The Puritans: A Transatlantic History
by David D. Hall
Princeton University Press

Puritanism was a wild comet of religious zeal that shook the baby legs of the Protestant Reformation in Elizabethan England, Scotland, and Ireland. For a brief time, it became a direct threat to the political order of its day, even to the point of condoning regicide. However, it was a movement that crashed and burned in the fractiousness of squabbling church and civil bodies across northern Europe—whilst finding a new home in the wilds of America. While today you won’t come across the Puritan pilgrims as portrayed in so many treacly Thanksgiving decorations, it doesn’t mean their impact in the realm of religious thought and practice is not all around us. If you’ve ever experienced the excruciating search for a cold beer in a “dry” American county on a Sunday, then you’ve stared the icy glare of Puritanism right in the face. 

Or so we’ve been told. But were the Puritans really just a bunch of joy-killing sad sacks who ended up with so much power they killed a king and set up the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell? Thanks to David D. Hall’s magisterial and thought-provoking new book, The Puritans: A Transatlantic History, the answer is as complicated as was their relationship to the Reformation itself. In this weighty study (with over 100 pages of end notes), readers are treated to an exhaustively researched and elegantly told tale of how a “reformation of morals” within the Protestant Reformation eventually yielded to the rise of a rigid Puritanical streak. When it was finally corralled and contained by growing anti-puritanical forces within the moderate reformed churches—in response to the beheading of Charles I and the depredations of Oliver Cromwell—Puritanism’s most ardent practitioners sailed off to America to preach and hear the “pure gospel” free from the restraints of a “corrupt” episcopal church wedded to ungodly kings.  

Guiding us through this quagmire of theological disputation is the eminent David D. Hall, the Bartlett Research Professor of New England Church History at Harvard Divinity School. He is the author or editor of numerous books on American religious and cultural history, including Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England and The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century. He aims to dispel some of the more popular stereotypes of the Puritans: 

Puritan-style moral reform is dogged by stereotypes and half-truths … the stereotypes that abound in modern Britain and America were mainly the doing of liberal Protestants and secular cultural critics who propagated the image of the Puritan as hostile to the arts, intolerant of dissent, and hyper-legalistic, a paradigm closely tied to a narrative of modernity freeing itself from unnecessary restraints.

There was a rich spirituality within the Puritan movement, Hall maintains, but it often was at loggerheads with an intractable system of church hierarchy and a monarchy that sought to squash the more socio-political acts of conscience, such as refusing to kneel at an altar for the sacrament or eschewing the use of The Book of Common Prayer, as mandated by King Edward VI in the 1549 Act of Uniformity, which really kicked things into high gear for about a century. 

What did the Puritans really want? A society full of the godly and the good, to put it most simply. This could not come from the church or the king, however, but rather from a “reformation of manners,” a perfect restoration to the unsullied Church of Believers God intended, with Christ as its King. It required a fellowship of like-minded Christians looking inward at their actions, upward for forgiveness, and at each other for remonstrance and support in pursuit of righteous lives. What did they leave behind? Hall relates:

Moral reform as imperative for a nation or people ever on the verge of decline was possibly the most significant legacy of the Puritan movement.

While Puritanism as a branch of Protestantism is no longer a functioning entity (has anyone driven by the First Puritan Church of Oswego, lately?), its impact is most keenly felt in America, where moral rectitude is still proclaimed as a value and “sin” a word you’ll still hear in church. Despite its subtle influences, the Puritans and Puritanism are not well-loved or remembered, as Hall states, and more’s the pity:  

Anti-puritanism is alive and well in our own times and, on both sides of the Atlantic, is responsible for most popular misconceptions of the movement. Freeing the word from the abuse directed at it over the centuries … can seem impossible.

In The Puritans, David D. Hall has “taken the Cross” and acquitted himself admirably in presenting a definitively researched explanation for a phenomena many of us still don’t understand. It is quite the case that the further one moves away from the subject, the less one makes sense of it. No other than Thomas Carlyle, that keen nineteenth century mind who studied Oliver Cromwell in painful detail, said that the passage of time made the Puritans “unintelligible … we understand not even in imagination … what it ever could have meant.” 

The Puritans goes a long way toward explicating the inexplicable and should stand as the definitive history for some time to come. 

—Peggy Kurkowski holds a BA in History from American Public University and is a copywriter living in Denver, Colorado