Writing in 1581, the English Puritan Perceval Wilburn cheekily described his religious compatriots as “the hotter sort of Protestants”: those who burned with religious zeal—and were also sometimes literally burned for it. Many historians have made this definition their own. More recently, journalist James Sleeper has ambivalently described the Puritan refugees who fled to a New England as “America’s first Very Serious People,” people who were serious about their moral principles.6 And also serious about enforcing them (including on non-Puritans).
