Conical Hats in Our Genes

"Discrimination" being such a vice in this society, one has to wonder that no-one experiences guilt over the treatment which the Puritans routinely receive from the New World's current inhabitants. The vitriol with which Nathaniel Hawthorne attacked his not-so-distant ancestors in, for example, The Scarlet Letter, has permanently set the tone for American reference to those hapless 17th-century settlers. But (to switch Hawthorne novels), like the ghosts of the Pyncheons, they still wreak their vengeance, for everyone born and raised in the United States has conical hats in his genes.

America is a place where a fastidious, albeit highly selective, moralism is a nearly universal trait, like individualism. And this fastidious moralism, the ghost of the Puritans' rigorous Christianity, has proved to be incorrigibly trans-generational. When one looks at abolition, or prohibition, or the current anti-smoking or anti-obesity craze, one sees the conical hats making their tour again. One could even argue that the contours of the pro-abortion movement have something of a conical shape to them.

The strange thing about these hat genes is that, subsequent to the Puritans, our rigid moralizing tends to concern itself with something that is, in the larger scope of things, rather silly. Consider prohibition, for example. Here you have multitudes of people concerned enough with their neighbors' consumption of alcohol to pass a constitutional amendment against it. And you'd better exhale quick if you want a last puff before somebody tries the same thing with smoking-or maybe french fries.

Another peculiarity of the American conscience is how specific (selective?) it is. It is specifically alcohol, rather than alcohol and opiates and tobacco and coffee, that captures the national imagination. Also, note the inflexibility of the American rule: it is not that sales of alcohol shall be limited to 2 ounces per person, but that no-one shall ever have any alcohol at all.

What can Christians make of this impulse, other than instigating or supporting whatever flippant manifestations it may currently take? I would suggest the following: knowing of our national propensity for Puritanical rule-making, why not present a meaningful issue for its consumption? Why could we not, for instance, tailor our defense of chastity to fit the fitful body of the American public? Calvinists in particular should remind themselves that we do (at least officially) believe in such a thing as civic righteousness, and we have surrounding us a country full of people who find themselves genetically predisposed to the proposal and enforcement of moralisms. Try on those conical hats; they're not so outdated after all.