A high level of commitment was required of group members—indeed, a very high of commitment, since the original Calvinist congregation was the entire city of Geneva rather than a self-selected group of people who voluntarily joined as converts. Church attendance was required, and each family was visited once a year in order to assess the state of their spiritual commitment. In order to maintain the organic nature of the group, punishment was directed at rich and poor alike. Many of Calvin’s greatest battles centered around enforcing the puritanical moral code on the wealthy and powerful who, as expected on the basis of evolutionary theory, are more likely than the less prosperous to be able to translate their wealth and power into sexual liaisons and reproductive success.
Calvinism was a success in Geneva and spread rapidly elsewhere in Europe. Geneva had been politically fractionated and in constant danger in its conflict with the Duchy of Savoy. Notwithstanding the repressive discipline, harsh laws, and paternalistic controls (which made Puritanism unpopular in England after the Puritan victory in the English Civil War), the positive and constructive elements of Calvin’s system became increasingly effective. The people of Geneva listened to preaching several times weekly. They were trained in Calvin’s Sunday School, instructed by his sermons, able to recite his catechism, to sing the Psalter, and to read the Bible with understanding. This was a high level of discipline and indoctrination indeed.[518]
Calvin had taken a city wracked with dissension and molded it into a power far out of proportion to its economic importance. The same can be said for an offshoot of Calvinism, the Puritans of England and the United States.
Puritanism in New England
Puritans wished to “purify” the established Church of England from any remnants of Catholicism. Puritanism originated in East Anglia in England, spread to New England, and became the most important cultural influence in the United States from the eighteenth century down to the mid-twentieth century.
Puritan Families. The great majority of the Puritan founders of Massachusetts arrived with their families.[519] By comparison with other colonies, “households throughout Massachusetts and Connecticut included large numbers of children, small numbers of servants and high proportions of intact marital unions. In Waltham, Massachusetts, for example, completed marriages formed in the 1730s produced 9.7 children on the average. These Waltham families were the largest that demographic historians have found anywhere in the Western world, except for a few Christian communes which regarded reproduction as a form of worship.”[520]
The high percentage of intact families in the Puritan migration to America meant that they engaged in a much lower incidence of exogamy with the Amerindian population (as occurred in the Spanish and especially the Portuguese colonies in the Americas), or with Black slaves (as in the Southern states), or even with other European ethnic and religious groups (as in the Mid-Atlantic states).
The English Puritans preserved Calvin’s original emphasis on moral rectitude and internally motivated adherence to group norms, many of which supported family life. Puritan ideology deplored “drunkenness, indolence, debauchery, and revels.” Puritans “worried constantly about losing God’s favor through some shortcoming, especially failure to promote moral reformation”; they “looked to the Bible for daily guidance, which made sermons and the interpretative abilities of ministers all-important.”[521]
These social supports for family life were remarkably adaptive in an evolutionary sense. East Anglian Puritans “became the breeding stock for America’s Yankee population” and “multiplied at a rapid rate, doubling every generation for two centuries. Their numbers increased to 100,000 by 1700, to at least one million by 1800, six million by 1900, and more than sixteen million by 1988—all descended from 21,000 English emigrants who came to Massachusetts in the period from 1629 to 1640.”[522]
Child-rearing Practices. Puritan child rearing practices were strict and involved rigorous supervision, yet emphasized maintaining warm family bonds throughout life. The importance of a well-ordered family life was surely not unique to Puritans in colonial American, but the Puritans continuously and vigorously “harped on the subject in sermons, pamphlets, laws, and governmental pronouncements.”[523] While mothers cared for infants, fathers played a major role in rearing both sons and daughters, often teaching them to read and write, instructing them in religion, and even in adulthood advising them in their decisions about work and marriage.
Puritan sexual mores emphasized sexual love within marriage but strongly forbade fornication and adultery. Courtship occurred under family supervision. An illustrative custom was the use of the “courting stick,” “a hollow pole six or eight feet long, with an earpiece at one end and a mouthpiece at the other. The courting couple whispered quietly to one another through this tube, while members of the family remained in the room nearby.” The stick had a dual purpose—”to combine close supervision by elders with free choice by the young.”[524] The courting stick illustrates the community’s commitment to high-investment parenting: Courtship was aimed at the possibility of marriage, not sexual experimentation.
Intelligence and Emphasis on Education. Havelock Ellis’s A Study of British Genius found East Anglia to have the highest average intelligence in Britain: “a larger proportion of scholars, scientists, and artists came from East Anglia than from any other part of England.”[525] Two Puritan East Anglian counties had the highest rates of literacy in England during the seventeenth century—around 50 percent. Puritans were especially prominent in law and commerce. East Anglian historian R. W. Cretton-Cremer described them as “dour, stubborn, fond of argument and litigation.”[526]
Reflecting this profile of high intelligence, most Puritan settlers in Massachusetts were middle-class or above, with only a few true aristocrats. Even fewer were poor: “Less than five percent were identified as laborers—a smaller proportion than in other colonies. Only a small minority came as servants—less than 25 percent, compared with 75 percent for Virginia,” and “nearly three-quarters of Massachusetts immigrants paid their own passage—no small sum in 1630.”[527] As indicated by family names, there were a disproportionate number of tradesmen and craftsmen—names such as “Chandler, Cooper, Courier, Cutler, Draper, Fletcher, Gardiner, Glover, Mason, Mercer, Miller, Sawyer, Saddler, Sherman, Thatcher, Tinker, Turner, Waterman, Webster, and Wheelwright.”[528]
It’s thus no surprise that the Puritans in Massachusetts distinguished themselves by their strong support of public libraries and public schools.[529] Massachusetts law required every town of 50 families to hire a schoolmaster and every town of 100 to maintain a grammar school that taught Latin and Greek.[530] Even illiterate New England farmers voluntarily contributed some of their harvest to support university faculty and students.
Educational institutions developed by Puritans were much more widespread and sophisticated than in the other colonies during the same period.[531] At least 130 of the original settlers had attended universities in Europe. Harvard University was established within six years of the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Those admitted to Harvard were required to be able to read and speak classical Latin and know the declensions of Greek nouns and verbs. These requirements were framed in a religious context: “Everyone shall consider the main end of his life and studies to know God and Jesus Christ which is Eternal Life.”[532]
Puritan Names as Ingroup Markers. The distinctive names given to Puritan children not only reinforced group values, but also served as ingroup markers. While many Puritans gave their children Biblical names from the New and especially the Old Testament, they avoided names such as Emmanuel, Jesus, Angel, Gabriel, Michael, or Christopher commonly used by Catholics. Most indicative of the values Puritans instilled in their children are their hortatory naming practices—Be-Courteous Cole, Fight-the-Good-fight-of-Faith White, Kill-Sin Pemble, and Mortifie Hicks. In some areas, almost half the children received such names, including “an unfortunate young woman named Fly-Fornication Bull ... who was made preg
nant in the shop of a yeoman improbably named Goodman Goodman.”[533] Another distinguishing mark were the “sadd colors,” a drab way of dressing that set Puritans off from others during the colonial period.
Puritan naming practices reflected the reality that being a member required them to transform their entire lives—to see all things great and small through the lens of religious ideology. “Puritanism asked them to look with new eyes at the nature and structure of government, at the role of communities, at the obligations of families; to have new attitudes toward work, toward leisure, toward witches and the wonders of the world.”[534]
Community Control of Individual Behavior: Puritan Collectivism. As with Calvin’s original doctrine, there was a great deal of supervision of individual behavior. Thomas Tombs notes that the radical leveling ideas that sprang up in the wake of the English Civil War “tended not toward democratic freedom, but toward godly authoritarianism resting on armed force.[535] David Hackett Fischer describes Puritan New England’s ideology of ‘Ordered Liberty’ as “the freedom to order one’s acts in a godly way—but not in any other.”[536]
As in the Old Testament, God’s wrath would be leveled at entire communities, not only individuals. Each member was therefore responsible for the purity of the whole, since transgressions of others would result in God’s wrath being leveled at the entire community.[537] Puritans were therefore highly motivated to control the behavior of others that they thought might offend God.
This “freedom as public obligation” implied strong social control of morals, famously including sexual relationships. Puritans forbade the celebration of Christmas, both in England and Massachusetts, and whipped, burned, and exiled those they found to be heretics, all the while believing themselves to be the beleaguered defenders of liberty.
Puritan collectivist ideology can be seen by the analogy of a Christian community to a body, as in Calvin’s original formulation (see above) and in this comment by John Winthrop, written in 1630 immediately prior to establishing the Massachusetts Bay Colony:
All true Christians are of one body in Christ. ... All parts of this body being thus united are made so contiguous in a special relation as they must needs partake of each other’s strength and infirmity, joy, sorrow, weal and woe. 1 Corinthians 12:26 If one member suffers, all suffer with it; if one be in honor, all rejoice with it. ... For the work we have in hand, it is by a mutual consent through a special overruling providence, and a more than ordinary approbation of the churches of Christ, to seek out a place of cohabitation and consortship under a due form of government both civil and ecclesiastical. In such cases as this the care of the public must oversway all private respects, by which not only conscience, but mere civil policy doth bind us; for it is a true rule that particular estates cannot subsist in the ruin of the public.[538]
Economic behavior also came under community control. As with traditional Jewish groups, economic relationships were predicated on fairness within the group and the good of the group as a whole, not maximizing individual profit. There were elaborate rules on what merchants could charge: “Some false principles are these: 1. That a man might sell as dear as he can, and buy as cheap as he can. 2. If a man lose by casualty of sea, etc., in some of his commodities, he may raise the price of the rest. 3. That he may sell as he bought, though he paid too dear, etc., and though the commodity be fallen, etc., 4. That, as a man may take the advantage of his own skill or ability, so he may of another’s ignorance or necessity.”[539]
These principles are collectivist, and they violate individualist economic logic, putting the risk much more heavily on the merchant. However, they indicate the extent to which group rather than individual interests were the critical consideration.
Was Puritanism a Closed Group Evolutionary Strategy? We have seen that a general characteristic of Western groups is permeability—barriers, if they exist at all, do not survive for long. This generalization holds for the Puritans, although there certainly were attempts to close off the group to others.
In England, Puritanism never really developed into a group evolutionary strategy. Rather, since Puritans did not control a specific territory, it remained a loosely bordered faction among other Protestant sects. In New England, however, it began as a hegemonic religious and political movement in control of a particular territory. Membership in the church required a vote of the congregation. “The principal criterion, besides an upright behavior, was evidence that God had chosen the candidate for eternal salvation, that he was a regenerate spirit rather than merely a man or woman who wanted to be picked for salvation.”[540]
Attesting to a considerable amount of endogamy and hence ingroup attraction, the leading Puritan families of East Anglia “intermarried with such frequency” that one historian dubbed them “a prosopographer’s dream.”[541] There are also examples of individuals who exhibited something close to racialist thinking. In the late eighteenth century, anti-Federalist James Winthrop, a Harvard professor and patriot during the Revolutionary War, urged his fellow New Englanders not to ratify the Constitution, instead exhorting them to “keep their blood pure” as it was only “by keeping separate from the foreign mixtures” that they had “acquired their present greatness ... [and] preserved their religion and morals.”[542] Puritans thought of themselves as “a Chosen People,” presumably a product of their immersion in the Old Testament.
Nevertheless, Puritans sought to convert others to their ways, so that, theoretically at least, Puritanism was not a genetically closed strategy. Puritans in Massachusetts thought that the heathens living among them, including the Native Americans, “must be converted to Reformed Protestantism; they must also take on the social and political habits of the true Christian. ... The conversion of the Indian neighbors was a cherished Puritan project, and one that reveals much about the objectives and outlook of Puritan society.”[543] In comments on Africans who were held mainly as bond servants in the Massachusetts colony, Cotton Mather wrote, “the considerations that would move you to teach your Negroes the truths of the glorious gospel as far as you can, and bring them, if it may be, to live according to those truths a sober, and a righteous, and a godly life; they are innumerable.”[544]
Nevertheless, very few Blacks or Indians joined Puritan churches, and Alden Vaughn comments that while a few Puritans like Mather attempted to convert Indians and Blacks, “their fellow New Englanders increasingly turned Puritanism into a tribalistic ritual for the descendants of the founding fathers.”[545]
From its founding in 1630, Puritans created a tribalistic, insular society in New England that regularly excluded non-Puritans and retained strong control over group boundaries. An early regulation from Springfield required that sale of property be only to those approved by town magistrates—an attempt to prevent the “sundry evils that may befall this township through ill-disposed persons that may thrust themselves in amongst us against the liking and consent of the generality of the inhabitants, or select townsmen by purchasing a lot or place of habitation, etc.”[546] As John Winthrop noted in 1637, “If we heere be a corporation established by free consent, if the place of our co-habitation be our owne, then no man hath a right to come into us ... without our consent.”[547]
Puritan theoretical openness to conversion was consistent with excluding those of a different faith, and at its origins, it did so quite energetically. Anabaptists and Quakers were particularly singled out for exclusion and even executed if they returned to New England after being banished. Four Quakers were executed in 1659–1661 when they returned after being banished from the colony, but within a generation even these dissenting religions were tolerated in Boston.
Decline of Puritan Group Boundaries. The Puritan colony retained a great deal of independence from England: “Neither foreign powers nor the English crown had much influence on the small cluster of colonies.”[548] However, after the Restoration of 1660 and the decline of Puritan political power in England, the ability of Puritans to retain control over their territory beg
an to decline, resulting in a more religiously diverse, materialistic, and cosmopolitan society. Puritans ceased being a religious group with a common ethnic origin and clear boundaries between themselves and the outside world. As German historian Theodor Mommsen said of the Romans, they were no longer a people, but a population.[549]
The main source of Puritan decline was that the British government denied them the right to police their borders and expel heretics. In 1664 the British government ruled that an Englishman need not be a member of the Congregationalist Church to qualify as a freeman in Massachusetts. The Charter of 1691 prescribed freedom of Christian religious conscience (except to Papists!); it also ended the colony’s right to select its own governor, its practice of limiting voting to church members, and its ability to expel heretics. And as political control waned, it became increasingly difficult to impose Puritan religious and moral orthodoxy on the inhabitants of New England.
The colony was thus opened up to immigration and soon became inundated by waves of people who were not committed to the Puritan way of life but attracted by its vibrant economy. Moreover, the colony itself became more inclined to commercialism and materialism—individualism had resurfaced from the chains of Puritan collectivism.[550] There was also a diminution of Puritan religious militancy, perhaps because of its extraordinary demands for conformity, emotional intensity, and self-denial. For all practical purposes, the dream (i.e., the group evolutionary strategy) had ended within 70 years after its beginning.
More significant perhaps than the gradual erosion of political monopoly and the growth of materialism was the feeling that after the Restoration, New Englanders were less determined than their predecessors to fashion a Zion in the wilderness, to make of their society a vigorous example of piety and right-walking. ... To their credit, the men and women of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries may have been more tolerant, more practical, more humane ... than their predecessors, but with the exception of the Mathers and a few other clergymen, they were certainly less militant in their attachment to Puritan principles.[551]
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