Pondering Puritans

After reading Hellfire Nation, I got to thinking about whether the puritan impulse is a healthy thing and where it should be directed.

By the puritan impulse I mean the impulse to make oneself or society better, purer, more just, closer to perfection. It is a religious impulse, but non-religious people have it too.

Currently, watching the religious right mess up the this country, its hard to see this impulse as a good thing. It seems so misguided for a bunch of people to decide that they have a god-given right to hunt small animals but that women's reproductive lives should be regulated by the state. Another theory might be that they've picked the wrong things to direct their puritan impulse at. Maybe they should be concerned with the personal rather than other people. If they concentrated on perfecting themselves as individuals (and there is plenty of room for that), they could go off into the woods with their pick up trucks and King James Bibles and could stop bothering the rest of us.

Yet, I don't think that about liberals when they exhibit the Puritan impulse. If you spend your whole life perfecting yoga poses and developing vegetarian cooking skills, you haven't made much of an impact on society. Having the noble ideas with no action seems selfish.

So, my thinking on this is massively inconsistent. I don't want everyone to direct their puritan impulses in the same way. The main reason I want conservatives to direct it inwards is because I think they have dangerous ideas.