Cotton Mather was not just a Puritan leader in the colonies, he was one of the leading Puritan leaders who received and earned widespread respect as a writer. A very common misconception about the Puritans is that they were anti-science, unread, uneducated ignorant rubes who saw witches and demons hiding behind every bush. While certainly some of that characterization is accurate, the big flaw here is the temptation to connect the more outlandish ideas common to Puritan belief and their medieval views on certain issues to pure backwoods idiocy.
It was not a lack of knowledge or even understanding of scientific principles that create among the Puritan communities a sense of an entire society woefully out of sync with the progressive movement forward of the rest of the society. In fact, the exact opposite was very often true. Speaking generally as a whole, Puritans often tended to be more well-read and educated than their neighbors. The genesis of their characterization by others lies not in what the didn’t know, but their single-minded devotion to interpreting everything they knew through a misguided ideology. The Bible—the presumed Word of God—was the final arbiter of interpretation of everything that came to be known, even science.
Maybe the single most illustrative principle of this concept is forwarded in one of Mather’s most famous essays, “The Negro Christianized: An Essay to Excite and Assist That Good Work, the Instruction of Negro-Servants in Christianity.” It is an essay written specifically to counter what was a prevailing ideological assumption of the time: converting pagan slaves to Christianity will inevitably result in the promotion of dissent at their circumstances which will inevitably lead to rebellion. Mather proposed a counter-argument which was apparently convincing enough to turn reverse the tide of history, leading to systemic forced conversion of those in bondage which in turn led directly to the stirring black spirituals and rollicking gospel songs heard throughout many churches in America every Sunday. Since the predicted uprising and rebellion never actually occurred in significant enough numbers to end slavery, the assumption is that Mather was correct in his analysis. This assumption requires overlooking a great many other elements which successfully suppressed such open subversion. More importantly, the assumption also overlooks the fundamentally flawed reasoning of the argument.
Mather does not engage any psychological or sociological underlying foundation for his belief that converting slaves to Christianity would produce a positive rather than negative effect from the perspective of white society. Mather’s basis for evidence here—as it is throughout his essays, regardless of subject—steeped entirely in his understanding of theology. That understanding extends to pagan theology as well as Christianity and that understanding of pagan theology leads to argumentative passages that insist that only conversion will stop African pagans from practicing ritualistic services for the purpose of communing with Devils.
But it is Mather’s interpretation of Christian theology and his misappropriation of it to serve his own secular purposes (a theme repeated time and time again throughout his essays) that points to the method by which Puritans promulgated intensely unenlightened views resulting from their sense of an enlightened understanding of the word of God. The substance of the argument that Mather puts forth as the reason why teaching slaves about Christianity will not destroy or negative impact the system of slavery is jaw-dropping, but absolute not surprising:
“Tell them; That if they Serve God patiently and cheerfully in the Condition which he orders for them, their condition will very quickly be infinitely mended, in Eternal Happiness.”
Just in case the meaning isn’t entirely clear: Biblical scripture can be used to justify the practice of owning slaves which in turn means that Christianity can be used to teach those who slaves that it is part of the natural order of God’s universe and that any attempt to personally subvert the conditions of God’s natural order is a sin requiring the punishment of everlasting torture. That Mather’s argument was convincing enough to alter the entire system of slavery is proof that a logical derived from prime sources of information is the mark an enlightened mind.
That Mather’s argument was convincing is at the same time irrefutable proof that when the prime source of information is corrupted by a lack of reason and scientific fact, even the most enlightened minds are doomed not just to ignorance but remain ignorant of the fact of their ignorance. The bulk of Mather’s essays are also products of this same underlying flaw with the only significance divergence being that the lesson the essays intend to instruct are not nearly as egregious and potential damaging in their outcome.
