“So, what possible relevance do you think the Puritans could really have for today's student?”

I instantly knew I was not going to get the job at the major Catholic, Jesuit university my interviewer represented. I don't know why I was so taken aback. As David D. Hall put it, “Too many people in the United States have come under the sway of Arthur Miller's The Crucible and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter,” and that includes academics. Nor was this scholar the first whose supposedly brash, iconoclastic, plain-spoken attitude barely concealed the various ideologies which captivate contemporary academia.

I’m grateful in hindsight, however, that this attack surfaced so that I knew in future encounters to address the issue, even when more polite scholars let it remain unspoken. On this particular occasion I tried to make a joke of it, stammering something about how John Winthrop's flagship in the 1630 Great Migration, the Arbella, carried 3,500 gallons of water and 10,000 gallons of beer. In a more recent interview, I brought up the question myself, asking how anyone could question whether the Puritans, with their mania for social regulation, would appeal to students in the era of Bernie Sanders.

Teachers must be “presentist” to some extent, trying to relate past events to contemporary issues, but I hope in this work of scholarship I can bypass our current ideologies as I try to explain why Puritan ideology interests me. The original research question that took me to graduate school has not changed: how did medieval political ideas, including natural law, natural rights, popular sovereignty, corporatism (the image of society as a body politic), the Aristotelian concept of natural sociability, the right of resistance and moral economy, as well as the primacy of the common good (“general welfare”) in politics, find their way into American political culture? The largely unspoken, unexamined consensus of mainstream academics has been that they arrived by way of Enlightenment thinkers, but these notions seemed to me too deeply ingrained in American life to have appeared so late in the formation of colonial communities. I had already been exploring Catholic vectors of influence on the founding of the United States, especially Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, but I found few additional leads.