A fourth reason Americans resist looking into their Puritan origins is that at least half of even the earliest Massachusetts settlers weren’t Puritan congregants; some were adventurers of a different sort, others indentured servants, and, soon enough, even the land-starved second and third sons of the settlers drifted away. Since then, the vast majority of Americans have been carriers of traditions at odds with Puritanism even when they are Christian—as, increasingly often, they are not. Most immigrants have come mainly to improve their material fortunes and their children’s prospects and to enjoy certain liberties, but not to take up the Puritan rigors of renewing those liberties that founders of the American republic such as John Adams and James Madison hoped they would take up when they wrote about what republican citizenship requires. But that doesn’t mean that they couldn’t reassume those rigors with the right institutions and instruction. In this, I argue that the Puritans can still offer some guidance.

* * *

Consider the Puritans’ bequests, in several dimensions. Perhaps the most arresting is the example they set in picking themselves up and leaving everything they’d known and loved, as well as hated, to cross an ocean, under conditions we can barely imagine now, to “a howling wilderness” where appalling loneliness and collective hysteria would seize some of them at times. The strength they drew from their pilgrim faith and from one another is so difficult for most people today to fathom that they tend to imagine religious cults or fascist rallies; and indeed, Puritans were sometimes as perverse to one another and as brutal in massacring Native Americans as the Israelites had been at the foot of Mt. Sinai and in slaughtering the Amalekites without mercy.

Yet they built a strong scaffolding from which one could look into the abyss without falling. Three thousand miles from their nominal rulers, they and other settlers governed themselves for 150 years, and rather democratically for the time. Even at American independence, John Adams, a graduate of then-still-residually Puritan Harvard, wrote in the preamble to the constitution for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (still in the state’s constitution today), “The body politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals: it is a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good.”

Not only does this echo Winthrop and the Plymouth Pilgrims’ Mayflower Compact, it also serves as a reminder that a liberal capitalist republic must ultimately rely on citizens voluntarily upholding public virtues and beliefs—reasonableness, forbearance, a willingness to discover one’s self-interest in serving public interests—that neither the liberal state nor capitalist markets do much to nourish or enforce. The liberal state doesn’t do it because it’s not supposed to judge between one way of life and another (as Puritans certainly did). Markets don’t do it because they work by approaching individuals as self-interested consumers and investors, not as bearers of a common mission. Small-r republican citizens and leaders need to be cultivated all the more intensively somehow. For that, America now relies on “civil society”—public schools, colleges, churches, civic associations, and youth sports leagues that stand somewhat apart from markets and the state. But with that model unwinding amid economic, technological, environmental, and other riptides that we ourselves have set in motion, we may need a new cosmology to address them in ways that a liberal capitalist republic no longer can.