Puritans: the original victim culture

A few weeks ago, the New Yorker ran a story about the Salem witch trials, whose second paragraph looked like this:

This is a self-deception buried so deep that even people paid to check facts can’t see it. Time for some actuallying…

The Puritans of 1600 were extremist Protestants who wanted to purge the Church of England of the last traces of Catholicism — which had been 100% of its identity only 60 years before. But King James wanted to keep the Church ‘broad’, which is to say, as pluralistic as possible, to keep reluctant ex-Catholics and zealot Protestants in uneasy coexistence, and save the kingdom from sliding back into the sectarian violence of the previous century.

But the Puritans weren’t having it. They wanted the church radically transformed to their specifications, which included:

• abolition of baptism at birth, confirmation, bishops
• abolition of the exchange of rings during the marriage ceremony
• abolition of making the sign of the cross
• all sports and games to be banned on Sundays
• translation of the Bible into English

among other impossible demands. They were met with compromise: famously, they got their English bible (the 1611 King James Version); some sports were banned on Sundays; a lot of church language was changed to make it less Catholic and more Puritanical. In other words, great lengths were gone to to accommodate them.

The result was that by 1620, many puritans were happy to practice their beliefs inside the now rather roomy Church of England. But for the real fanatics, it wasn’t enough. It could never be enough. So those were the ones who left on the Mayflower, with millennial dreams of a radically pure society uncontaminated by the ‘peril’ of pluralism, convinced that they were the real victims, who’d ‘suffered for their faith.’

That’s where America comes from. So when Obama says, of excluding Muslim refugees, ‘That’s not American. That’s not who we are,’ I have to take issue. That’s exactly who we are. Bullies obsessed with our own victimhood at the hands of Catholics, or Communists, or Muslims, for 400 years. And as the New Yorker shows, it’s almost impossible to get a psyche like that to recognize itself.