Rewriting History

Long story short: no, Virginia, the Puritans were not the innocent victims of ruthless religious oppression.

Long story long: history, it is often said, is written by the winners. This is often the case, though who the 'winner' ends up being is determined by a lot of wildly differing circumstances, including cheating and luck. At the time they were starting to keep records, nobody thought that the English, living physically separate from Europe on the last and furthest place in the known world, would one day be a sprawling empire; at the same time the great advanced civilizations of Central and South America would scarcely have believed that their great cultures would be eventually reduced to a small portion of the history books, their great written language solely the domain of specialist scholars. Sometimes it's even hard to tell who the winner is--more than one 'official' account of the same events show conspicuously opposing versions of the story. (Including a few war chronicles of the same wars--even the same individual battles--that each confidently record themselves the winner.) Just because one side came out on top doesn't necessarily, or even frequently, mean they were the 'good guys'. Or even that they were the best prepared. Sometimes history just throws a lucky curveball--defeat of the Spanish Armada, I'm looking at you.

So history shines a sympathetic light on the guys that come out on top, regardless of how good, bad, or ugly they really were.

And the Puritans definitely came out on top.

First off, the Puritans were not the most popular people in England by the turn of the seventeenth century. They were widely regarded as extremists and for a long time nobody took them at all seriously--definitely not seriously enough to be the targets of any unwarranted religious persecution. To be fair, they were picked on, but only in response to their own incivility--they were in the habit of openly breaking laws, insulting the monarchy (a major seventeenth-century no-no), being brazenly disobedient, their fanatical hatred for popular things like the theatre, and their outspoken arrogance. (Example--you know those big silly buckled hats we always picture them wearing? At the time wearing them was illegal and for reasons lost to history, and that may not even have been clear at the time, the Puritans didn't agree with it and publicly disobeyed it for which they were often fined.) This was not a group of people it was easy to get along with. Rather like that kid in school that never knew when to just stop talking before he got himself into trouble, the Puritans simply kept on doing the wrong things at the wrong times until they eventually became the targets of discrimination. The only group less popular among the English were the Catholics, who really were the victims of religious oppression--deprived of jobs and offices, charged with crippling steep fines for even holding a private mass, unjustly punished and jailed, and sometimes even tortured and executed based on their beliefs. Albeit excessive, barbaric, and unwarranted, they weren't picked completely out of the blue for no reasons at all--the Pope encouraged faithful nations to lay siege to Britain, Queen Mary spent much of her reign notoriously executing anyone who refused to convert, and the infamous Gunpowder Plot was less than twenty years prior to the Mayflower voyage. (Patently not good enough reasons to kill people, but they also didn't pick Catholics for no reason.) So oppression and persecution based on religion were hardly uncommon, even though the Puritans weren't at the centre of it.

In the end it was their bad habits, not their beliefs, that made them the Puritans the victims of the persecution that would eventually chase them from England. Far from there being religious discrimination against them, the Puritans were known for the religious discrimination from them. Forget religious freedom--that was the last thing they wanted. They didn't want there to be a universal freedom to practice whatever religion however anyone liked--they wanted to forced everyone to follow their particular flavour of religion, which was extreme, restrictive, fanatical, and extremely unpopular. Their flight from England was more like an old-time rage!quit than a flight from oppression, even though by 1620 they were more and more often targeted and persecuted.

They just weren't very popular people and the more extreme and restrictive of their beliefs were shunned--particularly their hatred of theatre and flashy clothing, which were extremely popular. They were England's pre-Colonial Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses--a fringe cult-like group with peculiar beliefs and a blind hatred for popular pursuits who doggedly asserted their own beliefs without realizing how ridiculous everybody else thought they looked. Or else they did realize and didn't care or believed they would one day be vindicated.

Ultimately history remembers them favourably and sweeps their faults under the rug. We see the Puritans as a quiet group of religious reformists aspiring to the noble cause of freedom of religion instead of fringe lunatics. History remembers the winners. Eventually they came to majority--and power--in England and did such helpful, worthwhile things as closing down all the theatres. They settled the New World to establish a religious monopoly, not let everyone worship in their own way, and imposed stiff penalties on people who failed to adhere to their rules.

And yet they're the winners.

They might be the butt of a lot of modern-day (and historical) jokes and their beliefs are looked at with disbelief and laughed over, but they are very much history's winners. If ever the phrase 'WINNING' can be accurately used, it's here.

How else do you describe an unpopular fringe cult of religious extremists with a serious beef against everything that everyone else enjoys whose vocal and arrogant insubordination and constant law-breaking led to being the victims of discrimination, who literally rage-quit what was becoming one of the most powerful empires in Europe and abandoning it for literally the last frontier--the most distant, lonely, unpopulated, uncivilized, unknown, and undeveloped place on the planet--despite having none of the relevant skills or experience or even packing the right supplies (one man brought 120 pairs of shoes), struggling to survive for 200 years, before their descendants struck it rich and turned a wild wooded continent into one of the biggest, wealthiest, most industrious, and fastest-growing nations the world had ever seen without even needing the rest of the world?

You don't. If that isn't 'WINNING', I have no idea what is. The Puritans themselves didn't fare so well in the Americas--they died in droves from a combination of starvation, illness, harsh winters, run-ins with unfriendly natives, and outright incompetence with regard to surviving in a wilderness, up to 90% of each colony failing to last the first few years--but their descendants enjoyed the fruits of living in what was for a time the biggest, richest in both money AND natural resources, most productive, most industrious, and richest country on the planet.

That's like if the Mormons escaping to the then-not-US-controlled Utah Territory had turned around and made it into the richest and most productive state in the US.

Not bad for a loud, obnoxious fringe group that didn't know when to shut up.