Making Haste contains multitudes and would be more accurately subtitled “New Histories,” for Bunker does his best to discuss everything that went into the voyage of the Mayflower and the founding of Plymouth Plantation. Rather, the phrase “and Their World” provides a more accurate summary of the book’s contents. Bunker gives us much that is new (though he also repeats debunkings that earlier scholars have already performed), but it’s rather misleading to refer to this book as “ a history” of anything. The subtitle–appealing, no doubt, to fans of Brian McLaren–reads “A New History,” a claim that is simultaneously true and false. The latest book of this sort is Nick Bunker’s Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World. Proper history must defuse the convenient and attractive myth until that happens, further books on the Puritans will be necessary. Certain members of the religious right admire the Puritans as much as the Revolutionaries and neo-Calvinists likely admire them more.)Įach year brings a new surge of books attempting to supply us with a new angle on what is a very familiar story, albeit one that has been so heavily mythologized that the average layman would not recognize the truth if he were transported back to the 1620s. (There are exceptions to this general rule, of course. We study the Puritans for the opposite reason: We want to avoid making what we view as their mistakes. Our attraction to the former stems, I think, from our desire both to emulate the bravery of the Founding Fathers and to claim them for our own political ends. Two eras of American history seem to be of perpetual interest to readers: the Revolutionary War and the Puritan epoch. Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World Principles of Christian Theology by John Macquarrie.

The Christian Humanist (all blog posts).

Making haste from babylon