Reliving our Puritanism with the modern Republican

I'm reading a book written in 1917 called "The American Family in the Colonial Period" - mostly because I'm curious about the claims by Christian and other conservatives that the contemporary version of marriage has been successful and unchanged for thousands of years. It's an interesting book, although it was written at the height of a "simplified English" movement, meaning some of the words are tough to decipher. In an early chapter on Old World origins, the author breaks down some background behind the colonial family makeup, He discusses the rise of Puritanism in the early seventeenth century, and provides this snippet:

...In Germany, says Bebel,

The merry, life-loving townsman of the middle ages became a bigoted, austere, sombre Philistine...The honorable citizen with his stiff cravat, his narrow intellectual horizon, his severe but hypocritical morality, became the prototype of society. Legitimate wives who had not favored the sensuality tolerated by the Catholicism of the middle ages, were generally better pleased by the Puritan spirit of Protestantism.

The Puritan emphasis on sexual restraint was of a piece with the general gospel of frugality so appropriate among a class of people trying to accumulate capital in an age of deficit.

Is it just me, or is this a completely contemporary description of today's prototypical Republican? Accumulating capital in an age of deficit, narrow intellectual horizon, severe but hypocritical morality - this entire passage could have been written three weeks ago about any loyal Bush Republican.

It strikes me that the current crop of Christian evangelicals do bear strong resemblance to the Puritans (but definitely not the Calvinists) of our past. Their single-minded focus on issues of sexuality and resultant proclivity for sexual misbehavior, their pursuit of capital side-by-side with their faith, and their increasing desire to segregate and/or eliminate believers of other faiths (or no faith!) draw close comparison to 17th-century Puritanism. Hell, their pursuit of Harry Potter as a witch is practically a straight-line descendant of Puritan belief!