Defining a Puritan – the case of John Davenport

This is the third time that I have been privileged to address a gathering of the Davenports. On one of the two previous occasions I talked about The Reverend John Davenport’s career in general, and on the other I addressed his views on education. Both times I more or less glossed over the fact that Davenport was a puritan, not because any of us are unaware of that fact, but because one the one hand defining puritanism is a difficult task, and on the other hand it is not a subject that brings people cheering out of their seats. But after the Yale event I was approached by one of the audience members who expressed a desire that I address myself to the question of what does it mean when we say that John Davenport was a puritan. And so that is the task I have set myself today.

But does it really matter that we learn more about John Davenport, and what it means when we say he was a puritan? Yes, I think it does, because puritanism was a movement at the root of our American society, and while throughout our history it has been a source of inspiration for some, a perception of it has been used by others to explain everything from bigotry to sexual repression.

Before I begin, however, I want to issue my standard caveat. What I say in this talk (and in answering questions) represents where I am on an ongoing journey of my own to better understand John Davenport. I have examined previously neglected archival material that has already modified some of my views, and I have identified other materials to look at later this summer. The research will continue, my understanding – hopefully -- will grow. In terms of defining my approach in this, I was particularly struck a few months back with a statement made by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in response to a question asked him in a lengthy newspaper interview. Williams, who is a scholar as well as a church leader, defined the academic temperament as one that seeks to qualify and complicate. At a time when public discourse and civility is undermined by the tendencies to over-simplify and polarize, it is especially important to remind ourselves that things are rarely as straightforward as they seem. And part of what I hope to accomplish partially today and more fully in my biography of John Davenport is to move beyond the stereotypes of puritanism to a more complex and nuanced understanding that will give us a better appreciation of the role of the puritans in the shaping of our culture.

I want to start by discussing the distorted image of the puritans in popular culture. Most of what people think of when they hear the word puritan are things that we reject or at least are uncomfortable with – excessive prudery, intolerance, kill-joy opposition to sport and recreation, appallingly dreary fashion sense; the types of things that led H. L. Mencken to characterize puritanism as “the fear that that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” Mencken wrote almost a century ago and was a main contributor to the popular understanding of puritans as Theocrats, Witch-burners, Indian killers, and bigoted Heresy hunters. That view is still so widespread as to be almost universal – at one of our previous gatherings a member of the Davenport family was honest enough to ask me why he should care about John Davenport since the puritans stood for everything he rejected.

If such misunderstandings of who the puritans actually were involved only our appreciation of the past, that would be bad enough. But what makes correcting the record more important is the ways in which the faulty image of puritans and puritanism are wielded as tools in political debates. This is not entirely new of course, puritans having been blamed in the twentieth century for everything from prohibition to McCarthyism. And this continues in our contemporary culture wars.

A number of commentators have talked of the “new puritans,” building on the negative stereotypes of John Davenport and his peers to identify those whom they feel are, in essence, busybodies trying to tell us how to live our lives. A report by a think tank called the Fortune Foundation says “The New Puritan does not binge drink, smoke, buy big brands, take cheap flights, eat junk food, have multiple sexual partners, waste money on designer clothes, grow beyond their optimum weight, subscribe to celebrity magazines, drive flash cars or live to watch television. These people seek to reject any form of enjoyment which has a negative effect on health or the environment and are happy to assault other people’s pleasure seeking as well.” Another author has written that “The old puritans wanted us to lead boring lives so we can be with God in the next life, but the new puritans want us to lead boring lives so we can live as long as possible in this life. The … basic attitudes are identical: both sets of puritans acknowledge that it's ultimately up to the sinner to change his ways, but they don't care what the sinner actually wants, and they certainly don't see anything wrong with a little coercion to help the process of repentance along.” And a writer on the Adam Smith Institute website says “There is a new Puritanism about. The original Puritans, you will recall, opposed bear-baiting not because it was cruel to the bears but because it gave pleasure to the people. And today, anything you might do to enjoy yourself - smoking, boozing, and now even eating - incurs a similar injunction from the politicians. Their idea of a perfect society seems to be one in which we all walk sheepishly to work and back, consume a bowl of thin gruel, and then go quietly to bed at nine o'clock.” Such critics are conservatives, blaming so-called “new puritan” do-gooders for interfering with the individual’s freedom to live life as he or she chooses.

Recently, those liberals who have no sympathy with religion have identified what they see as the baleful effect of puritanism in shaping various controversial policies of the current Bush administration. On the domestic front, the FCC has been attacked for puritanism as a result of its renewed efforts to curb what many perceive e as indecency on TV and in radio broadcasting. Attorney General John Ashcroft was mocked as a “puritan” for ordering nude statues in the Justice Department covered up, for holding daily prayer meetings, and for authorizing prying into our private lives. The effort to reshape the courts has been depicted as campaign to bring us back to the Mosaic code as espoused by the puritans. Another commentator, identifying puritans with the spirit of capitalism, has charged that it is the origin of a justifying ideology for the advancement of the rich and the impoverishment of the poor. Puritanism in the past, writes one observer, was marked by “An obsession with terrorists (in [their] case Irish and Jesuit), homosexuality and sexual license, the vicious chastisement of moral deviance, the disparagement of public support for the poor. Swap the black suits for grey ones, and the characters could have walked out of Bush's America.”

A similar use is made of the puritans to attack the Bush foreign policy. The administration’s earmarking of a significant portion of AIDS relief for Africa to be used for abstinence only programs has been denounced as an example of President Bush’s “puritanical missionary zeal.” A London newspaper characterized the administration’s foreign policy in Iraq as flawed by America’s “long standing [i.e., puritan] tradition of putting faith before facts.” And talking about what it labels the “Puritanism of the Rich,” that same London paper argued that “Bush’s ideology has it roots in 17^th century preaching that the world exists to be conquered.” And if misunderstanding of puritanism and the inability to distinguish between faith and fanaticism keeps us from a proper understanding of our own past, it also keeps us from understanding the views of those of other faiths and cultures.

Summing much of this up, just a few months ago, a guest on “Meet the Press” asked “Do we want the religion of the Crusades and the Inquisition and the witch burnings and segregation and slavery and the oppression of women and Puritanism that led to Prohibition, that didn’t last because it was somebody’s creed imposed on everybody else’s creed?” Clearly, there is a bipartisanship in misunderstanding the puritans!

Hopefully, this is enough to dispel the notion that the story of the puritans is irrelevant to Americans today. The fact is that they are regularly evoked by some Americans to support their political positions, and invoked by others to frighten us away from certain positions. Liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Liberals – everyone is willing to hurl the hated epithet of “puritan” at others if it will advance their partisan position, arguing by labeling rather than analysis. It would be nice if we knew who these puritans really were.

To start, we need to recognize that puritans – like virtually all of their contemporaries – accepted without question the existence of God, a being who, in the words of John Davenport, was “a Spirit most holy, immutable, eternal, every way infinite, in greatness, goodness, power, wisdom, justice, truth, and in all divine perfections.” God had made a natural creation from nothing, and this included “man, male and female,” for whom he had special care and with whom he made a covenant, granting man life in paradise and requiring in return obedience to the divine law. Adam’s fall through sin symbolized man’s turning inward to gratify his own desires, and his rejection of God’s love. Adam’s story spoke to the presence of evil in the heart of all men. Indeed, what most distinguishes us from John Davenport is the puritan’s pessimistic view of human nature, their acceptance, based on painful introspection, that they and all their peers were not only sinners but were addicted to sin. As Davenport expressed it in his own Profession of Faith, all men since Adam are “by nature children of wrath, dead in trespasses and sins, altogether filthy and polluted throughout in soul and body; utterly averse from any spiritual good, strongly bent to all evil, and subject to all calamities due to sin in this world, and forever.” All men break the divine law; all men deserve eternal punishment. To accept this of oneself takes great courage and is one of the most striking things about the puritans.

All men deserve to be damned because they are sinners at the disposal of an angry and just God. Some men are saved because God is a loving being who forgives the sins of those whom he has selected for his mercy. Where Christians in general and Protestants in particular differed had to do with whether or not man had any role to play in this process of selection. Catholics argued that God had given to the church the power to bind and loose men’s sins and the system of regulated behavior and earned indulgences was a means whereby men were held responsible not only for their original sins, but for whether they could overcome their impulses and take advantage of new chances to earn their way to heaven. Protestants rejected this, arguing that faith alone, never works, could save. Davenport made it clear that in his mind men “were saved not of themselves, neither by their own works, but only by the mighty power of God, of his unsearchable, rich, free grace and mercy through faith in Jesus Christ.” This was the doctrine of predestination as formulated by John Calvin and accepted by English puritans. In its starkest form, this meant that nothing we do can alter whether we go to heaven or hell. Perhaps not surprisingly, while many theologians engaged in increasingly complex efforts to probe the exact meaning and nature of these decrees, few clergy went beyond the basics in their preaching. Even so, the pastoral challenge of urging their congregants to do good simply because it was God’s command and with no chance of personal benefit, was daunting.

During Davenport’s lifetime, some began to look for new arguments for urging godliness on their followers. Some argued that God’s free offer of salvation was nevertheless conditional on some forms of human behavior signifying acceptance of the offer. Orthodox Calvinists such as Davenport labeled such thinkers Arminians, for the Dutch theologian Jacob Arminius who most thoughtfully advanced this position, and accused them of drawing Christians back towards a Catholic works-center religion. Nevertheless, such positions made headway in the Church of England in the early seventeenth century, generally associated with the churchmanship of William Laud and others whom the puritans saw as shaking the true foundations of the faith.

This having been said, not all puritans were in agreement on all aspects of the relationship between works and grace. As laypeople like John Winthrop and clergy like John Davenport struggled to discern the nature of divine things, some recognized that they were struggling to see through a glass darkly, as St. Paul expressed it. Gatherings of believers were opportunities to share views in the search for fuller understanding. Davenport, with his progress from Coventry, to Oxford, to Hilton Castle, to the diverse London community, to Amsterdam, the Hague, and Rotterdam -- all before he departed for New England -- was exposed to more varieties of puritan faith and religious experience than many of his New England peers, and it is clear that he was influenced by these experiences. He encountered those who argued that the elect were not only justified by God’s saving grace but were sanctified, so that, as he put it, they “were changed by degrees from the impurity of sin to the purity of God’s image.” The Spirit enlightens them and “leaves an impression of God’s love upon the soul,” so that the elect strive to do God’s will rather than their own. Even if they do not have a clear sense of God’s grace, believers might thus look to their behavior for evidence of the work of the Spirit on their souls and draw assurance from that. Though such divines cautioned that good works were the effect and not the cause of grace, others – most notably perhaps Anne Hutchinson – feared that this was simply a way or bringing back works-based teaching. Such puritans emphasized that assurance could only come from the exhilarating sensation of God’s caress, the immediate awareness of the divine presence in the soul. But remember -- complicate, clarify. The fact is that at various times troubled souls relied on either or both of these means of testing their state of grace. And for the most part there was a dialectic within puritan communities that kept them from drifting into the extreme formulations of Arminianism or Antinomianism.

This is perhaps as far as we can go today regarding the intricacies of puritan theology. But what of what it meant to live these doctrines out in one’s daily life? Here I want to address first the puritan personal ethic, and them explore their social gospel.

The best statement I have ever encountered regarding the puritan ethic is that of the 17^th century English divine Richard Baxter, who wrote that “Overdoing is the ordinary way of undoing.” The point that he was making is that God’s creation is good -- the things of the earth are to be used, but not abused; our natural impulses are good, if not misdirected by the pull of sin. Man offends God not by using the creation but by abusing it by excess or inappropriate behavior. Thus, the puritan ethic is a situational ethic – it is the character and the circumstanced of an action that make it sinful.

Let’s use this guide to examine some of the areas where puritans are misconstrued and misunderstood. First, and most simply, dress. The stereotype of the puritans wearing clothing severely cut and made of drab, dark colors is inaccurate. Two things alone guided them in their choice of what to wear. First, they believed that one should dress in accordance with one’s station in life. To dress so as to deceive others into thinking you were of higher station than you were was deceitful and meant that you were expending money on fancy clothes that was more appropriately spent on other things, including family needs and charity to others. Secondly, puritans rejected apparel that was deliberately designed to be sexually provocative such as low cut bodices that exposed women’s breasts and exaggerated cod pieces covering men’s genitals. Within this framework, people were expected to dress appropriate to their class. This meant that gentlemen could wear lace ruffs and cuffs. It meant that men and women could dress in fine fabrics and bright colors as other Englishmen of their class did. If laborers often dressed in earthtones that was because they had a limited wardrobe and such colors were less likely to show dirt between periodic washings . For a clergyman such as John Davenport, it was appropriate to dress in such a way as displayed his status as a university graduate. This was in part demonstrated by use of black cloth, not because of a desire to be dull or drear, but because black cloth was among the most expensive to produce and it reflected the status of the individual.

I previously alluded to the notion that the puritans were somehow the force in American culture that led to prohibition (a charge actually made by a recent guest on Meet the Press). Actually, puritans – like all their contemporaries – consumed almost exclusively alcoholic beverages. Tea houses and coffee houses were phenomena of the eighteenth century – neither tea, coffee, nor cocoa had been introduced into England during Davenport’s years there. Water was often contaminated by human or animal waste, and milk had its own observed health hazards before pasteurization. Thus, Europeans and early Americans drank beverages made from grain – whiskeys for the Scots and Irish, predominantly beers and ales in the case of the English. A second batch using the previous hops produced small beer, which had less alcoholic punch and was offered to children. Here, too, of course, overdoing was the ordinary way of undoing, and puritans condemned drunkenness [slide 37]. Magistrates in old and New England carefully regulated ale houses and ordinaries, and John Winthrop tried to set an example by doing away at his table with the new practice of toasting, which he believed could lead to excessive consumption.

Puritan attitudes towards sexuality is perhaps the area of greatest misunderstanding. Puritans were not prudish, growing up in a society where sexual activities were daily witnessed in the barnyard and in which children shared rooms with their parents. Sexually graphic descriptions that John Winthrop wrote into his journal in the seventeenth century were edited out by nineteenth century editors. Furthermore, puritans embraced their sexuality. In contrast to past Christian teachings that emphasized that intercourse was for procreation, puritan writers wrote of sex as a way of expressing love for a spouse, fulfilling the duty to desire, and recorded how they were ravished with the love of their partner. They could pay no greater tribute to sex between husband and wife than to compare it to the love between Christ and the saints. How then do we explain the story of Hester Prynne and the fact that sexual crimes were severely punished in early New England? The explanation is context. Puritans viewed human sexuality as a gift from God designed for the purpose of expressing love for one’s spouse. Any other expression of sexuality – whether in the form of adultery, fornication, bestiality, or anything else – was an abuse of that gift and a sin deserving punishment.

The discussion of marital love provides a good point for a transition to the puritan social outlook, for the family – the little commonwealth as some called it – was the foundation of all social concerns. Puritans lived in a society that believed in hierarchical order, and there was no question that the husband was viewed as the head of the household. But clergymen such as Davenport preached that the union between husband and wife was a partnership in which both parties had significant responsibilities and the duties of household governance were balanced between them. Women were neither passive nor subservient. Puritans believed that women should read and urged them to read and understand the word of God in the Bible. When John Winthrop’s father was absent for weeks on end his mother ran the substantial household. The correspondence between John and Margaret Winthrop reveals a depth of affection that anyone would envy. Elizabeth Davenport, in addition to her domestic duties, was trusted as a healer who brought comfort and medicines to members of the New Haven community. Indeed, when the noted London puritan preacher William Gouge preached on the family his initial discussion of women’s subjection to their husbands elicited the outraged protests of the female members of his congregation, leading him to moderate the views and apologize for his earlier insensitivity in the published sermons.

Children and adults also engaged in recreations, including soccer and bowling though not on the sabbath or when such activities would interfere with other responsibilities.

The household was also a little church. The Winthrops, Davenports and other puritan families regularly gathered their children and servants for morning prayer, for sessions where scriptures were read the week’s sermons reviewed and discussed. Within this context there was an exchange of ideas and views with each individual making a contribution to the understanding of the others, and this brings us to the basic puritan understanding of society, as most clearly articulated in John Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity,” but to be found throughout the writings of puritan clergy and laymen. Puritans believed that all men were equal in the eyes of the God who had created them, though each possessed talents that enabled him or her to make their own unique contributions to the welfare of the larger societies of which they were part. Each individual was called to work to maximize their talents, but cautioned to remember that all were parts of the social body, knit together, as Winthrop put it, as a single body.

Puritans were not advocates of individualism, but of a communitarianism that stressed mutuality shared obligations. The common good, not personal advancement, was the goal that were directed to strive for. The community was to be united, but not necessarily uniform. All benefited from the discussions that allowed individuals to suggest alternative ways of understanding God’s will and man’s needs, so long as everyone accepted the need to accept what emerged as the consensus of the vast majority. Even then, some differences could be accepted over matters that were not considered essential. Davenport and Eaton’s task at New Haven, like that of Winthrop and his peers in Massachusetts, Thomas Hooker in Connecticut, and Bradford and the Pilgrims at Plymouth was to establish what a scholar has called the perimeter fence separating who and what was acceptable and that which was unacceptable. The imperative to love one another applied to those within those bounds who lived in accord with the principles the society had defined as its own, but not to those who were outside the cultural walls.

Today, we as are faced with critical issues that the Puritans confronted in their time – What makes for a community and where do you draw the perimeter fence that divides acceptable and unacceptable people, behavior and beliefs? What do members of a civic and religious society owe to one another, and how can the pursuit of the common good be reconciled with personal freedom? When is the line crossed between a faith that inspires proper behavior and a fanaticism that expresses itself through intolerance? As we strive to get beyond rhetoric to deal meaningfully with issues such as immigration and border security, the rights to individual privacy versus the needs of common security, and the proper lace of faith in public life, we can learn from the puritans. But to do so we have to commit the effort to get behind the stereotypes to discover who the puritans really were.