The Puritan jeremiad lamented individual sloth, not systemic injustice

Evidence

White Protestant Christianity in early American history also inherited the tradition of the jeremiad, but it was put to different ends, focused on an individual’s relationship to God, and personal sin, and legislating morality. “The Puritans gave a special supernatural legitimacy to the Protestant work ethic in the New World,” the scholar Sacvan Bercovitch has observed. “They raised the success story to the status of visible sainthood.” In his book The American Jeremiad, Bercovitch points out that the Puritan jeremiad was a lament about how the colonists had neglected to seize the opportunity presented by land they had been given in New England. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1015

Categorization

• XREF: The contrast between the two jeremiads is a precise case study in how origin narratives work: the Puritan version anchors identity to providential opportunity (design), the Black version to moral corruption (deviation). Bear on the Wilentz/Revolutionary-dispute framing.
• QUESTION: Is Bercovitch’s reading of the jeremiad itself contested? The reader is mapping how historical controversy operates — worth checking scholarly objections to Bercovitch’s account.