Pilgrims Progress?

Nathaniel Philbrick offers this insightful description of the Pilgrims view of the church when they were are deciding whether to go to the New World or stay put:

Catholics and more conservative Protetants believed that the traditions of the church contained valid, time-honored additions to what was found in the Bible. Given man's fallen condition, no individual could presume to question the ancient, ceremonial truths of the established church.
But for the Pilgrims, man's fallen nature was precisely the point.
A Purtian believed it was necessary to venture back to the absolute beginning of Christianity, before the church had been corrupted by centuries of laxity and abuse, to locate divine truth. In lieu of time travel there was the Bible, with the New Testament providing the only reliable account of Christ's time on earth while the OT contained a rich storehouse of still vital truths. If something as not in the scriptures, it was a man-made distortion of what God intended. At once radical and deeply conservative, the Puritans had chosen to spurn thousands of years of accumalted tradition in favor of a text that gave them a direct and personal connection with God.
A Puritan had no use for the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer, since it tampered with the original meaning of the Bible and inhibited the spontaneity that they felt was essential to attaining a true and honest glimpse of the divine. Puritans refused to kneel while tking communion, since there was no evidence that the apostles had done so during the Last Supper. There was also no biblical precent for making the sign of the cross when uttering Christ's name. Even more important, there was no precedent for the system of bishops that ran the Church of England. The only biblically sanctioned organizational unit was the individual congregation.
(pp, 8,9 "Mayflower).

Boy, that has a familiar ring to it, doesn't it? Fellow Pilgrims, have we made any progess in discarding traditions that have nothing to do with God's word?