Generations and Regeneration: “Sexceptionalism” and Group Identity among Puritans in Colonial New England

As Puritan colonists ventured to North America, they experienced a set of obligations deeply connected to their identity as English subjects. To the Crown they pledged the settlement of a new continent that would further promote the monarchy’s growing empire. To God they vowed to be models of “Christian charitie” as they cared for each other in a harsh new environment.¹ And for their own fulfillment they promised commitment to pure Christianity, extending the dissent that had led them to pursue distance from England as well as its church.² While colonial New Englanders denigrated the world they had left—they believed England’s corruption would be punished by God—they experienced an internal struggle with regard to the authority of the Crown and their status as English subjects. The trinity of obligation, combined with their ambivalence regarding England and their experience of a hostile and foreign environment, created for the Puritans a powerful and at times contradictory collection of expectations regarding population growth, identity, and reproduction—each related directly to sexuality.

These New English settlers used notions of “generation” and “regeneration” to create a surprising, multifaceted discourse about sexuality that ultimately created a revised sense of group identity and continuity.³ Unpacking this trope, overlooked in the extraordinarily rich literature on colonial sexuality, reveals a prenational tribe that developed identity across generations partially, but significantly, through sexual expectations and behavior.⁴ In essence, from the first to the second and third generations they redefined their reproductive and sexual imperative. To use Benedict Anderson’s terms for nationalism, the Puritans show the “transforming of fatality into continuity” and “links between the dead and the yet unborn, the mystery of regeneration”—but with religion intact and infused with sexuality. More precisely, Puritan continuity was expressed substantially in religious terms, and these terms were intimately bound up with sex and generation.⁵

Recent historical scholarship has uncovered fascinating details about sex in colonial America while also suggesting new analytical approaches and subject matter. This body of work explores attitudes toward marital and heterosexual sex, as well as less common practices of homosexuality, bestiality, and sexual violence, and it has distinguished everyday sexual lives and beliefs from those of the Calvinist leaders. Recent investigations also cover Foucauldian struggles, socially constructed visions, and power dynamics in the regulation of sex, as well as crucial essentialist themes.⁶ Procreation is especially central to existing analysis of the Puritans, but despite the longdominant paradigm of the “reproductive matrix,” there were additional cultural uses of sex.⁷ For instance, Puritans believed that the reproduction of saints would further God’s plan by increasing the population of English participants in the regeneration of the world. Within this framework, however, Puritans developed nonreproductive meanings around sex, sensuality, purity, and taboos that provided useful ways of interpreting themselves and their environment. Sexual expression—especially when closely watched by the members of the Puritan community—could be used to gauge moral quality that could help identify saints and further the kingdoms of God, old England, and New England.⁸ Closer attention to sex and sexual behavior reveals a fairly utilitarian mechanism in Puritan efforts not only to bring about God’s plan for his people but also to develop individual agency in group identity, salvation, and improvement. Sexuality and religious conviction combined at “the crossroads of discourse and lived-experience” and created yet another intersection, that of “lived religion” and “lived sexuality.”⁹

The Calvinist New English sought regeneration, which was the process by which the group and the individual established a proper relationship with God. Understanding this (re)generative nature of the colonists helps to recover a more complex understanding of sex and its utility for group identity and continuity among New England Puritans—and what one might playfully call “sexceptionalism”—in America. It is not, however, that these colonists were exceptional sexually but instead that sex—as a tool for reproduction, population growth, and moral judgment—contributed to the group identity of a people that considered themselves “exceptional.”¹⁰ [End Page 335...