The Puritan Exodus was a Pilgrimage to Liberty
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 24, 2025 – The essential binary of life is one of the things that keeps nature up at night, devising ways to make it known to her favorite things, us human beings. When you pause a moment to ponder whether we are spiritual things in the midst of a physical experience, or vice versa, you’ll get the point.
Either this is, or that is. If not binary, then our airy spirit and our bloody sinew combine in an ever-diminishing, empirical thing, bound only for the grave, or the fire.
The vast majority of people believe in a hereafter; most believe in the eternity of the soul, while very many believe our physical existence is merely preparation for an eternity of divine, supernatural splendor, or else an eternity of anguished damnation. For some of us, it’s like “If you liked The Apprentice, just wait’ll you get to Heaven and meet a real boss, with awesome hair and normal hands.”
The storybook version of American history asserts that our Pilgrim founders colonized North America because they wanted to worship God according to the dictates of their Puritan souls, which is the same as saying they wanted to escape the spiritual orthodoxy that had been imposed on them in England.
Our Puritans were in deliberate exodus from governance that issues both marching and kneeling orders via legislation, executive order, or royal edict. American purity demands that our marching and kneeling orders originate in the soul-fired minds of the marchers and kneelers themselves, not in soulless legislatures and executive mansions.
Therefore, the first wave of immigration to America, to the new world, was as much an Exodus as it was a Pilgrimage. It is only when seen as Exodus, that a proper light shines on the documents of America’s nearly immaculate conception.
By erecting an impermeable wall between Church and State, the First Amendment not only prevents any sect from becoming dominant, but it promises that no sect has any more standing in law than any story book does.
As people are natural beings, religions are corporate, man-made things, forever bereft of the inalienable rights persons enjoy. No corporation has a right to vote, even though a rogue supreme court deems them to have the human power of speech, and therefore the power to mute the people’s voice with torrential streams of partisan propaganda. (Campaign to overturn Citizens United.)
The First Amendment means that religion will have no governmental sanction in America, so that Americans remain perfectly free to ignore and/or espouse any and all religions. The fact that the First Amendment is widely violated at every level of government should rally honest patriots. That vain citizens amass and wield political power via heretical readings of scripture should alarm everyone with or without a personal relationship with the Almighty.
American Justice is blind – it sees neither halo nor heavenly raiment on any person or entity. No amount of divine aspiration can separate one organization from another, one citizen from another. Organizations in the business of soul nourishment, in the eyes of the law, must be treated the same way organizations in the business of soul music are treated.
America’s Puritan origins, a 17th century exodus from England, where the monarch prescribed the ways and means the people must pursue toward eternal salvation, if reflected upon at all today, is likely to be looked upon with derision and a smug sense of superiority.
The Puritans, who uprooted themselves from their ancient homeland and sailed to an unknown wilderness, did so because they refused to conform to the spiritual dictates of monarchy. Subjects who elected not to follow the heavenly paths paved and sanctioned by the government were put to death, beheaded or burned at the stake.
But, our failure to study the fatal flaws that produced the Exodus of Puritans, especially in comparison to republican democracy, has produced the current absurdity, where Truth is what a venal and impure man says it is. Non-conformity to his whim can land you in an offshore torture chamber, get you fired by ABC, or canceled by CBS.
For all his bluster and dictatorial rule, America’s fake king is no Henry Vlll, because where heady Henry had valiant Thomas More, the Donald had vile Roy Cohn. Ancient wisdom still admonishes us to judge public figures by the company they keep and by the counsel they seek.
When it became public knowledge that Roy Cohn was dying of Aids, his best friend Donald dropped him like a stone. When Thomas More said no Henry Vlll, his own head was removed and mounted on a pike on London Bridge. Whether or not it faced New England is irncidental to the fact that his execution led to its settlement less than a century later.
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