I'd been meaning to read this book, and picked it up down in the Mission: my original goal had been to visit Borderlands Books, inspect the Abyssinians, and purchase a few really cheap old paperbacks (I don't care about bent spines), but Borderlands was closed for the day, or perhaps only lunch. So I proceeded farther south to Blue Dog Books and picked up a copy of this book.
The Wordy Shipmates represents a break from Vowell's usual genre, autobiographical adventures, although the research involved its share of driving around New England. The style, however, preserves her usual liveliness and sense of humor.
What struck me most about her description of the Puritans was the way in which their values were antithetical to contemporary American culture, and particularly conservative Christian culture. The Puritans were Calvinists, and thus believed in predestination, the doctrine which states that God has already decided whether who will rejoice in heaven and who will suffer eternal torments; what the individual does affects nothing, and a Christian follows the law of God because he (the Puritans were very male-oriented) loved God. Here is the knife in the wound: the individual does not know whether he is saved until he is hauled before the Great Judgement Seat, and it is more likely than he is already damned. Calvin himself doubted his salvation. Contemporary conservative Christians, by comparison, believe that believing in Jesus as Lord and Savior is the ticket to the Pearly Gates.
This assurance of salvation leads to the next contrast between Puritans and contemporary conservative Christians: the Puritans feared and distrusted personal revelation.; the behavior and decision-making process of our lame duck leader would be abhorrent to them. In contemporary conservative culture, however, personal revelation of the Lord's will is an acceptable practice. Puritan culture insisted that the leaders of the community interpret the will of the God for the whole.
The desire for assurance, however, found an outlet in signs and portents in every day life. Some contemporary Christians condemn reading the horoscope in the newspaper as condoning divination'; the Puritans could see the struggle between a snake and a mouse on the commons as an indicator of the future. This searching for security in public fora extended to individuals' public actions as well. A successful harvest confirmed God's favor on the individual - despite the cherished Calvinist doctrine of predestination. This equation of salvation with prosperity may have assuaged the fears of the prosperous, but it redoubled the doubts of those in dire economic straits, who already bore grave uncertainty of salvation. It is possible that the correlation of physical deprivation and spiritual damnation contributed to the capitalist character of American society. Compare this to the poor woman in southern Missouri who has virtually nothing but knows that she'll cross the Jordan when the chariot come to take her home.
The Puritan leaders, unlike much of contemporary America, valued the intellect, and wrote their own books since they had brought so few. The shunning of the intellect among contemporary conservative Christians would have appalled them, especially since they founded the two primary institutions of "elitist" education which the radio pundits so despise to educate the leaders of Puritan society. These institutions perforce included instructions in Greek and Latin, even though the latter was the language of the hated Antichrist, known to his followers as the Pope. The ridiculus mus process known as "dumbing down" was not an option for the Puritan preacher or statesmen.
That last distinction surprised me when I read it. The Puritans , despite their strong theological views, made a distinction between the church and the state and tried (with varying degrees of success ) to keep them separate. The difference between their view and that of Jefferson was that the Puritans were trying to keep the state from controlled the church, while Jefferson was trying to keep the church from controlling the state. The Puritan preachers were not allowed to hold political office, nor were the political office- holders allowed to be preachers; nor was this an empty distinction, although the impressive theological depth of any prominent Puritan leader placed them in good stead when arguing with the preacher. When Governor Winston lost the election to his rival, several men sheepishly admitted that their votes had been swayed by preacher John Cotton, an antagonist of Winston; thus it was not thought quite appropriate to vote according to pastoral decree.
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