In October 1621, when the people we now call Pilgrims gathered for what we now call Thanksgiving, they were no doubt eager to continue building their patriarchal theocracy in the hope that Jesus would soon return. In 1630, to the north, the first of those we now call Puritans arrived on the Arabella in what became the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The Pilgrims and Puritans were high-control radical Protestant doomsday groups. If they were around today, most Americans would identify them as cults.

Although these were two different groups with different investors and colonial structures, they were all “Hot Protestants,” as such radicals were known in England. They believed the end of the world as prophesied in the New Testament book of Revelation was imminent. Early Massachusetts Bay minister John Cotton thought the apocalypse would come shortly after 1655. Cotton’s son-in-law Increase Mather, reluctant to assign a particular date, simply said the cosmic battle would occur in the next few years. Increase’s son Cotton Mather, another significant minister in Puritan history, believed it would be in 1697.

“The Day of Doom,” a long-form poem published in 1662 about the return of a vengeful Jesus, was so popular in New England it’s known as America’s first bestseller.

The radical Protestants believed, as apocalyptic thinkers always have, that the world contained good and evil forces, eradication was the only goal of both, and each supernatural side had pursued it since the beginning of time. These early New Englanders wanted to hasten the apocalypse by blotting out everything that didn’t fit their ever-shrinking view of righteousness. Whoever wasn’t with them was against them. The UCLA historian Carla Gardina Pestana argues that Pilgrim governor William Bradford “thought anyone hostile to Plymouth itself risked God’s anger.”

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These groups did not come to the New World seeking religious freedom. The Pilgrims, in particular, already had religious freedom in Holland, where they lived for 12 years after fleeing England. Along with economic motivations, they came to America because they didn’t want to raise their children in a liberal society. They wanted theocracy. They wanted to be able to expel nonconformists and exert total control over culture.

The Puritans wanted the same—this is why they hanged Quakers, banished dissidents, and, eventually, ended the practice of questions and comments following sermons, because, as Cotton Mather wrote, it was “an occasion of much contention, vexation, and folly.” Church attendance was mandatory. They made it illegal to disagree with ministers.

Punishment for transgressions was extreme and designed to humiliate, just as it is in cults. Punishment was also a source of entertainment. On trial days, the taverns in Plymouth opened early. Brandings and ear clippings often occurred immediately after sentencing. Some condemned were tied to the back of a cart that paraded them through town while they were whipped.

Gossiping, flirting, swearing, smoking, playing ball sports, and doing almost anything on the Sabbath were crimes. Skipping church or criticizing the pastor were also punishable. Residents were encouraged to inform on one another. It was even a crime to interrupt the preacher. Blasphemy called for the death sentence.

At the time, discipline in England was also brutal, but comparatively speaking, there was hardly any crime in New England. In Pilgrim and Puritan communities, there was not just a culture of punishment; there was a culture of conformity. These were high-control groups, meaning the groups’ leaders used community pressure and threats of punishment, ostracism, and damnation to regulate residents’ behavior, thoughts, and information intake.

Some of the Puritans’ controlling doctrine and behavior started at the jump, but much of it developed beginning around the 1640s and 1650s, when founders and elders became rigidly determined to hold what they’d built and developed—that is, when they became corrupted by power and refused to relinquish it. For example, as more community members developed the inner conviction of being saved, ministers feared their leadership would lose authority. In response, they started preaching uncertainty, saying that, actually, God was hardly saving anyone, and therefore residents were unlikely to be among the so-called elect. This shift in doctrine made it almost impossible to gain entry into the church, a reality especially hard on teenagers whose entire identities had been built around entry.

Cults and high-control groups are typically most destructive to the children raised in them. In addition to uncertainty of their status among the saved, New England children were subject to fear-based indoctrination and extreme discipline. Further, parents were discouraged from indulging children with affection, lest it spoil them into wickedness. Scholars who’ve pored over diaries kept by the Puritans found that the second and third generations exhibited during adolescence significant increases in melancholy, pathological abnormalities, nervous breakdowns, suicide, and insanity.

Nevertheless, in the mid-to-late 1800s, the Pilgrims and Puritans became the avatars of America’s founding—in part because of associations with the new Thanksgiving holiday, and in part, as some scholars have argued, because the nation was struggling to define its identity and to separate its origins from the slave trade.

I’m passionate about painting an accurate portrait of our New England forebears, as I do in my recent book, Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America, not only in dedication to historical accuracy but because of the implications of their culture and belief systems in today’s United States, which go largely unrecognized.

Their radical doomsday ideology didn’t go away. It became the foundation of American culture. From these remarkably successful colonies, we inherited our knee-jerk anti-intellectualism, obsession with self-investigation, tendency to worship the wealthy, and desire for a strong man to rescue us from crisis. It should be no surprise that the country has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. This latent influence has also made us a nation of credulous marks for con artists, cult leaders, and demagogues, who activate us to behave in ways that serve them by pushing the buttons of our unconscious indoctrination. The result is division and extremism, currently rampant in our nation.

Americans today often wonder “how we got here” as a nation. My answer: the Mayflower and Arabella.

Cult-like thinking is not unique to the United States, but it is more prevalent in the United States for three reasons: our aforementioned ideological inheritance from the Pilgrims and Puritans; the first and second Great Awakenings (in the early 18th century and around the turn of the 19th century, respectively), which shattered church hierarchy and allowed anyone to gain a charismatic following; and the First Amendment, which effectively protects a certain number of scam artists, a necessary evil in exchange for religious freedom.

Of course, cultlike thinking is not always flaring. Sociologists argue that it increases during times of technological revolution, social upheaval, and crisis. Recently, Americans have seen social media shatter traditional communities, and they are preparing for mass AI-driven layoffs. We’re facing one of the biggest crises in our nation’s history: the chronic precarity of a majority of Americans.

Between 1975 and 2020, $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90 percent of Americans to the top 1 percent; that number is estimated to have reached $60 trillion today, a staggering and intentional redistribution of wealth. Through lobbying, influence, and ever-ballooning campaign donations, the wealthiest members of our nation have, since Reagan’s administration, wooed the government to cut taxes for the wealthy and for corporations, roll back regulations protecting the public from risky corporate behavior, neuter unions that empower workers to thwart exploitation, and allow corporations to move overseas and leave American workers behind.

People in crisis, such as broke and desperate Americans, turn to cultlike thinking. We have been and will continue to be easily manipulated. If we want to mitigate our national flirtation with autocracy and the extremism ravaging America, we must secure stability—for example, guaranteeing healthcare, shelter, food, and social security—for all Americans. And we must turn toward instead of away from one another. This Thanksgiving is as good a time as any to begin coming to terms with the country’s radical cultish origins. The consequences are ongoing, and we’re all in this together. There’s no going back. The Mayflower and Arabella aren’t offering return tickets.