Religion In Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown

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Religion is the most widespread social practice in Young Goodman Brown written by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Almost all of the citizens living in Salem Village in the 1600s participated in the puritan religion. “Say thy prayers, dear Faith, and go to bed at dusk, and no harm will come to thee” (Hawthorne 1). Before leaving for a night-long journey, this is what Young Goodman Brown tells to his wife. She had told him that she was scared to be alone on this night of all nights, and he tells her that if she prays, she will be perfectly fine. Praying is a practice that is extremely important to the puritans, they believe that by doing it, they are doing their christian duty, and that no harm will come to them. If the puritans didn’t pray, they would be looked down upon by …show more content…
“Lengel’s pretty dreary, teaches Sunday school and the rest, but he doesn’t miss that much. He comes over and says, ‘Girls, this isn’t the beach… he concentrates on giving the girls that sad Sunday school superintendent stare” (Updike 3). Lengel is the manager of the A&P grocery store in a small Massachusetts town. He’s a lot older than Sammy, the narrator of the story and his co-worker who were ogling the three teenage girls who walked into the grocery store in only their bathing suits. Sammy mentions that he is a Sunday school teacher, which means that he has a lot of religious values and enjoys sharing them with the youth of Massachusetts. Lengel had extremely different views than Sammy and the other characters because he believes that the girls are dressed inappropriately in his grocery store, but Sammy and the other younger characters see no problem in it. This is because of Lengel’s religious views, and the other character’s lack of them. While religion is a universal social practice, in the case of these two stories it is specific to the
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