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Cancel Culture began in 1620

thank the Puritans

By Maria Shimizu ChristensenPublished 3 years ago 3 min read
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Public domain image from the British Library. Anne Hutchinson on trial.

"You're outta here!"

From right to left, everyone in America is pretty busy trying to cancel just about everything and everyone (else). Or at least that's the way it’s described by a lot of people, regardless of their political ideologies or whether or not they’re trying to cancel someone or something. Double standards and hypocrisy are running amok in society. But what does cancelling even mean?

That's a nuanced, loaded, and long conversation I'm not getting into because others have covered it quite well. This article on Vox describes, "How the concept has evolved to mean different things to different people," and what the term evolved from. Suffice it to say that we want to punish people who don’t adhere to our standards.

The point I want to briefly make here is that America has never had a period in history where people weren’t trying to cancel, punish, and exclude other people, from its founding to modern times. This also includes the time before America was America.

In 1620 a group of Puritans set sail on the Mayflower, headed for the New World. You may have heard about that in history class. They founded Plymouth Colony in what is now known as Massachusetts and eventually started to spread out. More Puritans arrived, and new villages and communities were formed. A decade later they comprised most of the leadership of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Their history included a break with the Church of England because they believed, among other things, that the church was too similar to Catholicism and it condoned hedonistic pursuits. In a nutshell, they were persecuted, moved to the Netherlands to escape persecution, and left the Netherlands when it appeared that their children were beginning to assimilate into the culture.

The Puritans wanted to found a colony based on religious liberty. Sounds great, right? What they meant was that they wanted to be free to practice their version of religion, while also being free to deny that same liberty to anyone or any group that practiced a different religion or believed whatever they deemed were heretical thoughts.

In 1636 the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony kicked out the minister Roger Williams for his radical and dangerous ideas that threatened the stability of the status quo. He then founded what would become Rhode Island.

The next year, Anne Hutchinson was put on trial for similar reasons and banished from the colony.

In 1692 the infamous Salem witch trials began. Over 200 people faced accusations of witchcraft, 20 people were executed, and several died while in jail awaiting trial.

The Puritans banned Catholics and Anabaptists, and hanged Quakers. And then there were the Native Americans…

If that's not cancelling people I don't know what is. And that’s just the beginning of our history.

We have always made people into scapegoats, and have used public shaming since the days of the original Puritans. People were put in stocks for public consumption. Whippings and hangings were done in the open and turned into spectacles.

In the modern era we have effectively employed blacklisting and actual censorship against people and ideas. The invention of new technologies like television and the internet have made it easier than ever to not only condemn those we don’t like, but to gather like-minded followers on our crusades. The best and one of the earliest examples being Joseph McCarthy and the Red Scare.

Argue about terms, semantics, ideologies, freedom, and popular culture all you want, but it’s undeniable that we have a very long history of banishing, cancelling, persecuting, and executing people who do not agree with us. It’s what we do.

opinion
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About the Creator

Maria Shimizu Christensen

Writer living my dreams by day and dreaming up new ones by night

The Read Ink Scribbler

Bauble & Verve

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Also, History Major, Senior Accountant, Geek, Fan of cocktails and camping

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