Our first colonists were puritans. Or, as I call them: ABSOLUTELY RAVING NUTS. I've read their early writing and they're some of the most chillingly disturbed and creepy writings I've ever read because they absolutely believed every single thing they wrote down. Which is the scariest thing of all.
I still remember this account of a colonial woman whose house and town was sacked by Native Americans. She was kidnapped and taken prisoner and saw three of her children killed in-front of her one by one...and do you know what almost every single sentence ended with?
"And thus it happened due to God's will, praise god!"
And the creepy thing is the first in settlers always leave a disproportionately large impact on the culture of the area, with each succeeding wave of immigration having diminishing returns. Hence why Chinese food and bits of the Chinese languages have permeated our culture, but we don't have the same concept of filial piety (or whatever it is that modern China has now-a-days).
You can see this kind of puritanical thinking in our views on sex, punishment, and other sundry weirdness.
As my dad said, "Australia was lucky...they just got the convicts and thieves."
That's a bit over-simplified, but essentially, yeah, they're who I was talking about.
There were many shades of "Puritan" and "Calvinist." Technically, the Quakers are a spin-off of Calvinism and so are the Congregationalists who, nowadays, are one of the first American churches to marry same-sex couples, with or without state recognition, and are vanguards in the fight for civil rights for gays, women and immigrants (though they, too, have their conservatives who resist that liberalism). But such churches were never part of the Scarlet Letter set that you're referring to, not even back in the colonial day.
Amusing side note: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Salem-resident author of The Scarlet Letter, is a direct descendent of the Judge John Hathorne who tortured and hanged the victims of the Salem Witch Trials. Nathaniel may even have changed the spelling of his name because he was so disgusted by what his ancestor had done.
Link. I've always interpreted Hawthorne's stories to be about the corrupting evil of hypocrisy, particularly The Scarlet Letter. Gosh, could that also be a consistent trend with people like the OP pastor, Rick Santorum, etc, etc, from the 17th century down to the present day, right alongside loud, public religiosity -- rampant hypocrisy that wraps itself in the mantle of God while tearing other people's lives apart for profit?
In any event, I agree with you about the impact of the founding culture on all that come later. We've always been a hard divide between progressive and regressive, and never the 'twain shall meet.