Valley of Vision: Why an old puritan prayer book might change how you think about religion

Fun fact: the word ‘tunnel’ was once a word for a net used to trap birds. Some distant speaker used the word as a metaphor for a hole in the ground, presumably to indicate its dangerousness, and so dangerous holes likely to trap you were called ‘tunnels’, until every hole in the ground was called a tunnel, and eventually we invented the underground train, left the bird net in our forgotten past and now tunnels are just tunnels. Our language is a graveyard of dead metaphors.

The word ‘puritan’ or as we would use it ‘puritanical’ has a similar lacuna of meaning in our use of the word. For us Puritans are the great party poopers, the repressive, thou-shalt-not-ers who walked around tutting if they could see, say, a woman’s exposed ankle or raised their finger to scold if someone stubbed their toe and went “oh fu…”

This of course is one aspect of one part of Puritanism. There are many reasons why this aspect has remained in our language, for one thing the various elements of Christian history and theology which Puritans stood for or against has long been forgotten, so its meaning is no more significant than say ‘anabaptist’, a word most people wouldn’t even have heard of. It’s also a convenient reflection of the way we have come to see religion and the idea of moral…