America's First Social Justice Warriors

We hear a lot about the "purity culture" of American evangelicalism. This prudish, morbid obsession about sex is often taken to be the legacy of Puritanism upon American Protestantism. No one in our sexually liberated world wants to be a "Puritan" or "puritanical."

And yet, the moral legacy of the Puritans in America is a bit more complicated than you might think. Yes, the Puritans valued sexual chastity and continence. But the Puritans were also America's first social justice warriors. 

For example, John Brown, he of Harpers Ferry fame, was widely described as "a Puritan of the Puritans," even "the last of the Puritans." Why was John Brown considered the premier Puritan of his era? Because abolitionism, especially in its religious, revolutionary zeal, was understood to be the moral fruit of Puritanism. As the Democratic congressmen Samuel Cox declared in 1863, "Abolition is the offspring of Puritanism." 

Beyond their common source in New England, Puritanism trafficked in two things that fueled the abolitionist movement. 

First, a belief in the "higher law," God's law, that stood above the laws of the nation. Slavery was the law of the land, but abolitionists felt compelled to break the slave laws, and in Brown's case, even take up arms against the state, in obedience to God's higher law. 

Second, Puritanism was characterized by an unbending moral severity and rigidity that brooked no compromise with evil. Before and during the Civil War, political moderates tried to preserve the union by appeasing the South, allowing slavery to remain where it existed and limit only its westward expansion. The puritanical posture of the abolitionists found such compromises completely intolerable. Slavery was evil and it had to be eradicated. That was the "purity culture" of the abolitionist Christians. 

In summary, Puritanism was widely considered to be the force behind the American abolitionist movement before and during the Civil War. The Puritans were our first social justice warriors. 

And what's interesting here is how modern day social justice warriors carry on this same moral tradition. A chorus of commentators have observed how social justice activism, seemingly post-Christian in its religious attitude, is characterized by a moral rigidity, severity, and revolutionary zeal that is quintessentially Puritan. John Brown 2.0. 

Progressive, irreligious, woke social justice warriors might not like those prudish evangelicals, but they are more similar than they think.