The Imperial Impulse of the Puritans

In the Globalist, Robert Kagan looks at Puritan culture and American expansionism:

The picture of Puritan America as a pious Greta Garbo, wanting only to be left alone in her self-contained world, is misleading.For one thing, Winthrop’s Puritans were not isolationists.

They were global revolutionaries. They escaped persecution in the Old World to establish the ideal religious commonwealth in America, their “new Jerusalem.” But unlike the biblical Jews, they looked forward to the day, they hoped not far off, when they might return to a reformed Egypt.

Far from seeking permanent separation from the Old World, the Puritans’ “errand into the wilderness” aimed to establish a base from which to launch a counteroffensive across the Atlantic.

Their special covenant with God was not tied to the soil of the North American continent. America was not the Puritans’ promised land, but a temporary refuge. God had “peopled New England in order that the reformation of England and Scotland may be hastened.”

The Massachusetts Bay colonists neither sought isolation from the Old World nor considered themselves isolated. The Puritan leaders did not even believe they were establishing a “new” world distinct from the old. In their minds New England and Old England were the same world, spiritually if not geographically.