Puritans saw themselves as God’s chosen superior people destined for an exceptional land

Evidence

As a Puritan minister, Richard Mather had walked uprightly through fifteen years of British persecution before embarking on the perilous journey across the Atlantic to begin life anew in New England. There, he would be reunited with his illustrious ministerial friend John Cotton, who had faced British persecution for twenty years in Boston, England. In 1630, Cotton had given the farewell sermon to hundreds of Puritan founders of New England communities, blessing their fulfillment of God’s prophetic vision. As dissenters from the Church of England, Puritans believed themselves to be God’s chosen piece of humanity, a special, superior people, and New England, their Israel, was to be their exceptional land. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 35

Categorization

• SEED: Possible essay angle: the founding American exceptionalism conviction (chosen people, promised land) as the seedbed from which racial hierarchy imagery later grew — how ‘chosenness’ about religion slides into ‘chosenness’ about race.
• XREF: Echoes the white-savior/chosen-people framing the reader would recognize in contemporary debates; ties to the book’s earlier foundation of how ‘superior people’ thinking primes racial ideas.