Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Writing in 2019, the National Catholic Reporter pointed out: “… what we see with President Donald Trump and his cast of sycophants and co-conspirators — some of them beginning to flee the sinking ship on advice of counsel — is a rare thing: All seven deadly sins on display at once.”

It details how Trump and his sycophants committed the seven deadly sins – greed, lust, gluttony, sloth, deceit, envy and pride. Trump’s second term looks like his and his sycophants’ sins will only get worse.

The notion of sin, the forbidden, has been an aspect of American social and moral life since the nation’s founding four centuries ago. The Puritan minister, Samuel Willard (1640-1707), once observed, “… in nothing doth the raging power of original sin more discover itself … than in the ungoverned exorbitancy of fleshly lust.” The New World was besieged by numerous sex scandals during the first 75 years of Puritan settlement. These scandals revealed sin’s ever-present threat.

For New Englanders and other British colonists up and down the Atlantic Coast, these scandals set the boundaries of acceptable moral life. They mostly involved premarital sex (fornication), extramarital sex (adultery), sodomy (homosexuality) and interracial sex. Two offenses were most upsetting: bestiality involving young men and sexual witchcraft among older women.

Among Puritans, as the historian John Murrin points out, “Bestiality discredited men in the way that witchcraft discredited women.” However, in New England, sex with the devil was the gravest of all sins! Puritan sexual scandals were a terrain of struggle that illuminates, if only in its exaggeration, America’s most formative era of cultural identity. It is an identity that, like a threatening shadow, continues to hover over America today.

Mary Johnson,........

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