THE utopian disdain for hierarchy common among today’s social egalitarians — a contempt especially directed at the moment toward Donald Trump, who is (wrongly) seen as an exemplar of evil caste systems — comes to us straight from our Puritan forefathers. This is not a novel point, but it’s worth remembering now and then.
From the website Hesiod’s Corner (unfortunately taken down):
Puritanism is notoriously part of the “low church” tradition. Puritanism rejected the ecclesiastical hierarchy in favor of a priesthood of all believers – a major theme in Reformed Calvinist theology and teaching. Due to Puritanism’s low ecclesiology, they adopted an ecclesiastical egalitarianism. For those who are not that familiar with Christian ecclesiology, ecclesiology is the philosophy of understanding the nature of what the “Church” is. In Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglo-Catholic circles, the Church is hierarchal and subdivided – this is because Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and High Anglicanism understand the church to be a living reflection and embodiment of the hierarchy of the natural world in-of-itself.
The Churches tower upward to the skies, the bells call one to participate in the Mass – like the Spirit calling over the face of the Deep in Genesis 1 – the church structure is filial and patriarchal, sustained by fatherliness but nurtured by “Mother Church” tending to one’s spiritual and physical ailments and needs, etc. Catholicism goes as far as even saying that within this hierarchy all have different gifts and spiritual needs that differ from person to person, and it is the responsibility of the father to recognize these talents, but also necessary for the individual to recognize these needs too (cf. St. Gregory the Great, Pastoral Rule).
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The Puritans, in rejecting this hierarchal ecclesiology, were left with a latitudinal egalitarianism. Whereas Lutherans attempted to remake the hierarchy (and arguably this is what the contemporary Church of England is busy doing too), the Puritans didn’t even bother to go that route. Instead, the church was wholly and entirely invisible and the metaphysics of creation and the world were entirely egalitarian and latitudinal. The idea of the invisible church is another major theme. Puritanism’s low ecclesiology meant that the mission of God’s people was not the “pilgrim church,” but the holy nation.
This is why Puritanism had a certain obsession with the Old Testament moreover than the New Testament. Without a commission to the church, the commission was to be a new nation like the Israelites of old. In order to distinguish themselves from Catholic and crypto-Catholic Anglican ecclesiology, the Puritans adopted an anti-ecclesiastic reading of Scripture. God did not work through any Church; he worked through individuals and nations. Thus, the mark of Godly living was a Godly nation – not a “Godly Church.”
The mission to believers was to subdue the world, confront Satan’s Kingdom, and remake the world – to make the New Heavens and New Earth. The paradox of Puritan views on “Sin” and “Election” was that the world was filled with sin and that the “Elect” would purify this world of its iniquity, which ran counter to Catholic teaching of the sinful man in a good world where man needed to order his life to live in relation with the creation rather than transforming the world into a new Eden.
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When the Puritans landed in New England, they set out to build the new towns and cities of America with deliberate utopian intent. Cities were planned based on the visions of the New Jerusalem in the Book of Ezekiel and Revelation. New Haven, the very city where I attend at Yale, was consciously constructed with the New Jerusalem dimensions as recalled in Ezekiel and Revelation. The First Congregational Church on the Green, which still stands today, originally had a stream running out from it into the green lawn toward the new “tree of life.” What might also be surprising to many were the levels the Puritans went to ensure the separation of church and state. [not if you understand the jew]
Historian and political scientist Philip Hamburger notes that the “separation of Church and State” was originally a theologically Puritan and anti-Catholic and anti-Anglican mentality enshrined by the Puritans. This was to prevent the lands that they had settled from ever being “taken over” by Papists and crypto-Papists. Marriage, in Puritan New England, was administered by the civil justices of the peace instead of the Church. Families and their children were registered by the local government rather than on Church rolls. [a church roll is the ONLY way to EXIT the federal system and become a freeman]
Political and juridical authority rested in the hands of the secular courts and political institutions, rather than Church councils and Church sanctioned guilds. The Puritans were not “secular” as we use that term today (but as Leo Strauss said, secular is really a term applied to White Anglo-Saxon Protestants who still promote all the old Protestant ideas and habits without invoking Biblical or religious authority: belief in social egalitarianism, belief in the idea of Progress, the triumph of “reason” over “superstition” (where superstition meant Catholic in the origin of that quintessential Protestant dichotomy), and a strong belief in linear and latitudinal metaphysics over and against hierarchal metaphysics), but they self-consciously maintained a separation of church from society.
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Yes, the good Puritan was still a good Puritan in civil society and civil society embodied the Puritan ethos, but civil society did not need the strict approval of the Puritan Congregational churches to engage in the day-to-day activities of the polis. Puritan society, in other words, was self-consciously utopian in its character. Puritan society would be built “by the work of hands and fruit of the vine” into the egalitarian city of light.
Again, this is present from before the Puritans landed when John Winthrop preached his famous sermon on the Arabella, and in the city planning and construction as new towns and villages propped up being built on the ideal of the New Jerusalem in Ezekiel and Revelation. This is what Talcott Parsons picked up on when he claimed the Puritans bequeathed to America the spirit of “instrument activism,” a tirelessly workaholic, utopian-oriented, progress and forward looking people.“
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Puritan moralism is generally well known. And, of course, the Left today is exceedingly moralistic – just in different avenues of living. The Puritans, in one of their moments of redeeming grace in the eyes of almost any American (religious or non-religious), were the leaders of the anti-slavery and abolitionist movements. It was the scions of the Puritans in the latter half of the nineteenth century who came to endorse prohibition, women’s suffrage, and democratization of Senate elections. Owing to congregationalism’s infamous democratic church polity, that fever of democratic church life (voting on all matters important to the congregation) spilled over into civil society.
The Puritans, and then the successors to the Puritans, were the most fanatical in their support for “democracy.” But it was always their vision of (or for) democracy. It was a democracy of pure will to power, to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche. The Puritans would rally together behind a certain political cause and see that it would be made manifest in civil society. Again, Parsons noted that Puritan activism was not merely contained in the four walls of their churches, but spilled out into the city of man. Even the famed British liberal Prime Minister of the 1800s, William Gladstone, in his 1877 essay “The County Franchise and Mr. Lowe Thereon,” noted that the “backbone of British liberalism was nonconformist Protestantism.”
David Hume, long before others, saw Puritanism as the driving force behind British revolutionary politics, and ultimately the core hammer behind Cromwell’s republican dictatorship. Hume even described Puritanism as embodying a “gloomy enthusiasm, which prevailed among the parliamentary party, is surely the most curious spectacle presented by any history, and the most instructive, as well as entertaining, to a philosophical mind.” Even after Hume, though not strictly related to Puritanism – even though the Puritans shared many Anabaptist sentiments – Friedrich Engels saw the revolutionary and egalitarian spirit of German nonconformist Anabaptism as an almost quasi-prophetic force that was paving the way for the truth of the proletarian revolution that was supposed to occur in Engel’s and Marx’s day. [hmmm… I haven’t looked into them]
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Without a Church, or an understanding of a mission for a Church, the Puritans saw only the “godly society.” As such, they actively sought out to create this new utopian society in all the lands they settled in America. While the theology of the Puritans is long gone, even within the genealogical heirs of the Puritans (the United Church of Christ and Unitarian Universalist Association in America), the spirit of Puritan utopianism, instrumental activism, and strong-arm “democracy” is alive and well.
George McKenna summarizes it best, writing, “The Progressives loved America, but the America they loved was one that began in New England, traversed the North, and defeated the slave-holding South. Its religion was Protestant…It was the muscular, activist, strain of Puritanism.” Today, the most progressive lands in America remain the regions firmly steeped in Puritan lore, tradition, and history, or the regions that were settled by New England Puritan diaspora (the West Coast). The Puritan’s DNA is rooted in restless iconoclasm, reform, and protest. It is the only trinity Puritanism ever knew, and it remains the only trinity known to all the descendants and inheritors – consciously and unconsciously – of puritanismtoday.
After all, it is only in Puritan and Calvinist countries where iconoclasm still manifests itself. It is precisely modern secularism’s revolutionary, iconoclastic, utopian, and progressive spirit as to why most sociologists and philosophers see secularism as “the preservation of certain Biblical habits and ideas even after the atrophy of Biblical faith.” Alan Simpson’s 1954 article captured the essence of Puritanism in its title: Saints in Arms: English Puritanism as Political Utopianism. The Puritans may be dead, but their soul is still marching on.”
