What happened to the Puritans?
It is perhaps the greatest irony imaginable. And a lesson for today’s conservative churches.
The Puritans embodied Biblically centered, ultra-conservative Christianity: orthodox, rigorous Calvinists, aiming to forge a “city upon a hill”, founding what became a large part of mainline American Protestantism, founding universities such as Harvard and Yale to train orthodox clergy and uphold divine covenants.
Puritans built tight-knit communities with strong Biblical social structures, that were an undeniable foundation to the American colonies and eventually states (especially in New England).
At first this appeared successful. The exact goal of many of today’s conservative Christian nationalists.
But what is the Puritan legacy? Secularized institutions now championing theological liberalism, Unitarianism (rejecting the trinity), Universalism, churches promoting LGBTQ+ “rights”, environmental “justice”, promoting atheism and humanism, advocating for abortion, funding abortion, and claiming the murder of an unborn baby is “healthcare”.
If you see a church today with rainbow flags and clear woke propaganda, openly advocating for abortion, there’s a good chance it is a descendant of a Puritan church.
The “fruits” (Matthew 7:16) of Puritanism are directly antithetical to their own Biblical conservatism.
Did the gates of hell prevail?
One imagines not a single Puritan founder could look at the legacy of their churches and congregationalist communities and not be horrified.
Not just a failure, but a kind of demonic mockery of Christianity, arguably the worst and most antichrist churches and institutions that have ever existed have come from the Puritan lineage.
The lesson is hopefully clear, one needs more than Biblically centered Christianity, one needs more than conservative principles. This might be a hard lesson for today’s staunch Calvinists (it was for me), but the rotten fruits are clear.