What Is a Puritan?

The Baltimore journalist and "professional curmudgeon" H. L. Mencken famously and derisively defined Puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." While amusing in its way, this definition is wide of the mark.

The popular mis-conception of Puritans is that they were a dour lot who never had any fun, never wanted anyone else to have any fun, and dressed in dowdy dark colors. They were probably constipated, too. In the contemporary imagination, which probably borrows from its ideas of Christian fundamentalism and conflates the two, the Puritans were also anti-intellectual pietists.

All of these ideas are woefully wrong. Certainly the modern hedonistic materialistic pagan American would find he has little in common with the Puritans. They were the leading intellectuals of the late 16th and early 17th century in Great Britain and the godliest Christians in the land for several generations. They were nearly all Calvinists (of some degree) by theological persuasion, but of varying opinions on matters of church government, except that they were almost all opposed to episcopacy, especially as that polity was expressed in Roman Catholicism. The literature they have left behind indicates that they had a vibrant and loving home life and excellent senses of humor.

And they were natty dressers, too.

Tomorrow: The origins of Puritanism in England--the Henrician Reformation.