It is often accepted without question that the New England Puritans were hardhearted religious fanatics who took pleasure in publicly humiliating each other and calling down damnation on the heads of heathens. In 1917, H. L. Mencken wrote famously that the Puritan was characterized by his “utter lack of aesthetic sense, his distrust of all romantic emotion, his unmatchable intolerance of opposition, his unbreakable belief in his own bleak and narrow views, his savage cruelty of attack, [and] his lust for relentless and barbarous persecution.” In The Crucible (1953), Arthur Miller writes that the Puritans were a “sect of fanatics” who led a “strict and somber way of life” marked by “parochial snobbery” and “hard-handed justice.” Margaret Atwood once remarked that her 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale—in which a ruthless theocratic government enslaves young women and forces them to have sex with its childless party elite—was her “take on American Puritanism.”
These caricatures have been regularly debunked by scholars. In his groundbreaking two-volume New England Mind, Perry Miller showed how the Puritans’ fears and hopes shaped their “errand into the wilderness,” and Charles Lloyd Cohen and Charles Hambrick-Stowe have argued that feelings were central to the Puritans’ understanding of salvation and piety. Now, Abram Van Engen turns to the role of sympathy. Sympathy, or “fellow feeling,” he argues, was central to the Puritan way of life. Not only was a spontaneous affection for fellow Christians viewed as a sign of salvation, but sympathy was also understood as the defining characteristic of a godly society. At the heart of John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill,” Van Engen writes, is “a vision for society in which reciprocal affections become fundamental to communal well-being.”
Borrowing from both Erasmus and Calvin, Puritan sermons and commentaries argued again and again that sympathy—or an innate love of fellow Christians demonstrated, in particular, by a sensitivity to their suffering—“resulted from membership” in God’s covenant community alone. Arthur Hildersham wrote that the “fruit” of the presence of the Holy Spirit in the believer’s life was “sympathizing with the fellow-members of Christ’s mysticall body.” Likewise, the absence of such sympathy, John Preston warned, indicated spiritual death: “A living member, if the body be in danger, will have a sympathizing and feeling of the danger.” But if not, “it is a certaine signe we are dead men.” Paradoxically, such sympathy was also commanded. While sympathy did not extend to those outside God’s community—“whosoever is Gods enemie, must also be ours,” Richard Greenham wrote—God’s children were regularly exhorted to love each other. Preaching on 1 Peter 3:8, Nicholas Byfield remarked, “The doctrine is cleer. That we ought to have a sympathie one towards another.” Robert Bolton urged his readers to “make conscience” their sympathy. Puritan sermons often aimed at stirring the holy affections of congregants, and Van Engen writes,
This helps explain why the Puritans, contrary to popular belief, were so expressive. When his wife was dying, John Winthrop was “weeping so bitterly,” Van Engen writes, “she asked him to stop” because (in her words) “you breake mine heart with your grievings.” When the Puritans fled England, and British soldiers separated children from their parents, William Bradford wrote that there was “weeping and crying on every side.” Anne Bradstreet regularly refers to her “troubled heart,” “sorrows,” “cares,” “fears,” and “joy” in her poetry. One of the most popular poems of the early colony was Michael Wigglesworth’s “The Day of Doom” (1662), in which he imagines the “weeping” and wailing of sinners but also the singing and “great joy” of God’s elect at Christ’s second coming. Van Engen writes that each instance of “tears and grieving, melting and weeping, pity and sympathy” in Puritan texts fits within “a broad tradition of Puritan fellow feeling.”
Read in this context, he argues, John Winthrop’s A Model of Christian Charity is very much a text of its time. Most people are familiar with this sermon only for Winthrop’s use of the “City on a Hill” metaphor. What’s often missed or ignored is that the defining characteristic of this new Promised Land, Van Engen writes, is not only its “careful obedience of covenantal laws,” but also “and even more so through a charity enabled by the grace of Christ and lived out in the mutual affections of every member.” Like other Puritans, in other words, John Winthrop was preoccupied with sympathy, which shapes “his vision for a new community.”
Van Engen also reads the Antinomian Controversy and the Salem witch trials through the lens of sympathy. While the former crisis in the young colony is sometimes presented as dividing religious legalists and intuitive spiritualists like Anne Hutchinson, Van Engen argues that it was a debate about “the meaning and value of sympathy itself” and “what kinds of love could count as evidence of salvation.” For Thomas Shepherd, John Winthrop, and the majority of Puritans, affection for fellow Christians was both a duty and a sign of salvation. The Antinomians that opposed them, Van Engen writes, “discounted such love and declared that only a personal experience of Christ’s love could assure one of salvation.”
This may sound like Van Engen is putting too fine a point on this early controversy: After all, the church leaders did regularly call on members to obey the Ten Commandments and follow the various New Testament exhortations. Yet, as Van Engen notes, for Puritans these “works” were meaningless if divorced from “proper affection.”
Van Engen’s overall argument here is that, contrary to the dominant narrative, the religious establishment did not defend a merely “outward moral duty,” or define sanctification as “the moral behavior of the individual,” as one scholar puts it. Rather, it defended a less “demanding” sign of salvation—that of love of neighbor rather than (as John Cotton insisted) some overpowering mystical experience of Christ’s presence.
The importance of mutual affection, however, could be demanding in its own right, and tragically so. In Van Engen’s account of the Salem witch trials, which took place a little less than 60 years after the Antinomian Controversy, he highlights the role that sympathy played in convicting the supposed witches and in the willingness of the judges and townspeople to condemn their fellow citizens based solely on girls’ testimonies that women in the community were supernaturally tormenting them. Because fellow feeling was an indicator of belonging to God’s community, the women on trial were watched closely for how they responded to the girls’ testimonies. Van Engen writes that the cool responses of Rebecca Nurse to the girls’ sufferings were seen as damning: “If Rebecca Nurse could not weep with afflicted saints,” he writes, “some Puritans could conclude, she must be rejoicing with the devil.” She was eventually sentenced to hang. Conversely, with indifference being so costly, the townspeople had reason to show clearly that they were on the girls’ side.
In many ways, the witch trials became the final word on the Puritans. Motivated, in part, by guilt for an ancestor’s role in the trial, Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter (1850) presents them as a hard hearted, legalistic group. In a key scene at the beginning of the novel, the townspeople watch Hester Prynne step out of prison onto a scaffold with a 3-month-old child in her arms and a scarlet “A” on her chest. Her punishment for adultery is three hours on the scaffold and a lifetime wearing the letter; but a “hard-featured dame of fifty,” standing with her friends in the crowd, complains that it’s too light: “If the hussy stood up for judgment before us five, that are now here in a knot together, would she come off with such a sentence as the worshipful magistrates have awarded? Marry, I trow not.”
Other anti-Calvinists, in order to defeat original sin and predestination, Van Engen writes, “began to caricature Calvinism as rigorous, gloomy, heady, and heartless.” Women writers such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Harriet Beecher Stowe rejected Calvinism as “immoral” because they believed, ironically, that it lacked “the sympathy . . . essential to forming ethical bonds.” And so Calvinism “became characterized as an intellectual love of law and doctrine enforced through the fear of God and a terror of hell.”
Like all societies at the time, the 17th-century Massachusetts Bay Colony enforced its laws—some of which concerned speech and religious belief—strictly. Heterodox Christians were expelled, and pagan natives were treated as enemies. But the colony also instituted the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, a distinctly modern code of law that protected many of the same individual rights later protected in the Bill of Rights. In short, the Puritans were not fanatics who had an unquenchable lust for punishment. And they were not hardhearted, either, as this fascinating, scholarly account of sympathy shows.
Micah Mattix is assistant professor of literature at Houston Baptist University.
