Why this Puritan sculpture may revolutionize your thinking about the rise of Christian nationalism
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- Puritans, the religious fanatics of the 17th century Massachusetts Bay Colony, were part of a political movement that flopped.
- Centuries later, the Trump administration is institutionalizing Christian nationalism with echoes of Puritanism.
- For clues about how this push may play out, look to “The Puritan” — the famous bronze statue by sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens — and the ninth great-grandfather of The Times’ art critic.
The tyrannical doctrine of Christian nationalism, which falsely claims that the United States is a country founded by and for Christians, comes and goes — a recessive trait in the body politic that has reared its ugly head throughout American history. Today, however, the scourge is on the dangerous brink of being fully institutionalized in Washington, D.C., courtesy of the Trump administration.
We’ve been there, done that once before — and it was a flop. For details, check out this extraordinary sculpture, which looks back to a fiasco from 375 years ago.
The great American Beaux-Arts sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens was commissioned in the 1880s to create a memorial statue to Deacon Samuel Chapin, a pious mover and shaker (not that kind of Shaker) in the original Massachusetts Bay Colony. An ordained Puritan minister, Chapin was my ninth great-grandfather — a colonial transplant, born in England in 1598, who arrived in Boston as a 20-something, then headed west. Since no pictures of him exist, the artist hired a professional model to pose for the commemorative statue. Saint-Gaudens’ square-jawed fellow is dressed as the sartorial epitome of colonial sobriety.
He wears a fashionable doublet, breeches, stockings, chunky strapped shoes and a tall felt hat with a buckle in the hatband. Striding forward, his sturdy right hand clutches a knobby wooden walking stick, cut from a tree branch and stripped. The stick, a likely nod to a biblical shepherd’s staff, yields an image of stern authority. Anchoring the figure to the base, it also has a practical function: The cane helps support and stabilize one side of the weighty bronze.
Most dramatically, Chapin is enveloped by the voluminous folds of a massive cloak. He looks like some intrepid 17th century Batman.
This caped crusader effortlessly cradles a colossal Bible in the crook of his left arm. Hefty latches lock shut the big book’s pages, the final word on matters spiritual having been recorded for eternity. A powerful, idealized man of God casts his eyes down toward the ground beneath his feet, rather than heavenward. It’s as if he’s claiming nature’s untrampled territory with his reverential gaze — a distinctly political act for a colonizer.
Saint-Gaudens’ imposing, full-length bronze figure, soon nicknamed “The Puritan,” was an immediate sensation. Today it ranks with his “Robert Gould Shaw Memorial” on Boston Common, an elaborate bronze relief that commemorates African American soldiers serving in the Civil War, including two of Frederick Douglass’ sons. His other premier work is a classic man-on-a-horse — the gilded equestrian statue of William Tecumseh Sherman, victorious Union Army general, standing in front of the Plaza Hotel at an entrance to New York’s Central Park.
But it was “The Puritan” that caught the popular imagination like no other, embedding the icon in the national consciousness. At his Paris studio, Saint-Gaudens began pumping out scaled-down versions, each about 2½ feet tall and in a choice of different bronze patinas — black, green, golden brown — to meet customer demand.
Today, among the more than three dozen that he and his widow, Augusta, sold, examples are in the collections of major museums across America. They include Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, New York’s Metropolitan, Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Puritans were religious fanatics — the Christian nationalists of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Most know they came by the boatload from England in the early 1600s, searching for their religious freedom. Few know why they disappeared less than a century later.
The answer: political failure.
Puritans said religion and government don’t mix, based on the repression their combative sect experienced in Europe. But they couldn’t help themselves. In New England, they meddled, manipulated and even murdered. (Fanaticism is like that. It’s hard to back off when you’ve decided you’re speaking for God.) Not until the whole thing collapsed a hundred years on did space open for a fledgling radical experiment in democratic government, which became the United States. Religious freedom got protected by law, but the Puritans missed out.
Chapin — with lawyer and future colonial governor John Winthrop, savvy business entrepreneur William Pynchon and other British-born Puritans — left England in the 1620s as part of the Great Migration. In 1636, a small band traveled deep into the Connecticut River Valley, north of Hartford, and established rural towns through a covenant with the Pocumtuck Indians. Pynchon named one town Springfield, after his Essex birthplace, east of London. Further up the river, Chapin named Chicopee, a Nipmuc word for evergreen red cedar.
Trouble followed. Religious trouble.
On Oct. 16, 1650, a 158-page volume written by Pynchon, “The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption,” had the dubious distinction of being the first book in American history ordered to be burned by a local government. Pynchon was a devout Puritan, but his sober dismantling of a foundational element of the faith, with which he disagreed, caused an uproar. The arcane theological dispute concerned the precise meaning of Jesus’ suffering during crucifixion, which Pynchon wrote was not the true source of sinners’ redemption — the larger example of the prophet’s life was.
The book was banned in Boston — a phrase for suppressive moral outrage that survives to this day.
The city’s General Court went further. Noting condemnation by the colony’s leading government officials, the judges ruled that all the books should be torched on Boston Common for everyone to see. Just four copies of the reviled heresy survived the flames.
Weaponizing religion, the Puritan government unleashed social chaos. The book-burning spectacle caused a split between Pynchon, who fled back to England, fearing for his safety, and Deacon Chapin, who stayed. For the 250th anniversary of Springfield’s founding, Saint-Gaudens was commissioned to create a monument — not to Pynchon, but to Chapin.
Out with the “bad” Christian, in with the “good” one.
I saw “The Puritan” many times as a kid, growing up a couple towns away from Springfield. It has stood since 1899 in a pocket park between the city’s Central Library and Christ Church Cathedral. I never gave it much notice — I didn’t know then that he was my ancestor — but now the impressive statue seems like evidence that Pynchon, Springfield’s actual founder, was quietly being canceled. (Historian Daniel Crown has called him “the forgotten founding father of colonial New England.”) Not until 1927 was a memorial building to Pynchon constructed as a local history museum.
Canceling is today an official government practice. Trump has issued fervent anti-free-expression diktats forbidding anything but neoclassical style for new federal buildings, and disqualifying art institutions with antidiscrimination programs (DEI) from receiving National Endowment for the Arts grants. He blasted the “terrible” programs at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, while telling a reporter he’d never been there, and installed himself as its chairman. He appointed Ric Grenell, a far-right political operative with zero arts experience but a degree from Evangel University, a fundamentalist college, to run the place.
Advocates of Christian nationalism now permeate Trump’s government. Pete Hegseth, the Cabinet secretary with control of the U.S. military, has a big tattoo across his right bicep in a Gothic font spelling Deus Vult — the Latin term for “God wills it” — a holy-war motto of Europe’s 11th century Christian Crusades. On his chest he tattooed the Crusader’s cross, born as a heraldic symbol of the recaptured Kingdom of Jerusalem.
Trump’s rambling, often incoherent remarks at the recent National Prayer Breakfast, a supposedly interfaith annual event in Washington, boasted his administration’s Christian nationalist commitments. Followers of that corrosive doctrine had been instrumental in organizing the violent 2021 attack on the United States Capitol to keep him in power.
Announcing a presidential commission on religious liberty, he cited “anti-Christian violence and vandalism in our society” in ordering newly appointed Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi to “eradicate anti-Christian bias” from inside the federal government. No extensive examples of said violence and vandalism were forthcoming, but Bondi has ties to the America First Policy Institute, a bizarre political think tank espousing a Christian dominion philosophy called “10 Pillars for Restoring a Nation Under God.”
She co-authored a so-called religious liberty editorial with the daft head of a new White House Faith Office — far-right megachurch televangelist Paula White, who often speaks in tongues. Both are supporters of Russell Vought, an avowed Christian nationalist and principal architect of wildly unpopular Project 2025, now given the reins of the powerful Office of Management and Budget.
Art from ancient Thrace is often flashy and brusque, as befits a warrior tribe. The archaic society was known for the prowess of its soldiers and its brawny militarism.
In a recently released hidden-camera video, Vought is seen asking, “Can we, if we’re going to have legal immigration, can we get people that actually believe in Christianity?” In an emailed response to a reporter’s subsequent request for clarification, an OMB spokesperson simply replied, “There they going [sic] again, attacking Christians in politics.”
Christians, of course, really were persecuted by the Roman Empire beginning in the 1st century. Two millenniums later, when nearly 2 out of 3 U.S. adults and 87% of Congress identify as Christian, the absurd persecution claim is just culture war shtick.
The America First Policy Institute has partnered with Lance Wallnau, a venomous Christian nationalist evangelical leader who publicly accused Vice President Kamala Harris of using witchcraft to win the 2024 presidential debates. Forty years after William Pynchon’s books were burned in Boston, the nearby Salem witch trials exploded, with the state murdering 14 women and five men and tormenting nearly 200 others for demonic sorcery. By then, Deacon Chapin was dead, although Puritanism wasn’t yet.
But it was on its way out. The death knell was the wretched failure of Christian nationalism as a governing style.
Government submitting to the coercion of weaponized religion in the Colony was as disastrous as faith submitting to government coercion in England. Puritanism shattered into multiple feuding sects and collapsed, and 18th century Enlightenment values of cosmopolitan secular government were ushered in. Secularism permeates the nation’s liberal founding documents — the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights — even as the history of Saint-Gaudens’ statue of my pious ancestor demonstrates the idealistic tenacity of religious faith.
Unlike the Christian faithful, Christian fanatics have been a recurrent danger throughout American history. They have driven the modern culture wars that have roiled the nation at least since 1979, when televangelist Jerry Falwell organized fundamentalists into a political movement, the preposterous Moral Majority, to protect Jim Crow segregation in schools.
While I doubt that any Trump appointees identify as neo-Puritans, twice as many Republicans (67%) as Democrats (32%) think U.S. laws should be influenced by the giant locked book Saint-Gaudens tucked under his statue’s arm, according to a March 2024 Pew Research Center study. As religious affiliation in America continues its steady 21st century decline, the politics behind those White House appointments get reactionary: To retain power, the small Christian nationalist MAGA sect must be served.
Still, Pew also found that a slim majority of U.S. adults say they have heard or read “nothing at all” about fanatical Christian nationalism. As the Trump administration gets into high gear, expect that to change pretty fast. When it does, “banned in Mar-a-Lago” may well become the new standard for authoritarian moral outrage.
Holy caped crusader! What would Deacon Chapin think?
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