Commentary
Two books have recently been published with the words “The New Puritans” in their titles. From the UK comes Andrew Doyle’s “The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World,” while Noah Rothman of the United States has produced “The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives’ War on Fun.”
As their titles indicate, both authors seek to explain the increasingly oppressive “cancel culture” prevailing on both sides of the Atlantic as the recrudescence of a 17th-century British religious cult that is now mainly remembered for its members who were the first European settlers in New England in 1620 and, a generation later, spearheaded the English revolution, which ended with the beheading of King Charles I….