Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne is a story of a man who sets off on a life changing journey where he sees the true picture of puritan values. This journey reveals him the corruption and disloyalty of public morality within his community. Hawthorne presents the hypocrisy of the puritans and their values as they were the one who always preached about constant self-examinations to see if they are sinners and unworthy of God's Grace. He showed a clear picture of how the respected, religious people in broad day light changes into evil in the darkness of the night. He critiqued the puritan values of following religion blindly so that one can end up in heaven and rather than understanding what the religion says and teaches, their concern was always in finding faults in others then looking what they were up to. They ignored the fact that everyman has two sides a good and bad, no matter how religious one becomes the bad sides always existed and when given a chance works to its fullest extent.
If we take a look closer at our society we can see that the society depicted in Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown is similar to the one we are living in, where people create their false image so that they can pretend of being saints, where people blame others for their mistakes although they know who did it, where people love to find faults in each other. Even we have extreme religious preachers who preach of religion all the time but does not understand a word of it as just the lip service can't make anyone a religious person, who preach of truth and lie themselves, who tells about several ways of going to heaven and doesn't teach anyone of being a good human being, who in the name of God manipulates innocents because they already know that they have lost their faith hence they want others to lose it too and these who are the real evils from whom one must stay away from as they preach of God and are devils themselves.
