Question

If you had to choose one “answer” to Morone’s Puritan question, “Whom should we blame for our problems?”, which “answer” from the reading would you choose? The Puritan Approach or the Social Gospel?

Answer 1

The answer to this question would be the Puritan Approach.

Morone says that the Puritans were motivated by the questions "Who are we? Who belongs?". They were looped in a "restless quest for their own elusive identity" that they did not create naturally, but by making a list of Satanic Others, hence establishing the pattern through which all upcoming moral disputes arose. In the need to form and preserve its identity, Puritans proceed to denounce other groups, which inevitably results in their prohibition. But the pattern was already set and is the same for everything i.e., race, gender, class, etc.

According to Professor Morone, The centrality of morality in American political life, as he terms it in his study Hellfire Nation as "politics of sin" is "a form of moral discourse initiated by the Puritans and purveyed by their so-called neo-Puritan successors, such as the abolitionists, prohibitionists, and anticommunists of subsequent eras.''