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Puritans and Imperialism

By Robert Kagan Friday, November 03, 2006 In examining the roots of U.S. foreign policy, Robert Kagan looks back to the Puritan tradition of colonial America. In "Dangerous Nation," he argues that the ideology which took hold of early America was characterized by aggressive expansionism — not by isolationism and utopianism, nor by cities upon hills and covenants with God.

The picture of Puritan America as a pious Greta Garbo, wanting only to be left alone in her self-contained world, is misleading.

The rich lands of North America helped unleash liberal, materialist forces within Protestantism that overwhelmed the Puritan fathers’ original godly vision.

For one thing, Winthrop’s Puritans were not isolationists. They were global revolutionaries. They escaped persecution in the Old World to establish the ideal religious commonwealth in America, their “new Jerusalem.” But unlike the biblical Jews, they looked forward to the day, they hoped not far off, when they might return to a reformed Egypt.

Far from seeking permanent separation from the Old World, the Puritans’ “errand into the wilderness” aimed to establish a base from which to launch a counteroffensive across the Atlantic.

Covenant Their special covenant with God was not tied to the soil of the North American continent. America was not the Puritans’ promised land, but a temporary refuge. God had “peopled New England in order that the reformation of England and Scotland may be hastened.”

The Massachusetts Bay colonists neither sought isolation from the Old World nor considered themselves isolated. The Puritan leaders did not even believe they were establishing a “new” world distinct from the old. In their minds New England and Old England were the same world, spiritually if not geographically.

American wilderness A hundred years after Winthrop’s settlement, when the Puritan evangelist Jonathan Edwards spoke of “our nation,” he meant both Britain and the British North American colonies.

The picture of Puritan America as a pious Greta Garbo, wanting only to be left alone in her self-contained world, is misleading.

It was a measure of how little the New England Puritans sought isolation from the Old World that their greatest disappointment came when England’s Puritan revolution in the mid-17th century abandoned rigid Calvinism, the Puritans’ model, thus leaving the Puritans theologically isolated in their American wilderness.

America, in turn, became not a promised land but a burial ground for the kind of Puritan theocracy Winthrop and his followers had hoped to establish. Puritanism died in part because the American wilderness, like the biblical Israel, was a land of milk and honey.

New world The New World was too vast for the Puritans’ worldly asceticism. Their rigid theocracy required control and obedience and self-restraint, but the expansive North American wilderness created freedom, dissent, independence, and the lust for land.

The abundance of land and economic opportunities for men and women of all social stations diverted too many minds from godly to worldly pursuits. It undermined patriarchal hierarchy and shattered orthodoxy.

Elbow room Those who did not like the way the doctrines of Calvinism were construed and enforced in the Massachusetts Bay Colony had only to move up the Connecticut Valley.

The Massachusetts Bay colonists neither sought isolation from the Old World — nor considered themselves isolated.

Within a dozen years of Winthrop’s arrival, Puritan divines were decrying their congregants’ sinful desire for ever more “elbow-room” in their New World.

“Land! Land! hath been the Idol of many in New-England,” cried Increase Mather. “They that profess themselves Christians, have foresaken Churches, and Ordinances, and all for land and elbow-room enough in the World.”

Losing sight The rich lands of North America also helped unleash liberal, materialist forces within Protestantism. And overwhelmed the Puritan fathers’ original godly vision and brought New England onto the path on which the rest of British-American civilization was already traveling: toward individualism, progress, and modernity. With so many opportunities for personal enrichment available in the New World, the “Protestant ethic,” as Max Weber called it, which countenanced the rewards of labor as a sign of God’s favor and which demanded hard work in one’s “calling” as a sign of election, became a powerful engine of material progress.

River gods In a short time, settlers, plantation owners, and the increasingly prosperous and powerful merchants of Boston — the so-called River Gods — came to worship at altars other than those of their Calvinist fathers and grandfathers.

The expansive North American wilderness created freedom, dissent, independence, and the lust for land.

The liberal, commercial ethos of these new mercantile groups represented the spirit of a new age — whose “guiding principles were not social stability, order, and the discipline of the senses, but mobility, growth, and the enjoyment of life.”

By the early eighteenth century Puritan New England had entered “the emerging secular and commercial culture” of Anglo-America. The New Englanders “relinquished their grand vision of building a city upon a hill,” and Puritanism itself melted into the new, modernizing society.

Failing Puritanism The burst of religious revivalism in the early to mid-18th century, termed the Great Awakening, was a monument to Puritanism’s failure, a worried response to the increasing secularization of American society and to the spread of Christian rationalism and Deism among colonial elites.

From its original pious ambitions, Jonathan Edwards lamented, the Puritans’ America had fallen into sin. History had never witnessed “such a casting off [of] the Christian religion,” nor “so much scoffing at and ridiculing the gospel of Christ by those that have been brought up under gospel light.”

Land of the free Not only has the original Puritan mission often been misunderstood, but the rapid absorption and dissipation of Puritanism within the mainstream of colonial American society meant that the Puritan influence in shaping the character of that society, and its foreign policies, was not as great as has sometimes been imagined.

Puritanism died in part because the American wilderness was a land of milk and honey.

Most of America outside of New England had never been under Puritan influence, and by the early 18th century even New England was no Puritan commonwealth but a rising center of liberalism and commercialism.

In the 17th and early 18th centuries it was the southern and middle colonies, not New England, that “epitomized what was arguably the most important element in the emerging British-American culture: the conception of America as a place in which free people could pursue their own individual happiness in safety and with a fair prospect that they might be successful in their several quests.”

Lost utopia The society and culture that took root in the Chesapeake Bay region had far greater influence on the evolution of American society, and therefore on American foreign policy, than did Puritanism.

This colonial America was characterized not by isolationism and utopianism, not by cities upon hills and covenants with God, but by aggressive expansionism, acquisitive materialism and an overarching ideology of civilization that encouraged and justified both.

In Virginia and the other settlements along the Chesapeake Bay that predated the Puritans’ arrival in New England, the dreams that drew Englishmen to a rough and untamed country were of wealth and opportunity, not the founding of a new Israel.

The boom years that came to Virginia in the middle of the 17th century produced no utopia but, at first, an almost lawless capitalism run amok.

Editor's note: Adapted from DANGEROUS NATION © 2006 by Robert Kagan.

Reprinted with permission by Knopf.