Fly Fornication And Other Puritan Names: The Dustin Benge & Nate Pickowicz Interview
Things get downright puritanical when Kyle and Ethan talk to Nate Pickowicz and Dustin Benge about their new book The American Puritans. Dustin is Provost and lecturer and Union School of Theology and Nate is pastor of Harvest Bible Church. Dustin and Nate talk about the inspiration that they draw today from the lives of these men and women and their religious movement in church history while Kyle and Ethan try to figure out why someone would name their kid 'If-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned' and whether it's true that Puritans invented tablecloths to cover up scandalous table legs. Topics Discussed The difference between Puritans and Pilgrims Puritan theology: Are sinners in the hands of an angry God? Myth or fact: Puritan edition Puritans' favorite alcoholic beverage Some church history of the Puritans in England and in America Strange Puritan names like 'Praise-God' and 'Fly Fornication' People walking stark naked through church and cutting off Quaker ears Some of the Puritans highlighted in their new book The American Puritans Kyle and Ethan provoke some baptist answers to The Ten Questions in the Subscriber Portion! To watch or listen to the full length podcast, become a paid subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans
I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word hilarious.
Hard-hitting questions.
What do you think about feminism?
Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Brian Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I want to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon Bee Interview Show.
Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Babylon Bee Interview Show.
This is a very exciting episode because we're going to talk about the most exciting thing of all time.
Kyron, Sauras Rex's writing monster trucks.
Sadly, no.
Puritans.
Oh, okay.
That was next to my list.
Yeah.
Puritans.
So that's like the pilgrims.
They got buckles everywhere.
I don't think pilgrims are necessarily elbows.
Well, we'll ask the experts.
So this is Nate Pickowitz and Dustin Binge.
All right.
Pickowitz and Binge.
That sounds like something you order at an English pub.
Get me some Pickowicks and Binge pate.
I was going to say it sounded like an old haberdasher shop or something.
Oh, yeah, that's true.
Some company, Pickowitz and Binge.
Like a plate with weird sausages and pieces of potato all fried around the sausage.
Like pigs' feet sticking out and stuff.
We should live them.
Hi, guys.
Thanks for coming on.
Welcome.
Thanks for having us.
Yeah, thanks, guys.
Sorry, we like to entertain ourselves.
Obviously.
You're welcome to insult us.
It's funnier when the guests insult us.
That's true.
Okay.
Yeah, so hold nothing back.
Yeah.
So what's the difference between a pilgrim and a Puritan?
So we're starting.
We're not going to do the how are you?
Where are you from?
No.
I want to know how's it going?
Straight into the.
All right.
Hey, we are actors.
Wait, we are running a show, so I want to know what the difference between a pilgrim and a puritan is because he said pilgrims.
But they wrote a book about Puritans.
Yes.
Just to people who they do have qualifications.
Long and the short of it is that Puritans are Christians coming out of an English movement, but the Puritans were specifically a group.
Wait, did I, what did I just say?
Pilgrims are the ones who came over on the Mayflower.
So they're a small sect of Puritanism, but distinct in their mission.
So that's the long and the short of it.
So like Puritan is the sport.
Pilgrims were the one team.
Yeah, if the team left and decided that the sport wasn't any good anymore.
But yes, that's true.
So not all.
But then the sport came back to them, like came back.
That's right.
Not all Puritans are pilgrims, but all Puritans, or excuse me, all pilgrims were Puritans.
Okay.
Interesting.
This is not interesting yet.
But I said interesting.
Can you explain it in terms of a lemonade stand analogy?
Oh, my goodness.
That's economic.
I'm going to ask Dustin to do that one.
Yeah.
Okay.
What drives a human being to write a book about Puritans?
Let's go to that.
All right.
Dustin, go for it.
Well, yeah, that's a very good question.
It's a question we get actually a lot.
I'm sorry.
I guess people would just Google that and listen to those answers.
Yeah, they do because nobody knows what a Puritan is besides, you know, Nathaniel Hawthorne with a scarlet letter.
You know, that's their idea of Puritans.
But I think Nate and I just, we like the Puritans.
We like these guys and gals, and we think they're really godly men and women coming over from England looking for religious freedom among many other things.
And yeah, we just had a mutual love for these men and women and wanted to write a book on them.
But kind of the pushback we've got is what we call these Puritans.
So Puritan is not a the best of terms.
It's a derogatory term in that period.
But we're identifying the group of people that we wrote about as the American Puritans.
And both of you can figure that out for yourselves because America did not exist at that time.
So why would we call them the American Puritans?
So you've got to buy the book and read it to find out.
Kind of like another.
That's right.
The other thing about that, too, is that you have, with Puritanism being so popular now, people reading John Owen and John Bunyan and all these others, there's a whole swath of people, a whole group of people that most people are not even aware exists.
So not only was it out of a love to expose these people to modern day times, but also a desire to sort of rekindle a love for them and to remind people who they were.
Again, we don't learn about them in history.
They're a paragraph in a textbook and then we move on.
So it's kind of an uncovering effort was really the desire to do that as well.
Back to the question about the Pilgrims, just to insert this.
Most people think that the Pilgrims on the Mayflower was kind of the only group that came over from England to America, to the New World, whatever you would want to call it.
But Nate and I uncover a myriad of ships and individuals that came over during that period that were not just pilgrims and Mayflower individuals, but huge groups of men and women coming over during that period.
Interesting.
Fascinating.
Yeah, Puritans are a group that people kind of like hear about and they go, oh yeah, I get it.
Yeah, they are all stuffy and they didn't like to party and stuff and whatever.
Let's move on to someone more interesting, like Vikings.
Yeah.
So what do you know about the Vikings?
That could be our next book, The American Vikings.
American Pirates.
Yeah, so we actually have a series.
You've just unveiled our secret series that we're going to be doing.
American Puritans.
Isn't that like a Babylon B thing where you guys always like predict things that are going to happen in the future, like in the news?
So you guys have predicted our whole series.
So you're all set.
The prophecy has been fulfilled.
So we, when I was in high school, we learned about Puritans, but it was like, well.
Well, like they said, it was very cursory and, oh, yeah, it's these guys.
But you don't delve into any of their works.
You don't really know what they're about.
We read Jonathan Edwards' Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God when I was in high school.
But it was like, and the assignment was write about all the horrifying imagery that he uses.
And so you're supposed to tear this thing apart, like how terrible the sermon was.
And I was like, oh, yeah, I didn't really grow up Calvinistic or knowing anything about the Puritans.
So for me, it was like, oh, yeah, this is terrible.
Why is this so harsh?
And then later on at college, I read it again and I'm like, this is a great sermon.
And people have such a strange understanding of Puritans.
It wasn't until I read John Owen on my own that I started to really, really like them, other than like Pilgrim's Progress.
So yeah, what is it about Puritans that people have all these misunderstandings of what it was that they stood for?
I mean, what's the biggest misconception that you guys have encountered?
And I'll piggyback on that.
Why?
Why do you think people need to hear about them and what makes it worth it to know about them?
And I'll piggyback on that.
How?
Triple piggyback.
So I'm very happy to answer.
I'm happy to answer the first question.
You guys can piggyback on this.
Yeah, we'll piggyback on each other.
Just answer the first question in regard to the example of Edwards and why Puritans are painted in a certain way as they are as these rough, angry, hateful people walking around in long black garbs with white wigs, you know, disrupting every kid's birthday party in the town.
And I think that's because popping balloons.
Yeah, exactly.
Tarr and feathering, everybody, you know, having fun.
But if you take the example of Jonathan Edwards, for instance, the only thing that the mass population knows about Edwards, if they've even heard of Edwards, is his sermon, as you've said, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.
And I remember in high school reading that sermon in a literature book as Early American Literature.
And it wasn't until college as I began to look into Edwards that I found that that particular sermon was not typical of his pastoral and preaching ministry at all.
In fact, it was quite untypical of Edwards.
Edwards' writings, his whole corpus is filled with joy and love and grace and beauty and perfection and something that once you begin reading, your affections just begin to bubble over in worship to God.
Sinners in the hands of an angry God is not typical Edwards.
And so I think through the years, what we've done is we've taken these small parts of the Puritans and picked them apart and then judged the whole movement based on these auster, terrible, dark, kind of hateful genres that we read.
And that's not at all what the Puritan movement is.
If anything, and I think we can have, you know, John Popper to thank as much as anyone for this, and Banner of Truth and others who have kind of uncovered the Puritans, the Puritans are about joy.
Edwards is walking through the forest singing songs and making up hymns as he goes.
He's not popping little kids' balloons.
He's not breaking up parties.
He's sitting on his rooftop as a storm approaches, making up hymns in worship to God.
He's riding on his horse, you know, into town as a loving pastor.
And we don't ride on Edwards, but Edwards is, you know, it can be argued Edwards is not even a Puritan.
But the men and women that we ride on, John Elliott, for instance, who I wrote on in American Puritans, he was a pastor for 40-some years and translated the whole Bible into the Native American Algonquin language.
This, guys, has to be love overflowing in missionary and pastoral efforts.
That's all it can be.
These are not hateful guys.
These are guys and women, of course, I'm including those as well, who love the Lord, who have a joy for Christ, who have a desire to expand his kingdom.
And I could go on and on, but that's somewhat of my observance of how we have painted the Puritans.
Yeah, so it's kind of like if in 100 years we were to have textbooks on John MacArthur, and the only sermon they included was when he said, go home to Beth Moore.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Caricature.
And we tend to want to demonize people and theology that we don't agree with.
To piggyback on what Dustin was talking about with why we do this to them, probably the biggest transgression historically is the Salem witch trials.
You have the Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne view of Cotton Mather, sort of standing there laughing menacingly as they're hanging witches.
And it's like he wasn't even at the trials.
I mean, that's just not history.
So that's probably one of the biggest dust-ups, I think, that's come through.
And it's been there for 300 years.
People actually go to school and think that these things actually happen, and they're wildly exaggerated.
And we actually argue, make an argument for this in the book where the reason, and scholars have redeemed this, but the reason that they were maligned so badly is because it was an opposing movement, a liberal movement, Unitarian movement that was going through and trying to basically supplant congregationalism and reform theology and elder congregationalism.
So it was a movement to usurp them.
And how do you destroy a movement?
Well, you destroy the reputation of people that are in it.
So you can paint them out to be terrible people.
And that's what leftism does even now.
Liberalism does that now.
Which hopefully it's just true.
I mean, we hear about it all the time.
And things haven't changed in 300 years.
And this is the same thing.
So all we're doing now is we're seeing the rotten fruit of slandering a person and maligning their character.
And so part of our job, I think, is to try to at least tell the truth about the events.
As terrible as these things are, tell the truth about them and try to see things for what they really are.
So the Salem witch trials, I did not know this.
This was the Libs.
This was Antifa of that time.
Yeah, right, right.
So, I mean, they really happened, obviously.
I mean, like 20 people died.
I mean, there's no, it wasn't.
That's when they often find that.
I think people that hear about it just kind of peripherally, they think, oh, thousands of witches died over all these years.
And it was a small, like, I mean, not 20 people is a lot of people, but compared to a lot of people.
It was a short trial over the course of maybe a few months.
And actually, the governor of Salem was out.
I should say the Massachusetts colony was out when he came back and he realized how bad things were.
He ended it immediately.
And actually, the person who told him to end the trials was Cotton Mather's father, Increase Mather.
So Increase Mather, end of the witch trial.
We got to talk about his name.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
But you're going to get me going because this is like conspiracy theory stuff of like the Puritan movement.
But I mean, this is what really happened.
We like getting conspiracy theorists going.
Yeah.
So Dustin, do you have as many books as Nate?
Yeah, because he's really putting you to shame.
Is that all your books, Nate?
No.
We got more.
Yeah, I have three offices full of books.
And so Nate likes to.
He's actually sitting on a pile of books.
Yeah, exactly.
Nate's background is actually one of those virtual backgrounds.
Yeah.
It's a Zoom background.
He has a background that was provided by Dustin.
It's actually his life.
I took a picture.
Right.
This is a picture of Dustin's office.
This is my background.
Dustin has a PhD, so he doesn't have to show books.
He's got like a couple of small hardback books and like a nice painting.
So you don't have to.
I have something to prove.
He does not have anything to prove.
Yeah, you look like you're trying to compensate.
So you got some, I mean, you got some John MacArthur commentaries there.
I think you're the second person we've interviewed with the MacArthur commentaries.
So I feel like the MacArthur fans want to show MacArthur.
I don't know if he watches the show.
I assume not.
I don't know if he's discovered the internet.
He stays up late watching YouTube videos.
I am in New Hampshire.
We don't really have the internet like three years ago.
Yeah, sure.
He probably watches fail videos or something if he does.
I do.
I do.
Dude Purpose.
That's usually kind of what I watch.
Oh, I was talking about John MacArthur.
If he stays up late watching YouTube, it's probably people face planting.
Oh, right.
Right.
Okay, so I've got a list of fun things for you guys here.
My research involved finding myths or facts or things we didn't know about Puritans, and you guys can fill in the details.
First, they believed in fairies.
True or not true?
Oh, my goodness.
Fairies?
Yeah, I found this article that claims they believed in fairies.
I don't think so.
I've never bumped into that, but I mean, we're, I should have brought, we, We should have read.
Save the reference.
The closest that I can think of, my dissertation is on Jonathan Edwards' theology of angels.
And so I've read everything that Edwards wrote on angels.
He never, to my knowledge, mentions a fairy.
So in regard to spirituality and the spiritual world, the Puritans were much more in tune in regard to believing in the unseen realm than I think we are currently.
Now, of course, this has nothing to do with fairies, but they wrote copious literature on fairies.
Both Increase and Cotton both wrote books on angels.
There was evidence that angels actually appeared in bedrooms and barns in New England, etc.
All of this stuff, of course, is going on during the Great Awakening.
This is why Edwards wrote religious affections and other books to try to substantiate some of this supernatural activity that was going on.
So in regard to fairies, I can fairly easily see how someone could come up with that and claim that for the Puritans.
So they were like crazy charismatics, is what you're saying.
Well, there's a lot of crazy charismatic stuff going on during that period.
Absolutely.
So what was there?
Was there an article you said that you've read that?
Yeah, but I just looked at it.
They didn't really make a good case.
They said all they said was that, let's see.
The Pilgrims belonged to a religious order that came out of newly established Church of England and was created during a period in which science was often indistinguishable from magic and therefore hocum.
Coming from England, their cultural identities were usually formed by folklore and ancient traditions.
So while they had strong religious beliefs that informed their every decision, they also believed in the supernatural, including fairies, as every beneficiary of that cultural tradition did at the time.
One thing that we bumped into in our research was just the constant, just ruinous nature of seculars trying to understand Christianity and trying to explain doctrine and explain belief.
It's amazing because you read these academic books that win prizes.
This is BBC America right here, BBC.
Yeah, and you're like, you don't even understand the most basic thing about their belief.
When you view people like Jonathan Edwards as philosophers and don't even mention anything about his love for Christ, you don't even understand the person at all.
So I'd be very surprised.
I'd be very interested to know where articles like that come from and who writes them.
But that's sounds totally bogus.
I mainly looked it up for entertainment for this.
From what it sounds like, what you said, it sounds like they took beliefs that people had just in general at the time.
Yeah.
Well, since they lived at that time.
Yeah, they said most people believed in it.
But also, I always wonder if you look back on our civilization today with people think that we believed in superheroes.
It pervades our whole, you know, it's everywhere.
There's so many books, and people are obsessed.
You think that looking back, scientists would be like, oh, they had a true belief in the guy that got bit by a spider and became these guys were not dummies.
I mean, they were educated in some of the finest institutions in England and in Europe during this period.
They were doctors.
They were medical doctors.
They were scientists.
They were philosophers.
They were pastors.
They were statesmen.
I mean, in regard to, you know, 16th century kind of education, they were the top echelon of that education.
So they're not some hokey group that, you know, just kind of fell off the turnip wagon or whatever.
I mean, they know what they're talking about.
Now, of course, they.
Yeah, a bunch of turnip eaters.
They, you know, they're extremely well educated.
And yeah, I agree with Nate.
It's just a secular desire to explain away their Christianity, which has a deep root in spiritual and biblical understanding.
So they weren't anti-science.
They were not anti-science.
Look at Jonathan Edwards.
Look at all his studies on spiders when he was a teenager.
I mean, it's phenomenal.
I got to read that.
Cotton Mather wrote the first science textbook in America.
It's not about cotton.
Yeah.
It was mostly about cotton.
It was 100 pages on cotton.
It was called mathematics.
It should have been.
No, it was not.
It was called The Christian Philosopher, and it was a science textbook.
He actually received an honorary degree from the University of Glasgow and the Royal Society, actually.
So, yeah, these people were incredibly intelligent, and I can tell you they did not believe in fairies.
Did they hate Christmas?
Yeah, why they hate Christmas?
I hear they hate Christmas.
The Pilgrims didn't like Christmas.
Well, they just didn't want to, they wanted to see it in scripture.
So they viewed a lot of the holidays as sort of carryover from Roman Catholic Church and a lot of the mysticism that they were seeing.
So if it wasn't in the Bible, they didn't want to celebrate it.
So yeah, the Pilgrims famously did not celebrate Christmas at all.
Like, show with me the candy canes in this book, or I will not celebrate.
Yeah.
And they went through the town stealing the gifts and brought them all up to the mountain.
Yeah, I think you're mixing some genres there, but we'll allow it.
We'll allow it.
Okay.
Did they invent tablecloths to hide the scandalous table legs that were too tempting to Puritans?
Did you actually find that somewhere?
Please tell me.
It was more like Victorian era, but yeah.
That isn't.
I love how you guys are trying to make Puritans entertaining.
Half the hats off to you.
Have you guys ever read or seen Solomon Cain?
I have not.
If they did their research, they did.
So you guys didn't do your research.
Discredited.
Return your PhD.
I've never read it, but I don't have a PhD.
We're not going to be able to put American Puritans into our book club because you haven't passed the rigorous examination here.
Yeah, Solomon Cain was a pulp fiction hero that Robert E. Howard wrote about, where he was this Puritan that went around blasting demons with his blunderbuss, which was wonderful.
He's the best superhero of all time.
But they have blender buses?
The movie was kind of terrible.
Yeah, they would have had guns.
I want to know about this next one.
Which one?
Quakers.
Oh, they were super mean to Quakers.
Did they like poke Quakers?
I want to read hot pokers.
There's details here.
We've got to read the details here.
So they passed a law preventing Quakers from entering Boston.
Should a Quaker man be found, one of his ears would be cut off.
If he came back, they cut the other one off.
If that wasn't enough of a deterrent, the third visit would result in a red-hot poker through the tongue.
Can you imagine the sound I'm going to make?
The Quaker women would just be whipped, jailed, and hanged.
So yeah, why do they hate Quakers so much?
According to BBC America.
Well, sadly, I would say that's true.
Those things are true.
So you have to, the short, short answer, you know, you guys watch Spaceballs, the short, short version is that you have this movement that has gone from people getting off boats and settling a colony to fast forward like 100 years.
And you have Puritanism now as a political and social movement.
And they're trying to keep order and keep things in check.
And so they're creating these structures, sociological structures to keep people in check, keep laws in place, and so on and so forth.
And so they viewed at that point, you're talking about 1660, 1670, all the original settlers had passed away.
And now you have the new generation that's come in.
They don't have the same faith or same love that their parents did, but they still have the same laws and they're still pushing Puritanism, the extremes of it pretty hard.
And so they viewed anybody who was heretical in their eyes as an enemy of the state.
And so they persecuted them.
And they, again, we don't explain away some of the terrible things that happen.
We just have to understand them rightly in history.
So sadly, I've read a lot of, I've actually read a lot more of some of those things, even down to whipping Baptists who came into town.
And even Cotton Mather actually, 25, 30 years later, goes and participates in the ordination of a Baptist minister and apologizes to the Baptist church and says, we're sorry for what our people did to you, you know, all these years ago.
So yeah, it was a tough period of time.
And again, I think this is why people don't want to talk about it.
They'd rather just turn a blind eye and say, I don't like that period of time.
It doesn't make any sense.
I hate it.
They were mean to people.
And the big thesis here is that every single person is sinful apart from Christ.
And every single, there's no golden age of church history.
There's no golden age of anywhere in time.
There's always people hurting each other and people who are in need of redemption.
So yeah, I wish I could say that those stories didn't happen.
It was just a big joke, but some of those things actually did happen.
We never know.
Maybe the Quakers were jerks.
There was a lot behind that.
I've only seen the open day.
He looks untrustworthy.
I mean, we get our maple syrup from Quakers.
So it's like, you know, they're pretty mild now.
But a lot of the, I mean, some of the Quakers in rebellion in Boston actually would strip down, get naked, and walk through church meetings without their clothes on, and they're yelling and screaming.
And so these weren't just peace-loving people.
They were trying to disrupt the order.
So you had a lot of people.
Cutting off an ear was merciful in that situation.
I mean, it could have been worse.
Who knows?
Yeah.
I mean, but so you have men, women, and children sitting in church, and a Quaker strips naked and runs through their assembly.
You know, this is this is to a people who is trying to set up the city on the hill.
This is just atrocious.
So there's a lot of factors.
You just, people don't consider.
You know, all the causing earthquakes.
That's right.
Well, they were, that's true.
Sounds like a charismatic church service, just this naked guy just walks through.
Do you ever have naked cults?
Well, we do, but I mean, you know, Christian offshoots anymore.
We don't.
You know, we need to go back to the naked cults.
The naked denominations.
So you guys talk about in your book, American Puritans, you talk about William Bradford, John Winthrop, John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, and Brad Street, John Elliott, Samuel Willard, and Cotton Mather.
So who's your favorite?
I think he likes Cotton Mather.
Who's your favorite?
I guess Nate, because he's talking.
You're going to guess Cotton Mather?
Yeah.
You guess.
Justin can go first.
I know which one is his favorite.
What do you think, Kylie?
We got to guess first.
Just guess purely based on.
I'm going to guess Ann Bradstreet because she's a woman.
I'll say John Winthrop.
That's kind of cool.
That sounds like a smart name.
Ann is a woman, right?
Ann is a woman.
Yes.
You never know.
They have weird names.
We're going to get into that.
Yeah.
Well, I can't wait.
So, yeah, so Ann Bradstreet was a woman.
She was an early American poet, just phenomenal.
We wanted to include her to really give a nod to exactly what went on in the home during that period of, you know, she's attending to children and to in-laws and to elderly parents and a husband who's gone all the time in statecraft and other things.
She's writing copious poems about various life struggles.
She's making candles and she's gardening.
Just all of this stuff that would make any of us guys just weep now and really show our laziness.
So I think Anne kind of shines out of most of these guys as some of the more difficult things that she went through.
But that's not my favorite.
So my favorite, yeah, sorry.
So my favorite was John Elliott.
When I came to this period and when we began writing this book, I did not know a lot about some of the characters that I had written on.
I had heard about them.
I had spoken to Nate about them, but I had not studied their life in depth.
And that's what we're doing here.
These are just biographical accounts.
We're not getting into their writings and theology and other things.
We're just weaving together a tapestry that's a story.
And John Elliott's story was just so compelling to me, born in 1604 in England was kind of an understudy of Thomas Hooker.
He died in 1690, a colonial pastor with an ardent desire to go to his neighbors and to share the gospel.
He wasn't a great statesman.
He wasn't a great intellectual, or though he would say he was a very simple man, pastoring 40 years in Roxbury, Massachusetts.
But what he's remembered for most is his missionary work among the Native Americans during this period.
He began to minister to them in such a way that much like William Tyndale did in England, he felt like if the Native Americans are going to hear the gospel, receive the gospel, and believe the gospel, they have to read the Bible in their own language.
And so the Algonquin language had no alphabet.
It had no grammar.
Nothing had ever been written down of this language.
And so John Elliot, along with translators, began to develop, and he actually wrote an Algonquin alphabet.
He wrote two Indian grammar books and dictionaries in order to begin translation work on the Old and New Testament.
By the time he was finished, he had translated a Psalm hymn book, which was one of the first hymn books published of the Psalms in America, as well as the whole Old Testament and New Testament in Algonquin.
This was the first time anything had been done like this with an unwritten language for almost 1,000 years.
And so here's John Elliot just faithfully pastoring his church while he is setting up these great missionary outposts to the Native Americans.
And so Nate and I have often discussed that, you know, there's a lot of current kind of idea that the Puritans came over.
They didn't care about anything that was going on in the New World.
They hated the Indians.
They wanted to kill them all.
They didn't want to share the gospel with them because they thought them lower than themselves in regard to racial hierarchy, etc.
That's not at all the case with somebody like John Elliot.
He is giving his life.
I mean, can you imagine translating every word in the Bible for a people that you thought were lower than yourself?
I don't think so.
And so that's exactly what John Elliott's doing.
And at the end of his life, when he's dying, he calls himself a shrub in the wilderness.
I mean, out of all the massive work that he's done, he calls himself just a bush that's sitting over here in the wilderness, basically useless.
But yet God used him in dramatic, dramatic ways.
And it's my hope that I will soon, soon, meaning in five years or so, write a full biography of John Elliott and bring him into the mainstream from the shadows.
Justin, I'm going to need you to calm down.
Yeah, so yeah, these people excite me.
And I'm using my preacher hands.
The Puritans would probably not approve of how animated and excited you're getting.
Not at all.
Not at all.
We need Nate's.
Yeah, we got to get Nate's favorite.
I'll be briefer, but so I think Cotton Mather is pretty amazing.
Well, I mean, when I began researching, I think my heart was more toward John Cotton because I had done more research in him.
I like him more.
But when I started to study Cotton Mather, he's just a fascinating guy.
Like he's much like the Apostle Peter in that, like on one level, you can see he's just brilliant and godly and does all these amazing things.
And then in the next breath, he's a complete train wreck.
So, I mean, you read his journals, you read his diaries.
He's just an incredibly flawed human person and does very just eccentric things.
He writes over 400 books in his lifetime, publishes 400 titles, and was a pastor, a minister.
He gave generously.
He started foundation societies.
He founded schools to train young black children in Boston.
I mean, he just did these amazing things, but yet at the same time, you know, just really was troubled and just wrestled with his own soul and his own sinfulness.
And so he's just very human, and we see that more.
You know, you kind of get away from a lot of the auspices of the picture of Puritanism, and you get into this human being, this person who's got all these emotions.
So I just identify with Mather.
He's just a fascinating guy, and it's a lot of fun reading about him.
Well, I have been wanting to get this.
There's a lot of other things I want to bring up here on my list of stupid things I found, but this is my favorite.
So, these they claim these are actual names of Puritan children.
I guess they named very literally according to morals that they wanted to instill in their children.
So, it'd kind of be like naming your kid like Hope or something nowadays, or like outrage, outrage, yeah.
These are the word virus, coronavirus, none, yeah, virus-free.
Okay, so one's name is Praise God, Fear God.
That's another one.
This one's name, this is a long name.
If Christ had not died for thee, thou hadst been damned.
Yes, I've heard that one before.
Last name, last name is Barebone on that one.
There you go, there you go.
So, that's their name.
Uh, Joe Breaked Out of the Ashes, and my favorite one is Fly Fornication.
I know you stole my favorite one.
That's a person named Fly Fornica.
I heard that one.
Fly fornication.
We were trying to figure out what it meant, and then we realized it was like flea fornication, flee from fornication.
It's sort of after we googled fly fornication, which was not a wise thing.
Google that, don't Google that.
Not a wise thing.
Old websites, it's horrible.
But can you imagine calling all those kids to dinner?
It reminds me of Indian names.
You know, like 18 kids.
I mean, they had 15 or 16 kids, you know, especially standing at the door.
Yeah, you got to say the name like eight times.
If Christ had not died for thee, that's been damned.
Yeah, that's a good sermon.
Yeah, during the Great Awakening, people would have been saved just as people called their kids' names out.
It seems so fly fornication sounds kind of like, and they were around Indians, so maybe they started naming their kids the way Indians are like he who walks with the wolves or whatever.
They're like he who runs from the whore or who he who can we say that he who runs from the prostitution or something like that.
All right, and you guys having kids anytime soon?
You can pick up any of these names.
Yeah, experience.
I think we're both about almost done.
Are you guys done, or are you got more?
We're pretty much done.
We may adopt if we adopt young enough.
We can rename them.
Okay, can rename them.
So, here's more ideas, more ideas.
Uh, there you go, handmaid.
So, if you have a daughter, Reformation, obedience.
I feel like people who like the handmaids tale may use handmade now.
Oh, ironically, yeah, handmade Smith.
Uh, sorry for sin.
That's good.
Oh, that's a good one.
Uh, wrestling.
Yep.
This one seems modern.
Fly debate, which doesn't mean flies debating, like sitting atop a cow turd and debating philosophically, but I think it means run from debate.
This would be like if John Piper named his kid a value of our time.
Singing as John Piper named his kid God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.
That's right.
That's right.
So, is this true?
Did they really name their kids this?
I mean, is this all absolutely?
Oh, yeah.
I don't know what the nicknames would have been, but yeah, there's you can read old old church records, old town records.
You see their names all over the place.
You know, it's uh oh, nice.
I'm doing research on a character right now, and her, one of his ancestors, her first name was Experience.
I mean, that was on here.
Yeah, Experience is there.
There's one named Fang.
That's just an Abbott Costello routine waiting to happen.
What's your name?
Charity was a popular, popular name.
Charity.
One of you guys, isn't one of your wife's names charity?
No, my wife is Destiny.
Destiny, that's right.
That's right.
I guess that's similar.
Yeah, it's in the same vein.
It's gorgeous.
Hey, one's is Dust, which is pretty close to you.
Yep.
Humiliation is a nice name for your newborn child.
I'm wondering if they're.
We will call him humiliation.
I'm wondering if that's where Dustin came from.
They named him Dustin the Wind.
Yeah.
And then they just shortened it.
The last one on this list is free gift, which I like that.
That sounds like an 80s ballot or something.
Free gift.
So Nathan means gift of God.
So that's essentially my name right there.
I'm Ethan, and it means strong.
There you go.
It's weird how so close sounding, but different meanings completely.
Yeah.
I had a professor in college say he would often stop by my office and say he was going on a dusting binge.
So I thought, you know, maybe my mom named me that to remind herself she needed to clean the house.
We recently interviewed Costi Hinn, Benny Hinn's nephew, and he is telling us about how Benny Hinn has a personal duster guy who just rocks around dusting everything.
So he thought he does a lot of dust and binges.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yes.
Like his Netflix.
Yeah.
Well, interesting.
I'm just going to keep saying interesting.
So interesting.
So these Puritans, they were Anglicans, right?
And then they left.
So what's like the defining thing that made them say, screw you, Anglicans, we're going to America or whatever.
Yeah, that's like the opposite of missions, right?
It's the opposite of missions.
Right.
Usually you right?
You just leave everybody.
We're supposed to reach these people.
Also, but did they know they were there?
Although these people, were they born in America?
Why don't you just say some facts?
Yeah, just say stuff.
It's smart.
Well, the people that we write about were not born in America.
Okay.
I mean, there was no America during that time.
So in that, you know, what it became in 1776.
So when Elizabeth I, just to give a fair brief history, came to the throne, ascended the throne after her sister, Bloody Mary, not the drink, by the way, but the actual woman who had killed, yeah, who had killed lots of Protestant men and women because she wanted to blanket her whole kingdom with Roman Catholicism.
After she died and Elizabeth kind of came to the throne, the term Puritan in the 1560s or so came to refer really to a large contingency of Protestants who were seeking to purify or further reform the Church of England.
They did not feel that as everything switched over back to Anglicanism and Catholicism began to be kind of stamped out from Bloody Mary's influence.
They did not feel that the reforms went far enough, as sometimes the reformers themselves are accused of.
They did not reform enough.
And so out of that movement came several different groups.
There were groups that desired mild reforms.
Another group wanted kind of only organizational reforms within the church.
Another group completely opposed the Church of England and fully rejected most of the practices of the state-run church because they saw too much kind of Catholicism that was intertwined with the state church.
They didn't like the idea of a state church.
They wanted to worship freely and openly.
And so that's why they got on boats and came to the new world in the hope of, in John Winthrop's terminology, setting up a city on a hill that could be a shining example of what true religious freedom looked like.
So what are some other myths or misconceptions?
For instance, this list says that they actually were quite into drinking.
Is that true?
Because I would imagine them to be teetotalers, but I guess it's kind of hard to be a teetotaler.
I guess they really liked beer.
Is that true?
Yeah, they drank beer.
I mean, if you read Bradford's history on Plymouth Plantation, he talked about all the things that they had at Thanksgiving.
And one of those things was beer.
They brought huge barrels of beer over on ships with them.
Wasn't that what Sam was set?
First thing he asked, right?
He showed up and he was like, hey, you got to do that.
Yeah, they wanted food, right?
That was actually one of the bigger problems that they had.
So it wasn't just one or two times.
A lot of Massasoits tribe actually stayed with the pilgrims and lived there for months on end.
And one of the problems they were running into is they kept on coming and asking for food and beer and supplies and stuff like that.
And the pilgrims, they wanted to oblige, but half of them died the first year because they didn't have anything.
So trying to oblige and be a good neighbor, but at the same time, at a certain point, telling the Indians, okay, you guys need to go find something to do because you're bleeding us dry here.
So it was a social dynamic they were trying to navigate through.
But I mean, their relationships with them was really good.
But yeah, they fed a lot of them.
And it was a good relationship for about 40 years until things went really bad.
Do you guys have any cool stories about the Puritans?
Like, what's the coolest Puritan story that you have?
Apart from all the ones that are in the book, you mean?
We'll just assume that I read it and forgot all of them.
Oh, I don't know.
There's a whole bunch.
I mean, I think probably one of my favorites was John Cotton learning about expository preaching.
And so he's well known at Cambridge for being this great dynamic preacher and really kind of the who's who of preaching.
And so he's getting ready to go preach at St. Marie's Chapel and the place packs out and they're ready for this dynamic, erudite, powerful sermon.
But before he goes and preaches that, he comes under conviction that he wants to just preach a very plain expository sermon, just text and proofs and applications and so on and so forth.
So he gets up and he begins to preach this very plain sermon.
And all the students at the school were so bothered and so angry that the sermon was so plain, they actually pulled their caps, their shovel caps over their ears.
And so you can imagine this poor preacher looking out, not just at sad faces, but all the, and even the professors pulling down their caps and just shaking their heads, you know, in disdain because they hated his sermon so bad.
And so then he goes and slinks off to his room and just kind of sulks in his room.
And then John Preston, the great Puritan, comes and tells him that he's not a Christian and he needs to be born again and asks him how to do that.
And so that plain, boring sermon actually led one of the greatest Puritans to Christ.
So pretty neat little story, but just the humiliation of, you know, all of us who preached a sermon have probably preached bad ones and have experienced some level of humiliation.
But I've never had to sit there and watch people pull their hat over their ears as I preach a terrible sermon.
So that's a pretty cool story.
I'll say like seven out of ten.
Dustin, can you one up that with a cooler story?
Yeah, I probably can't.
Any explosions?
Yeah, no explosions.
You know, I love Jonathan Edwards, and so I know a lot of kind of intricate stories about him.
But in regard to the people that we wrote on, and back to the subject of angels, I found actually pretty hilarious that pastorally, when Cotton Mather was Speaking with and giving pastoral counsel to his congregants, if there was one particular lady that kept coming back to Cotton and saying that she had this dream of an angel visiting her sitting on her bed,
telling her about various things that were going on in the town and various things that were going on in the church and warning her to avoid certain people.
And when Cotton began to investigate further, it was the case that if the angel affirmed what he was doing, then it obviously was a messenger from God.
But if she came to him with the story that the angel was not affirming what Cotton was doing, then Cotton labeled that angel as a demon from hell that needed to be avoided.
And so his affirmation was from this angel.
If it was good stuff about Cotton himself, then he was a messenger from God.
But if not, he had to be from Satan.
And so I just found that pretty pastorally hilarious.
Tell them the story about John Winthrop and the vampire.
Dude, you know that one?
No, that wasn't something in the book, Dustin?
Vampire?
No, I don't think so.
Why did you not lead off with the vampire story when I said that?
Yeah, sorry.
So John Winthrop was a modern-day Van Helsing and walked around.
Yeah.
I thought you guys were going to ask us about that, like from the get-go.
I mean, I don't know why we talked about all these other things, you know, that have more importance.
Yeah.
Wait, so what's the vampire story?
I want to hear the vampire story.
Walked around with steaks.
It's in the book.
You'll have to read it.
Oh, my God.
There is no story.
I'm sorry.
There's no story.
You told us to push back, so here we go.
He's supposed to double down on it and just run.
Oh, okay.
All right.
So just make it up as I go.
We are trying to keep a reputation as, you know, upstanding writers and scholarship possibly.
Well, yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Do you want to move on to our 10 questions?
Should we?
All right, everyone.
We have exhausted our questions.
And so Dustin Binge and Nate Pickowitz wrote The American Pickowitz.
Yeah.
They wrote The American Puritans.
You can find it on Amazon, anywhere else.
Is Amazon a good place for people to go or you guys got?
Yeah, Amazon's fine.
Reformation Heritage has a site they have.
They ship them out pretty fast right now.
So either RHB or Amazon is just fine.
Cool.
Awesome.
Thanks, guys.
All right.
Thanks for joining us.
Thank you very much, guys.
Yeah.
Coming up next for Babylon Bee subscribers.
It's great.
So you guys devoted your lives to bringing, painting this picture of the Puritans.
That's us to Carmen.
Are you a leaky dispensationalist?
I'm a train wreck.
I have no idea.
I don't like what's happened to dispensation.
We need to make dispensationalism great again.
And it's like, it's really gone off the rails.
I don't like it.
I don't like where it's gone.
Cigars or pipes?
Oh, heavens.
Go ahead, D.W.
Oh, heavens.
Oh, wow.
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