c. 2006 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) When I consider the “New Puritanism” abroad in our land, I remember that some of my ancestors were English puritans who followed a firebrand Calvinist pastor to New Haven Colony but soon denounced New Haven as insufficiently rigorous. They went south to New Jersey, where they founded a settlement, New Ark, more suited to their extreme religiosity.
The New World’s expansiveness had drawn my intolerant ancestors westward and away from the victim-status that feeds puritan zeal. No longer were they outcasts in England’s stratified Christianity, forbidden to enter certain professions, disdained by royalists and their establishment church. In this New Jerusalem, they could own property, seek education, pursue any endeavor, worship freely, and claim a stake in the emerging nation.
In time, these assimilated Calvinists linked up with assimilated Norwegian and German Lutherans, found a home in the Episcopal Church, and left behind Old World sectarianism.
Now our nation is embroiled in an eerie New Puritanism that picked up steam with President Reagan, swept moderates out of the Southern Baptist Convention, caught the notice of politicians seeking a new Republican majority, and now ÆÂ? perhaps sensing that a window of opportunity is closing ÆÂ? is pushing hard a political and moralistic agenda that shows an astonishing disregard for American history and heritage.
This New Puritanism has recreated the hyper-moralizing, sectarian suspicions, and church-state blurring that paralyzed Europe and nearly stopped the New World in its tracks. Intolerance dominates the religious landscape; if New Puritans have their way, it will be etched into our legal and constitutional systems.
How did this come about? The usual line is to blame post-modernism and whirlwind societal change ÆÂ? as if science victimized faith, “free love” victimized the straitlaced, homosexuality victimized families, immigrants victimized true Americans, and Hollywood victimized children. As in the 17th Century, victim status was a potent call to arms. The “righteous remnant” would save the nation.
I sense, however, that the New Puritanism’s breeding ground has become prosperity itself. It is both an expectation of continued comfort, safety, self-indulgence and control, and a nagging sense that the house of cards is falling and someone must be blamed.
Rather than blame a rigged economic system, predatory commerce and the unbridled greed of the super-rich, it feels better to blame the easily marginalized.
When neighbors work together to raise a barn, build a town, solve common problems, recover from a hurricane or celebrate our common life, normal human diversity isn’t an issue. When digging a foxhole or fighting a fire, all prayers sound alike.
When we are isolated, however, and feel endangered by the unknown neighbor and approach life as a personal project of self-advancement and self-fulfillment, it is easy to embrace the New Puritanism’s promises of perfection and victory.
If one’s daily life proceeds from one self-referential enclave to another ÆÂ? moving from air-conditioned house to SUV to homogeneous church ÆÂ? and the only occasions of diversity feel compelled, then sectarian smugness and suspicion come naturally.
Personally, I think the future belongs to communities where people know each other and get beyond their fear of diversity, where we let go of any need to control how other people live their lives and worship their God. Suburbs are already fading as destinations, especially among young adults. Intolerant religion isn’t the same easy sell. The more we see of the theocratic designs of white suburban mega-churches, the less inviting they seem.
I think we will discover what my intolerant ancestors discovered: that America works best when all have a stake in the system, when we meet in the middle and work together.
(Tom Ehrich is a writer, consultant and leader of workshops. His book, “Just Wondering, Jesus: 100 Questions People Want to Ask,” was published by Morehouse Publishing. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C. His Web site is http://www.onajourney.org.)
KRE END EHRICH
AP-NY-05-30-06 1804EDT
