The truth is, the Pilgrims were Puritan fascists who were only looking for their own religious freedom. They were too ... independent and fanatical even for the more mainstream zealots of English and European Reformations. They called themselves “Puritans” because they were dedicated to purifying the Church of England of Roman influences. They hated Rome and they hated heretics, and they hated sinners and they really hated witches. Their reigning English King, James I was also a foaming Protestant Scottish witch hunter, and was every bit as fanatical as the Pilgrims were, since they were all theological soul mates. But James I actually had to sophisticate himself a bit, particularly stifling his witch-hating fanaticism when he took power in England. He had to accommodate the more moderate and educated Protestantism that then still held great sway in his English Court and Parliament. This social moderation at home however, didn’t slow him from encouraging the exportation of sharp, Puritan zeal to his growing colonies in the New World though, where raw Puritanism would be free to dominate the new society he intended to found there.
I say with very little exaggeration, that living under Puritan rule in the New England American Colonies would be nearly as religiously oppressive as living under the Taliban in Afghanistan, or Wahhabi ruled Saudi Arabia. The principle difference between Sharia Law and Pilgrim Law would be that the Pilgrims let women show their whole faces in public. the Puritans in particular on the other hand, weren’t all that put off by
the Inquisition’s tactics or even goals in and of themselves. The Puritans and many other Reformers in truth just wanted the Inquisitional zeal applied unilaterally up and down the Church ranks from clergy to commoner. They just didn’t think you should be able to buy or politic your way out of being tortured into a confession of heresy. They figured that kings, Popes and bishops and priests were just as good candidates for heresy as anyone else—the more the merrier. Puritans in short, actually wanted more repression and more micromanaging of the Body of Christ. They wanted the power to institute the same sort of fanatical purification of Christendom that the Inquisition only pretended to enforce, and then only selectively, often for personal, social, or political reasons. The Puritans wanted their newly cleansed Protestant Inquistition to be universally applied to all Christians of whatever rank. The Puritans wanted everyone to be beaten into piety whatever his station in the Church or society– they just wanted to insure it was being done fairly and correctly by a dictatorial theocracy of their own design.
We read about the Salem Witch trials, some decades after the Pilgrims landed, and think that hanging nineteen men and women as witches on the say-so of a couple of snotty little girls looking for attention was a fluke carried out by an isolated, small group of inbred fanatics. We think the old man they crushed under stones for refusing to submit to their trials was the result of some abnormal paranoia due to the bunker mentality of a pioneer colony in a harsh new land. When we read about the dozens of fellow colonists they just let rot in jail for months as they queued them up for their American Inquisition, we assume that this sort of fiendish treatment had to be the product of some sort of atypical mass mental illness brought about through a bad diet and not enough sunlight. But no, that’s what Puritans did.