The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American

by Andrew L. Seidel

The Puritans’s founding principle was intolerance, not tolerance, let alone religious freedom. They understood and even admitted this. One Puritan preacher, Urian Oakes, later president of Harvard, called toleration the “first-born of all abominations.”62 Another, Thomas Shepard Jr., preached that it is “Satan’s policy to plead for an indefinite and boundless toleration.”63 John Cotton helped banish the heretics Anne Hutchinson, who was once Cotton’s acolyte, and Roger Williams. In 1647, Cotton published The Bloudy Tenent, Washed and Made White in the Bloud of the Lambe as a response to Williams’s 1644 book The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, for Cause of Conscience, which had called for a “hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world.” Cotton claimed that “it was toleration that made the Church anti-Christian and the Church never took hurt by the punishment of heretics.”64 This from a man who fled England because Charles I was persecuting Puritans like himself.