Were the Puritans Puritanical?

The popular view is that the Puritans were rigid ascetics who generally found all pleasure to be sinful. In fact, “puritanical” has come to mean “exaggeratedly proper”, or “morally rigorous”, and it is never a positive descriptive term. However, it seems that history does not support this view of the Puritans.

“The Puritans were typical people of their time in that they enjoyed the pleasures of the 17th century. They liked to drink. They liked to sit and talk. They liked to eat well when they had the food to eat. They enjoyed sex. They also liked to play games, like an early version of shuffleboard. Let's put it this way, they weren't ascetics, like monks.” Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil's Snare

The Puritans believed that sex was a gift and a duty from God, but only within the confines of marriage. This sounds “ho-hum” today, but it was radical in its day because the standard teaching was that sex was morally tainted and primarily only for reproduction. They were so serious about this, however, that one historic account has a man being excommunicated from the Church because for two years he denied his wife “conjugal fellowship”. The Puritans were in favor of sex in marriage.

Puritans have been misrepresented for quite some time now. Journalist H.L. Mencken is well known for his 1928 definition of “puritanism” as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” The media portrays them in drab clothing, but the fact was that they often wore colorful outfits. They are shown as teetotalers, while history says that they actually drank quite a bit of beer, rum, ale, and cider. (According to the Pilgrim Journal, the reason the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts rather than further south was, “We could not now take the time for further search or consideration, our victuals being much spent, especially our beer.”) They're blamed for burning witches in Salem, but as it turns out, the event wasn't particularly “Puritan” at all, but rather a result of a world-wide mindset of intolerance and superstition. According to Norton, “There wasn't anything particularly Puritan about the witchcraft trials.”

What is the truth about the Puritans? The “Puritan work ethic”, much maligned today, was actually a phenomenal approach. First, their view was “What can offer to the people in my community that they need?” Today's greed has moved to “What will people pay for that I can offer?”, but the original ethic was less selfish. Second, the work ethic insisted that no one had a “career” - they had a “vocation”. The notion of “full-time Christian work” was novel to them; instead, they believed that your job was a calling from God, a ministry. They believed that Christians actually worked for God and, as such, had much higher standards to meet as well as a much higher sense of importance. All Christians were doing “full-time Christian work”. At the bottom line, they believed work was good, divinely ordained, and necessary to the well-being of Man (as in “Idle hands are the devil's workshop”). It was this work ethic, the belief that work was materially, morally, and spiritually beneficial, that made America the productive nation that it was.

Theologically, the Puritans were known for their “fire and brimstone”. Most people have heard of Jonathan Edwards, and his “Sinners in the hands of an angry God” sermon is legendary. What is less well known is the extreme joy Edwards and others found in Christ. Edwards preached sermons such as “Safety, Fulness, and Sweet Refreshment to be Found in Christ”, “The Peace Which Christ Gives His True Followers”, and “Praise, One Of The Chief Employments Of Heaven”. Probably no group of Christians has spent more time emphasizing the work of the Holy Spirit and the necessity of spiritual experience, combining profound biblical insight with intense interest in the experiential work of the Holy Spirit.

Puritans were known for their charity. They believed America itself was “a city set on a hill”, a beacon of light that was obligated to be charitable to the needy both within and without. It was the Puritan belief that God ordered the universe that brought about modern science. It was the Puritan desire for religious freedom that made America the nation of religious freedom that it is.

Puritans were ahead of others in terms of women's rights. While in other places women were extremely limited in their rights, the Puritans allowed women to inherit property, run their husband's businesses, and vote on their minister. They allowed women political voting rights as early as 1630.

And as has been already mentioned, the Puritans were actually enthusiastic about sex. They certainly required sex to be within the confines of marriage, but it wasn't something to be endured or something that was a “necessary evil”. They encouraged, even demanded it of married couples. They viewed spinsters with pity and encouraged their daughters to marry young. They even allowed their daughters to share a bed with her suitor in a process known as “bundling”, where an unmarried, but “interested” couple could share a night of pillow talk with their clothes on. (How many modern-day parents would allow that?) There are even some historians that credit the concept of the modern “sex manual” to the early Puritan preachers who would actually preach explicit marital sex sermons.

And, of course, we all know that they established “Thanksgiving”. But what we don't know is that it wasn't an “event” for them, but a regular thing that they did. They regularly proclaimed days of thanks throughout the year when good things happened and days of prayer and fasting when bad things happened. Their purpose was to thank God whenever good things occurred, not make a single day of gratitude. So they were ahead of the curve there as well.

Puritans are portrayed as uptight, prudish, stick-in-the-mud, “have no fun” killjoys in the early days of America. While it is likely that there were a few of them like that, in fact, as a whole they were not. I think if we truly understand the Puritans without the evils that are inflicted on them by modern writers and the media, we might begin to see them in a truly different light. One might actually find that they were normal, perhaps even “too much fun” people.