I appreciate your concerns and have written some items very critical of the Puritans, especially as it relates to their treatment of Native Americans. Here is an example of an essay I wrote under another name in 2016. https://historytime.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/King-Philips-Shadow2016.pdf

I must admit that I think Puritan bashing has become a tad too popular in the United States. Benjamin Franklin loved trashing Boston and Nathaniel Hawthorne raised it to a high art. Some critics have claimed that the inclusion of Jonathan Edwards “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” In the American Literature cannon was a “Unitarian Conspiracy” to discredit the bunch. If you are interested the minister Brian Zahnd recently wrote a very compelling book called “Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God.”

I am both descended from Puritans and very critical of them. At the same time I find myself compelled to defend them when things are out of balance. I have even been known to host a “Puritan Dance Party” with my students.

My most important defenses of the Puritans are as follows.

1. They had a strong Communitarian ethic that informs much of the “blue state” economic justice position.
2. They were passionate about literacy and education, (albeit for the purpose of reading the Bible.) Massachusetts had the first law mandating public schools and established Harvard College within the first decade of settlement.
3. Their focus on “original sin” made them a hotbed of “critical” thought and spawned competing “Orthodoxies.” Yale was founded because Harvard had become to “liberal.” Brown was founded for “Baptists.” Rhode Island hosted one of the first Synagogues in the nation.
4. Puritanism helped spawn the scientific revolution in America. Jonathan Edwards was an amateur naturalist and later became president of Princeton as well as the grandfather of Aaron Burr.

Americans have always had a love/hate relationship with Puritanism. If I recall the Hawthorne quote it is something like, “Let us Thank God for having given us such ancestors, and let us thank Him not less fervently for being one step further removed from them in the march of ages.” If you would like an expanded sense of my take on Puritanism please check our Paul Hanson’s book, A Political History of the Bible in America. I collaborated with him extensively for the American history part of the book.

As a final note, I completely agree with your emphasis on the problematic nature of the doctrine of original sin. It has been used to bash outsiders and has created a compulsion to “fix people who may not be broken.” I recently stumbled upon a work in which the author was noting the Greek word Hamartia, and translated it as “wounded vision.” Hamartia is the word that New Testament authors use which is translated as “sin.” I very much prefer the “wounded vision” translation. It resonates with Jesus’ command to remove the plank from our own eye before attempting to remove specks from other peoples’ eyes.

I wish more “Christians” would take Jesus’ advice on that.