The Pilgrims

That dissenters such as Hutchinson and Williams were banished, suggests what has recurringly been described as a major factor in the evolution not only of the Puritan theocracy, but of supposed national identity in general--the frontier. Both Crevecoeur and Tocqueville portray the pioneer type, the individual who, being away from the influence of religion and mannered, social customs, becomes increasingly rough, and even near-barabaric. This same figure is also seen as a necessary precursor to more and more 'civilized' waves of society. Another view of the frontier effect comes with the increasing democratization of the United States, where populist movements occur such as the Jacksonian Revolution, suggesting a kind of evolutionary mode through which the American socio-political 'self' is more and more fully realized. For Puritan society, Miller suggests a more socio-economic effect, where the frontier increasingly disperses communities and so disperses the effect and control of the clergy, and where the drive for material profit begins to predominate over the concern with "religion and salvation" (Miller, I: 17). And if the frontier demands more a stripped-down material efficacy than the finer attributes of 'culture' and class distinction, then so too does frontier-influenced religion lose its taste for the nicer distinctions of theological scholarship, and move instead toward a greater simplicity, toward the eventual evangelism of the Great Awakening in the 1740s, further out toward "fundamentalism" and other forms of belief that had long-since ceased to be Puritan.

caveat--a note on the jeremiad

At this point one must step back with a bit of caution, and once again take note of an important provision underlying the terminology. That is, in using the term "puritan" above and assigning to it a set of characteristics and preponderances, I must qualify the grounds of the (non)definition. Specifically, an argument such as that belonging to Darrett Rutman becomes useful, even if one does not take it as far as does he (in using specifically against the likes of Perry Miller). Primarily, he takes issue with an approach to history that employs only the selected writings of a selected few, in determining some "notion of Puritan quintessence"--one which is supposed to represent all of Puritan New England, ministry and laity alike. As he puts it, this "view of New England Puritanism...rests upon two major implicit assumptions....that there is such a thing as 'Puritanism'...and that the acme of Puritan ideals is to be found in New England during the years 1630-1650" (In Hall, 110). His argument is correlative to one which Sacvan Bercovitch will take up in The American Jeremiad, where he points out that historians, in assuming this so-called decline, are simply following the lead of "Cotton Mather and other New England Jeremiahs." Taking statements such as Mather's, historians, instead of seeing it as part of a tradition of "political sermon" (to use Bercovitch's phrase) that could be evinced all the way from the sailing of the Arbella, have instead interpreted them as even more historically specific, reactions against an increasing lack of coherence between religious and secular authority, and declarations of a failing mission. Rutman indicates the "pragmatic value" of seeing the jeremiad this way, in that it helps isolate a model of Puritanism, and narrows the historian's task to one of describing the thought of a specific twenty-year period.

Rutman's basic argument rests on the recognition that, to gain a clearer picture, one must study not only published sermons and theological treatises, but also more wide- ranging anthropologic data--records of social, political, and economic relations within and among individuals and communities. Into the specifics of this, one need not go; a study in this vein of Sudbury, Massachusetts, reveals underlying instabilities that challenge assumptions of a dominant Puritan 'theocracy,' but then this is not so far from Miller's own conclusion, that Puritan ideology held within it the basis of its own loss of control. The point here is rather the point from which Rutman begins and with which he concludes, that one must be careful not assume an essence of identity to be described before attempting to describe simply what one finds, that such an assumption may lead to dangerous equivocations between the ideology of Puritanism and the history of New England (and extrapolating from that, much of the United States as a whole).

It is the old instability--that between the religious and the secular--which the idea of Puritanism contains. The confusion then becomes translated into the historical perspective in terms that, as Bercovitch states, come from the jeremiad itself: "the New England Puritan jeremiad evokes the mythic past not merely to elicit imitation but above all to demand progress" (Bercovitch, 24). For Bercovitch, who reads those key texts of the 'Great Migration'--John Winthrop's "A Model of Christian Charity" and John Cotton's "God's Promise to His Plantations"--as important transitions into distinctly American forms of the jeremiad, this entails an "effort to fuse the sacred and profane," to historicize transcendent values and goals into what he calls a "ritual of errand" (Bercovitch, 26,29). Defined then not so much by pre-existing social distinctions but rather by a continual and purposefully-held sense of mission to which the modern idea of 'progress' is intrinsic and out of which the notion of "civil religion" (as Kammen would say, "memory in place of religion") develops, Puritanism, as an ideological mode and not (Rutman's) historical "actuality," suggests America as a modern region from the very beginnings of its colonization.

Less so with historians than popularizers of a Puritan mythos, the evocation of a "golden age" existing less as past fact than future promise, comes to dominate the sense of 'Puritan tradition'. This, as Bercovitch indicates, is at the heart of 'explaining' America, with all its promise as a New World, with its idea of Manifest Destiny, with the kind of self-idealization of National Purpose that Henry Nash Smith describes in Virgin Land. The modern perspective and its blurred secular and religious (or moral) understandings, thus is what will be explored in the sequel.