From Early New England to the Present Day, Censors Have Acted Out of Fear, Not Prudishness
By Peter C. Mancall November 25, 2024 (ZocaloPublicSwuare.org)
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Efforts to ban books come and go in American life. Today, they have returned with a vengeance, with parents and school boards singling out certain works as inappropriate for modern students. Many of these deal with human sexuality; violence, including sexual assault; or our nation’s tragic history of race-based hatred.
Critics interpret these recent book ban efforts as signs of American Puritanism, harkening back to the evergreen stereotype of dour souls trudging to church through 17th-century New England woods. The link between book banning and Puritans is not accidental. In the 1630s, Puritans in England managed to temporarily halt the publication of the Anglican lawyer and exiled colonist Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan, which criticized the Pilgrims and the Puritans for rituals that violated Church of England norms, and for mistreatment of Native peoples.
Morton ultimately managed to get his book published in Amsterdam. Still, for this suppression—the first explicit banning of a book about North America—along with their moralizing, Puritans came to be known as self-righteous, anti-sex scolds. A New Yorker cartoon in November 2020 captured prevailing stereotypes about both the Puritans and their fellow New England-settling Protestants, the Pilgrims. Four men on a “Hot Pilgrims 1620 Calendar” bore revealing labels: “Stern!! Remote!! Pious!! Humorless!!” But the sexless Puritan stereotype does not conform to historical reality—and may take away from the real lesson of book bans, old and new.
Puritans had a lot of sex—and not just to make their large families of six-plus children. Local court records suggest that some, if not many, Puritans engaged in pre-marital fornication and adultery—activities that ran afoul of contemporary religious values.
In early New England, where church and state were closely connected, deviant behavior could have dire consequences. In 1642, a New Plymouth colony servant named Thomas Granger was accused of “buggery” with “a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves and a turkey.” The Pilgrims needed to know which individual beasts had partnered with Granger because the Book of Leviticus forbade eating such polluted creatures. Authorities paraded the animals in front of Granger, who identified his victims. Colonial leaders killed the animals first. Then they executed Granger, a boy of 16 or 17.
Did the Pilgrims kill Granger because he violated their notions about sex? Yes—and no. His behavior was unacceptable to authorities because the Bible had decreed bestiality a sin punishable by death. But his punishment tells us less about his sexual activity than about the general climate of fear that pervaded Puritan communities.
These religious dissenters were anxious about what they saw as unsettling changes in England and potential threats in America. At home, the Puritans and Pilgrims had opposed more vigorous enforcement of ritual practices embraced by the Church of England, such as kneeling to take communion and wearing a wedding ring. Punishments for objecting to these Catholic-leaning practices could include confiscation of one’s property, imprisonment, slicing off an ear, or having one’s head branded with “S. S.”—for “sower of sedition.” In New England, the Puritans and Pilgrims felt an all-encompassing sense of danger. Puritans were convinced that the Devil lurked in New England’s forests, eager to invade human bodies. Colonists often saw signs of witchcraft in the appearance and behavior of elderly and poor women, whom they then prosecuted and sometimes killed. They also condemned Quakers, who believed that God spoke to them directly—a notion the Puritans rejected. In 1659, Massachusetts authorities banished three Quakers from Boston for what the governor called their “presumptuousness and incorrigible contempt of authority”—and executed them upon their return.
The sexless Puritan stereotype does not conform to historical reality—and may take away from the real lesson of book bans, old and new.
The Pilgrims and Puritans felt many other threats from the Indigenous peoples whose lands they had invaded. New Plymouth Governor William Bradford wrote about “savage barbarians” roaming New England forests, “readier to fill [colonists’] sides full of arrows than otherwise.” Fears of Native peoples eventually grew so intense that the Pilgrims and Puritans launched a brutal assault on the Pequots, their neighbors to the southwest, in 1637. Bradford and others celebrated burning a Pequot town and shooting those who fled the flames—killing between 400 and 700 Indigenous people in a single night. Afterward, colonists rounded up the survivors and sold many into slavery.
Such actions—executions, witch trials, mass slaughters—sprang not from being dour or sexless. Those violent actions emanated from a climate of fear, which led Puritans to see every threat as a test of their faith and every response an attempt to please a stern God.
By the end of the 17th century, Puritanism was in retreat—a religious faith unable to adapt to changing circumstances. The original Puritans’ children and grandchildren began to bristle, often unwilling to be cross-examined by church elders about their faith. Many colonists re-examined their religious practices more deeply after local authorities killed 20 accused witches in Salem, Massachusetts, most of them women, in 1692. Within a generation, countless New England colonists embraced the religious revival of the Great Awakening—an effort to bring more people into the church—over excluding or punishing those with different views.
Not long afterward, at the time of the American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson crafted the Statute for Religious Freedom for the state of Virginia. He wrote that no civil authority should tell people what to think or what faith to embrace. Jefferson believed that the free exchange of ideas would improve society. His views on that topic had little in common with his European contemporaries, who often believed church and state should be linked—or with those of the Puritans.
Modern-day book banners who target “sexually explicit” material lack Jefferson’s faith that Americans can judge books for themselves. The New York Times recently reported that during the 2023-2024 school year, book banners identified 4,231 unique titles they wanted removed from school or public libraries. They succeeded in removing more than 10,000 books—including Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Let’s Talk About It: The Teen’s Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human—from shelves.
Censors seem to believe that taking a book off a library’s shelf or moving it to an adult section may somehow make things they fear—sex and violence, perhaps, but also diversity and freedom of thought—go away. If they were really afraid of sex and violence, perhaps they would try to ban William Bradford’s history of Plymouth, with its stories of bestiality and mass slaughter. Of course, if they ban that book, we would lose one of the few sources that described an early feast that became a national holiday. When critics refer to book banners as being Puritanical, they are right. Those who hope to stifle thought act out of fear—just like many of the religious migrants to early New England. Like the Puritans, today’s censors too may be destined for failure and ridicule.
Peter C. Mancall, distinguished professor at USC, is the author of The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England.