The Impuritans -- All the Judgment...None of the Virtue

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Once upon a time, King Henry the Eighth left the Catholic Church and started his own church, which was basically the Catholic Church, except he was allowed a divorce.

Some of the English felt that if they were going to leave the previously established church, they should go farther. The officials of the Church of England lived like kings—in opulence and corruption. These people wanted a more virtuous and more austere life.

Those who pursued this path were called the Puritans.

The Puritans—and their moral descendants, the Victorians—strove to lead good lives. They dressed simply*. They strove for virtue. They tried to do good works.

*—they are almost always shown dressed in black, but, apparently, those were their Sunday garments. In America, at least, Puritans wore colors, like everyone else, during the week.

As time went on, some people took this seriously and truly strove to live good lives. Some did this quietly. Others did it loudly, attempting to influence their neighbors—sometimes kindly, sometimes through a shrill and holier-than-thou manner that many found grating.

What was the most grating of all was when these people did not live up to what they preached.

Those who wanted approval without effort made a show of virtue in public while drinking and whoring behind closed doors.

The word we use for these people is hypocrites.

By the time the 1960s came along, hypocrisy had become the ultimate offense in the eyes of the young. They believed that avoiding hypocrisy was the number one duty. So if people were falling short of the ideals of the Puritans and Victorians, the best thing was to embrace the vice. Better to admit your sin than to claim falsely to be virtuous.

So they tried to adopt an attitude of tolerance and permissiveness, suggesting that we should be more accepting of those who failed to live up to the virtuous standards.

This approach did not encourage virtue. Sometimes, quite the opposite. But they did succeed at showing tolerance. In the seventies through the nineties, the mantra of many was “Nothing you can say will offend me” and “I don’t agree with what you said, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Then, around 2007, all this went awry.

What came next was something far worse than either holier-than-thou Puritans, or hypocrites not-living-up-to-Puritanical-standards, or the lazy all-accepting standard.

Starting around fifteen years ago, the holier-than-thou attitude returned…but without the call to virtue.

Instead, they aped the behavior of these earlier religious movements, the Puritans and the Victorians, but they used their condescension to enforce vice—Abortion. Sexual perversion. Exposure and degradation of women.

The list could go on and on.

They ape the Puritans, but they are not Puritans.

They are Impuritans.

It is true that many in the past fell short of their high ideals, and this led to hypocrisy. But when the Puritans and the Victorians exhorted people to virtue, some people took it seriously.

Some people did live virtuous lives, or at least more virtuous than they would have without this exhortation. But the modern Impuritans? Not so much.

Their shrewish attitude will still cause some to strive to live…down?…to their standards, but they will not be improved thereby.

People call the behavior of trying to demonstrate that you are living according to the values of your neighbors virtue-signalling.

But really, it’s all signal and no virtue.

When I think of these times, I am reminded of a scene from A Wanderer in the Spirit Land—a book written in 1896. (It is supposedly a channeled true story. We can make of that what we will.) When the main character, Francezzo, is wandering through Hell, he meets an ancestor of his who claims he was there with Francezzo in “all your best moments.” Slowly, it dawns on Francezzo that the moments when this prideful ancestor influenced him were his most vile moments.

The ancestor then tries to tempt Francezzo to stay in Hell and offers to teach him to tempt living men.

Francezzo says:

Again, I saw the power in intellect and in literature which I could control and influence through the imaginative descriptive faculties of mortals who, under my prompting, would write such books as appealed to the reason, the intellect, and the sensual passions of mankind, until the false glamour thrown over them should cause men to view with indulgence and even approval the most revolting ideas and the most abominable teachings. 

Francezzo wisely turned him down, but that has not stopped the Powers of Hell from influencing modern people in just such a fashion, has it?

There’s even a related Bible verse:

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! (Isaiah 5:20 )