A Puritan’s History of the United States
“The Puritan's utter lack of aesthetic sense, his distrust of all romantic emotion, his unmatchable intolerance of opposition, his unbreakable belief in his own bleak and narrow views, his savage cruelty of attack, his lust for relentless and barbarous persecution — these things have put an almost unbearable burden upon the exchange of ideas in the United States.”
— H. L. Mencken, A Book of Prefaces (1917)
The writer and early same-sex marriage advocate Andrew Sullivan once observed, as have many gay men of his generation, that “there is something very sexless about the [modern LGBT] movement. It is not erotic. It doesn’t have that slight libidinous edge of the old gay movement.” Once upon a time, gay, lesbian, and bisexual activists fought for the freedom to love as they pleased. Sex — the physical act — was central not only to the cause, it was everywhere present in gay and bi culture. Today’s activists, by contrast, are by and large a dour lot of anxious and celibate shut-ins, more concerned with social control, rigid ideology, and matters of “identity” than with the actual living of life. But LGBT activism is by no means alone in this. The combatants on virtually every front of the American culture wars are consumed with a compulsion to purify society matched only by their neuroticism about all things sex.
The political landscape is now awash in competing moral panics over “groomers”, “power dynamics”, incels, “toxic masculinity”, and an LGBT “social contagion”, to name just a few. Countless institutions have imploded or been purged in zealous struggles for total conformity. Normal human interactions and experiences have been “problematized.” Between the religious right, the radical feminist left, the post-liberal fringe, the manosphere, far-left queers, and the trad movement, everyone has extraordinarily strong views about sex, romance, and relationships — they just don’t seem to be having any themselves. Instead, sex (and social) lives are being systematically replaced by social media addiction and a culture of cancelation, airing dirty laundry, and performative one-upmanship. Alongside this, we’ve seen a resurgence of old-fashioned homophobia and a backlash against both sexual freedom and even the Sexual Revolution itself.
But while this may all seem like a chaotic jumble of late-stage imperial madness, on both the political right and the left, America’s eclectic blend of tormented prudery, entrepreneurial populism, and fanatical religious enthusiasm can trace its intellectual lineage back to the same source. From the Salem Witch trials to the anti-vice crusades, to McCarthyism, the Lavender Scare, the Satanic Panic, QAnon, age-gap discourse, and our rather unique fixation with the sex lives of public figures, that star-spangled urge to become heretic-hunting, purity-obsessed sexual busybodies comes courtesy of the Puritans.
The Original Political Radicals
The deliciously scathing journalist H. L. Mencken, perhaps the most prolific anti-Puritan writer in history, defined Puritanism as “an attempt to repeal physiology,” “the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99.9% of them are wrong,” and, most famously, “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” But by Mencken’s era — the early 20th century — Puritanism had long since morphed from its initial form. The original Puritans were a related but altogether more novel breed. In fact, as the political theorist Michael Walzer wrote in his provocative Revolution of the Saints (1965), Puritanism was “the earliest form of political radicalism.”
Puritanism arose in late-16th-century England as a movement within the Protestant Reformation seeking to “purify” the Church of England. A subset within Calvinism, Puritanism was, in effect, a fervent reaction to the modernization and social change that accompanied Europe’s transition away from medieval feudalism — a counter-revolution against the intellectual and cultural currents that would eventually become the Enlightenment. “All forms of radical politics,” Walzer noted, “make their appearance at moments of rapid and decisive change, moments when customary status is in doubt and character (or ‘identity’) is itself а problem.”
Calvinist Puritans placed far less stock than other Protestant denominations of the day in the intellect and reason as tools to understand the divine, favoring pure faith and absolute obedience to God’s will. John Calvin himself wrote that man was “not to indulge curiosity” and “not to speak, or think, or even desire to know, concerning obscure subjects, anything beyond the information given in the Divine Word." This closed-mindedness and rigidity of thought permeated every facet of Puritan life. Puritan communities were characterized by a culture of intense collectivist discipline and constant, intrusive watchfulness of one’s brethren for the slightest indiscretions — the original call-out and cancel culture. In Walzer’s words, “They felt themselves to be living in an age of chaos and crime and sought to train conscience to be permanently on guard, permanently at War, against sin.”
Puritans merged this collectivist purity-policing with the Protestant work ethic and elements of individualism. They believed in the capacity of the individual to transform society, but rejected any celebration of or deference to the expression of individuality. Such misguided frivolities would stand in the way of their Divinely anointed mission to build a “godly society.” The Puritans wanted a revolution, and in the New World, they saw a blank slate that they could remake in their own image.
The City Upon a Hill
Puritanism came to define the early American colonies in New England, even as the movement lost steam back in old England. Puritanism was the culture, the social mores, and the law. Any behavior that deviated from their biblically derived ideal of perfect moral virtue was harshly punished. Adulterers were publicly shamed with literal scarlet letters, and in at least one case, executed. Blaspheming, lying, working on the sabbath, drunkenness, and “wickedness” were punished in public spectacles featuring an array of cruel and humiliating corporal punishments. Children who cursed or struck their parents could be legally put to death. Sodomy and buggery were capital offenses, as was, of course, witchcraft. And religious persecution was institutional. Puritan society was so repressive and suffocating that author Margaret Atwood, writing in 1985, needed only to crack the pages of colonial American history to find all the inspiration she needed for her dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Her Republic of Gilead seems to most contemporary audiences a living nightmare — yet it’s mostly just Puritanism with modern technology and control of the US military.
Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Source: Detroit Publishing Company, circa early 20th century.
The original Puritans reached the hysterical climax of their power in the infamous Salem Witch Trials of 1692 and 1693, in which 25 people died, 19 of them convicted “witches” who were executed. One man, an 81-year-old farmer named Giles Corey, was crushed to death while members of the court attempted (and failed) to coerce a confession from him. The Puritans were hardly the first religious extremists to hold witch trials — European witch-hunters killed between 40,000 and 50,000 people for this imaginary crime — but these pious New Englanders did so more than 60 years after the anti-witch tide had crested in Europe. It was a miscarriage of justice so severe, and a mass psychosis so insane that even the Puritans themselves were stunned and appalled at themselves in the years that followed. Ironically, the spell had been broken. As the 18th century turned over, Puritanism lost its direct stranglehold and slid into rapid decline. By 1740, it had been quietly absorbed into other Protestant churches. But, like Tolkien’s dark lord, the spirit of Puritanism endured.
In their industrious zeal, the Puritans had raised up what John Winthrop — who led the first large wave of colonists across the Atlantic, helped found the Massachusetts Bay colony, and served as its long-time governor — called a “city upon a hill.” That line, borrowed from the Sermon on the Mount, would become part of America’s founding ethos, echoed by presidents ranging from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan. Though its builders faded and took new forms, that shining city stood immovably. The impetus to wage moral crusades, the hatred and guilty fascination with sex, and the obsessive drive to exert social control over others in the quest to purify society — the very essence of Puritanism — has proven itself an imperishable fire in America’s ever-expanding belly.
Great Awakenings and the Purity Explosion
Just as the first iteration of Puritanism was giving up the ghost, the American colonies underwent the First Great Awakening, an Evangelical religious revival led by Puritan holdout preacher Jonathan Edwards, Calvinist preacher George Whitefield, and others. But before the movement could ramp itself up into a new and improved Puritanism, the growing tensions between America and Britain, the American Revolutionary War, and the work of establishing a new country stole its thunder. With more pressing matters at hand, Puritanism was shunted to the side. But sure enough, as soon as the tumult died down and the newly minted USA was up and running, the Second Great Awakening arrived right on cue — and with it, a range of diverse puritanical movements.
Unlike its predecessor, the Puritanism of the 19th century was not a single thing. Nor was it strictly associated with views and practices that, looking back with today’s political lens, would be classified as right-wing. As the legacy of Puritanism took root and flourished, it grew, spread, and branched out in every political direction.
Nativists created the Know Nothing Party, a conspiratorial, xenophobic populist movement centered around preserving the purity of American Protestant values from the unwashed Catholic immigrant hordes. The party was so named not because of its actual ignorance, but rather its feigned ignorance: when questioned by outsiders about the Know Nothing Party, members were required to say “I know nothing.” Religious fundamentalists spearheaded a slew of state-level Sabbatarian Sunday laws (or “blue laws”) prohibiting work and business on the Christian Sabbath, many of which remain on the books in some form to this day. Meanwhile, bizarre, moralizing, and pseudoscientific beliefs about sex spread like wildfire.
It was commonly believed that sex, wholly apart from venereal disease, was both spiritually and physically dangerous. The excessive loss of sperm in particular, especially from nocturnal emissions or male masturbation, was thought to cause a number of health problems, including headaches, depression, epilepsy, insanity, and even blindness. Pious dietary reformers, somehow convinced that bland comestibles were the remedy society needed to keep men from touching themselves, sprung eagerly into action. Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham created flavorless biscuits known as Graham crackers, in those days sans cinnamon and sugar, while Seventh-day Adventist physician John Harvey Kellogg invented corn flakes. Needless to say, neither had any effect whatsoever on curbing male “self-abuse.” If sexuality was to be repressed, it needed, shall we say, a firmer hand.
Sylvester Graham (pictured left) and John Harvey Kellogg (pictured right).
To this end, social conservatives passed a blizzard of indecency and obscenity laws across the country aimed at eradicating any semblance of sex, however faint, from American public (and often private) life. The most infamous of which was the Comstock Act of 1873. Passed at the behest and with the guidance of anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock, the law banned anything deemed “obscene”, “lewd”, “lascivious”, “immoral”, or “indecent” from the US postal service — the primary avenue of information in the 19th century. This applied not only to pornography, erotica, and anything even remotely racy, but also materials related to abortion or contraceptives — including medical textbooks and correspondence between women and their physicians. Appointed a Special Agent to the Post Office, Comstock and his nosy minions were deputized to snoop through the nation's mail and arrest anyone, aside from themselves, who might be thinking a little too much about sex.
But the many anti-vice societies and moral reform movements that arose in the 1800s were hardly the sole domain of religious conservatives. The mantle of Puritanism was also taken up by progressives and women’s movements, who led the charge against an impressive litany of disapproved practices. Christian traditionalists and feminist activists worked together — and not for the last time — but these campaigns were largely female-led movements driven as much by secular feminist concerns over “social reform” as anything else. And “social”, in this era, was often a euphemism for “sex.”
The women who propelled these movements forward saw themselves as having what historian David J. Pivar described in his 1973 book Purity Crusade: Sexual Morality and Social Control as “a special mission to lead men into [a] ‘higher stage of civilization.’ [...] They were purifiers of American society.” But, as Pivar noted, “purification meant various things to various reformers.” Operating under the shared banner of “purity” allowed activists to put up an outwardly unified front; however, in Pivar’s words, the movement had “no philosophical consistency” and amounted to “a social religion.” And within these circles, much like the original Puritans who came before and every generation that has come since, “obedience proved to be a most important component.”
This social religion targeted everything from nude art and photography to gambling, prize fighting, lotteries, football, and even the ballet, but its primary pillars were temperance and the campaign to abolish prostitution — which later came to be known as “social purity.” Activists saw alcohol and prostitution as the “twin evils” and themselves as the twin forces to vanquish them. These submovements rose together, worked together, and imitated one another in rhetoric, style, and ideology. By 1833, more than 6,000 local temperance societies already dotted the American landscape, and anti-prostitution activism wasn’t far behind. One prominent organization, the New York Female Moral Reform Society, formed in 1834. Three years later, they had 250 chapters from New England to the Midwest.
Radical temperance activist Carrie Nation with her famous bottle-smashing hatchet and a bible, circa 1900.
The hand of the broken Puritan clock was, however, unambiguously right about one 19th-century issue: the abolition of slavery. Puritanical fervor was everywhere evident among radical abolitionists, and the moral reform community was ferocious in its opposition to slavery — and to any politician who would not move on the issue as quickly as they wished. But their denunciatory style alienated fence-sitters and would-be allies as often as it persuaded them. Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator himself, expressed more than periodic frustration with “the self-righteousness of the abolitionists”, whose antics, in his view, tended “rather to increase than to abate [slavery’s] evils.”
In the end, it took a Civil War to eradicate the scourge of slavery, but purity reformers played their role. However, in a now-all-too-familiar dynamic, these activists discovered that winning such a monumental cause, while gratifying, neither dissipated their religious enthusiasm nor quenched their thirst for glorious crusading. And so, the enormous well of energy that had fueled radical abolitionism was diverted into every other facet of purity reform. By the 1880s, social purity had swelled into a single, cohesive movement, and by the 1890s, a mass movement.
Some purity reformers took what Pivar characterized as “repressive action against prostitutes” that “approached vigilantism in its severity”, often sniffing out every house of ill repute they could find and calling the police on them. “Prostitution” itself also became a sweeping umbrella term for any behavior frowned upon in polite society. Promiscuity, cohabitation, premarital sex, or “immoral” lines of work such as burlesque dancing were lumped in alongside the transactional selling of sex for money. As the journalist Henry Mahew wrote across the pond in 1861, “Literally every woman who yields to her passions and loses her virtue is a prostitute.” The exploitation of women was one concern, but the larger issue, as always, was the sex itself.
To this end, activists decried the prevailing women’s fashion trends as too French and decadent, and, in Pivar’s words, “denounced the love of fashion as disobedience to the laws of health and an obstacle to moral purity.” They also embraced censorship both in the sense of seeking to suppress “impure” literature and the free press’s role in publicizing ideas and behaviors they found deviant, but also in the ancient Roman sense of being magistrates appointed to supervise public morality.
After leaning on city officials in Philadelphia to get a high-profile prize fight cancelled in 1885, purity censors lobbied Congress to outlaw any transmission of pictures or even descriptions of boxing matches through the mail or interstate commerce. In their ardor, as Pivar wrote, purity reformers “searched for signs of social disintegration” and “discovered an abundance of them” everywhere they looked. But simply abstaining from their infinitely expanding list of sins, great and small, earned one no reprieve: “According to a Calvinist heritage, purity reformers demanded that the value of one’s social existence be proven and demonstrated in action.” Silence, it turns out, was “violence” long before the summer of 2020.
Puritanism, however, was soon to evolve into its next form. As the 19th century drew to a close, anti-vice scolds and moral reformers melded into the burgeoning progressive movement. And armed not only with Calvinist utopianism but also the visionary conceit of cutting-edge pseudoscience, things took a rather dark turn.
White Slavery, Social Hygiene, and Progressivism
The crusade against prostitution morphed into a moral panic about “white slavery” — a term denoting coerced prostitution and human trafficking. Then, as now, anti-prostitution warriors relied heavily on the conflation of sex work with sex slavery to make their case. And while women of any race could fall victim to white slavery, the scare had an ugly racial dimension. For one, the “white” in “white slavery” sought to highlight the plight of white Christian victims, drawing an implicit parallel with the chattel slavery imposed upon black Americans. Worse, as a historical review published in Social Work in Public Health noted, “Eastern European Jews and Chinese immigrants were often singled out to be the most likely suspects” in cases of white slavery.
The hysteria, rarely backed by verifiable evidence or data, culminated in the passage of the Mann Act of 1910, also known as the White-Slave Traffic Act, which criminalized the transportation of women or girls “for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” The federal law, still in effect today, with its ill-defined “or any other immoral purpose”, supplied authorities with yet another cudgel to police people’s consensual sex lives and later to persecute Cold War-era political dissidents.
By 1925, every state in the union had passed anti-prostitution legislation. The temperance movement, too, realized their long-held dream of the Prohibition of alcohol with the ratification of the 18th Amendment in 1919, a pyrrhic victory that was repealed after 13 years, though not before causing an explosive surge in organized crime.
New York City police dumping liquor into sewers during Prohibition. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
But the progressive era brought more than just legal triumphs against the “twin evils”; it transformed both the style and substance of the purity movement. Activists began incorporating scientific-sounding jargon in their rhetoric, such as “moral contagion“ and “moral diet.” Immoral practices were likened to germs and pathogens, and the progressive agenda was rebranded from “social purity” to “social hygiene.” Reformers shed the language of religious judgement in favor of clinical terminology that disguised a new and disturbingly dehumanizing moralism as scientific objectivity. Enamored of social Darwinist ideas about hereditary weakness, “degenerate stock”, social “parasites”, and biological fitness, progressives became convinced they could medically fix humanity’s moral woes with technocratic solutions. The result was the eugenics movement, forced sterilizations, labor colonies, and a throttling of immigration to prevent “race suicide.” Whereas purity crusaders sought to hector, police, shame, discipline, and ultimately reform those they deemed moral reprobates, progressives saw moral shortcomings as the innate features of tainted heredity. To reform such defectives wasn’t worth the effort — better to simply remove them from the gene pool altogether or prevent them from entering the country.
As Princeton historian Thomas C. Leonard wrote in Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics & American Economics in the Progressive Era (2016):
“Between 1914 and 1928, the number of American university courses dedicated to eugenics increased from 44 to 376. Eugenicist tracts were best sellers. When Samuel Jackson Holmes [...], a Berkeley zoologist active in eugenics, published his Bibliography of Eugenics in 1924, it listed well over 6,000 titles.”
Eugenics was most certainly a dangerous idea, but it didn’t remain merely theoretical for long. As Leonard documented, in the early decades of the 20th century, more than 30 US states passed forcible sterilization laws, leading to the sterilization of tens of thousands of Americans — over 20,000 during the 1930s alone.
American eugenicists saw themselves as the vanguard of human progress, and they weren’t alone in that view. Adolf Hitler drew much of his eugenic inspiration directly from the American progressive movement. He considered Madison Grant’s infamous 1916 eugenics book The Passing of the Great Race to be his “bible”, regularly corresponded with American eugenicists, and invited Charles Fremont Dight to Munich, a eugenicist who helped write a Minnesota law that involuntarily sterilized over 2,200 disabled people. Speaking to a fellow Nazi, Hitler said:
“It is possible to a large extent to prevent unhealthy and severely handicapped beings from coming into the world. I have studied with interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.”
Thankfully, social hygiene’s days were numbered. Over the course of the 1930s, FDR’s New Deal policies, which delivered actual, material progress rather than a blueprint for crimes against humanity, siphoned much of the energy from the movement. What support remained sputtered and died as World War II not only sucked all the oxygen out of the room, but revealed in the form of the Holocaust where these “progressive” ideas led. By the time the war was over, so was progressivism. But with Allied victory came the dawn of the Cold War, and with it, a puritanical vacuum American conservatives rushed in to fill.
Lies, Witch-Hunts, and the American Way
American Puritans have always had a crotch-sniffing fixation with the sex lives of others, and long sought to and often succeeded in trying to turn matters of private sex into issues of public morality. But in the late 1940s, they truly outdid themselves by managing to link sex — namely, gay sex — with national security, geopolitics, and nuclear war.
It began in 1948 when a former Soviet spy turned anti-communist named Whittaker Chambers testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and fingered a number of US government officials as communist agents. One of the accused, a highly influential senior State Department Official named Alger Hiss, fought back, and for two years, his case became one of the biggest news stories in the nation.
Hiss’s defense rested on discrediting Chambers, who was bisexual, in part by insinuating that Chambers was a disturbed and malicious sexual deviant. The defense hinted, though never stated outright, that Chambers was driven by a personal vendetta against Hiss, who’d rejected his sexual advances. As James Kirchick quoted in Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington (2022), one of Hiss’s lawyers wrote in a memo that “Chambers had a homosexual attraction toward Alger Hiss, which caused him to identify himself with Hiss, to desire, to possess him, and to destroy him.” While there’s no indication that Hiss was gay or bisexual, members of the press were soon describing the case as a “battle between two queers.”
In the end, the saga resulted in little more than a slap on the wrist for Hiss, but it initiated what might be called a homophobic domino effect parallel to the Second Red Scare known as the Lavender Scare.
Months later, a Senate report determined that homosexual people were susceptible to Soviet blackmail over their sexual orientation, rendering them “unsuitable for employment in the federal government" and “security risks in positions of public trust." Despite the fact that not a single case of a gay or bisexual person being blackmailed into betraying the US ever materialized, this belief became a universally held axiom across the military and federal government for decades. The Alger Hiss case also put the State Department in a very uncomfortable spotlight. “The early 20th-century US Foreign Service was a uniquely attractive institution for gay men,” Kirchick wrote, “affording them a measure of freedom and a literal world of possibilities unavailable at home.” And while this was all happening, the American people were coming to grips with Alfred Kinsey’s explosive sex research informing a shocked nation that same-sex behavior was far more common than anyone thought.
As the 1950s began, queerness transcended mere sinful deviance. The gays were a threat to national security, and they were hiding everywhere in plain sight, especially in the State Department. The stage was set for a latter-day witch-hunt, and little-known Senator Joseph McCarthy seized the moment with zeal.
In a speech delivered in Wheeling, West Virginia, Senator McCarthy railed against the Truman administration for being soft on communism. He spoke of a clash of civilizations and an existential “all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity,” and claimed to have in his possession a list of 205 names of “traitorous” communists in the State Department. Newspaper coverage spread the speech far and wide, and just like that, the Second Red Scare became McCarthyism.
McCarthy never produced his so-called list of State Department employees, whose exact number fluctuated. Like much of what McCarthy went on to do, evidence didn’t matter. Using his newfound notoriety and his position as chair of two powerful Senate committees, McCarthy spent years churning out myriad inquiries, hearings, press conferences, and public statements in which he launched blistering denunciations and outlandish allegations against people from all walks of life — usually without credible evidence. Anyone who drew the disapproval of Senator McCarthy and his supporters — or who criticized their kangaroo court methods — became in their eyes communists, foreign agents, subversives, or fellow travelers. There were in fact actual Soviet spies in the US during this period, but McCarthy never found any. He only torched reputations, destroyed careers, and ruined lives. And just as with the Hiss case, while his crusades were ostensibly waged in service of the Cold War and preserving the ideological purity of American society, there was a clear sexual subtext. As Kirchick wrote:
“Of the 25,000 letters sent to McCarthy’s office in the weeks following his Wheeling speech [...], only one out of four was primarily concerned with Communist infiltration of the federal government. The rest decried ‘sex depravity.’ A shrewd reader of public sentiment, McCarthy adjusted his rhetoric accordingly. The State Department, he declared in April, was riddled with ‘Communists and queers’ [...] [Secretary of State] Acheson should be fired, McCarthy demanded, along with his crew of ‘prancing mimics of the Moscow party line in the State Department.’”
Senator Joseph McCarthy. Source: LIFE Magazine, 1954.
McCarthy’s increasingly unhinged antics, helped along by journalist Edward R. Murrow’s devastating exposé, led to an official censure by the Senate in December 1954, and with it, the end of McCarthy’s power and influence. But the damage he’d done was lasting. Congressional investigations into disloyalty, often on flimsy grounds, continued. President Eisenhower’s executive order barring from federal employment anyone exhibiting “immoral, or notoriously disgraceful conduct” or “sexual perversion” (read: gay or bisexual people) remained in effect for decades. Hollywood continued to blacklist suspected communists, vice squads continued to entrap and arrest gay and bisexual men, and the FBI continued to surveil, harass, and persecute anyone on their radar whose political views or personal lives deviated from what they believed was right and proper. And no one was spared from the paranoia of Cold Warriors. The hard-right John Birch Society accused Eisenhower himself, a Republican president and former Supreme Allied Commander in WWII, of being a “dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy.”
Ultimately, the puritanical hysteria underlying McCarthyism — and Cold-War excesses more broadly — was part of a more pervasive pattern in 20th-century American thought: one that saw malevolent forces lurking around every corner, threatening not only to weaken the country, but to corrupt the youth.
Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Children!
The 20th century was a time of unprecedented speed — speed of communication, of travel, and of cultural shifts. It was the first era in which teenagers were often involved in subcultures or trends that their parents didn’t recognize and found socially pernicious or even spiritually harmful. It was also an era in which the long-standing Puritan fear of unplanned social change went mainstream — in which any repression of personal freedom, individual liberty, and free expression could be justified in the service of safeguarding children from one danger or another.
In the 1920s, the second iteration of the Ku Klux Klan swelled to as many as five million dues-paying members in part because they expanded beyond the rabble of white supremacist neo-Confederate terrorists that had rampaged across the South in the years just after the Civil War. They were still those things, of course, as well as violently anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, and anti-immigrant, but they also branched out into moral reform. As historian Nancy MacLean documented in her definitive Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (1994), the Klan opposed and took action against alcohol, prostitution, gambling, jazz music, “filthy fiction”, pool halls, premarital sex, and even dancing. They saw themselves as “cleaning up” society and “purifying” domestic life.
From 1934 to 1968, Hollywood’s Hays Code used similar appeals to family values to decree that “No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil, or sin.” Examples of such “wrongdoing, evil, or sin” included same-sex relationships. Interracial relationships, like depictions of sex or profane language, were prohibited outright.
Over and over, reformers who ran the social and political gamut turned to children as their crusading armor of choice. Hundreds of books were banned or censored to “protect” kids. The singer turned anti-gay activist Anita Bryant advocated against anti-discrimination protections for LGBT people as part of her “Save Our Children” campaign, writing in 1977 that “Homosexuals cannot reproduce — so they must recruit. And to freshen their ranks, they must recruit the youth of America.” Christian conservatives and the Moral Majority blocked the teaching of evolution, pushed abstinence-only sex education, defended state sodomy laws, and campaigned against any form of sexual freedom. And social conservatives launched the disastrous War on Drugs — all in the name of children.
Anita Bryant speaking in the late 1970s. Source: Slate.
This tireless vigilance against the corruption of youth took on increasingly bizarre forms as the new millennium approached. Baseless conspiracy theories about child-abusing Satanic cults swept the nation in the 1980s in a mass hysteria known as the Satanic Panic. It sprang offshoot panics over ritual abuse and day cares, as well as the recovered memory movement, in which overzealous therapists convinced children that they had repressed memories of abuse. Collectively, over 12,000 people were accused of Satanic abuses, many of whom were investigated. Approximately 800 civil and criminal cases were filed over child abuse stemming from “recovered” memories, the vast majority of which turned out to have been fictitious. But once this diabolical seed had taken root in the public imagination, Beelzebub was everywhere Americans looked: in heavy metal and rock music, in new age spirituality, in ouija boards, Dungeons & Dragons, and even in Harry Potter.
Of course, not everyone was so superstitious, and yet in an environment with so much smoke, parents moved to protect their children from any conceivable fire, however remote. Even as the rates of violence, including sexual violence, plunged across the board, kids stopped walking to school, free and unsupervised outdoor play disappeared from children’s lives, and all adults became predators until proven otherwise. And so safetyism was born. What could go wrong?
Great Awokenings and Purity Implosions
Viewed through the historical lens of Puritanism, there is much to recognize in 21st-century culture wars. From “purity rings” to the battles over teaching “intelligent design.” From the “Groomer” and incel panics to the war on Pride Month and anti-drag hysteria. From “age-gap” taboos to the backlash against sexual liberalism. And from the Trumpist purge of American conservatism to the endless circular firing squads of far-left social justice politics, we see the unbroken continuation of American Puritanism.
In the sharp and fervent pivot from the campaign for same-sex marriage to the most extreme and uncompromising brand of trans activism, we see an echo of the post-Civil War abolitionist pivot into purity movements. In the fixation with gender-neutrality, gender-nonconformity, dubious medical interventions, and clinical, woman-erasing language, we catch a glimpse of the original progressives’ “attempt to repeal physiology.” In left- and right-wing cancel culture, #MeToo overreaches, and MAGA loyalty tests, we see the next generation of witch-hunts. And, then as now, those who view themselves as moral reformers censor literature, ban books, and seek to strangle all creativity from publishing. As Michael Walzer wrote 60 years ago:
“Virtually all the modern world has been read into Calvinism: liberal politics and voluntary association; capitalism and the social discipline upon which it rests, bureaucracy with its systematic procedures and its putatively diligent and devoted officials; and finally all the routine forms of repression, joylessness, and unrelaxed aspiration.”
It’s Puritanism all the way down. We can trace its thread through the prudish, self-righteous, purity-obsessed, heresy-hunting tapestry of American history.
Puritanism, across much of the West, was a phase. An embarrassing phase, to be sure, and one that persisted longer in some societies than in others — but a phase nevertheless. America, however, was born from Puritanism. The high-minded liberalism of the Founding Fathers may remain, to one degree or another, in our hearts and minds, but Puritanism is in our bones. It is our cultural DNA.
In America, many movements, trends, and cultural phenomena are puritanical simply because it is in their nature. But the US, perhaps alone among its Western peers, can turn any subculture or movement from libertine individualism to Calvinist hive mind merely by going mainstream. How did the LGBT movement go from a vibrant and defiantly libidinous counterculture to a conglomeration of sexless sad sacks? It simply went mainstream, both absorbing and being swallowed by the dominant Puritan culture it once stood in direct opposition to. It is an uncanny dynamic we see time and again.
Universities went from the Free Speech Movement to the free speech graveyard, from Animal House to consent forms, and from havens of intellectual dissidence to Maoist asshole factories. All it took was for college education to become the norm. Youth activism went from Woodstock, hippies, and free love to a cancel culture of anxious and celibate backstabbing. All that was needed were the social technologies to give them an outsized influence. And the conservative movement has cyclically oscillated between small-government classical liberalism and big-government authoritarianism, depending entirely on whether they were culturally and politically dominant. In America, Enlightenment liberalism is the tool of choice in times of cultural vulnerability and weakness — the better angels of our nature. Once the levers of power are safely in hand, however, we reach for that old-time Puritan religion. It’s who we are — who we’ve always been. But it doesn’t have to be.
Without a doubt, its Calvinist heritage has helped make the United States the exceptional nation it became. As Walzer noted, “Calvinism was not a liberal ideology, even though congregational life was surely a training for self-government and democratic participation.” And yet, with just a handful of exceptions, most of America’s advances in culture, ethics, human rights, and technology have occurred not because of Puritanism, but in spite of it, with Puritanism kicking and screaming all the way. Perhaps there is something to be said for progress being born out of the tension between pragmatic, reformist liberalism and left- or right-wing Puritanism, but one thing is clear: without liberalism, there’s nothing left in America but Gilead.
Published June 15, 2025
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Published in Issue XIII: Heretic
