But more tellingly, Graziano shows, American intelligence officers were overly inclined to view powerful religions and religious figures through the frameworks of Catholicism. In a practical sense, this was because the Roman Catholic Church already had global networks of people and safe places that American agents could use to their advantage. Graziano argues that the religious approach to intelligence by key OSS and CIA figures like “Wild” Bill Donovan and Edward Lansdale was an essential, and overlooked, factor in establishing the agency’s concerns, methods, and understandings of the world.

Fittingly, Errand Into the Wilderness of Mirrors: Religion and the History of the CIA(U Chicago Press, 2021) investigates the dangers and delusions that ensued from the religious worldview of the early molders of the Central Intelligence Agency. Miller emphasized the importance of the Puritans’ consistent thought and their belief that they were on a mission from God, while avoiding a fall into the trap of viewing them as forerunners of liberal democracy.Michael Graziano’s intriguing book fuses two landmark titles in American history: Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness (1956), about the religious worldview of the early Massachusetts colonists, and David Martin’s Wilderness of Mirrors (1980), about the dangers and delusions inherent to the Central Intelligence Agency. The founder of Connecticut and Massachusetts minister John Cotton collaborated in a synod that denounced presbyterianism. Hooker set up a Massachusetts-like settlement with the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, which resembled a church covenant. Parrington and James Truslow Adams” who “conspired to present Thomas Hooker as a sort of John the Baptist to Thomas Jefferson.” He quite ably emphasized that a desire for land, rather than a desire for greater democracy, led Hooker and those who followed him to the new settlement of Connecticut. Miller argued against historians like “Vernon L. Miller disagreed with those who viewed the Puritans as early liberal democrats and did not rely upon the strict theocracy of John Winthrop as his only example. An individualism that was uninterested in the good of the community was not a part of early Puritan thought. These transatlantic immigrants focused upon the covenant relationships that they had with God and each other. The Puritans saw their errand in these terms: God intended them to move to the New World to be the example, “a shining city upon a hill,” that would show the Old World how a true Christian commonwealth would operate. Whereas Turner argued that the frontier gave America its rugged individualism, Miller understood that the Puritans’ view of themselves as the elect of God sent on an errand drove them into the wilderness.

However, his idea of what made the frontier important was very different. He agreed with Frederick Jackson Turner that “the frontier” was an important factor in shaping American life.

Miller attempted to understand the Puritans on their own terms, rather than through the economic determinism that many historians of the day employed. While he wrote important works on The New England Mind, The Puritans, and Jonathan Edwards, perhaps his best-known work was Errand into the Wilderness, which was a collection of essays that traced New England (and to a lesser extent Virginia) thought from the settlement of Massachusetts in 1630 to the nineteenth-century transcendentalists. Miller wrote extensively between 1930 and his death in 1963 on the intellectual history of Puritan New England. One of the leading historians who changed the general understanding of the Puritans was Harvard University professor Perry Miller. Beginning in the 1930s, however, some historians began to question the established understanding of the Puritans. Before the 1930s, most historians tended to view the Puritans either as a group of persecuted liberal democrats who stood up to the backward, autocratic, and semi-Catholic monarchy of the early Stuarts or as the prototypical capitalists who had concern only for their pecuniary gain.

Perry miller errand into the wilderness