Critics interpret these recent book ban efforts as signs of American Puritanism, harkening back to the evergreen stereotype of dour souls trudging to church through 17th-century New England woods. The link between book banning and Puritans is not accidental. In the 1630s, Puritans in England managed to temporarily halt the publication of the Anglican lawyer and exiled colonist Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan, which criticized the Pilgrims and the Puritans for rituals that violated Church of England norms, and for mistreatment of Native peoples.
Morton ultimately managed to get his book published in Amsterdam. Still, for this suppression—the first explicit banning of a book about North America—along with their moralizing, Puritans came to be known as self-righteous, anti-sex scolds. A New Yorker cartoon in November 2020 captured prevailing stereotypes about both the Puritans and their fellow New England-settling Protestants, the Pilgrims. Four men on a “Hot Pilgrims 1620 Calendar” bore revealing labels: “Stern!! Remote!! Pious!! Humorless!!” But the sexless Puritan stereotype does not conform to historical reality—and may take away from the real lesson of book bans, old and new.
Puritans had a lot of sex—and not just to make their large families of six-plus children. Local court records suggest that some, if not many, Puritans engaged in pre-marital fornication and adultery—activities that ran afoul of contemporary religious values.
In early New England, where church and state were closely connected, deviant behavior could have dire consequences. In 1642, a New Plymouth colony servant named Thomas Granger was accused of “buggery” with “a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves and a turkey.” The Pilgrims needed to know which individual beasts had partnered with Granger because the Book of Leviticus forbade eating such polluted creatures. Authorities paraded the animals in front of Granger, who identified his victims. Colonial leaders killed the animals first. Then they executed Granger, a boy of 16 or 17.
Did the Pilgrims kill Granger because he violated their notions about sex? Yes—and no. His behavior was unacceptable to authorities because the Bible had decreed bestiality a sin punishable by death. But his punishment tells us less about his sexual activity than about the general climate of fear that pervaded Puritan communities.