From the colonial era onward, the Puritan spirit has shaped the American tendency to mark outsiders as deviant. Kai Erikson’s Wayward Puritans showed that in seventeenth-century Massachusetts Bay, trials of witches, heretics, and dissenters were not simply about eliminating wrongdoers but about drawing boundaries around the moral community. The Puritans needed deviance as much as they feared it, for by identifying sinners they reminded themselves of what they were not and reassured one another of their collective identity. That habit of exclusion—constructing the community by defining an outside—did not end with the disappearance of the Puritan churches but became a deep feature of American culture. Richard White’s account of saloons in the Gilded Age shows the same mechanism at work in a different context. The saloon, especially when dominated by Irish and German immigrants, became the symbol of everything Protestant nativists despised. It was noisy, male, foreign, and Catholic. Reformers saw in it both cause and sign of immigrant inferiority, a perfect scapegoat through which the “respectable” middle class could reassure themselves of their own sobriety and virtue. The Worcester rhyme that mocked the Irish and the Dutch demonstrates how ethnic difference and drinking customs were collapsed into one image of deviance, against which “we Americans” could define ourselves.

This process reflects the continuity of the Puritan ethos. What began as theological vigilance against corruption migrated into a cultural style that insists on purity, sharp boundaries, and the constant identification of outsiders. In each era the figures change, but the logic is consistent: witches and heretics in the seventeenth century, drunken immigrants in the nineteenth, communists in the twentieth, undocumented migrants or Muslims in the twenty-first. The pattern is not accidental but structural. As Erikson argued, communities need deviance in order to reaffirm themselves. America, steeped in Puritan heritage, has repeatedly met that need by finding new groups to stigmatize. Reformers and nativists have not merely responded to vice but produced a ritual of exclusion that renews the community’s sense of moral cohesion.

Contrasting this with Catholic societies makes the distinctiveness of the American pattern clear. In Catholic cultures, sin is assumed to be universal, ordinary, and inevitable. Everyone confesses, everyone is forgiven, and the goal of ritual is reintegration. Drinking in Italy or Spain is part of everyday family life, not a mark of deviance. Sexual transgressions are frowned upon but often tolerated with a wink, because the Church provides confession as a means of reconciliation. In such cultures, outsiders are less necessary, because everyone is already implicated in sin and everyone has a route back into the community. By contrast, in the Puritan tradition sin is divided starkly between the righteous and the fallen. Communities protect themselves by expelling the deviant rather than reincorporating them, producing harsher stigmas and more durable exclusions.

The American obsession with outsiders thus flows from its Puritan origins. The immigrant saloon was condemned not only for liquor but for its ethnic, Catholic, and working-class associations. Later, communists in the Cold War were not just political dissenters but traitors to the American way of life. Today, immigrants from Latin America or Muslims from the Middle East are cast as threats to purity, as if the health of the nation depended on their exclusion. The Puritan habit ensures that even as the targets change, the ritual continues: the community discovers deviance, stigmatizes it, and thereby affirms its own imagined righteousness. This is why America, more than many Western countries, is prone to moral panics, to nativist suspicion, and to cycles of reform that quickly become campaigns against outsiders.

The consequences are paradoxical. The Puritan inheritance has given America enormous moral energy, a belief in being a “city upon a hill,” tasked with demonstrating virtue to the world. Yet the same inheritance makes America fragile, prone to suspicion, and eager to cast neighbors as enemies. The effort to purify the community by identifying deviants is self-perpetuating: the community cannot live without outsiders because without them it would lose its sense of itself. Unlike Catholic cultures that assume universal sin and forgiveness, the Puritan ethos requires vigilance, exclusion, and punishment. That is why in America the immigrant, the dissenter, the deviant, or the foreigner so often becomes the necessary villain of public life.

The story of the saloon illustrates this with special clarity. Reformers saw the immigrant saloon as both proof of immigrant vice and justification for immigrant exclusion. They imagined themselves virtuous by contrast, defining their Americanness against the foreignness of Irish whiskey or German beer. This was not simply prejudice but a structural habit of mind rooted in Puritan traditions. The Puritans had once needed witches to police their boundaries; the Gilded Age needed drunken immigrants; each generation has needed its own scapegoats. The effect is that American society repeatedly distances itself from outsiders with an intensity less common in Catholic countries, where difference is more easily absorbed. This is the enduring shadow of Puritanism: the constant search for deviants to mark the line between “us” and “them,” the insiders and the outsiders, the saved and the damned. Until that inheritance loosens its grip, America will continue to reproduce the same rituals of exclusion, turning new groups into wayward Puritans so that the community can reassure itself of its purity.