On December 20, 1606, three small ships—the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery—slipped into the gray winter current of the Thames River. On board were 145 men, a mix of settlers and seamen, grim-faced as they left the shores of England for a faraway continent few of them could imagine. These members of the Virginia Company carried with them a double commission: to establish an English foothold in America and to spread the Christian faith among the peoples they expected to encounter.
The charter of King James I obliged the Virginia Company to seek natural resources—in particular the gold, silver, and copper they believed to be lying underneath the new land—but its language was suffused with divine mission concerning the human beings living there. The settlers on board those three ships would be responsible for the “propagating of Christian Religion to such People, as yet live in Darkness and miserable Ignorance of the true Knowledge and Worship of God.” They would ultimately bring “the Infidels and Savages, living in those parts, to human Civility, and to a settled and quiet Government.”
The Virginia Company’s own True Declaration of the State of Virginia declared as its task “first, to preach and baptize into Christian religion and by the propagation of the Gospel, to recover out of the arms of the devil a number of poor and miserable souls wrapped up into death in almost invincible ignorance; to endeavor the fulfilling and accomplishments of the number of the elect which shall be gathered from out of all corners of the earth; and to add to our myte the treasury of heaven.”
In America, founded by Puritans yet propelled by markets, the conflict between self-abnegation and self-indulgence has been uniquely sharp.
The mission of the settlers would not be local or provisional, nor simply accumulative, but universal, moral, and divine. They would be the world’s savior.
After many harrowing months at sea, in April 1607 the ships finally entered the mouth of the Chesapeake, and the sea-legged men stumbled onto the dunes of a narrow promontory, which they christened Cape Henry after the eldest son of King James I. The first act of the English in America was neither to build shelter nor to scout for food. Instead, they planted a cross in the sand, thereby claiming the territory while declaring their purpose: that this unknown land was to be bound to God.
When the colonists learned to raise crops, in particular tobacco, and stabilized Jamestown, they were able to concentrate on their godly mission to remake the Powhatan Indians into Christian Englishmen. The most celebrated conversion was that of Pocahontas, daughter of the chief Powhatan, captured in 1613 and baptized the following year as Rebecca. Her transformation from “heathen” to Christian Englishwoman was celebrated in England as proof that the colony was serving its purpose. The Virginia Company also instructed the colony’s governor to take Indian children and bring them up in English “language, and manners,” away from native priests and leaders who might “poison and infect them.”
That evangelical and civilizing mission was shaken by what some international relations scholars now call blowback. In the Powhatan uprising of 1622, native warriors killed 347 colonists; in 1644 Chief Opechancanough led a final attempt to expel the English, killing up to five hundred more. Afterward, some colonists clung to conversion and assimilation, while others concluded that the Indians were obstacles to a Christian nation who had to be removed.
The Pilgrims of New England arrived with a similar imperial mission. The Council for New England’s charter called for the “Conversion and reduction” of native peoples to “Civil Society and Christian Religion,” and the Mayflower Compact declared that their voyage was undertaken “for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith.” The founders of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay conceived of their settlements as godly commonwealths defined by discipline and self-denial. Governor John Winthrop promised liberty, but defined it as “subjection to authority.” Colonial laws suppressed drunkenness, idleness, sexual liberty, and extravagance in dress. They sought not merely to plant settlements but to establish ascetic societies in which every individual lived under the discipline of God.
The norms first imposed by the early settlers in Virginia and New England eventually formed the basis of the formal culture of the United States of America. From the nation’s founding until the election of Donald Trump, American political leaders conceived of the republic as Christlike and imperial. Yet simultaneously, ordinary Americans produced popular cultures that undermined puritanical repression both at home and in the foreign countries where they spread.
When Thomas Morton stepped off the ship Unity and onto the beach at Camp Wollaston, at the northern end of Plymouth Colony, the first thing he did was sell beer to the Indians. Morton had traveled from London to New England not to help establish the Puritans’ “city upon a hill” but to find partners in trade and recreation. Dissatisfied with the ascetic regime in Plymouth, Morton organized a decidedly non-Puritan settlement, Merrymount, north of Plymouth at the present site of Quincy, Massachusetts. To its Puritan neighbors, it was everything they feared. At Merrymount, whiskey and beer flowed freely, colonists and Indians mingled with a familiarity considered both indecent and dangerous, and on May Day in 1627, when they gathered to dance around a towering maypole, the neighboring Puritans considered it a demonic totem of individual license their laws had long since forbidden.
Morton himself recalled the celebrations with pride. The Merrymount settlers, he wrote, “did devise amongst themselves revels and merriment after the old English custome,” brewing a barrel of “excellent beare” and raising the maypole with “drumes, gunnes, pistols and other fitting instruments,” aided by Indian visitors who joined in the revels. For the Puritans, who had banned such rituals in England and sought to build a godly commonwealth in the New World, Merrymount was a threat to their very mission.
By 1628, the renegade colony’s reputation and its growing population proved too much. Governor William Bradford condemned Morton as a “Lord of Misrule,” and dispatched Captain Myles Standish and an armed militia to put an end to the Merrymount experiment. Morton was captured, nearly killed in the assault, and eventually deported to England. The maypole was chopped down and burned, leaving only a warning of what libertine freedom would bring in a land the Puritans intended to govern with discipline.
After destroying Merrymount, Puritan authorities waged systematic campaigns against drinking, sexuality, and pleasure. They fined, whipped, or publicly humiliated drunkards and severely punished sex outside marriage. Dancing was singled out as especially dangerous. In 1684, clergyman Increase Mather condemned “Mixt or Promiscuous Dancing” at frolics, revels, balls, and “wanton Bacchanallian Christmasses,” urging magistrates to declare it “utterly unlawful.” His son Cotton later called for an end to dances that led young men and women “unto great liberties with one another.” Yet the attack on fun was never fully successful. In back rooms, backwoods, and barns, settlers brewed ale, stole hours for private dances, and found ways to enjoy themselves outside the reach of the godly state.
This was an empire of repression, waging an eternal battle against the desires of people for freedom and pleasure.
The renegade cultural forms produced and enjoyed by ordinary Americans have done more to liberate the people under dictators than anything the 82nd Airborne could do.
The Puritans were able to subdue the revelers of Merrymount, but they never erased the impulses the settlement embodied. From the beginning, America contained both John Winthrop’s “City upon a Hill,” with its demands for discipline and devotion, and Thomas Morton’s maypole, with its celebration of sensuality. One vision was ascetic, evangelical, and belligerent; the other was hedonistic, subversive, and liberatory.
That tension has shaped not only the nation’s domestic life but also its place in the world. States, by their nature, require repression: subjects and citizens must curb their individual urges and bend their interests to the needs of the state. Capitalism, too, requires discipline to function, yet it is equally dependent on desire—on consumption, gratification, and the pursuit of novelty. In America, founded by Puritans yet propelled by markets, the conflict between self-abnegation and self-indulgence has been uniquely sharp.
In the formal culture of politics and foreign policy, the United States has clung to the original mission of the colonists. It has cast itself as a moral nation with a mission, projecting Christlike ideals abroad. From the Puritan sermons of the seventeenth century to the calls of twentieth-century progressives to make the world “safe for democracy,” Americans have often spoken as though they bore a divine responsibility to bring order to a fallen world.
But alongside that ascetic imperial vision ran another current. American popular culture, produced by the cultural descendants of Merrymount, offered something very different. Its exports were not sermons but songs, not codes of conduct but offers of emancipation. Jazz, rock and roll, Hollywood movies, blue jeans, and hip-hop have proved to be existential threats to every authoritarian regime of the modern era.
In the twentieth century, fascists, communists, Islamists, and nationalists of every kind have devoted much of their energy to containing, expelling, and eradicating what Soviet commissars called the “virus” of American popular culture. In each case, what Puritans had once sought to suppress at home—music, dancing, sexuality, irreverence—became a vehicle for cultural subversion abroad. And in each case, the deployment of American military force to contend with its perceived enemies has resulted in what we call blowback—the unexpected but predictable violent reaction of the native populations who resented and resisted armed intrusions into their world.
Again and again through America’s history in the world, the renegade cultural forms produced and enjoyed by ordinary Americans have done more to liberate the people under dictators than anything the 82nd Airborne could do. Pleasure, in other words, has proved more destabilizing than military power.
Savior and Seducer is about that unresolved contradiction: repression and freedom, evangelism and individualism, death and desire. It argues that America’s place in the world cannot be understood without reckoning with the struggle between Winthrop’s severe vision and Morton’s libertine rebellion. And it poses a question for Americans today: Will we persist as God’s chosen empire, or simply allow the liberatory impulses of our society to continue to roam free?
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From Savior and Seducer: A Renegade History of the United States in the World by Thaddeus Russell. Copyright © 2026. Available from Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic.