Puritans had big stories to tell, and they cast themselves big parts to play in those stories. The fervent English Protestants who believed that the Elizabethan Church urgently needed further reformation, and the self-selecting band among them who went on to colonize New England, were sure that they could re-create the churches of the apostolic age, and eliminate centuries’ worth of Romish accretions. By instituting scriptural forms of worship, these purified churches might have a beneficial influence on the state as well, and bring about the rule of the godly. If a purified English church and state could inaugurate reformation across all of Christendom, spread the gospel to infidels around the globe, and usher in the millennium, then all the better. In 1641, an anonymous tract called A Glimpse of Sions Glory announced that the new puritan-controlled Parliament would bring on “Babylon's destruction . . . The work of the day [is] to give God no rest till he sets up Jerusalem in the praise of the whole world.”Footnote ¹ The leading minister of colonial Boston at the time, John Cotton, predicted that as soon as 1655, as Michael Winship summarizes Cotton:

Those are big stories.

Needless to say, things did not turn out that way. But the very fact that puritans saw themselves as protagonists in their own world-historical narratives has made them appealing subjects for later historians with their own big stories to tell. In England, nineteenth-century Whiggish historians made puritans into the unwitting shock troops of modern liberal society, accidental creators of constitutional government as a by-product of their religious zeal. In the twentieth century, Marxist scholars turned the same puritans into agents of historical materialism, an aspiring bourgeoisie that overthrew the feudal past while blocking any possibility of a workers’ revolution.

In America, different stories emerged to suit different national needs. Nineteenth-century historians debated whether puritanism was the source of American democracy, or whether it presented an authoritarian and theocratic obstacle that true democracy had to overcome. Twentieth-century American scholars turned their attention from politics to society and culture, and looked to the puritans for the source of an American “mind,” “soul,” or “character” that long outlived its Calvinist origins. But in both England and America, puritans, whether heroes or villains, remained major figures in the historical imaginary through the mid- to late twentieth century.

Over the past generation, puritans have been shunted aside from their once central place in the historiography of the modern Anglo-American world. In England, the reason can be summarized in the word “revisionism,” the challenge within Britain's historical community to the grand narratives that once dominated the profession. In the last third of the twentieth century, leading figures such as Conrad Russell, John Morrill, and their many students dismantled older ideologically driven histories by pursuing deeply contextualist explanations for the cornerstone political events of the Tudor–Stuart era. By emphasizing local variations, the contingency of events, and the immediate concerns that drove decisions large and small, revisionists have produced accounts of impressive detail and erudition, difficult to challenge without matching the revisionists’ immersion in the sources. With respect to England's religious history, Patrick Collinson and his many students conducted a similar revisionist project, in which “the Puritans,” once seen as a distinctive ideological protest movement, a revolutionary vanguard driving the political convulsions of the seventeenth century, became simply “puritans,” a normal part of England's culture, the more fervent proponents of religious views that all English Protestants shared. While the revisionists have collectively succeeded in demythologizing much of this history, in the process they have shaken out some of the interest these subjects once held for the reading public. If the intricacies of the Forced Loan and the Five Knights Case cannot explain anything big or important to us today, then why should we care?Footnote ³

In America, the displacement of puritans occurred over the same time period but by different means. The centrality of “the Puritans,” or “Puritanism,” still often capitalized by American scholars, has not been refuted so much as abandoned by the scholarly community. The rise of social history in the 1960s, with its concern for things that can be counted and its endeavor to recover the experiences of underrepresented and inarticulate peoples in the past, caused some of this turn away from the logocentric histories of puritanism. But this shift was accelerated by the interpretive overreach of mid-twentieth-century authors, especially those in the school of Perry Miller, who assumed that a complete view of a society and culture could be gleaned from the writings of its intellectual elites. A turning point came with the publication by Alan Heimert, Miller's student and successor at Harvard, of Religion and the American Mind from the Great Awakening to the Revolution (1966), which argued that proponents of evangelical revivals in New England paved the way for the American Revolution. Edmund Morgan, himself a Miller student, wrote a caustic review, concluding that Heimert's account “partakes more of fantasy than of history.”Footnote ⁴ With Morgan's critique, the door began to close on the idea that New England puritans could be seen as America writ small. Morgan's next major work, American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), placed indentured servants and slaves at the center of his story, and boldly substituted Virginia for Massachusetts as the true colonial microcosm of what America would become. Since that time, the rush away from puritan New England and toward other origins options has been general.

At present, the puritan origins of America persists mainly in the rhetoric of journalists, politicians, preachers, and other mythmakers, who continue to promote the Pilgrims, the Mayflower Compact, the City on a Hill, and similar totems of America as a Chosen People. Here lies a second reason why professional historians have abandoned this narrative, namely the resurgence of fundamentalist religion in America and its firm alliance with right-wing politics. The mid-twentieth-century literary scholars’ nuanced, sometimes left-wing, and often quite critical, claims that the American mind, self, character, and even the Revolution were the product of biblical-literalist Protestants now appear uncomfortably close to the favored stories of the religious right for whom the notion of an orthodox Christian foundation for their version of America is very appealing, nuance be damned.Footnote ⁵

Despite these potential pitfalls, two new and important books are bringing the puritans back, and with the politics put back in. Michael Winship, author of Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill, is the foremost “revisionist” working on the puritan movement's transition from England to America. In his mastery of the relevant sources, in his strict attention to chronology and causation in framing fine-grained arguments, and in his deep immersion in sixteenth-century English puritanism as well as its seventeenth-century American offshoots, Winship has demonstrated this influence in earlier works such as Making Heretics (2002), his account of the famous “antinomian controversy” of early Massachusetts. There, Winship addressed an event weighted with centuries of ideological baggage. The antinomian controversy had been portrayed as a critical moment in the creation of American patriarchy, capitalism, authoritarianism, and race relations, to name just a few. Winship stripped it clean by restoring its principal issue—the doctrine of free grace and its relation to “sanctification” (godly behavior by those with the gift of grace)—to the center of conflicts among the leaders of early Massachusetts.

Winship's new book tackles a bigger and more important subject, the very subject that the excessive claims of Whiggish scholars had previously tarnished, namely the relationship between the puritan movement's zeal for popular church government and the beginnings of popular civil government in America. One strand of what Winship calls “the recoil from Calvinism-and-the-rise-of-democracy historiography” has been the inquiry into “classical republicanism” undertaken in the past generation by J. G. A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and their students, who have championed the significance of a secular Atlantic republican tradition, rooted in classical antiquity and its revival in the Renaissance. In this school of thought, English republicanism emerged only in the 1640s with Parliament's revolt against Charles I, and in a decidedly secular form. For Winship, this recoil has been far too strong, and his new book is meant to correct the imbalance by locating the religious roots of English republicanism.

By contrast with political scientists, who prefer to work in the more ethereal realm of published texts and their seemingly mystical ability to influence one another, Winship offers a brand of intellectual history that digs deep in manuscripts and correspondence to find the evidentiary proof of immediate influence—puritan preachers who shared a pulpit or a cell in the clink where they haggled over doctrine and church politics. Such a thickly documented approach can be immensely satisfying; it avoids the feeling of “fantasy,” of “reading beyond the lines,” that Morgan castigated in his review of Heimert, and supplies the context often missing from the text-based analyses of Skinner's disciples.

To make the case that puritans were critical to the creation of English republicanism, Winship contends that for the most radical reformers, getting church government right was the first priority; any reform of civil government that might result from it was secondary. Separatists were the most radical puritans of the Elizabethan era, removing themselves entirely from the corrupt Church of England in order to create truly reformed churches on an apostolic model, so Winship places separatism at the center of the evolution of the puritan movement, first in England, then in America. The standard narratives in both England and America have marginalized separatists, partly for their small numbers but mainly on the assumption that in their complete withdrawal from the established church, separatists disengaged from the politics of reform, drawing a curtain upon the world to worship undisturbed in exclusive purity. Winship disproves this assumption by tracking closely the leading English separatists from the 1570s onward, demonstrating that at each stage of the evolving puritan movement, separatists engaged with moderate conforming puritans in critical debates that shaped the movement's direction.

All puritan subgroups, separatist and conforming alike, believed that a perfected church would be ruled by “presbyters” or elders (ideally two ordained clergymen for preaching and teaching and a lay ruling elder to supervise church discipline), chosen by the devout members of godly congregations rather than by bishops appointed by popes or monarchs. But Winship demonstrates that the separatists’ arguments forced open a division among the less radical reformers, between those who favored the Scottish model, in which the ordained clergy collectively ruled over a unified “Presbyterian” state church, and the emerging “congregational” alternative, a more atomistic position with each church on its own bottom, ruled and disciplined by its own chosen elders but subject to no higher religious authority. Each of these variations was a republican form of church polity, in that power emanated from the choices of the laity. But when Parliament's forces overthrew the monarchy and established a civil republic, these two competing forms of republican church polity battled over the shape that England's new state church would take.

Winship powerfully demonstrates the separatists’ role in the development of republican government in England. But godly republicanism in America rather than civic republicanism in England is the destination he seeks to reach, so, midway through, his focus shifts across the Atlantic. Here Winship revisits an old and formerly discredited story, the claim that the tiny band of lay separatists (the “Pilgrims”) who founded the Plymouth colony in 1620 shaped the church polity of the much larger Massachusetts Bay colony founded in 1630. Samuel Fuller, a surgeon and deacon of Plymouth's church, visited the Massachusetts colonists in Salem shortly after their arrival. While treating their scurvy, Deacon Fuller also instructed Salem's puritans, including their ordained ministers, in Plymouth's form of church polity. As Plymouth's Governor William Bradford described the event, “as one small candle may light a thousand, so the light here kindled hath shone to many.”Footnote ⁶

Earlier scholars, not least of them Perry Miller, doubted the power of that little candle. Miller insisted that because the Massachusetts leaders claimed to be “non-separating,” fearing to risk their royal charter by denouncing the king's church, their church polity must have been framed by ministers in the conforming puritan tradition, not through the influence of separatists.Footnote ⁷ By revising our understanding of the dialogue between separatists and conforming puritans before 1630, Winship makes Bradford's account of Fuller and the “one small candle” far more plausible. If moderate puritans had been listening to and arguing with separatists for years in England and Holland, then why not Deacon Fuller in Salem in 1630? The remainder of the book shows that the separatist influence was much more than plausible. Continuing pressure from separatist challengers, especially Roger Williams, pushed Massachusetts to adopt godly republican forms of church and civil polity. This self-reinforcing system in which the churches exercised discipline over the magistrates while the civil government, elected by the enfranchised church members, kept guard over the orthodox churches, demonstrated the truth of what the puritans’ English opponents like King Charles had feared all along, that the logical culmination of puritan church reform pointed towards a republic as the best form of civil government as well.

Having inched their way toward this discovery, Massachusetts puritans found that they had liberated the millennial impulses latent within their movement. Enthusiasts on both sides of the Atlantic began to wonder by the late 1630s whether Massachusetts's achievements in church and state were the signs of the “new heaven and new earth” appearing at last. Then, and only then, Winship argues, did Massachusetts become a “shining city on a hill,” an exemplar for the churches and states of Europe to follow in their own reforming efforts. Only then did John Cotton begin preaching the sermons that predicted worldwide reformation and the approaching millennium. Through this careful reconstruction of the chronology of Massachusetts's church- and state-building, Winship has found a way to resuscitate this otherwise debased concept, a usable “city on a hill” in accord with the timing and purpose of New England puritan millennialism.

By stopping the story here, in Massachusetts at the moment when puritan republicanism had achieved its long implicit goal, Winship sidesteps the question of its fate, and failure, in England's revolutions of the 1640s and 1650s. David Hall, in his new book, A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England, brings these comparisons to the forefront, as they help to illuminate puritans’ social and political achievements in the first several decades of New England's colonization. Hall, a student of Edmund Morgan, has been Morgan's successor as the dean of American historians of puritanism over the past generation, but Hall writes intellectual history in a different style. Morgan wrote intellectual biographies of John Winthrop, Roger Williams, and Ezra Stiles in which each subject's relation to a conceptual problem, such as church–state relations in the case of Williams, was central to the narrative. Morgan also published chronological histories of specific ideas, such as Visible Saints (1965), on the restriction of church membership to the godly, and Inventing the People (1989), on the concept of popular sovereignty.

Hall, by contrast, writes books that perambulate a subject, organizing them not chronologically with a focus on changes within a single subject or institution over time, but as linked essays exploring interconnected topics that collectively inform a historical era. This approach allows Hall to delve deeply in culture as an integrated whole, as each chapter bleeds into the next, breaking down heuristic distinctions between topics such as “literacy” and “ritual” to show their interconnections. The material he selects highlights the ways that the lived experiences of ordinary folks, not just prominent male leaders, play a part in the collective construction of their world. If Winship's influences lie among the British revisionists, then Hall's work aligns more closely with Continental European historians, such as Roger Chartier. Like Chartier, Hall has built on the work of earlier cultural historians with innovative studies of the history of the book and reading practices, designed to explore the mental world of a specific culture in all its various aspects. When Hall writes biographically, he tends not to use individuals as windows onto a single concept (as Morgan did), but instead portrays a person (such as Samuel Sewall in Hall's Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment (1989)) as a fully rounded and even contradictory character, deeply embedded in the particularities of his context, exemplifying the various strands that comprise a culture.

A Reforming People does exactly this by turning to politics as a form of cultural expression. It picks up where Godly Republicanism leaves off, exploring the nature of “godly rule” in New England during the first decades of colonization. But it does so in Hall's characteristic fashion, with interlinked essays assessing the puritans’ achievements in colony government, town government, church polity, and law and social equity, until finally focusing on Thomas Shepard and his community of Cambridge as an example of how these strands converged. Like Winship, Hall is deeply aware of the pitfalls of Whiggish history: “I resist the temptation to turn the colonists into nineteenth-century liberals or twentieth-century social gospelers and democrats” (xii). But where Winship's desire to revisit puritan politics emerged from an English revisionist's sense that ideological interpretations have got the story wrong, Hall wades into this fraught subject from an Americanist's sense that in the abandonment of previous generations’ political accounts, we have lost something central to our understanding of the puritans as a political force. Hall's initial impulse was to name this book, “Why They Mattered,” and his answer to that question has everything to do with how puritans governed themselves.

In a chapter called “Godly Rule,” Hall describes New England's implementation of a republican form of church polity, a story that is remarkably close to Winship's account; he even cites the same apocalyptic sermons that John Cotton preached. But Hall tells this story in a single chapter, laying less emphasis on separatists than does Winship, who favors a more genetic approach to intellectual history. Hall does not neglect the separatists, but he prefers a wide-angled explanation of the origins of New England's church polity, with impulses from the diverse strands of the puritan movement coalescing in the early churches of Massachusetts. Unlike Winship, for whom the achievement in America of republican church polity is the culmination of his story, Hall locates “Godly Rule” as the middle chapter in his book. He agrees that church governance constituted the puritans’ primary concern, with reform of the state to follow. Hall quotes John Cotton, who in 1636 paraphrased the very statement that Thomas Cartwright made in the 1570s which Winship cited to make the same point, “It is better that the commonwealth be fashioned to the setting forth of Gods house, which is his church: than to accommodate the church frame to the civill state” (112).Footnote ⁸ But Hall surrounds this chapter with essays on the framing of New England's colony and town governments and the practice of social equity encouraged by the judicious use of law and authority. In other words, Hall recapitulates Winship's story, then embeds it as the centerpiece of a wider inquiry into social and political practices.

The chapters on politics and civil society do not unearth a wealth of previously unknown information, with the exception of Hall's discussion of the prominence of “equity” in the colonists’ social dealings. Rather, the news in Hall's book lies in its framing. In the Whiggish mode of historians past, assessments of puritans’ practices regarding authority, liberty, democracy, oligarchy, and other key words were always made, implicitly or explicitly, with respect to later conditions in the United States. Hall will have none of this. Instead, he explicitly compares New England puritans with their compatriots in England, and his most striking claim is that New England puritans actually achieved the reforms in church, state, and society that the most radical reformers in England, the Levellers, hoped to accomplish but failed. In New England's self-governing godly commonwealths, the problem of the relationship between the authority of governors and the liberties of the people were resolved, or at least brought into a stable balance, through ongoing negotiations—testy conflicts, certainly, but not enough to destroy the civil polity.Footnote ⁹

In one matter, however, New England's puritans differed sharply from England's Levellers. The Levellers’ demands, according to Hall, lay mainly in the secular realm of popular suffrage and equality before the law, while their call for religious tolerance among Protestants was anathema to New England's puritans. Yet Hall argues (and Winship supports the idea) that it was exactly their refusal to accept toleration, their insistence on godly rule, that made republican civil government a success in New England. Hall writes, “For the Levellers, the reform of civil society and social injustice was their alpha and omega; for the colonists, the reform of the church came first, with a civil society remade in the name of righteousness a close second” (124).Footnote ¹⁰ In this regard, the negotiations over civil and religious polity that Hall ascribes to New England were largely conducted among orthodox insiders; dissidents were banished.

According to J. G. A. Pocock, the characteristic problem in the classical republican tradition was what he called the “Machiavellian moment,” the inevitable point in any republic when the virtue of the rulers begins to slip and they no longer seek the common good.Footnote ¹¹ The New England solution to this dilemma lay in a combination of linkage and separation between godly rule in the churches and godly rule in the state. By restricting the civil franchise to men who passed a test of godliness in the churches, but preventing church elders from holding civil office, the churches supported the state but were kept separate from it. By allowing churches to have disciplinary authority over individual magistrates but also granting magistrates limited authority over the good order of the churches, church and state, while separate, engaged in mutual watchfulness to preserve godliness in both realms. In this way, Massachusetts created what Winship calls a “self-sustaining loop of piety and virtue” (229), a solution to the republican problem of virtuous rulers.

Winship ends his account with the creation of this loop, but Hall's most striking chapter explains what kept it going. His answer is “equity,” a word nowhere to be found in Winship's account, and a concept that, according to Hall, “became ubiquitous among the colonists, though it is largely unnoticed in modern scholarship” (144). Hall explores the social practices of the churches and civil authorities in maintaining order and resolving conflicts, as well as the reforms made by the colonies to traditional English legal practices. These included making access to the law less cumbersome and expensive than in England, reducing the law's resort to capital punishment for property crimes, eliminating forms of privilege, and balancing the use of the law as protector of righteousness with its use as protector of liberties.

“Equity” was the dominant ethic behind all these practices, a concept that puritans equated with “conscience”: not a belief in perfect social equality, so much as “strong hopes for even-handedness in a world where ‘unrighteousness and iniquity’ were visibly present in the workings of English politics, civil society, ecclesiastical governance, and the law, each of which was aligned with structures of privilege and power” (Hall, 147). To demonstrate this principle at work, Hall describes the problem of land distribution in Cambridge, Massachusetts, showing that the church members, the men with full voting rights in town and colony government, did not abuse this privilege in the civil matter of land distribution but instead developed an equitable plan to satisfy all the town's inhabitants. This was not a revolutionary remaking of traditional hierarchies of seventeenth-century social life; the rich and powerful received larger grants than the poor and weak. But it was a system where “fairness and reason” prevailed over “stubborn custom or entrenched privilege” (147), a system in which the “middle terms” of “obligation” and “limits” were as important as the extreme ends of the spectrum—“authority” and “liberty”—in shaping social outcomes (158).Footnote ¹²

Hall's closing chapters accentuate the striking difference between his image of puritans and those portrayed by Winship. Winship focuses on conflict among puritans and their opponents. His protagonists, the separatists, were the most uncompromising self-righteous figures in the movement. A famous treatise written by an early separatist, Robert Browne, was called “Reformation Without Tarrying for Any”—its title captures the separatists’ disdain for those who had not yet reached their conclusion that the Church of England was hopelessly corrupt and that worshipping with the unreformed would taint the saints. Some of Winship's separatists, such as Henry Barrow, who denounced presbyterian reformers with the same vitriol he poured on Church of England bishops, and Roger Williams, scourge of the Massachusetts puritans, paired their intensely scrupulous religiosity with a remarkable lack of sympathy toward the human weaknesses of their fellow reformers. Winship's focus on these figures shows us the sharp conflicts through which the walls that protected Massachusetts’ godly republic were built. It also gives us a glimpse, at least, of the violence done to those excluded from the godly commonwealth, such as the Native Americans whose claims to the land Roger Williams championed.

Hall's puritans are, by contrast, exemplars of faith, hope, and charity, justifying his unironic use of the title, “Already in Heaven” for the chapter on Thomas Shepard's Cambridge. In Hall's words,

Hall is here describing a group of people already living within the protective walls of the godly republic created by the conflicts Winship traces. The equity they practiced among themselves did not look so equitable from the viewpoint of those excluded from the charmed circle of covenanted churches and incorporated towns. In Winship's prior book, Making Heretics, Thomas Shepard appeared as the scourge of the antinomians in 1636–7, the Massachusetts clergyman most committed to rooting out and banishing a dangerous heresy—defining and protecting the community. In Hall's account, the same Thomas Shepard's “everyday churchmanship” promoted compromise and “fashioned other bridges between church and town, leaders and people” in order to preserve the peace and extend the benefits of church and town to as many as possible. Despite the stark contrast, both images can be true—indeed, both are necessary to a complete understanding of puritan New England—precisely because the chronological framing of their studies and the styles of intellectual history practiced by Winship and Hall capture the puritan movement at slightly different moments, and from slightly different viewpoints, in its transition from England to a corner of America.

America. That word troubles both of these first-rate books, like thunder heard off in the distance of a still mostly blue summer sky. Though they scrupulously aim to avoid the pitfalls of Whig history, Winship and Hall each allows himself one “brief look forward” (as Hall puts it) in their concluding chapters. “America” is where they look.

In Hall's case, this forward look in no way suggests that the reformation of public life achieved by New England's founders somehow shaped the United States. Rather, Hall highlights the stark contrast between Thomas Shepard's Cambridge and contemporary America:

The distance between then and now projected in this conclusion is too great for A Reforming People to be called a jeremiad. The classic jeremiad offered a remedy, a means for a backsliding people to return to the path of righteousness, and Hall makes no such offer. Instead, Hall's tone is elegiac, a lament for a world we have lost, and he ends not with an answer but another question: “can we take heart from the capacities of the colonists to break through abuses of power and language in early-seventeenth-century England?” (196).

Winship looks forward in a different way. Despite his revisionist bona fides, he nonetheless succumbs to a modicum of Whiggery by suggesting that the American Revolution's roots might lie in godly republicanism. His connecting link is Algernon Sidney, the later-seventeenth-century English republican, beheaded by Charles II in 1683 for his part in the Rye House Plot and his authorship of the antimonarchical Discourses Concerning Government. Sidney was a hero to the eighteenth-century radical Whig tradition, one of the most popular authors among the leaders of North America's rebellion against the crown in the 1770s. John Adams was still citing Sidney with enthusiasm in his letters to Thomas Jefferson in the 1820s.

The classical republican tradition has long considered Sidney their own, a proto-Enlightenment figure with a “radically secularized political science of liberty” (Winship, 240). But Winship shows clearly what few modern scholars have seen, that Sidney “in fact was a Calvinist, and his republicanism was godly.” He therefore argues that the “Whig tradition represented not so much a clean rupture from the puritan theopolitics that stretched back to the Elizabethan presbyterians and created both congregationalism and Massachusetts but, in many ways, a selective, evolving adaptation of it.” Winship comes by this belated embrace of the Whig tradition honestly, because in the genetic form of explanation he favors, godly republicanism can be found in its DNA. Winship then suggests that “much of the original puritan discourse of liberty and tyranny” was preserved in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, and that this “ensured a tumultuous reaction to the British imperial innovations of the 1760s and 1770s that finally provoked the American Revolution” (248–9).

For me, the thunder is now rumbling too loud and close for comfort. Winship's closing words differ strikingly from those of Hall:

From the demonstrable influence of Roger Williams upon John Cotton, we are now reduced to ghost stories. This nebulous gesture toward the future of godly republicanism in the United States implies a long and distant chain of influence, without suggesting an endpoint or articulating the mechanisms of change with the clarity and precision that characterize nearly all of Winship's work.

What troubles me slightly with Hall's conclusion, and much more so with Winship's, is the unspoken assumption that “America” is the right unit of comparison or the appropriate vessel to embody the influence of early Massachusetts's achievement. Yes, Thomas Jefferson read Algernon Sidney as avidly as John Adams did, but that does not make Jefferson's Commonwealth of Virginia an heir to the puritans and their godly republican tradition in the way that Adams's Massachusetts clearly was. In all likelihood, Jefferson read Sidney as a secular proto-Enlightenment figure, while Adams recognized Sidney's roots in puritan reform because he grew up in a society framed by it. Jefferson's Virginia was not a godly commonwealth with a Calvinist established church, he did not come of age in a political culture framed by the widespread participation of most adult males in self-government, and his fellow native Virginians did not expect an ethic of equity to mitigate entrenched privilege and power.

Together, Winship and Hall convincingly demonstrate that institutions embody ideas and that institutions matter; they shape social practices and political expectations in ways that have enduring effects, but ones that must be traced precisely if their real influence is to be assessed. To me, this makes the United States of 1787 and afterwards, even if we can properly call it a republic,Footnote ¹³ a radically different entity from the commonwealth that produced John Adams, and a poor unit of comparison with colonial Massachusetts. Winship's false note in his concluding comments, and Hall's elegiac tone in his comparison of the puritans’ virtues to contemporary America's vices, bespeak the continuing power of the American Revolution to cast a spell over the imagination and reasoning of even the most rigorous historians. The magic of e pluribus unum is such that unum can erase the dramatic varieties and the distinctive enduring qualities of pluribus as soon as the United States makes its vaunted appearance on the world stage.

Winship is not wrong to suggest that the power of godly republicanism had lasting effects—in Massachusetts and its neighboring colonies where puritans were powerful. But it is a mistake to conflate Massachusetts with America. Nor is Hall wrong to wish that puritan New England's more appealing virtues might be rediscovered in contemporary society. But we should follow Hall's guidance in knowing where to look for it: not in “America,” but in exactly the sort of place he describes so well in A Reforming People: small, self-selecting social groups with a common stake in a collective enterprise and a vision for the future that can sustain faith through the inevitable troubles of a fallen world. America is and has been many things, but it has never been that, except in the hands of false prophets and mythmakers.