Perry Miller’s exhaustive intellectual histories of Puritan theology were published back in the 1930s and 1940s, and did a lot to revitalize and rehabilitate the Puritans (what? You didn’t know that Puritans have been rehabilitated?). One of Miller’s primary narrative structures – one he shared, interestingly enough, with his subjects – was the declension narrative: that is, early Puritanism of the 1620s and 1630s shared, as Miller put it, “almost unbroken allegiance to a unified body of thought, and that individual differences among particular writers or theorists were merely minor variations within a general frame.” It was the later generations, seduced by capitalism and disrupted by immigration that surrendered the early Puritans’ allegiance to covenant and community and the city upon a hill. Miller seems to believe this, and certainly the sermons of Puritan ministers in 1680, 1690, and even those who survived into the eighteenth century share that idea.
Some of Miller’s most recent critics – particularly David Hall – have argued that Miller suffered from an overly narrow definition of “religion” – that is, sure, the Puritans were in decline if you defined being “Puritan” as adhering to a particularly specific and detailed set of beliefs and practices. But even if your local Puritan worthy was feeling skeptical about predestination and warming up to the Half Way Covenant, out back the kids were drawing astrological signs in the sand and his neighbor was healing the sick with urine and rye cake, and who’s to say that this wasn’t “religion” too?
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