The Spine That Remains (7) - The Puritan Spine of America, a Seven Part Series

The Posture of a Grown Republic

Dino Alonso

Feb 16, 2026

0:00

-11:40

“We can only learn to love by loving.” — Iris Murdoch

Opening

The spine was never the problem.

A spine gives structure. It lets a body stand upright. It holds weight. It keeps the head lifted instead of bowed by gravity. Without it, there’s collapse. With it, there’s posture.

The problem was mistaking rigidity for strength.

Across this series, I’ve traced a particular inheritance, an anxiety about disorder, a suspicion of moral drift, a belief that righteousness must be visible to be real. That inheritance shaped covenant communities, revolutionary politics, reform movements, civil war, cultural grievance, and our modern addiction to spectacle. It gave us seriousness. It gave us discipline. It gave us reform energy. It also gave us a reflex.

When things feel unstable, tighten.
When trust erodes, enforce.
When fear rises, purify.

That reflex was formed under pressure. In a fragile settlement, visible discipline meant survival. In a small covenant community, surveillance meant cohesion. Moral order wasn’t abstract. It was immediate.

But what protects a village can corrode a republic.

What stabilizes a small, uniform community doesn’t scale cleanly into a plural democracy. When the population expands, when beliefs diverge, when institutions grow layered and complex, a reflex built for survival can begin to distort the very thing it once preserved.

What does moral adulthood look like in a culture trained to fear disorder?

That question has been underneath every installment of this series.

The issue isn’t whether we have a spine. It’s whether we know how to bend without breaking.

The Cost of Perpetual Moral Emergency

A culture that lives in emergency eventually forgets what settled maturity feels like.

If every disagreement is existential, if every election signals doom, if every moral dispute demands purification, then the nervous system never rests. We move from alarm to alarm, from outrage to outrage, convinced that vigilance is the same thing as virtue.

What happens when moral seriousness hardens into permanent alarm?

It stops forming adults.

It forms responders.

Responders react. They don’t reflect. They seek resolution, not understanding. They crave clarity, not complexity. They measure success by visible control.

You can see the cost if you look without flinching. Exhaustion that feels permanent. Institutions that no longer command trust because they perform righteousness rather than embody it. A civic imagination that shrinks to crisis management. A public culture that confuses control with character.

In this environment, punishment becomes emotional relief. It offers closure. It proves that someone is still in charge. It reassures us that standards haven’t dissolved.

But when punishment becomes the primary language of morality, formation disappears.

We correct, but we don’t cultivate.
We enforce, but we don’t educate.
We expose, but we don’t reconcile.

A culture that never leaves emergency mode can’t raise citizens. It can only mobilize factions.

Moral Seriousness Without Fear

Let me say this plainly.

Moral seriousness is good. Discipline is good. Conviction is good. A society that abandons those doesn’t become free. It becomes unmoored.

The question isn’t whether we should care deeply about right and wrong. The question is how that care shows itself.

Fear based righteousness produces fragility. It can’t tolerate ambiguity. It struggles to distinguish disagreement from threat. It needs visible enemies in order to steady its own anxiety. Certainty replaces humility. Volume replaces patience. Enforcement replaces formation.

A mature culture looks different.

It seeks internal discipline before external display.
It practices restraint even when it could dominate.
It builds trust slowly rather than demanding instant conformity.
It tolerates complexity without surrendering standards.

That kind of maturity doesn’t feel heroic. It doesn’t generate applause. It doesn’t produce the rush of crusade. It looks almost ordinary.

And yet it’s the only posture that endures.

True moral adulthood isn’t the absence of standards. It’s the ability to hold standards without panic.

Institutional Adulthood

If you bring this into governance, the contrast becomes sharper.

What would institutions look like if they didn’t need to perform moral purity to survive?

They’d move with steadiness. They’d rely less on spectacle. They’d understand that legitimacy grows through consistency, not dramatic gestures. Accountability would still exist, but it wouldn’t depend on humiliation. Justice would still operate, but it wouldn’t need an audience.

A mature republic doesn’t need to display its righteousness to feel secure. It knows who it is.

Early Puritan logic made sense in a small covenant community. Order had to be visible. Deviation had to be addressed publicly. Cohesion required clarity.

But in a plural democracy, constant surveillance corrodes trust. Public shaming weakens solidarity. Governance turns into performance. Citizens turn into spectators.

And spectators demand drama.

The spine stiffens.

The Temptation to Amputate

There’s another temptation that appears once we see this pattern.

It’s the temptation to discard the inheritance entirely.

To reject discipline because it has been weaponized.
To reject moral language because it has been misused.
To reject tradition because it has been rigid.

That move feels freeing. It feels modern. It feels clean.

But it’s recoil, not maturity.

The Puritan inheritance gave America work ethic, literacy, civic engagement, moral vocabulary, reform movements that confronted injustice. It seeded abolition. It seeded public education. It seeded a belief that character matters.

That’s part of the spine too.

A body without a spine collapses. A republic without moral seriousness dissolves into appetite and impulse.

We can’t cut away the inheritance without losing structure.

We have to integrate it.

Integration means keeping the seriousness while releasing the panic. Keeping discipline while releasing fear. Keeping conviction while releasing the need for theatrical enforcement.

Formation is slower than punishment.
Trust is quieter than spectacle.
Adulthood is less dramatic than crusade.

And that pace can feel like weakness.

The Work of Integration

If I’m honest, I feel the pull of rigidity myself.

Certainty is comforting. Enforcement looks decisive. Drawing a bright line feels strong. Moral clarity, especially in public, can feel like courage.

There’s relief in hardness.

Bending feels exposed. It feels like compromise. It feels like surrender.

But rigidity is fear wearing the mask of strength.

A spine doesn’t exist to lock the body in place. It exists to let the body move with integrity. To stand upright. To turn when needed. To reach. To kneel. To rise again.

Strength isn’t immobility. It’s resilience.

A rigid spine shatters under pressure. A flexible spine absorbs shock. It carries weight without snapping. It adjusts without collapsing.

That’s what a grown republic looks like.

Not soft. Not morally indifferent. Not adrift.

Upright. Grounded. Capable of restraint. Capable of self correction. Capable of holding tension without reaching immediately for enforcement. Capable of practicing its standards rather than performing them.

We only learn maturity by practicing it. We only learn restraint by choosing it when we could dominate. We only learn love by loving.

Formation doesn’t happen through proclamation. It happens through repetition.

A Question for the Reader

This series has traced an inheritance across centuries. It has examined fear, discipline, purification, grievance, punishment, and the longing for visible righteousness.

Now the question turns inward.

When disorder rises, in politics, in culture, in your own community, what’s your first instinct?

Do you reach for enforcement?
For certainty?
For visible control?

Or are you willing to practice restraint?
To tolerate complexity?
To build trust slowly?
To choose formation over spectacle?

If a republic is only as mature as the citizens who inhabit it, then the posture of the culture begins in the posture of the individual.

When no one is watching, when no crisis is declared, when no enemy is named, what kind of moral seriousness do you practice?

Coda: Carrying the Spine

I don’t want less morality in this country. I want less fear disguised as morality. I don’t want less conviction. I want less theatrical enforcement. I don’t want to forget what we inherited. I want to grow up inside it.

Growing up doesn’t mean abandoning discipline. It means internalizing it. It means carrying standards without needing to display them constantly. It means standing upright without locking the joints.

A spine that can’t bend won’t last.

A mature republic stands upright, and knows when to bend.

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?