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Indeed. What have we done with my church?

Unfortunately, my fellow heirs of Puritanism here in New England all vote for same sex marriages, abortions, environmental straitjackets and all the rest of the modern left-wing politically correct line...

Ignores the historical reality of the strength of Calvinism in the southern Piedmont both before and after the war.

Not very rigorous in its scholarship. Deserves a ‘gentleman’s C’.

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Wait, weren’t Congregationalists distinct from Puritans?

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Thank you so much for posting this. As an "Old" Southern Republican (descended from Civil War Unionists, and before that of Whigs and Federalists), I have always resented the neo-Confederate/palaeocon/civilizationist characterization of Puritanism as radical, destructive, progressive, and ultimately of spawning Ted Kennedy. The fact that the current crop of radical secularist New Englanders (I won't even honor them with the title "Yankees") are lineal descendants of the Puritans no more makes them its intellectual/spiritual continuation than the fact that the ancestors of many of today's Southern Fundamentalists once fought for slavery makes contemporary conservatism the ideological descendant of that practice.

The South of today is no longer the neo-European high church bourbon culture of yore but truly the Bible Belt, the true heir of Puritanism. I suppose this saddens "palaeos" like it did their hero H.L. Mencken (rot his bones!!!), but too diddley-dog-gone bad. "Palaeos" and high churches never took religion seriously anyway, as shown by the liberalism of the Cavaliers during the English Civil War. After all, religion is only a product of a culture (via zillions of years of trial-and-error) and not some "rationalist blueprint" from A-mighty G-d, now, is it? [/sarcasm]

Some of our Southern Puritan-haters should be locked in a room with Rev. Ian Paisley.

One mistake in the article, though, is the assumption that contemporary Catholicism is as conservative as the old Puritanism or the current Evangelicalism. Contemporary Catholicism is in fact the world's largest and most successful liberal Protestant denomination (or, to use their favorite word, "sect"). Also ethno-culturally American Catholicism is an urban immigrant religion largely hostile to the culture of the rural American Heartland, or at the very least extremely unsympathetic to it.

You know, there was an argument on a Catholic forum a while back between an advocate of "limited inerrancy" who called it that and an advocate of "limited inerrancy" who was not honest enough to call it that. Honest--they were saying the exact same thing about Biblical inerrancy but the dishonest guy was having a conniption because the honest guy admitted that this should be called "limited inerrancy" while the dishonest guy wanted to call it "total inerrancy, but the Bible isn't a science book." Blah.