The Puritan era in American society was one in which the individual and his or her actions were often pitted against a social order determined to stamp out behaviors it considered immoral. In The Scarlet Letter, we see that Hester Prynne is persecuted by a Massachusetts society whose leaders believed that religious authority overrides civil authority. The officious, hypocritical, and prosecutorial nature of men like Roger Chillingworth are very much akin to people like Cotton Mather, men of faith who refused to tolerate any beliefs or practices in civil society that conflict with the idea of religious superiority. Such attitudes enabled men like Mather and Chillingworth to rationalize and validate social control that included the persecution and prosecution of those who transgressed their beliefs. According to Becker, such a justification and validation stemmed from “the vain and pathetic effort of single-minded men to identify the temporal and the spiritual commonwealths,” (97).
It was in such a society that Hawthorne lived and in which the events of The Scarlet Letter take place. Men like Mather and Chillingworth believe they and members of the community who believed as they did maintained a monopoly and virtue on goodness. Hawthorne, in contrast, believed that all humans are imperfect and such ideals, beliefs, values and attitudes stemmed from intolerance and evil when used to persecute others merely because they believe differently. If we look at Mather’s persecution of those suspected of being witches, we see a mindset similar to Chillingworth’s determination to bring down Dimmesdale. Mather called the people of Massachusetts “a people of God,” but in order to do so he posited himself in the position of knowing God more than others and placed himself above imperfection or sin (Mather 9). Such men like Mather and Chillingworth see the world in black and white terms, with good against evil and right versus w...