It's a very complimentary article, and a recognition of the influence of puritanism on the US still today. In the end, the pioneers wanted individualist decentralized government and religion. A farmer in Kentucky wanted to vote, interpret the Bible and live as he saw fit - hence we have democracy and fundamentalism.
The Puritans had many virtues, but they also had many, many flaws.
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Remember how Freud applied Greek mythology to individual psychoanalysis? This essay is an instance of applying religious history to national psychoanalysis. Complete BS.
The church of England is cracking up over homosexuality.
The whole business is deeply shameful and shaming to any brit worth half his tartan.
The puritans are the part of cromwell's england lived on-- but not in England. England's theology became naught but pomp and circumstance. Now both are gone and all that's left when a brit runs up the flag is a queer flapping in the breeze.
They were however deeply opposed to adultery as destructive of “community”.
(See for example David Hackett Fischer's “Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America ” for a description of Putitan courtship, sexuality, and married life.)
This article is just a long winded way of saying....absolutely nothing.
To attribute all Protestantism in the modern United States to New England Puritans is not just simplistic, it's incorrect. Every ancestor I have, other than the few native Cherokee and Creek, were Protestant; the latest arrival was 1738, the earliest predated the arrival of the Mayflower by over a decade, and none of them came to New England. They came to Virginia and Maryland. From my perspective, there is a fairly deep anti-individualistic streak in the New England variety of Protestantism, and that is the legacy of Puritanism in the New England of today. The Scots-Irish and Virginia Anglicans had far more influence upon the development and psyche of this nation, as a whole.
I generally feel all the world's people do not quite understand people from other countries. That goes for Americans as well. I'm sure thanks to the assiduous labeling by our wacko libs abroad with help from vicious anti-American wacko foreign libs, many non-Americans thing of Republicans and conservatives as being all ultra-religious and gung-ho about war and conquering countries. It's a stupid assumption, but it's one that's stuck. But whatever foreigners think about us, we have to do what is in our best interests. It is always amusing to read accounts by foreign observers who attempt to analyze America and Americans.
"There would be fewer people in jail, and no executions. There might also be fewer Republican presidents and Bible literalists, and because a non-Puritan America would be less mesmerised by sex and introspection, less pornography and fewer psychiatrists’ couches."
You've got to be kidding.
Your viewpoint is malignantly skewed.
One of the few good points in the article. Alas, the choice isn't between non-Puritanism and Puritanism, but between Puritanism and secularized anti-Puritanism, far more self-righteous and far less salutary.
The unique association between Puritans and capitalism isn't much believed among scholars of the topics, though it persists in pop-culture.
I wonder if Europeans get horny when they go fishing, when they peel potatoes, and when they do calculus problems. They seem to think sex explains everything, and is guiding everything.