The Not-So-Puritan Origins of the American Self

Abstract

Twenty years ago, while I was studying at Cambridge University, my accommodation overlooked a college chapel that had once been a victim of Puritan iconoclasm. The chapel of Peterhouse was consecrated in 1633 by supporters of Archbishop William Laud and his Beauty of Holiness movement. Unsurprisingly, its quirky Renaissance-Gothic synthesis did not appeal to the thousands of Parliamentary troops who were quartered in Cambridge during the English Civil Wars, nor the newly appointed “Commissioner for the destruction of monuments of idolatry and superstition” for the Eastern Association, William Dowsing (1596–1668). Though Dowsing succeeded in removing statues of angels and cherubs from the chapel in 1643, High-Church-leaning Peterhouse fellows managed to hide the Flemish stained-glass panel that depicted Rubens’s Le Coup de Lance, which they reinstalled after the restoration of the Stuart royal line in 1660.1 Ten years after gazing at that chapel roof, during my two-day campus interview for a job at the University of Minnesota, I included its iconoclastic story in my response to a question from a search committee member. I had been discussing how the 1707 Act of Union between the English and Scottish parliaments had created a bi-confessional British state, which provided a model of jurisdictional pluralism for dissenting Protestants in North America. But the professor asked me to rewind one century to consider how the 1603 Regal Union between the English and Scottish monarchies might also help us to understand the origins of religious pluralism in colonial North America and the nascent United States. I used the chapel story to illustrate a warning that I offered to students: be careful mining seventeenth-century Anglo-Scottish history for the disestablishmentarian roots of British imperial life and American religious pluralism, or even the notion that multiple religious establishments might cohere within a single political union. As demonstrated by the deployment of authority by William Dowsing, iconoclastic Puritans shared a tendency for