Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games

> People keep saying "Puritans" like it answers all questions, but Puritans were hundreds of years ago. We had our own share of people with peculiar attitudes back then.

We literally had Puritans in Europe [1]

” The Puritans were English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who sought to rid the Church of England of what they considered to be Roman Catholic practices, maintaining that the Church of England had not been fully reformed and should become more Protestant.[1] Puritanism played a significant role in English and early American history, especially in the Protectorate in Great Britain, and the earlier settlement of New England.”

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puritans

Yeah, and then most of them left and came here, which the article cites as having caused a "radical" divergence:

> Almost all Puritan clergy left the Church of England after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the Act of Uniformity 1662. Many continued to practise their faith in nonconformist denominations, especially in Congregationalist and Presbyterian churches.[2] The nature of the Puritan movement in England changed radically. In New England, it retained its character for a longer period.

It's not crazy to think that this could have had an outsized influence on the US given how influential New England was in the early days. Even 120-130 years after the point that the quoted section mentions, when the colonies were transitioning into what's now the United States, close to a third of them were part of New England.

> Church of England

Doesn't mean that continental Europe wasn't full of puritanical nutjobs.

Calvin himself ran a dystopian theocratic state\hellhole in Geneva yet hardly anyone references that when talking about conservativism in Switzerland.

> Even 120-130 years after the point

There was a significant generational backlash towards puritanism and a push towards pluralism/secularism by the late 1700s. IMHO Second/Third "Great Awakenings" had a much bigger impact than a handful of Puritans inhabiting New England in the 1600s.

> Doesn't mean that continental Europe wasn't full of puritanical nutjobs.

I believe English puritans were also in Holland and France for a while.

If you’re looking at the geographical distribution of their influence, isn’t it weird that the place where the puritans settled (“New England”) is arguably the least puritanical region of the US?

Yes the Pilgrims for instance emigrated from Holland and not England. Of course the Plymouth Colony was quite "progressive" compared to the oppressive theocracy in Massachusetts. At least they weren't hanging quakers, dissenters and didn't burn a single witch during the panic..

Anyway I don't think that the English Puritans/etc. were somehow particularly exceptional (besides the fact that they emigrated to North America) compared to other similar groups in Europe.

Nowadays, sure, but keep in mind that the "US" didn't extend beyond the east coast when the Puritans first settled here. You might be able to make an argument that there's no cultural influence from the colonial days that lasted until today (although I'd disagree with that sentiment), but otherwise, where would you expect any cultural influence in the rest of the US to have come from?

(To be clear, I'm not saying that there weren't existing cultures there before the US expanded out further west, but I imagine most people would agree that the US today isn't culturally as influenced by them as much as from the the colonies and pre-expansion US.)

New England is perceived as less religious than the South, but one reason for that is that New England's moral perceptions had a strong influence on US political beliefs. In other words, the Puritans morphed into the Congregationalists who morphed into the Unitarians, who basically took over (in the 19th Century) US political thinking (or at least the Left side of it), giving the appearance that New England does not having any particular or special moral or religious beliefs (at least to those on the Left half of the US political divide).

I grew up in New England and have lived in the South and in California, and IMHO morality is a bigger determinant of the behavior of the average person in New England than it is in the other places I've lived (all in the US). The South and California are more pragmatic, less moralistic.

> Calvin himself ran a dystopian theocratic state\hellhole in Geneva yet hardly anyone references that when talking about conservativism in Switzerland.

I'm not familiar with Swiss politics, but if there's a significant Christian element to it, it seems like it would be pretty reasonable to wonder about whether the historical basis for this is related to Calvinism. If it's not significantly Christian, then it's not surprising it doesn't get mentioned.

> There was a significant generational backlash towards puritanism and a push towards pluralism/secularism by the late 1700s. IMHO Second/Third "Great Awakenings" had a much bigger impact than a handful of Puritans inhabiting New England in the 1600s.

Sure, but those those were backlashes themselves to the backlash to the secularism that you mentioned happened beforehand. I'm not saying that there weren't Puritan-like influences elsewhere, or that there were no other developments in between the Puritans and modern Christian conservatism in the US, but there's a clear historical tradition of Christian conservatism in US politics, so I don't know why you don't think it's unreasonable to recognize how that has influenced what we see today.

To explain at a higher level where I'm coming from: I don't see historical analysis as making claims about the state we're in today as being a deterministic outcome based on the events that happen in the past because that's not any more possible than predicting exactly what will happen in the future based on the knowledge we have today. The most we can do to explain why things are the way they are now is to look at what things in the past have influenced where we are today.

Not inherently disagreeing with you at all. I'm not just sure whether we should look as far back as the 1600s. Yes some American colonies were founded by religious extremists.

But the divergence between US and Europe didn't happen until the late 1800s if not the early 1900s.

e.g. according to the census of 1851 ~40% of people in Britain were regularly attending religious services. No hard figures for the US from the time but from what I can find the proportion in the US was comparable. Except while mid 1800s was pretty much the peak in Britain in US it kept rising and reached its highest point in the 1950s while in UK religious participation had almost reached current levels by then.

IMHO the rise of political secularism, socialiam and the near societal collapse across much of Europe during and after WW1 and WW2 had a much bigger impact than whatever happened 400 years ago.

That's a good point. When something is within the usual for someone's experience, it's not going to be as obvious, so it becomes the baseline that's used to compare other things to. For stuff like religion, it's easy to assume that your amount is normal, and having more (if you don't feel like you have much) or less (if you do feel like you have a lot) is unusual.

I don't have any experience living outside of the northeast (although not New England specifically since high school), but I definitely agree that there's certainly more religion in New England than might be obvious from the outside (more Catholic than the rest of the country, which also might explain some of the differences).