On December 20, 1606, 3 tiny ships—the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery—slipped into the grey wintertime existent of the Thames River. On committee were 145 men, a premix of settlers and seamen, grim-faced arsenic they near the shores of England for a faraway continent fewer of them could imagine. These members of the Virginia Company carried with them a treble commission: to found an English foothold successful America and to dispersed the Christian religion among the peoples they expected to encounter.
The charter of King James I obliged the Virginia Company to question earthy resources—in peculiar the gold, silver, and copper they believed to beryllium lying underneath the caller land—but its connection was suffused with divine ngo concerning the quality beings surviving there. The settlers connected committee those 3 ships would beryllium liable for the “propagating of Christian Religion to specified People, arsenic yet unrecorded successful Darkness and miserable Ignorance of the existent Knowledge and Worship of God.” They would yet bring “the Infidels and Savages, surviving successful those parts, to quality Civility, and to a settled and quiescent Government.”
The Virginia Company’s ain True Declaration of the State of Virginia declared arsenic its task “first, to preach and baptize into Christian religion and by the propagation of the Gospel, to retrieve retired of the arms of the devil a fig of mediocre and miserable souls wrapped up into decease successful astir invincible ignorance; to endeavor the fulfilling and accomplishments of the fig of the elite which shall beryllium gathered from retired of each corners of the earth; and to adhd to our myte the treasury of heaven.”
In America, founded by Puritans yet propelled by markets, the struggle betwixt self-abnegation and self-indulgence has been uniquely sharp.
The ngo of the settlers would not beryllium section oregon provisional, nor simply accumulative, but universal, moral, and divine. They would beryllium the world’s savior.
After galore harrowing months astatine sea, successful April 1607 the ships yet entered the rima of the Chesapeake, and the sea-legged men stumbled onto the dunes of a constrictive promontory, which they christened Cape Henry aft the eldest lad of King James I. The archetypal enactment of the English successful America was neither to physique structure nor to scout for food. Instead, they planted a transverse successful the sand, thereby claiming the territory portion declaring their purpose: that this chartless onshore was to beryllium bound to God.
When the colonists learned to rise crops, successful peculiar tobacco, and stabilized Jamestown, they were capable to ore connected their godly ngo to remake the Powhatan Indians into Christian Englishmen. The astir celebrated conversion was that of Pocahontas, girl of the main Powhatan, captured successful 1613 and baptized the pursuing twelvemonth arsenic Rebecca. Her translation from “heathen” to Christian Englishwoman was celebrated successful England arsenic impervious that the colony was serving its purpose. The Virginia Company besides instructed the colony’s politician to instrumentality Indian children and bring them up successful English “language, and manners,” distant from autochthonal priests and leaders who mightiness “poison and infect them.”
That evangelical and civilizing ngo was shaken by what immoderate planetary relations scholars present telephone blowback. In the Powhatan uprising of 1622, autochthonal warriors killed 347 colonists; successful 1644 Chief Opechancanough led a last effort to expel the English, sidesplitting up to 5 100 more. Afterward, immoderate colonists clung to conversion and assimilation, portion others concluded that the Indians were obstacles to a Christian federation who had to beryllium removed.
The Pilgrims of New England arrived with a akin imperial mission. The Council for New England’s charter called for the “Conversion and reduction” of autochthonal peoples to “Civil Society and Christian Religion,” and the Mayflower Compact declared that their voyage was undertaken “for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith.” The founders of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay conceived of their settlements arsenic godly commonwealths defined by subject and self-denial. Governor John Winthrop promised liberty, but defined it arsenic “subjection to authority.” Colonial laws suppressed drunkenness, idleness, intersexual liberty, and extravagance successful dress. They sought not simply to works settlements but to found ascetic societies successful which each idiosyncratic lived nether the subject of God.
The norms archetypal imposed by the aboriginal settlers successful Virginia and New England yet formed the ground of the ceremonial civilization of the United States of America. From the nation’s founding until the predetermination of Donald Trump, American governmental leaders conceived of the republic arsenic Christlike and imperial. Yet simultaneously, mean Americans produced fashionable cultures that undermined puritanical repression some astatine location and successful the overseas countries wherever they spread.
When Thomas Morton stepped disconnected the vessel Unity and onto the formation astatine Camp Wollaston, astatine the bluish extremity of Plymouth Colony, the archetypal happening helium did was merchantability brew to the Indians. Morton had traveled from London to New England not to assistance found the Puritans’ “city upon a hill” but to find partners successful commercialized and recreation. Dissatisfied with the ascetic authorities successful Plymouth, Morton organized a decidedly non-Puritan settlement, Merrymount, northbound of Plymouth astatine the contiguous tract of Quincy, Massachusetts. To its Puritan neighbors, it was everything they feared. At Merrymount, whiskey and brew flowed freely, colonists and Indians mingled with a familiarity considered some indecent and dangerous, and connected May Day successful 1627, erstwhile they gathered to creation astir a towering maypole, the neighboring Puritans considered it a demonic totem of idiosyncratic licence their laws had agelong since forbidden.
Morton himself recalled the celebrations with pride. The Merrymount settlers, helium wrote, “did devise amongst themselves revels and merriment aft the aged English custome,” brewing a tube of “excellent beare” and raising the maypole with “drumes, gunnes, pistols and different fitting instruments,” aided by Indian visitors who joined successful the revels. For the Puritans, who had banned specified rituals successful England and sought to physique a godly commonwealth successful the New World, Merrymount was a menace to their precise mission.
By 1628, the renegade colony’s estimation and its increasing colonisation proved excessively much. Governor William Bradford condemned Morton arsenic a “Lord of Misrule,” and dispatched Captain Myles Standish and an equipped militia to enactment an extremity to the Merrymount experiment. Morton was captured, astir killed successful the assault, and yet deported to England. The maypole was chopped down and burned, leaving lone a informing of what libertine state would bring successful a onshore the Puritans intended to govern with discipline.
After destroying Merrymount, Puritan authorities waged systematic campaigns against drinking, sexuality, and pleasure. They fined, whipped, oregon publically humiliated drunkards and severely punished enactment extracurricular marriage. Dancing was singled retired arsenic particularly dangerous. In 1684, clergyman Increase Mather condemned “Mixt oregon Promiscuous Dancing” astatine frolics, revels, balls, and “wanton Bacchanallian Christmasses,” urging magistrates to state it “utterly unlawful.” His lad Cotton aboriginal called for an extremity to dances that led young men and women “unto large liberties with 1 another.” Yet the onslaught connected amusive was ne'er afloat successful. In backmost rooms, backwoods, and barns, settlers brewed ale, stole hours for backstage dances, and recovered ways to bask themselves extracurricular the scope of the godly state.
This was an empire of repression, waging an eternal conflict against the desires of radical for state and pleasure.
The renegade taste forms produced and enjoyed by mean Americans person done much to liberate the radical nether dictators than thing the 82nd Airborne could do.
The Puritans were capable to subdue the revelers of Merrymount, but they ne'er erased the impulses the colony embodied. From the beginning, America contained some John Winthrop’s “City upon a Hill,” with its demands for subject and devotion, and Thomas Morton’s maypole, with its solemnisation of sensuality. One imaginativeness was ascetic, evangelical, and belligerent; the different was hedonistic, subversive, and liberatory.
That hostility has shaped not lone the nation’s home beingness but besides its spot successful the world. States, by their nature, necessitate repression: subjects and citizens indispensable curb their idiosyncratic urges and crook their interests to the needs of the state. Capitalism, too, requires subject to function, yet it is arsenic babelike connected desire—on consumption, gratification, and the pursuit of novelty. In America, founded by Puritans yet propelled by markets, the struggle betwixt self-abnegation and self-indulgence has been uniquely sharp.
In the ceremonial civilization of authorities and overseas policy, the United States has clung to the archetypal ngo of the colonists. It has formed itself arsenic a motivation federation with a mission, projecting Christlike ideals abroad. From the Puritan sermons of the seventeenth period to the calls of twentieth-century progressives to marque the satellite “safe for democracy,” Americans person often spoken arsenic though they bore a divine work to bring bid to a fallen world.
But alongside that ascetic imperial imaginativeness ran different current. American fashionable culture, produced by the taste descendants of Merrymount, offered thing precise different. Its exports were not sermons but songs, not codes of behaviour but offers of emancipation. Jazz, stone and roll, Hollywood movies, bluish jeans, and hip-hop person proved to beryllium existential threats to each authoritarian authorities of the modern era.
In the twentieth century, fascists, communists, Islamists, and nationalists of each benignant person devoted overmuch of their vigor to containing, expelling, and eradicating what Soviet commissars called the “virus” of American fashionable culture. In each case, what Puritans had erstwhile sought to suppress astatine home—music, dancing, sexuality, irreverence—became a conveyance for taste subversion abroad. And successful each case, the deployment of American subject unit to contend with its perceived enemies has resulted successful what we telephone blowback—the unexpected but predictable convulsive absorption of the autochthonal populations who resented and resisted equipped intrusions into their world.
Again and again done America’s past successful the world, the renegade taste forms produced and enjoyed by mean Americans person done much to liberate the radical nether dictators than thing the 82nd Airborne could do. Pleasure, successful different words, has proved much destabilizing than subject power.
Savior and Seducer is astir that unresolved contradiction: repression and freedom, evangelism and individualism, decease and desire. It argues that America’s spot successful the satellite cannot beryllium understood without reckoning with the conflict betwixt Winthrop’s terrible imaginativeness and Morton’s libertine rebellion. And it poses a question for Americans today: Will we persist arsenic God’s chosen empire, oregon simply let the liberatory impulses of our nine to proceed to roam free?
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From Savior and Seducer: A Renegade History of the United States successful the World by Thaddeus Russell. Copyright © 2026. Available from Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic.
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