I would raise a small issue with this excellent essay.
Regarding the Puritans, it is often stated that they fled to the New World to escape religious oppression. One should note that the oppression they were fleeing was the infamy of being "forced" to live in a society in which non-Puritans were tolerated. In their view, a society that was not "Godly", as they defined it, was oppressive to them. The freedom they sought was the freedom to employ the stake, the noose, and the rack to enforce their own orthodoxy. Thus, it is hardly surprising that they founded not some Eden of tolerance but an intolerant religious dictatorship.