Definition of "Puritanical"

President Upham delivered a lengthy speech which covered the entire history of the Society along with some Puritanical sniffing.

1965, H[arold] Earle Johnson, Hallelujah, Amen!: The Story of the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston, Boston, Mass.: Bruce Humphries, page 94

[…] in his writings he [Benjamin Franklin] took an earthy, practical view of sex that outraged Puritanical sentiment.

1990 May 1, “The wisdom of Benjamin Franklin”, in Saturday Evening Post

My mother’s philosophy of life was a happy one. She said children should have every pleasure that there was not some good reason they should not have—a radical point of view in those Puritanical times. .

1995 September, “Patty Smith Hill, gifted early childhood educator of the progressive era”, in Roeper Review, volume 18, number 1

She has become very Puritanical, his daughter, and it baffles him, her strict views on religion.

1996 April, Allegra Goodman, “The Four Questions”, in Commentary, volume 101, number 4

Crude humor and violence used to earn films R ratings. These days, to get an R, you need to show something really outrageous, like a naked woman. (The system is still Puritanical in matters of sex, adult romance and flesh.)

2002 March 29, “This Essay Is Rated PG-13”, in Time

Unlike the transgressions of Cokes, or of the grocer and his wife in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Busy’s willful and Puritanical misunderstanding of the theater meets with severe reproach.

2003 summer, “Redressing Cross-Dressed Shakespeare”, in Academic Questions, volume 16, number 3

Speer thus had a rather “Puritanical upbringing,” a description appropriate for the style of a father committed to the spirituality of the Christian man as dutiful patriarch.

2005, Charles H. Lippy, Do Real Men Pray?: Images of the Christian Man and Male Spirituality in White Protestant America, Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, page 105

He loved the house he’d built and occupied, and when activities happened there that his Puritanical soul disapproved of, he came to scare the current occupants straight.

2010 November/December (published in Fantasy & Science Fiction), Albert E. Cowdrey, “Death Must Die”, in Otto Penzler, editor, The Big Book of Ghost Stories, New York, N.Y.: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, published September 2012, page 329, column 2

The Puritanical elements of English society had become appalled at those who they claimed were trying to taint the fundamentals of Christianity.

2014 June, Kevin L. Dooley, “De Tocqueville’s Allegorical Journey: Equality, Individualism, and the Spread of American Values”, in Journal of American Culture, volume 37, number 2

The founding fathers and mothers of the CAC were Puritanical, and were almost legalistic in their understanding of Christian living.

2018, George O. Folarin, “Theology and practice of Christ Apostolic Church on Bible inspiration and its authority in the context of Evangelical theology”, in Hervormde Teologiese Studies, volume 74, number 1

He [Timothy Leary] famously spoke to a “Human Be-In” in 1967 in San Francisco, appealing to what was characterized erroneously as the “love generation” rebelling against the Puritanical work ethic of their parents’ generation.

2019 January 30, Suzanne Fields, “Beware of the high-tech hustle”, in The Washington Times‎, archived from the original on 31 January 2019