The Review: Puritans and Propaganda

On that old-time religion. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. In Harper’s, Marilynne Robinson has a [long new essay]( about the 17th-century Puritan thinker and preacher Hugh Peters (or Peter; both were used). Peters was born in England in 1598 and emigrated to Massachusetts in 1635; in 1641, he went back to England, where he participated in the English Revolution and became Oliver Cromwell’s chaplain and adviser. After the Restoration, he was put to death by what Robinson calls the “ingeniously horrible and protracted punishment of half-hanging, burning, and dismemberment typically reserved for traitors and Jesuits.” For many years now, Robinson has been arguing in essays for Harper’s, the NYRB, and elsewhere that early modern Puritanism is foundational to America’s liberal culture and its democratic ideals — and that that fact has been systematically repressed. Her resuscitation of Peters is another entry in that project. Along with John Winthrop and several others, Peters was the author of the “[Body of Liberties]( a 1641 Massachusetts legal code that, Robinson says, “substantially anticipated the Bill of Rights.” Robinson is both deeply learned and passionately partisan about the Puritans. She is the only living writer I know of who succeeds in communicating something of the thrilling adventures of Puritan freedom and Puritan conscience to general-audience readers. At the same time, she sometimes seems too willing to assume that her audience’s knowledge of the subject doesn’t extend beyond viewings of The Crucible. Robinson’s essays suffer from a pattern of omission that can make her, at her worst, a propagandist — seriously distorting both the record of the Puritans themselves and the large academic literature about them. SPONSOR CONTENT | Microsoft [Cloud computing tools are changing research in exciting ways]( Consider this apparently authoritative statement: “Americans, even or especially historians, tend to treat the early New Englanders as dogmatists: narrow, pious simpletons.” Even or especially historians? The claim is peculiar. Well over a hundred years’ worth of scholarship has understood the Puritans as — just to name a few — innovators in the application of logic to religion; intellectuals at the cutting edge of natural philosophy; avatars of Transcendentalism and nature-worship; and (Robinson’s special topic) ancestors of both the legal theory and the ethos of American democracy. Indeed, that last theme has constituted something like an obsession in the literature. The notion that historians caricature the Puritans is itself a caricature. And in Robinson’s essays, it’s attached to a speaking silence: the minimization or neglect of the manifold brutalities of the Massachusetts theocracy. As Peter Laarman [writes in a response]( to Robinson’s “refusal to acknowledge the dark side of Puritanism” published in Religion Dispatches, “Would it have killed her to make brief mention of the pious settlers’ treatment of the indigenous people — stealing their food, burning their villages, seizing their land — or, for that matter, their treatment of Quakers and of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson?” Indeed, the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s execution of a handful of Quakers in the middle of the 17th century triggered reprisals from England on grounds, more or less, of religious liberty. And Robinson’s hero, Hugh Peters? As Laarman observes, “Robinson fails to mention that Peters played a major role in the 1637 trial of Anne Hutchinson and was one of the ministers who demanded that Hutchinson be banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for holding heretical views.” No one knows this history better than Robinson. Surely her admiration for the Puritans — and her transmission of that admiration to her many fond readers, among whom I include myself — can survive an unexpurgated account. Read Marilynne Robinson’s “One Manner of Law: The Religious Origins of American Liberalism” [here]( and Peter Laarman’s “Breaking Up With Marilynne Robinson” [here](. ADVERTISEMENT SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHRONICLE Enjoying the newsletter? [Subscribe today]( for unlimited access to essential news, analysis, and advice. The Latest THE REVIEW | OPINION [Reclaiming Academe’s Idealism]( By Joshua Doležal [STORY IMAGE]( Lessons from Václav Havel for a profession in decline. ADVERTISEMENT THE REVIEW | OPINION [Abortion Bans Put Colleges in Legal Limbo]( By Katie Rose Guest Pryal [STORY IMAGE]( Post-Dobbs, weak medical privacy endangers students — and the rest of us. Recommended - “Writing is actually physically very pleasurable to me. 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