Authoritarian Legacy of Puritanism in Contemporary Society

Abstract

Even if Puritanism actually and completely ended (as many think), for example, with the defeat of the English Puritan Revolutionin the 1660s and, in particular, the official disestablishment of New England’s theocracy by the Congregational Church inthe 1830s, its legacy, vestige, or influence has been persisting, strong, and even crucial, primarily in America and secondarilyGreat Britain. In particular, the official disestablishment of New England’s Puritan theocracy after exactly two long centuriesof its existence (e.g., 1620s–30s to 1833) meant, to useWeber’s terms, only the formal but not the substantive end of theoverwhelming presence and salience of Puritanism in America. On the contrary. this is especially evident in the South thathas, as seen, experienced a sort of neo-Puritan evangelical, specifically Baptist-Methodist renaissance during and in thewake of the Great Awakenings. In a sense, Puritanism has been both, to paraphrase Durkheim, the genesis and historical evolution,if not the future “manifest destiny,” of America. Notably, by its enduring and cardinal legacy or influence, Puritanism remainsWeber’s“most fateful” cultural force with, like capitalism, nearly “absolute power” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1993)—predictably, corruptingPuritans and their proxies “absolutely”— and blended with political conservatism, in America, above all its Southern and otherultraconservative (“red-neck”) states during the early twenty-first century.