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Politics : Did Slick Boink Monica? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Zoltan! who wrote (9584)	3/4/1998 9:03:00 AM
From: DMaA	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20981

The term "Puritan" has been bandied about here a bit so I found this piece in today's WSJ interesting. I include it in the record for what it's worth. The Puritans Weren't Puritanical By TIMOTHY LAMER In the wake of the Clinton sex scandal, opinion leaders and foreigners have sounded a familiar refrain: Americans are too puritanical. Tina Brown of the New Yorker writes of "the dog-in-the-manger, down-in-the-mouth neo-puritanism of the op-ed tumbrel drivers." Los Angeles Times columnist Tom Plate reports that Asians would be laughing "at the president's alleged behavior, if not American Puritanism," except they want a strong American president to deal with their monetary crisis. And how often have we been told that Europeans scoff at Americans who show a "puritanical" disgust with our president's sex life? This is nonsense. The term "puritanical" has come to mean things that have nothing to do with what real Puritans believed. It's true that the Puritans had no patience for adultery, but critics suggest that the Puritans hated all sex and any pleasure or fun. In H.L. Mencken's famous definition: "Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." The truth is quite different: "The Puritans were not ascetics; they never wished to prevent the enjoyment of earthly delights," according to Edmund S. Morgan of Yale University. "They merely demanded that the pleasures of the flesh be subordinated to the greater glory of God." Many of the Puritans' contemporaries actually criticized them for having too much fun. The Quaker George Fox objected to their "ribbons and lace and costly apparel," as well as to their "sporting and feasting." The great Catholic Thomas More charged that William Tyndale and his early Puritan followers "eat fast and drink fast and lust fast in their lechery." More was scandalized by the Puritan insistence that celibacy wasn't superior to marital sex. He was also shocked that these Protestants "loved no Lenten fast." The Puritans viewed Lent as a man-made tradition imposed without scriptural warrant. Regardless of which side was correct, clearly More was more "puritanical" in today's meaning than the Puritans were. Wheaton College's Leland Ryken, whose book "Worldly Saints" analyzes Puritan beliefs, notes that most of today's conventional wisdom about the Puritans is false. Puritanism was a youthful, highly educated movement. The Puritans revived Cambridge University and founded Harvard only six years after founding the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Puritans celebrated the material world, with Richard Sibbes affirming that "this world and the things thereof are all good, and were all made of God, for the benefit of his creature." And the Puritans consistently extolled sex--within marriage, of course. William Gouge was typical in calling sex "one of the most proper and essential acts of marriage," to be enjoyed "with good will and delight, willingly, readily, and cheerfully." One congregation even excommunicated a man for sexually neglecting his wife. Mencken's caricature of Puritanism is ironic, given that he was a great admirer of the closest thing his era had to a Puritan--Calvinist scholar J. Gresham Machen. A Princeton theologian, Machen gained fame by battling liberal Protestantism, contending that it was an entirely different religion from Christianity. Observing this fight, Mencken declared: "If [Machen] is wrong, then the science of logic is a hollow vanity, signifying nothing." Upon Machen's death in 1937, Mencken favorably compared the man he called "Doctor Fundamentalis" to another famous fundamentalist: "Dr. Machen was to [William Jennings] Bryan as the Matterhorn is to a wart." Machen was an "adept theologian" with a "wealth of professional knowledge," while "Bryan could only bawl." That Machen opposed Prohibition and what he saw as hollow Victorian sentimentality should have alerted Mencken that he may have been misinformed about Puritanism, and Calvinism in general. To be sure, there are legitimate grounds for criticizing the Puritans. The Salem witch trials were heinous, though they happened only in one area, during one year, and the Puritans themselves stopped the practice. And the Puritans' willingness to use state power to impose religion was, at its root, unbiblical, though they were hardly alone among religious groups in doing this. But Puritan-bashers, instead of leveling such valid criticisms, usually opt for falsely painting the Puritans as sexless, dour ascetics. The Puritans had their faults, but being puritanical wasn't among them. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mr. Lamer is director of the Free Market Project at the Media Research Center in Alexandria, Va. Return