What Winship does well, and what becomes crucial once we trace the ways in which the Puritans remain influential, is convey how much of their concerns weren’t only theological but fundamentally political. He described one such Puritan campaign involving a royal petition for “vetting of prospective parish ministers […] better discipline, with selected clergymen authorized to assist their bishops […] and tolerance of puritan nonconformity.” That so many of the issues which the Puritans battled more orthodox opponents over strike us as arcane — from rejection of the Book of Common Prayer and the wearing of the surplice to proper church organization — is irrelevant. Are we so smug as to assume that 400 years hence all of our carping about supply-side economics or the differences between democratic socialism and social democracy aren’t as hermetic as parsing the intricacies of the antinomian controversy or the halfway covenant? What Hot Protestants verifies is that in the past religion was politics, as today politics is religion. Nothing is really partisan, only sectarian.
Which raises the question of what exactly Puritan politics was. The answer to that issue becomes crucial in how much we’re willing to forgive them. For the economist Max Weber, in his classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the Puritans were responsible for enshrining “acquisition as the purpose of life,” while by contrast Christopher Hill, an English Marxist, would claim in The World Turned Upside Down that some currents of non-conformist thought could have allowed for the “rejection of private property for communism, religion for rationalistic […] pantheism, [and] the mechanical philosophy for dialectical science” (admittedly he had in mind groups that horrified or were oppressed by most Puritans). What is always integral to any fair accounting of Puritanism is an understanding that they were complex, multifaceted, contradictory, and very well read. Mencken may have identified them with the rural Tennessee rabble hooting at Scopes, but the New England Puritans come from entirely different intellectual strands than do the fundamentalists of the 20th century, and for better and for worse it’s the good readers (and writers) of the Los Angeles Review of Books, and our fellow-travelers, who are the result.
Erroneous to see Pat Robertson as the son of Cotton Mather, Oral Roberts as the patrimony of John Cotton, Jim Bakker as the descendant of Richard Danforth. The evangelicals so roundly mocked by Mencken (few of whom were probably Calvinists) can trace their intellectual family tree back through the low church revivals of the Second Great Awakening, in both Scots-Irish (largely Calvinist) Presbyterianism and later (largely Arminian) English Methodism, with an injection of Pentecostalism in the previous century. While all are Protestants, the concerns of Mencken’s straw-ministers are not the same as that of the Puritans, their perspective is different, and so are their worldview, their concerns, and their way of being-in-the-world. That the Puritans were influential is stated by Winship as a given (which I agree with), but the question still has to be answered: why should we still care? For that answer we must gesture back to Miller, reading, writing, and teaching in dusty rooms overlooking the brown grass of Harvard Yard, founded by Puritans. From Miller we consider that we still care about the Puritans because they molded the American mind in a very exact way, and that there are certain political ramifications in that.