Word: puritans
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While it seems unreasonable to attribute people’s being flattened in Wal-Mart parking lots to Increase Mather, Will’s indictment of Puritanism is hardly unique. In section and dining hall discussions, “Puritan” may be understood as shorthand for “obsolete, sexually repressed, joyless prude.” It is one of Harvard’s milder ironies that vilifying Puritans has become something of a pastime at the College that was once a cradle of the Puritan orthodoxy. In October, on this very page, for instance...
...this Puritan-maligning has made me suspect that our picture of 17th century New England was not entirely accurate. I am not sure that it is possible for a society to be as gloomy as the one we imagine the Puritans inhabited. Surely extreme asceticism is as doomed a societal ethos as extreme hedonism. This suspicion drove me to e-mail David D. Hall ’58, the Divinity School’s Bartlett Professor of New England Church History...
Hall wrote that the idea upon which Will’s criticism was founded—“the ‘repression’ idea,” which also posits that Puritans were “mean to kids, didn’t like sex, etc.,” wasn’t accurate either. Hall directed me to Edmund S. Morgan’s forthrightly-titled essay “Puritans and Sex,” in the December 1942 New England Quarterly. And it turns out that Puritans were by no means the prudes...
...decades, Massachusetts has enjoyed a peculiar double reputation for political affiliations. The Commonwealth is both the Puritan colony of John Winthrop and the most liberal state in the Union; it was the only state to give its electoral votes to George McGovern in 1972 and is the outdated land that only recently took its Blue liquor laws off the books. The last 200 years were, in a sense, a lengthy experiment in banishing the 17th century from Massachusetts—leaving its reactionary history behind and defining the Bay State as a haven for the progressive principles of tolerance...
Students with a spontaneous craving for beer or screwdrivers on Sunday afternoon may no longer be thwarted by the vestiges of Massachusetts’ puritan laws...