Puritans and Southerners: Red v. Blue Ain’t New

Jamestown 1619, Plymouth 1620, and the Struggle for the Soul of America

About a year ago, I wrote about Carnival and Lent as a metaphor for America’s eternal cultural divide. I said, basically, that it all started with the Puritans and their Lenten self-renouncing rigidity vs the Southerners and their Carnival-esque debauched slave-owning.

Turns out I was not the only one to cop to this fairly obvious cultural divide. In a new book entitled Two Ships (Jamestown 1619, Plymouth 1620, and the Struggle for the Soul of America), historian David S. Reynolds traces how thoroughly the idea of spiritual warfare between two different kinds of Americans permeated national discussion from the get-go.

Back then, Americans called the Northerners ‘Puritans’ and the Southerners ‘Cavaliers’. The Puritans hated the Cavaliers and the Cavaliers hated the Puritans, and the division was so deep that they went to war with each other. And both still burn with desire to annihilate the other.

It’s like America is the Beatles but it wasn’t allowed to break up.

I traced the divide back to ideas about how religion should be. The book traces the divide back to ideas about how government should be. The Cavaliers seemingly believed that government should be rigidly hierarchical and that the church should be a part of government. The Puritans seemingly believed ‘don’t you f’ing boss me around. I can boss myself thank you very much’.

Puritans Believe Authority comes from within; Cavaliers don’t

You could call this divide, and I have and will continue to call it a divide between the idea that authority comes from within and is expressed via self-discipline, integrity, and risking worldly acclaim to adhere to the dictates of conscience – OR – authority comes from without and is expressed via tradition, domination, and force.

More colloquially, some people LIKE being bossed, and some people don’t. Horrifyingly, those two types of people are not going away no matter what part of the US they may live in.

The original Americans knew the two types of cultures were yoked to each other by necessity not affection. They knew when they ratified the Constitution that the two sides didn’t like each other. The American motto ‘e pluribus unum’ (out of many, one) isn’t ‘because we share a common heritage, we share a common destiny’ or something like that. There isn’t anything about brotherly love in that motto. It’s more like ‘oh boy, wish us luck, eh.’

The original Americans knew that slavery was the rift between the two Americas – not because either side didn’t profit from it. The Puritans profited from slavery too and the Cavaliers knew it. The difference between the two is that the Puritans thought it profitable and wrong; the Cavaliers thought it natural and right.

Oddly enough, the Puritans have always thought more highly of money than the Cavaliers, as evidenced by the relentless relative prosperity of blue vs. red. Money is equalizing in the Puritan creed, and the Cavaliers are more interested in power than money.

Being a Cavalier, or a Puritan, is definitely a matter of geography, inheritance, tradition, and environment. But it is also a matter of temperament and character and spiritual leanings. Cavaliers by geography can be all-in on democracy and self-government, and Puritans by geography can be all-in on whatever the faux-monarchy of the day is or long for theocracy as desperately as any Southern Baptist.

And neither side is immune from hypocrisy. Or contradictions. And many Americans are kinda sorta both Puritan and Cavalier , and neither. External authority is good – but not too much. Internal authority is good – but doesn’t always fit the bill. Tradition is good – unless something else is better. Progress is good – as long as it doesn’t interfere with what you don’t want changed. And so on.

Nobody these days wants to be a puritan really

Almost nobody really wants to be a true Puritan. And, to be honest, almost nobody really wants to be a Cavalier either. Both extremes are tedious, boring, and impractical.

What allows the many to become one, allows the Puritans, the Cavaliers, the boths, and the neithers to join forces? A backdrop of shared experiences and ideas. Shared ideals.

The shared ideals of the US seem to be breaking down these days. They don’t meet the needs of the times. Puritans ideals (inclusiveness) and Cavalier ideals (white Christian nationalism) oppose each other so thoroughly that neither can plausibly described as ideal at all.

Shared economic ideals once united Americans. Belief in the beneficence of American capitalism. Americans don’t want to abandon that belief – but they find themselves increasingly unable to believe in it.

If there are any shared ideals left, there’s one I see most commonly across the spectrum. Get big money get the hell out of politics so the little guy has a chance again. It is anti-elitism perhaps. Shared by everyone except by certain elites.

The Trumpists don’t have to hate the libs. They don’t even have to hate everything they think the libs stand for. And vice versa. The moral chasm, wide as it is, can be bridged. By a shared ideal of freedom from the despotic tyranny of the excessively over-monetized political class.

Carnival and Lent, Puritan and Cavalier – they aren’t going away. But we can turn our attention – if we choose – for at least a while, to the hatreds that bind us. To the common enemies, the current King Georges and Redcoats, data centers and dark money. Let the Revolution begin!