Exploring the religious radicalism of puritan theocracy

     Last year in my AP lit class, I wrote a research paper on the Scarlet Letter that analyzed the religious radicalism that was present in puritan theocracy. In Religious Radicalism, actions are carried out by social groups with the motive to make a societal change based on religious beliefs or religious text. In my essay, I wanted to understand the nature of Puritan society by looking at the extent to which the Puritan Religion and its principles affected citizens abilities to function with reason and empathy, and how that empathy was lost as a result of the rigidity of patriarchs. While Puritanism is on the more extreme side of the spectrum, after analyzing many articles and text from the time period, I came to the conclusion that the society portrayed in Hawthorne's novel was representative of the idea that religious and government functions do not blend well together. As the puritans were a people who came to America on the basis of freedom from religious persecution, the merciless way in which they ran their settlements has separated them from the original values of their religion. Values such as compassion for others, loyalty, education, etc. I go into more depth in my actual paper, but taking RSTD 236 this semester has made me compare failed religious communities and ones that thrive from shared communitas.