Her concern, though, was not simply with the modern Puritan’s denials of earthly pleasures, but rather the toll that a despiritualized Christian morality—what she referred to as the “narrow puritanic spirit” —takes on the life of the mind. “Aspirit which is absolutely blind to the simplest manifestations of life; hence stands for stagnation and decay,” she argued, can only produce an intellectual life that is fearful, wrathful, and “steeped in the densest provincialism.” Social conservatives were not its only victims. Indeed, social progressives “apparently free from religious and social
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Emma Goldman noted both cons and wokes were Puritanical
