Sarah Vowell is a great humorist and if you don’t immediately know her name, then you surely would recognize her uniquely gifted voice, heard on public radio’s “This American Life” and as Violet, the teenage superhero of Pixar’s “The Incredibles.” Vowell is also an excellent amateur historian, and her wit illuminates her love of American history in all its glory and controversy in her books “The Partly Cloudy Patriot,” “Assassination Vacation” and “The Wordy Shipmates.” She gives a reading tonight at 8 at the Paramount Theatre.
I tried to interview Vowell (pictured right) ahead of tonight’s Austin appearance, but, alas, she was unavailable. Since her most recent book, “The Wordy Shipmates,” explores the history and beliefs of the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (who are not to be confused with the Thanksgiving Puritans of Plymouth, thank you very much), I wanted to ask her if she had any thoughts on the controversy surrounding the State Board of Education’s reassessment of the social studies curriculum and the effort by the board’s religious conservatives to set textbook guidelines that support their view of America as a Christian nation. A good look at the controversy appeared two weeks ago in The New York Times Magazine in an article titled “How Christian Were the Founders?” The short answer: Very, kind of, in name only. Depends.
To say the United States is a Christian nation is to unfortunately simplify a rich, complicated cultural history — a history that’s far more interesting than the politically motivated notion supported by the education board’s Christian conservatives. Vowell relishes this complexity and all the contradictions and tangled arguments associated with it. And few groups in American history were as divided and disputatious as the Massachusetts Puritans. As she writes in “The Wordy Shipmates”: “I’m always disappointed when I see the word ‘Puritan’ tossed around for shorthand for a bunch of generic, boring, stupid, judgmental killjoys. Because to me, they are very specific, fascinating, sometimes brilliant, judgmental killjoys who rarely agreed on anything except that Catholics are going to hell.”
Vowell may not agree with the Massachusetts Puritans but she admires their intellectual rigor. These were the people who gave us Harvard, after all. “The United States is often called a Puritan nation,” Vowell writes. “Well, here is one way in which it emphatically is not: Puritan lives were overwhelmingly, fanatically literary. Their single-minded obsession with one book, the Bible, made words the center of their lives — not land, not money, not power, not fun. I swear on Peter Stuyvesant’s peg leg that the country that became the U.S. bears a closer family resemblance to the devil-may-care merchants of New Amsterdam than it does to Boston’s communitarian English majors.”
The enduring legacy of the Puritans is not that they left behind a Christian nation but that they planted the seed of American exceptionalism. Their particular brand of Christianity led them to see themselves as God’s favorites and New England “as a city upon a hill,” to quote from John Winthrop’s famous sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity.” The Puritans saw themselves as God-preferred exceptions. In addition to arguing that America is a Christian nation, the religious conservatives on the State Board of Education also want guidelines that reflect America’s exceptionalism — they share the Puritan view that we are a nation chosen by God to bring goodness and light to the world.
The official seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (pictured above) featured the image of an Indian, naked save for a cluster of leaves shielding his privates. He holds a bow in his left hand and an arrow in his right. Drifting in a cartoon bubble over his head are these words: “Come over and help us.”
“The worldview behind that motto — we’re here to help, whether you want our help or not — is the Massachusetts Puritans’ most enduring bequest to the future United States,” Vowell writes. An entire history course could be constructed around a discussion of the words on that seal. What context created them? What did they mean? What consequences did they produce? Most important, how do they continue to inspire or haunt America?