Haller and Wolfe did much to advance the study of Milton and the Levellers, but their Whiggish reading of Puritanism fell out of favour in the later twentieth century. Revisionist historians argued that they were guilty of anachronism, projecting modern liberal values back into a pre-liberal age. The Whig interpretation had underestimated the limits of Miltonic tolerance and Leveller democracy, and the consuming Puritan passion for godly rule. The English Revolution, far from being the first modern revolution, was (if anything) the last of the European wars of religion. Its greatest legacy lay in the reaction it provoked and the divisions it engendered. The Restoration restored episcopacy, monarchy, aristocracy, and traditional festive culture, and the English ruling class acquired a lasting dislike of enthusiasm, cant and millenarian politics. See L. Solt, Saints in Arms: Puritanism and Democracy in Cromwell’s Army (Stanford, 1959); B. Worden, ‘Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate’ in W. J. Sheils, ed., Persecution and Toleration (Oxford, 1984), pp. 199-233; J. C. Davis, ‘Religion and the struggle for freedom in the English Revolution’, Historical Journal, 35 (1992), 507-30; J. Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (Harlow, 1993); Lamont, Puritanism and Historical Controversy, chs. 5 and 6. For generations to come, English political culture would be shaped by bitter memories of the civil war and by the rivalry between Church and Dissent. In stressing the atavistic character and divisive effects of the Revolution, revisionists perhaps underplayed its constructive and innovative dimensions. By derailing Charles I’s Personal Rule, the godly revived the fortunes of Parliament and participated in an unprecedented surge of radical political thought. Milton, the Levellers and tolerationists like John Goodwin developed Protestant thought in new directions, preparing the ground for the radical Whig politics of eighteenth-century Dissent. See D. Wootton, ‘Leveller democracy and the Puritan Revolution’, in J. H. Burns, ed., The Cambridge History of Early Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 1991), ch. 14; D. Armitage, A. Himy and Q. Skinner, eds, Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge, 1995); J. Scott, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2004); J. Coffey, John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution: Religion and Intellectual Change in Seventeenth-Century England (Woodbridge, 2006). Yet these radical Puritans were hardly typical – the mainstream godly retained a more traditional vision of politics, and opposed new fangled ideas about civil and religious liberty. Whilst grand theories about Puritanism and modernity have generally focussed on English Puritanism, there has also been a vigorous search for the Puritan roots of American identity. Alexis De Tocqueville found in New England’s Puritan settlers the fusion of twin passions – the spirit of liberty and the spirit of religion – that set America apart from his native France. Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America (London, 1994), part I, ch. 2. Perry Miller was more circumspect, observing that ‘the Puritans are frequently praised or blamed for qualities which never belonged to them or for ideas which originated only among their successors and which they themselves would have disowned’. But he agreed that Puritanism had shaped national identity: ‘Without some understanding of Puritanism, it may safely be said, there is no understanding of America’. P. Miller and T. J. Johnson, eds, The Puritans: A Sourcebook of their Writings, 2 vols (New York, 1938), I. 1-4. Accordingly, books on the Puritan legacy in America abound. Various writers have argued that that the American sense of exceptionalism, mission and national destiny has its origins in the New England Puritans. For Richard Slotkin, the Puritans’ assurance of election bequeathed a lethal legacy of contempt for ‘the other’ together with a myth of redemptive violence. A Jesuit scholar has suggested that the prominence of horror in American fiction and film is a legacy of the Puritan fear of satanic attack and divine vengeance. Others insist that Puritanism lumbered Americans (and Anglo-Saxons more generally) with ‘puritanical’ attitudes to sex. Most recently, the Puritans have even been credited with inventing American managerial culture. S. Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, 1975); C. Longley, Chosen People: The Big Idea that Shapes England and America (London, 2002); G. McKenna, The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism (New Haven, 2007); R. Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, CT, 1973); E. J. Ingebretsen, Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell: Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King (Armonk, NY, 1996); T. Fessenden et al, eds, The Puritan Origins of American Sex: Religion, Sexuality and National Identity in American Literature (New York, 2001); K. Hopper and W. Hopper, The Puritan Gift (London, 2007), esp. ch. 1. The most sustained argument for a Puritan legacy in American politics is mounted by James Morone in his book Hellfire Nation. By starting his narrative in Massachusetts in 1630, rather than in Philadelphia in 1776, Morone presents a picture of American politics not dominated by liberal individualism or secular republicanism but by ‘great bouts of moral fervour’. The Puritans, he maintains, ‘founded American moral politics’, though their legacy is an ambivalent one. On the one hand, they bequeathed to subsequent generations a noble sense of corporate mission, the drive to create a city on a hill. On the other hand, Puritans promoted a politics of exclusion by demonising foes who threatened the godly community – heretics, heathens and witches. In different ways, these Puritan impulses fed into the abolitionist movement, nativist anti-Catholicism, Victorian campaigns against smut and prostitution, the temperance and prohibition crusades, the social gospel and the New Deal, anti-communism, the civil rights movement, the war on drugs, the anti-abortion crusade, and the Lewinsky scandal. Americans, he concludes, are not merely ‘a nation of shoppers…we remain Puritans all’. J. Morone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (New Haven, 1993). Such bold claims about the Puritan legacy force historians to consider the wider impact of Puritan religion on Anglo-American culture. The arguments of modernity theorists have drawn attention to distinctive individuals like Robert Keayne, Samuel Hartlib and Roger Williams. But whilst being suggestive and provocative, they have proved problematic. It is noticeable that, for the most part, sweeping claims about the Puritan legacy have not been made by historians. Instead, they have been advanced by sociologists, political scientists, literary critics, media commentators or public intellectuals. While some of these writers were immensely erudite, others displayed a rather superficial acquaintance with Puritan sources. Speculations about the Puritan legacy were often conceptually flawed and evidentially underdetermined. Such theories were based on the plausible contention that religion is not a hermetically-sealed compartment, but one which has ‘spillover effects’ in other spheres of human activity, including politics, economics and culture. Yet the abstractions discussed were grand and ill-defined (‘Puritanism’, ‘capitalism’, ‘modernity’ etc), and it proved difficult to isolate the religious factor and assess its relative importance alongside a multiplicity of other significant forces. See the astute remarks of P. Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven, 2002), pp. 533-44. Moreover, by focussing attention on the secular by-products of Puritanism, the grand theorists have tended to distract us from its religious legacy. A. G. Dickens once wrote that ‘When we have finished our efforts to modernise and secularise Puritanism, it remains an obstinately religious phenomenon’. A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation (New York, 1964), p. 319. Yet modernisation theorists have been less interested in Puritan religion than in its possible side effects. C. H. George had a point when he complained of ‘the alchemistic tricks’ of historians who ‘transmute the base stuff of puritan piety into the gold of egalitarianism, individual liberty and tolerance’. C. H. George, ‘Puritanism as history and historiography’, Past and Present, 41 (1968), 102. In the second half of this chapter, I aim to refocus attention on the religious legacy of the Puritans, by discussing the transmission, reception and use of Puritan writings in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and observing how the ‘memory’ of the Puritans was kept alive long after their demise. This can be no more than a preliminary sketch, but it will highlight an area that cries out for further research. II Before investigating the afterlife of Puritanism, we need to discuss the date of our subject’s demise. Historians of English Puritanism tend to focus on the transition from ‘Puritanism’ to ‘Dissent’, or from ‘Puritanism’ to ‘Whiggism’. The end date typically comes in 1689, when the Act of Toleration drew the curtain on the heroic age of Puritanism, and ushered in the rather more prosaic era of Protestant Nonconformity. In New England, things are a little different, for here the story of Puritanism normally carries on to around 1730. By this date, we are told, ‘Puritans’ were turning into ‘Yankees’, and ‘Puritanism’ was being displaced by ‘Evangelicalism’. These historical categories sound clear cut, but the reality is rather blurred. Among the candidates for the honorific title, ‘last of the Puritans’, are Matthew Henry, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, the Victorian Baptist Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and (in the twentieth century) the Welsh preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Significantly, all of them were members of dissenting churches, a useful reminder of the Puritans’ ecclesiastical legacy. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most English dissenters worshipped in denominations that could trace their roots back to Puritanism – Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Quakers, Particular and General Baptists all celebrated their seventeenth-century forebears, and kept alive their historical memory. In North America too, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Quakers retained a significant presence well into the modern era, with the Baptists eventually becoming the nation’s largest Protestant grouping. The ‘last of the Puritans’ listed above were also defenders of Calvinist doctrine. Although the predestinarian theology associated with Puritanism was gradually marginalised in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we should not underestimate its tenacity. As Brooks Holifield explains, ‘a substantial part of the history of theology in early America was an extended debate, stretching over more than two centuries [i.e. till around 1850], about the meaning and the truth of Calvinism’. E. B. Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven, 2003), p. 10. See also M. Noll, America’s God (New York, 2002). Crucial to the persistence of Calvinism were the documents produced by the Westminster Assembly during the 1640s, especially the Confession of Faith and Catechisms. As the official standards of English-speaking Presbyterianism, and of much of Independency and Baptist Christianity too, the Westminster texts instilled Reformed orthodoxy (even if reservations about them sparked heated debates about subscription). Moreover, for much of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century, the heavy doctrinal tomes of Puritan theologians were widely read by clergy in England, Scotland, Ireland and North America. Writings by John Owen, the ablest of the Puritan high Calvinists, were republished on numerous occasions in the eighteenth century, in London, Sheffield, Coventry, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Falkirk, Belfast and other towns. Owen’s strict Calvinism, of course, had not gone unchallenged within seventeenth-century Puritanism, and later Evangelicals could also draw on the alternative theological visions of Puritans such as Richard Baxter, the antinomian Tobias Crisp or the Arminian John Goodwin, whose writings were republished by the Wesleyan Methodists. See Coffey, John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution, pp. 285-90. Puritan theological controversies had a tendency to resurface in later centuries. If the doctrine of the Puritans was effectively transmitted to later generations, so was their piety (indeed the two were closely linked). Among the key figures here was Isaac Watts, Independent pastor and hymnwriter extraordinaire. Watts’ Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1707) was one of the most popular and influential books of the eighteenth century, and it mediated the affective piety of the Puritan tradition to later Protestants, especially Evangelicals. Baxter’s works were also widely republished – his Call to the Unconverted went through numerous editions in the course of the eighteenth century and was (like his Saints Everlasting Rest) translated into Welsh by the Calvinistic Methodists. Even more important was John Bunyan. By 1789, Pilgrim’s Progress was in its 57th English edition, and Protestant missionaries went on to make it one of the world’s bestselling books. Translated into 30 European languages, and about 130 non-European tongues, Bunyan’s classic would mould the piety of millions of evangelical Protestants around the globe. Of course, Bunyan was never the sole property of his core constituency – read in contexts far removed from that of its author, Pilgrim’s Progress would fire the imagination of an astounding array of readers, from the Russian poet Pushkin to the man who led China’s catastrophic Taiping rebellion. See I. Hofmeyr, ‘How Bunyan became English’, Journal of British Studies, 41 (2002), 84-11; C. Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People: John Bunyan and His Church (Oxford, 1989), pp. 367-380. Yet the role of Puritan texts in promoting evangelical piety needs to be underlined. Puritan practical divinity (recognised in its own day as a distinctively English speciality) was to be one of the major sources feeding later Pietism and Evangelicalism. Dutch Reformed Pietists were avid consumers of British devotional writings – Bayly, Sibbes, Baxter and Bunyan were especially popular. In Germany, Scandinavia and Switzerland too, these writers and others were frequently published and republished during the critical phase of Pietism between 1660 and 1720, reaching a Lutheran as well as a Reformed audience, in what Hans Leube called ‘the victory march of English devotional literature in the Lutheran church’. Quoted in W. R. Ward, Early Evangelicalism: A Global Intellectual History, 1670-1789 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 9, 73. According to one recent study, ‘the characteristic language of Pietism resulted from translations of Puritan works’. P. Damrau, The Reception of English Puritan Literature in Germany (London, 2006), p. 12. The leading Calvinist preachers of the Evangelical Revival consciously revived the doctrine and piety of the Puritans. The New Englander, Jonathan Edwards, has been described as ‘first and last a Puritan theologian’. C. Cherry, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards: A Reappraisal (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1966), xxiii. For compelling supporting evidence, see H. S. Stout, ‘Edwards and the Puritans’, in N. O. Hatch and H. S. Stout, eds, Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience (New York, 1988), ch. 9; B. Walton, Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections and the Puritan Analysis of True Piety, Spiritual Sensation and Heart Religion (Lewiston, NY, 2002). The Presbyterian Samuel Davies noted that before the revival, awakening had come ‘on reading some Authors of the last Century, particularly Bolton, Baxter, Flavel, Bunyan’. Samuel Davies, An Account of a Remarkable Work of Grace (1752), p. 1. During the early years of his fame as a revivalist, the Anglican George Whitefield was reading Bunyan, Matthew Henry, Isaac Watts’s hymns and Daniel Neal’s History of the Puritans (1732-38). By 1741, he hoped to see ‘the spirit of scriptural Puritanism universally prevail’, and confessed (admittedly to a New Englander) ‘I am more and more in love with the good old Puritans’. Letters of George Whitefield, 1734 to 1742 (Edinburgh, 1976), pp. 17, 23, 72, 92, 212, 233, 255, 269, 347, 504. John Wesley, who held on to the Arminianism of his High Church father, had more eclectic spiritual tastes, but he too drew on Puritan influences, editing and republishing many Puritan works in his Christian Library (while carefully excising dubious predestinarian doctrine). See R. C. Monk, John Wesley: His Puritan Heritage (London, 1966). Other Evangelicals edited similar anthologies with many extracts from Puritan works. See for example, A Library of Divinity (1771), A Cluster of Canaan’s Grapes (1772) and The Evangelical Library (1789). And Evangelical publishers, like the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor, founded in 1750, distributed thousands of copies seventeenth-century nonconformists texts by writers like Baxter, Alleine, James Janeway and Henry Scudder. See I. Rivers, ‘The first Evangelical tract society’, The Historical Journal, 50 (2007), 1-22. Although they denied the charge of ‘enthusiasm’, the revivalists effectively rehabilitated Puritan zeal, as Anglican critics of Evangelicalism were keen to point out. William Warburton complained of ‘the old Puritan fanaticism revived under the new name of Methodism’. Horace Walpole feared that the New Light was ‘a revival of all the folly and cant of the last age’ (i.e. the seventeenth century). James Hervey had to tell his fellow Evangelicals, ‘Be not ashamed of the name Puritan’. A. S. Wood, The Inextinguishable Blaze: Spiritual Renewal and Advance in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1960), p. 29. Puritanism lived on in the eighteenth-century equivalents of ‘the hotter sort of Protestant’. But the revival also divided the heirs of the Puritans, both Congregationalists and Presbyterians. Some of the anti-revivalists, like the English Presbyterians and the New England Arminians and Unitarians, rejected classic Calvinist divinity, but they were keen to uphold elements of the mainstream Puritan legacy – especially its intellectualism – against the populism and emotionalism of the Great Awakening. This is why Perry Miller once remarked that ‘Unitarianism is as much the child of Puritanism as Methodism’. Miller and Johnson, eds, The Puritans, p. 4. Others – like the ‘gentle Puritan’ Ezra Stiles, President of Yale – aimed to conserve the sober evangelical doctrine of ‘the good old Puritans’ while eschewing vehemence. See E. C. Morgan, The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727-1795 (New Haven, 1962), ch. 11. The revivalists themselves worked hard to show that they were the true heirs of the Puritans. As Charles Hambrick-Stowe explains, ‘To New Light clergy, the Great Awakening at its best vindicated what we would call “old time religion”, basic seventeenth-century Puritan principles and spirituality’. The American revivalists republished ‘an astonishing number’ of Puritan devotional classics, such as Joseph Alleine’s Alarm to the Unconverted. The Awakening was ‘a revival of religion’, fuelled in part by seventeenth-century devotional tracts. C. Hambrick-Stowe, ‘The spirit of the old writers: the Great Awakening and the persistence of Puritan piety’, in F. Bremer, ed., Puritanism: Transatlantic Perspectives on an Anglo-American Faith (Boston, 1993), pp. 277-91, quotations at pp. 277 and 281. Despite their differences, New Lights and their Old Light critics united to fight the British during the American Revolution. Congregationalists in New England and Presbyterians in the Middle Colonies were among the most fervent supporters of the rebellion. The political sermons of the ‘black regiment’ of Reformed clergy often deployed the same texts and arguments as their Parliamentarian predecessors, and at times, the Patriot cause was even presented as a sequel to the Puritan revolt. Loyalists bitterly recalled the subversion of Presbyterians and ‘republican sectaries’ in the 1640s, while Patriots praised Puritan revolutionaries. The American Revolution may have been an essentially secular affair, but the revolutionaries also drew on the politics of memory and religion. Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Baptists were inclined to back the revolution because of their dissenting traditions and Puritan heritage. J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty, 1660-1800 (Cambridge, 1994); K. Phillips, The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, & the Triumph of Anglo-America (New York, 1999). See also E. Morgan, ‘The Puritan ethic and the American Revolution’, William and Mary Quarterly, 24 (1967), 3-43; P. Karsten, ‘Cromwell in America’, in R. C. Richardson, ed., Oliver Cromwell (Manchester, 1993), ch. 12; K. L. Griffin, Revolution and Religion: American Revolutionary War and the Reformed Clergy (New York, 1994); D. Hammer, The Puritan Tradition in Revolutionary, Federalist, and Whig Political Theory (New York, 1998). Yet it was in the nineteenth century that the reputation of the Puritans flourished as never before. In Britain, according to Raphael Samuel, ‘the years from 1820 to 1920 might fairly be described as Bunyan’s century’. Bunyan was canonised by Coleridge and other poets; ‘Milton the Puritan’ was rediscovered; and Carlyle depicted Cromwell as a hero. From the 1860s, Milton Roads and Cromwell Streets started to proliferate across English towns and cities. Political memories of ‘the Puritan Revolution’, constructed by historians like Carlyle and Gardiner, shaped popular politics. Nonconformist radicals lionised the Puritan revolutionaries. Cromwell was one of the four politicians whose portraits adorned the membership card of the National Liberal League. Liberal election songs featured Cromwell, Milton and Algernon Sydney. See R. Samuel, ‘The discovery of Puritanism, 1820-1914’, in J. Garnett and H. C. G. Matthew, eds, Revival and Religion since 1700 (London, 1993), pp. 201-47; B. Worden, Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity (London, 2001); Richardson, ed., Oliver Cromwell, chs. 5 and 6; E. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860-1880 (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 15-16, 31-47. Evangelicalism had now become firmly established as a powerful cultural force in both Britain and America, and there was buoyant demand for the classics of Puritan devotional literature. British publishers printed the complete works of seventeenth-century godly divines: Sibbes (7 vols), Baxter (23 vols), Owen (24 vols), Bunyan (4 vols), Thomas Manton (22 vols), Thomas Goodwin (12 vols), Thomas Brooks (6 vols), John Howe (6 vols), John Flavel (6 vols), Edward Reynolds (6 vols), William Bridge (5 vols), George Swinnock (4 vols), and David Clarkson (3 vols). Theorists of the Puritan legacy have tended to overlook the longevity and persistent popularity of the zealous evangelical religion that Puritans did so much to promote. They have been inclined to think of Puritan religion as a kind of booster rocket that propelled the spacecraft (of capitalism or democracy or American national identity) into orbit and then fell away once its job was done. Yet Puritan texts helped to feed revivals of hot Protestantism in the eighteenth century and beyond. It is precisely because Puritanism never really died out, precisely because much that counted as Puritanism was subsumed and perpetuated within the broader evangelical Protestant tradition, that Puritan ideals of strenuous godliness and moral discipline retained much of their vitality during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Dissenters and Evangelicals were the prime carriers of elements of the Puritan ethos into the modern era through their churches, Sunday Schools, publishing houses, missionary societies, voluntary associations and moral reform campaigns. Max Weber, of course, was well aware of the enduring vitality of what he called ‘ascetic Protestantism’, especially after his visit to the United States in 1904. See his essay ‘Churches and sects in North America’ (1906), in Weber, The Protestant Ethic, pp. 203-20. Nineteenth-century America had been swept by successive waves of revival, and though much of popular Evangelicalism was both Arminian and anti-intellectual, there was still a market for Puritan classics. Evangelical publishers like the American Tract Society reprinted numerous titles by both English Puritans and their New England counterparts. Alleine’s Alarm to the Unconverted, Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted, and Bunyan’s Grace Abounding were each republished more than a dozen times, with most of the editions appearing at the height of the Second Great Awakening during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. The hymns of Watts were sung by millions. However, the reception and uses of ‘Puritanism’ varied by region. In the antebellum South, Baxter and Bunyan were widely read, but white Southerners were ambivalent about the Puritans, admiring their godly virtue, but censuring them as progenitors of politically militant, holier-than-thou Northern abolitionists. E. Fox-Genovese and E. D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 327-28, 660-68. In New England, by contrast, Protestants promoted a filiopietist interpretation of their region’s past. ‘Pilgrims’ and ‘Puritans’ were invoked to fortify ideas of national mission, American liberty and anti-slavery. As Thanksgiving became an increasingly important national holiday, the story of the Pilgrim Fathers assumed the status of a foundational myth. In a striking case of the invention of tradition, Whig politicians praised the Mayflower Compact as a great constitutional document, and Plymouth Rock became a place of pilgrimage. See M. Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, 1991), pp. 63-65, 206-15, 378-92, quotation at p. 378. See also J. McWilliams, New England’s Crises and Cultural Memory: Literature, Politics, History, Religion, 1620-1860 (Cambridge, 2004); K. Stavely, Puritan Legacies: ‘Paradise Lost’ and the New England Tradition, 1690-1830 (Ithaca, 1987); J. Dawson, The Usable Past: America’s Puritan Tradition, 1830 to 1930 (Chico, CA, 1984); J. Seelye, Memory’s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998). For all their fame, the Puritans’ religious legacy was being eroded on both sides of the Atlantic by theological liberalism and secularisation. The New England intellectuals who celebrated their Puritan forebears had broken with evangelical Protestantism. New England writers – like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton and T. S. Eliot – wrestled with their Puritan inheritance, but even when they retained Puritan traits, their intellectual outlook was far removed from that of seventeenth-century Calvinism. See A. Barnstone, M. T. Manson, C. J. Singley, eds, The Calvinist Roots of the Modern Era (Hanover, 1997). Alleine’s Alarm and Baxter’s Call, which had gone through numerous editions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were largely forgotten in the period between 1900 and 1950. In 1920s America, reactionary fundamentalists were the public face of conservative Protestanism, and (in the words of Michael Kammen) ‘Puritan bashing became a popular national pastime’. H. L. Mencken famously defined Puritanism as ‘the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy’. From the 1940s onwards, secular scholars like Perry Miller rehabilitated the original Puritans as serious intellectuals, distancing them from ill-educated fundamentalists and holy-rollers, but their popular image was more profoundly shaped by Arthur’s Miller’s great play about the Salem witch trials, The Crucible (1953). Although Evangelicalism continued to thrive in America in the face of secularisation, it was now a largely populist movement with little taste for the weighty tomes of seventeenth-century divines. Tens of millions of Americans worshipped in Evangelical churches, but only a tiny percentage were familiar with the Westminster Shorter Catechism or with any Puritan work besides Pilgrim’s Progress. In many ways, Evangelicals were the Puritans’ heirs, but much had changed since the 1730s. Millenarianism was alive and well, but now centred on ‘the Rapture’, a doctrine unknown to Puritans that first emerged in the nineteenth century. Megachurches and Christian pop music thrived; sabbatarianism and psalm-singing had almost vanished. Yet the second half of the twentieth century did witness a quiet but steady revival of traditional Calvinism. Disturbed by new religious and secular trends, some British Evangelicals in the 1950s set about renovating the old paths. Led initially by the Welsh preacher Martin Lloyd-Jones and the Anglican scholar J. I. Packer, they organised an annual ‘Puritan Conference’ in London and set up a publishing house, uncompromisingly named The Banner of Truth. See their collected essays on Puritanism: M. Lloyd-Jones, The Puritans (Edinburgh, 1987); J. I. Packer, Among God’s Giants: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life (Eastbourne, 1991). Over the next fifty years, The Banner would republish hundreds of Puritan titles, and even issue a series of abridged ‘Puritan paperbacks’ for readers with less time on their hands. In constructing a new Puritan canon, they stuck to a staunchly conservative agenda, eschewing radical Puritanism and omitting anything that strayed from the path of orthodox Calvinism. Their catalogue had no space for the polemical theology of Richard Baxter, John Goodwin, or Tobias Crisp; the prophecies of Anna Trapnel; the works of John Milton or Roger Williams; or anything by General Baptists. Yet the publisher was clearly meeting and feeding a significant demand for Puritan writings. Its two-volume edition of the works of Jonathan Edwards, one of the ‘last of the Puritans’, was selling at the rate of 20,000 copies per year. R. B. Bademan, ‘The Edwards of history and the Edwards of faith’, Reviews in American History, 34 (2006), 144. By the early twenty-first century, great quantities of Puritan writing were available in print and on Christian websites. For a listing of modern print editions see J. R. Beeke and R. J. Pederson, eds, Meet the Puritans: With a Guide to Modern Reprints (Grand Rapids, 2007). Websites with Puritan writings abound; see for example: http://www.puritansermons.com. In conservative Reformed seminaries, the theological and devotional works of the Puritans were being read as avidly as ever, and in the United States there were clear signs of Calvinist resurgence. See C. Hansen, ‘Young, restless, reformed: Calvinism is making a comeback’, Christianity Today, 22 September 2006. Clergy serving thirty million Presbyterians around the world (including nine million in South Korea) were usually required to adhere in some fashion to the Westminster Assembly’s Confession of Faith. Within an Anglican communion torn apart by the controversy over gay clergy, the name ‘Puritan’ was recycled as a term of abuse by liberals angered at conservative Evangelicals. The Evangelical archbishop of Sydney even wrote an article (‘On being called bad names’), in which he defended the original Puritans against their critics. P. Jensen, ‘On being called bad names’, http://www.sydneyanglicans.net/archbishop/abwrites/on_being_called_bad_names/ Indeed, with the rise of the American Religious Right, Puritan bashing once again became a popular sport. The re-election of George W. Bush in 2004 provoked fears that the Christian Right was out to ‘repeal the Enlightenment’ and recreate ‘a Puritan theocracy’. The split between red states and blue states led some to claim there had always been two Americas: a godly America with roots that went back to Puritan New England, and a worldly America with origins in early Virginia or New Amsterdam or Thomas Morton’s Merry Mount. These dichotomous historical genealogies simplified a complex past, making the questionable assumption that a straight line ran from John Winthrop to George W. Bush, and never stopping to explain why the Puritans’ legacy should be sought in the South rather than in their native New England. The twists and turns of history were often overlooked by commentators who insisted that contemporary America (especially conservative Protestant America) could be simply explained by reference to its Puritan ‘founders’. See for example Tristram Hunt’s article on George W. Bush, ‘A Puritan on the warpath’, Observer, 1 September 2002; and G. Walden, Why God Won’t Save America (London, 2006). FURTHER READING Cohen, I. Bernard, Puritanism and the Rise of Modern Science: The Merton Thesis. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Hambrick-Stowe, Charles, ‘The spirit of the old writers: The Great Awakening and the persistence of Puritan piety’, in Francis Bremer, ed., Puritanism: Transatlantic Perspectives on an Anglo-American Faith. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1993. Kammen, Michael, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture. New York: Knopf, 1991. Lamont, William, Puritanism and Historical Controversy. London: UCL Press, 1996. Lehman, Hartmut and Guenter Roth, eds, Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Samuel, Raphael, ‘The discovery of Puritanism, 1820-1914’, in J. Garnett and H. C. G. Matthew, eds, Revival and Religion since 1700. London: Hambledon, 1993. Weber, Max The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism, trans. P. Baehr and G. Wells. London: Penguin Books, 2002. Webster, Charles, ed., The Intellectual Revolution of the Seventeenth Century. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974. Worden, Blair, Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity. London: 2001. Yet the United States remained a nation where evangelical Protestantism was still a major force not just a minority interest. In England, ‘Bunyan’s century’ had been ended decisively by twentieth-century secularisation. In America, things were different. It is tempting to suggest that nowhere has the Puritan legacy been greater or more enduring than in the United States. For better or worse, concepts of covenant, chosen people, millennium, and national mission remain alive within American culture. But such concepts ultimately derived from the Bible itself, a book read far more widely and intensively than all Puritan texts put together. Puritans no doubt helped to shape how modern Americans read the Bible, but so have later movements and traditions. We should be wary about attributing too much to the seventeenth century. III The persistent tendency to invoke ‘Puritanism’ as an explanatory tool illustrates the tenacious hold that the godly have exercised on the imagination of posterity. For generations after their passing, they have attracted pious readers and curious scholars convinced (for very different reasons) that Puritanism matters. But identifying the Puritan legacy is no easy matter. Puritanism has been made to carry heavy freight, and used to explain a host of phenomena that may owe relatively little to the hot Protestants of the seventeenth century. The grand ‘spillover’ theories of Weber and his followers have stimulated valuable research, but they remain controversial. It would be a mistake for historians to stop asking big questions about the impact of Puritanism on the culture of Britain and America. But answering them will involve thinking about how Puritans were read and remembered by later generations. And we should not overlook their most obvious legacy – ardent evangelical religion. NOTES