New age puritans

Contemporary puritans are driving a culture of moral conformity that demands performative piety in all public activities. By Nick Cater.

This year’s Melbourne Comedy Festival began with a less-than-sparkling, expletive-laden welcome to country ceremony that screened on the ABC for a full seven minutes.

It was accompanied by a lecture by Steph Tisdell, an Indigenous woman who identifies as a comedian. Tisdell’s “sense of social justice matched with her formidable intelligence enables her to deliver social insights that challenge cultural stereotypes in a way that is hilarious”, boasts her website. There was little evidence of that hilarity as she reprimanded those who find welcome to country awkward. “You can think of it as awkward or you can think of it as (expletive) getting off easy. A lot of damage was done. All we’re asking for is 10 seconds of recognition at the start of your (expletive) Easter parade.”

Welcome to the new age of puritanism where stand-up comedy has been replaced with performative piety. It doesn’t have to be funny, it just has to contribute to the fight against systemic evils and the creation of a less shameful society.

Like Hollywood directors, artists and athletes, comedians are no longer tasked with delivering enjoyment for its own sake. They must convey the correct moral and political message or risk being deplatformed.

The enthusiasts driving this culture of moral conformity have more in common with their 17th- and 18th-century puritan forebears than they care to imagine. In 1707, Benjamin Colman, a Congregational church minister in Boston, published a comprehensive guide to sober mirth not dissimilar to the rules that seem to apply at the Melbourne Comedy Festival. “Let it be pure and grave, serious and devout, all of which it may be and yet free and cheerful,” he instructed. He admonished the use of “carnal and vicious mirth” and “idle or impertinent mirth”. The man who uses mirth in a licentious manner abandons “the gravity of reason and acts the part of a frolic colt … He roars and frisks and leaps”.

Not surprisingly, the requirement comedians be both earnest and funny is threatening to kill off the business altogether. In 2008, comedy movies accounted for 25 per cent of Hollywood box-office takings. Ten years later comedy was reduced to just 8 per cent. Comedy box-office receipts had more than halved even as overall revenue had grown larger.

These striking comparisons between puritans old and new are drawn in a new book by US conservative commentator Noah Rothman. Others have compared today’s progressive ideology to a fundamentalist new religion replete with dogma, liturgy and conformity with a narrative of sin and redemption. Rothman goes further, explaining earlier generations of puritans sought more than personal salvation. They were engaged on a utopian, messianic mission not dissimilar to the people we today consider as woke. Puritanism was more than a religious creed, “it was also a program for society” furthered by the good work of the righteous. Any activity not seen as useful to the cause was regarded with contempt. Actively seeking personal salvation meant being active in the world.

The imperative for public activities to be useful and not merely fun has overtaken America’s National Football League, beginning with former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s 2016 kneeling protest against almost everything American during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner.

The NFL took a stand against the protest in a desire to preserve the sport as a politics-free zone. In 2020, however, within a week of the protests sparked by the death of George Floyd, the NFL issued a grovelling statement beginning with the words, “We were wrong”. The protests were “emblematic of the centuries of silence, inequality and oppression of black players, coaches, fans and staff”.

The new puritans bring their morality to bear on the food we eat. The production of meat and other animal products is causing global warming, they claim. The world must move to a vegan diet supplemented only by bugs, the only type of fauna considered to be acceptable for human consumption. The absence of meat is seen as a virtuous form of self-denial.

“Proponents of this sort of thing seem constitutionally incapable of arguing in favour of a bug-heavy diet because you might actually like it,” writes Rothman. “For the New Puritans, a smug sense of self-satisfaction is the most delicious dish of all.”

The demonisation of food reached absurdity with Raj Patel’s condemnation of apple pie in The Guardian last year. Since apple pie is a version of an English pumpkin pie recipe, it is both appropriative and sullied by the legacy of English colonialism. Sugarcane is a by-product of the exploitation of black Caribbean labourers, claims Patel. Apples owe their origins to the Spanish colonists who brought this Central Asian fruit to North America in their quest to pilfer the continent’s bounty. Patel is a crusader for “food justice”. He writes: “The history of the US food system has always, however, been one of struggle.”

Holidays for the sake of rest, recreation and familial gatherings are equally problematic. If Americans insist on taking a break on the fourth Thursday in November it must be given a greater purpose. “Thanksgiving Day should be known as National Land Theft and American Genocide Day,” writes Huffington Post contributor Nicole Breedlove.

Rothman’s hopeful message is that this state of mass confusion will not last forever. It cannot be countered by politicians, since the New Puritans are engaged in a moral crusade that allows no compromise. Our system of government is designed to frustrate all-or-nothing demands, force trade-offs and water down grandiose initiatives. Politicians can neither force cultural change nor resist it.

If Rothman is right, however, and we are witnessing a puritanical revival rather than the rise of a conventional political movement, there is hope that it will be consumed sooner rather than later by its own risibility. Earlier incarnations of puritanism ended when its proponents became laughing stock. Indeed, the very word puritan was coined as an insult. Their heirs have become “the very portrait of fastidious busybodies”, writes Rothman. “The consequences of their actions may be deadly serious, but these are not serious people. They are worthy of mockery. Mock them.”

He says a quiet resentment is breeding that will one day fuel a backlash. In an era of earnest, unfunny comedy, perhaps we will have the last laugh.

The Rise of the New Puritans by Noah Rothman is published this month by, Broadside Books, a division of Harper Collins.