With no fees or minimums, banking with Capital One is the easiest decision in the history of decisions.
Even easier than deciding to listen to another episode of your favorite podcasts.
And with no overdraft fees, is it even a decision that's banking reimagined?
What's in your wallet? Terms apply, see capital1.com slash bank, Capital One NA member FDIC.
Look around everyone. Every car you see is probably on auto trader, like that sleek convertible that turn heads when it picks you up from the airport, or the custom ride from your favorite van life couple on social media.
Even that vintage sports car that's tailing you a little too closely.
New cars, use cars, electric cars, even flying cars.
Well, okay, no flying cars yet, but as soon as those things get invented, they'll be on auto trader.
If you see a car you like, it's probably on auto trader.
That's kind of their thing.
Auto trader. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio.
Hey and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh and Chuck C. and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know.
I think it's you every time, doesn't it?
Sure. After 16 years, it didn't take much for me to get a giggle for me.
That's good. I like it. It should have gone the opposite.
The giggle in me from me because of you.
I put a giggle in you. Oh, well that fresh.
Speaking of fresh Chuck, you probably would not have just said that, were you not born in American?
It was America not founded by essentially the most radical element, and extremist element that England had to offer at the time.
Wow. Nice work. Look at you.
Thanks. That's all we need to say about their backstory.
I eat jerk. Well, I can sum it up in three sentences.
All right, let's hear what you got.
Well, we're talking about Puritanism and getting into just English Puritanism is a big ball of wax, very detailed and it's very easy to get in the weeds.
We're going to concentrate more on the Puritans, or at least my charge to Livia.
I was like, you know what?
I think it was a Massachusetts at the time, and we were doing our show in Medford.
What's up with this place, Massachusetts?
What was up with the Puritans?
Why is everybody dressed like pilgrims?
Yeah, so we're not going to go super into detail about their formation, but we will talk a little bit about that right now.
My first sentence, and then you can just take over, the Puritans were.
Who they were was a group of extreme, far extreme Protestants, and it was a movement that came out of the fact that they were like, hey, England's been reformed.
The Church of England, we don't want any sniff of Catholicism around anymore.
So we're going to go hard, hard toward the most extreme version of Protestantism that you could imagine.
Yeah, and you can make a case that the Puritans would not have existed, had England not broken with the Catholic Church and formed its own Church of England, right?
But these people are like, no, like, we're not going far enough.
We need to just be completely off the rails, make our own thing.
And like you said, this is a thick, thick period of English history from the 1530s to the 1660s, something like that, like a lot happened during that time.
And the Puritans, they either responded to it or were shaped by it in some way, shape or form.
But you can kind of sum the whole thing up as that there was a lot of changing of hands of power from monarchs to people who staged coups.
And sometimes the Puritans were deeply persecuted, sometimes brutally.
Other times they were the ones in charge and they would brutalize other people.
And it was enough that it shook loose some of the more radical groups of Puritans, of Puritans who either wanted to reform the Anglicane Church to be more Puritan or decided that Anglicane Church couldn't be reformed and that they should go off and form their own mini churches.
It's called Congregationalism.
So the upshot is things were just in such upheaval that it shook some groups loose, some moved to Holland and some ended up moving to North America because stuff was just so crazy back in England at the time.
Yeah, they were basically like, hey, we can we can go over there.
This was in 1608. And it was a group of separatists.
You were talking about these congregationalists.
They were separatists.
They wanted to sort of branch off.
If you saw the movie The Vivich, remember that one?
Yeah. That's kind of what we're talking about.
These people that set up their own shops and were like, hey, we can just go out here on our own and be as radically Protestant as we can be because we're based in Calvinism.
We believe in predestination.
We think that there are chosen few that are designated to go to heaven.
And you're either one of those people or you're not.
There's really nothing you can do about that.
And we've got ministers that are going to decide if you've gone through a real religious conversion or not.
And the other thing we should point out too is that the actual term puritan, that didn't come along until the 1560s and it was like an insult, right?
It was. I saw it described as I think in the New World and Cyclopedia that you could consider calling somebody like uptight or high strong or like just a worry ward or something today.
That's kind of what they were calling puritans back then.
The puritans call themselves saints if that says enough to you about what they thought about themselves.
But puritan was kind of a put down.
Because the people, the other people in the Anglican church were like, things are fine.
You guys are really nitpicking here.
You're up in arms about some really dumb stuff, like people burning incense during church services, like to stuff that doesn't matter.
And the puritans were like, it does matter because that is Satan's way of corrupting us.
Yeah. And it's funny too.
One of the other things that keeps coming up, it seems like they really got stuck on was like, can you talk to God directly?
Can you pray or not? Or do you have to go through official channels of people higher up in this religion?
Yeah. And it seemed like that was a fight like on and off again for a long, long time as people saying like, no, we think you can like, you don't need to be especially.
You can pray and talk to God.
And other people are like, no, that's blasphemy.
I know. And you just touched on something that's kind of at the heart.
Like, this was the great puritan struggle because one of the reasons for breaking with the church and getting as far away from it is because the church was like, to get through God, you go through us.
Right. Bishops, Cardinal, Pope, like, that's the way you go to get to God.
You can't do it yourself.
You need the church. And by the way, give us a bunch of money.
And the puritans hated that.
So they did believe that like a congregation could take care of itself and that the minister could help people.
But really, you just needed to know what it said in the Bible and live your life accordingly.
And hope that you were one of the saved who were going to make it into heaven.
That was their whole way.
Yet they were also a deeply elitist group where the wealthier you were, the more that meant you were favored by God.
And so by association, if you were poor, the poverty's stricken, that must mean you had some sort of moral failing.
And if that's not essentially the basis of America, still today, I don't know what is.
Yeah, it's really funny.
Well, not funny. It's sad.
But you know what I mean.
It's not exactly what you mean.
So I mentioned the group of separatists that in 1608, they came from a village in York tree called Scroobee.
You mentioned they moved to Holland.
And then about 12 years later, a little more than a hundred of them went to Plymouth Rock and founded that colony here in North America.
And again, with the idea, they're going to create this great community where they can be English.
They don't have to compromise what they believe in.
These were the people in the Mayflower, who a lot of them died.
They had that first Thanksgiving.
I didn't have Christmas though, right?
No, the Puritans hated Christmas.
They did. They did. Like I always thought it was because I saw somebody explain it that it's not in the Bible.
If it wasn't in the Bible, it was satanic.
Right. And so of course, they didn't mention Christmas in the Bible.
But I also saw more reasonable explanation is that I think we talked about this.
Christmas at the time was a drunken rabble-rousing occasion where almost like, you know, Halloween can get to be like today.
That's kind of what Christmas was like.
So of course, they hated Christmas.
Yeah, because no one drinks around Christmas now.
No, everybody observers that puritanically.
In 1630, if we jump ahead just a little bit, this is when, and this is sort of the money stuff I was after.
This is when the Massachusetts Bay colony was founded.
It was another group from England led by a guy named John Winthrop, who was kind of a well-heeled attorney.
He was a gentry member, which means he was sort of just below nobility, but you know, very highly respected class of people, which, you know, as you'll see, comes, like you were saying, comes to be something that the puritans were known for.
Yeah. And when we think about puritans in this country, generally, we're thinking about the people that came over with John Winthrop, the founding of Massachusetts, not the pilgrims, not separatists, because they weren't like, hey, we don't want anything to do with the Church of England, but they were still congregationless.
Yeah. So, yes, the puritans and the pilgrims were, for all intents and purposes, separate groups.
They lived separately.
They were both, they were both reformists, Calvinists, who wanted the Anglican Church to either get further away from Catholicism or split from the Anglican Church altogether.
So the best way, the rule thumb to understand both groups is the pilgrims would have found the Puritans ungodly in Satan.
Right. Like, that's how radical, the pilgrims were the most radical of all of the separatists or of all of the, the, the reformists of the Anglican Church.
And the Puritans were definitely, they would look down on us today.
The pilgrims would have just run and tear if they saw any of us today.
The Puritans would just look down on us and they would recognize themselves in us, I think, a lot of it too.
Yeah, totally. And we'll get to some of that a little bit later.
But the other thing is that they had a lot more money than the pilgrims did.
They had a lot more financing and resources.
There were also about 10 times as many, think about a thousand people came over in that first group.
And they weren't, they were just looking to set up an idealized society over there.
They weren't like fleeing England or anything.
