Introduction: The Puritan Spine of America
A New Series Begins This Sunday
This Sunday, January 4th, I’ll begin publishing a new long-form series titled The Puritan Spine of America.
It grows out of a question that’s been occupying me for a long time, and lately it’s begun to feel less academic and more urgent. Why does American politics keep snapping back to the same moral arguments, even when the language changes. Why do we sort people so quickly into the worthy and the unworthy. Why does punishment feel clarifying, even comforting, to so many of us. And why do these instincts seem to intensify precisely when the stakes are highest.
This series isn’t about theology or nostalgia. It’s about temperament, and about consequences.
Rather than starting with laws or institutions, I’ll be tracing an emotional inheritance that shaped America before it became a nation at all. A moral posture formed in early Puritan life, anxious, severe, convinced the world is a test and that judgment brings order. That posture survived long after the theology faded. Over seven installments, I follow how this emotional architecture moved from religion into politics, from sermons into civic life, from divine chosenness into national destiny, and eventually into modern struggles over identity, punishment, belonging, and power.
Each essay stands on its own, but together they form a single arc. We’ll move from the earliest settlements, through the Revolution, reform movements, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and into our present moment. Along the way, the series asks how a nation built on moral seriousness learned to confuse judgment with virtue, and why the same inherited reflexes now make democratic life feel so brittle, so easily fractured, and so vulnerable to authoritarian comfort.
The aim isn’t to condemn or to absolve. It’s to name a shared inheritance clearly enough that we can finally see it working through us, often without our awareness or consent. The question underneath all of it is whether a democracy can survive an emotional architecture that was built for purity, discipline, and division long before it was built for pluralism.
I’ll be publishing the series in weekly installments. Each piece will be substantial and reflective, written as a guided excavation rather than a lecture. Less a history lesson, more an attempt to understand why the same moral dramas keep reappearing, even as we insist we’ve outgrown them.
The first installment, The Seedbed, arrives Sunday.
If this country keeps reenacting the same moral story, with higher stakes each time, the question I’m asking is simple, and I hope you’ll sit with it alongside me. Do we recognize the inheritance shaping us well enough to change where it’s carrying us next?
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Further Reading:
As a descendant of a Puritan, and not proud of it, I’m looking forward to this series, understanding better how that mindset continues to assert itself in this country. I see a great deal of it in Russell Vought’s stunningly awful convictions. Thank you.