In 1517, Martin Luther’s assertions that 1) a Christian’s salvation is determined only by faith, not strict adherence to ritual, and 2) Scriptures, not clergy or tradition, determine what an individual must believe and practice sparked a firestorm that displaced the Roman Catholic Church as the dominant institution of Western Civilization. Within fifteen short years, Henry VIII founded the Church of England to escape the commands of the Pope, and the Protest Reformation was underway. After Henry’s death in 1547, England jerked from King Edward’s radical Protestantism to Queen Mary’s aggressive Roman Catholicism in 1553, then to Queen Elizabeth’s renewed Protestantism in 1558. Dissent toward the rulers, however short-lived, was not tolerated: “Before Cromwell’s soldiers forced recognition of the right to dissent in 1653, the crown, and later Parliament, required all Englishmen to belong to and support the established church. Membership in a separatist church was a high crime against the state, and even during Elizabeth’s reign, when mere nonconformity was not the target of aggressive persecution, two prominent separatist ministers were executed for their beliefs” (Langdon 4).
A group, known today as Puritans but known then as Separatists
and later as Independents or Congregationalists, were enraged by the decline of
society and the corruption of the rulers: “Every nation or people, the Puritans
believed, existed by virtue of a covenant with God, an agreement whereby they
promised to abide by His laws, and He in turn agreed to treat them well. To
help carry out their part of the bargain, people instituted governments, and
the business of government was to enforce God’s laws by punishing every
detectable breach. Government in this view had a sacred task and enjoyed divine
sanction in carrying it out...if the governors failed in their sacred task and
fell prey to the evils they were supposed to suppress, then the people must
rebel and replace the wicked rulers with better ones. If they did not, God
would descend in fire and brimstone to punish the whole nation” (Morgan 19).
As Medieval scholasticism, or the analysis of issues and
ideas from a religious perspective, evolved into Renaissance humanism, a
rejection of the transcendental in favor of reason and a return to the ideas of
antiquity, the Puritan was increasingly alarmed, especially as the competition
and greed of the burgeoning capitalist system replaced the cooperation and
sacrifice to God inherent in the barter system, with governments nurturing the
rise of a global free market system. To a Puritan, who believed “this world was
little more than a testing ground for the next” and they “must not permit
themselves to be cheated of this supreme prize by reaching for the temporary, unreal
pleasures of human existence”
(Wertenbaker 159), the changing values of society indicated imminent
danger: “In addition to the burden of
guilt each of them carried for his own sins, they became increasingly troubled
by the sins of the nation. Whenever drought, disease, or depression appeared,
they looked fearfully for worse to come, because they knew that worse was
deserved, that God would not always tolerate the evils that the English
Government tolerated, nay practiced”
(Morgan 20).
The Puritans,
distressed by the decadence and debauchery, considered “a second Protestant
Reformation, to give up England and the Church of England as beyond saving and
to withdraw from them as [England] had withdrawn from Rome a hundred years
before. To many this was a tempting solution...Those who did take it were
called separatists. They would have
noting to do with the Anglican Church at all—and some went so far as to cut
themselves off even more completely by emigration to Holland and then to
Plymouth Plantation in New England”
(Morgan 31). But, beyond religious dissent as a motivating factor or the
final cause, poor economics, which they interpreted a sign of God’s
displeasure, may have played a greater role in their defection than has been
reported: “In the 1620s the textile industry suffered a depression that
affected the whole country. Clothworkers were unemployed, hungry by unable to
pay for country produce; clothiers could not market their fabrics; farmers
could not pay their rents” (Morgan 21).
The decade-long retreat to the Netherlands was also
unsuccessful, in their view. The influence of the ailing society was too
powerful for the small community to resist. When the Puritan could not persuade
her neighbors to adopt her lofty standards, the Puritan fled to the wilderness
of America, where, far from the temptations of European society, a new society
could thrive in devotion to God and His laws. “The separatists in their
simplicity, their forthrightness, and their courage defied a wicked world. But
their defiance was also a desertion. They failed their fellow men” (Morgan 32).
As Puritans interpreted the Bible as the infallible
guidebook for living, they justified their escape from the Old World to America
by claiming parallels with the Hebrews liberation from slavery and journey to
the Promised Land. “They were separated from England, also, by the belief that
they were God’s chosen people, the especial object of His care and guidance,
and that they had come to America in obedience to His direct command...This
belief that God had set them apart for His special guidance and blessing
pervaded every phase of New England religious and political life and gave to it
a purpose and strength lacking in many societies...And since the established
order was the direct work of God, planned especially for His elect, to attempt
to overthrow it, even to criticize it, was the most hideous of crimes...Their
Zion, the leaders hoped, would last for all time. In the remote part of the
world where they had founded it the people would be comparatively safe from the
errors which had surrounded them in England”
(Wertenbaker 75). In this way, the Puritan denied the right to dissent
toward her own new Separatist community that she was unfairly denied by the
Church of England.
From before the moment of their arrival on the shores of
America, the Puritans intended to build a church without the theatrics and
inequality the Church of England carried forward from the Roman Catholic
Church: “These earnest Christians could find no warrant in Scripture for the
massive, splendid, and barbaric structure which had been erected upon the
simple teachings of Christ, and which dared call itself His church. They could find no bishops, popes,
cathedrals, robes of gold brocade, indulgences, or bread turned into virtual
flesh in the Bible. The church they
found there was simple in the extreme, without distinctions of rank and
emphasizing the supreme value of every individual before God. It was without elaborate paraphernalia, or
man-made ritual. This was the church
they wanted to reinstitute. It would be
essentially a church of laymen, hence democratic. It would be a church based upon biblical
authority, not overlaid with man-made inventions” (Smith 59).
In 1620, the Puritan sailed across the Atlantic in the
Mayflower. “The great migration to Massachusetts, which began with the arrival
of John Winthrop and his company, continued without interruption for thirteen
years, scores of little vessels making the dangerous voyage to discharge their
human freight upon the wild New England shores (Wertenbaker 41). No doubt, their greatest comfort through this
tumultuous journey to the promised land was the steadfast belief of their
status as God’s chosen people. One of the earliest leaders, William Bradford, declared
that they would serve as an example community that will bring about a kingdom
of heaven on earth. He suggested the Puritans possessed “a great hope and
inward zeal...of laying some good foundation, or at least to make some way
thereunto for the propagating and advancing of the gospel of the kingdom of
Christ in those remote parts of the world; yea, though they should be but even
as stepping stones unto others for the performing of so great a work”
(Bradford 160).
A successful outcome was not assured. In a letter reprinted
in "Of Plymouth Plantation," Bradford was warned of the potential for
transgression: “your intended course of civil community will minister continual
occasion of offense, and will be as fuel for that fire, except you diligently
quench it with brotherly forebearance” (Bradford 165). Because their
principles—social, political, legal, moral and religious—were established by
the authority of the Bible, the Puritan leaders, especially John Winthrop,
sought to clarify exactly what the Bible said the community owed to its members
and God. In a sermon delivered before the departure of to the New World, "A
Model of Christian Charity," Winthrop argues:
“We must entertain each other in brotherly affection, we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of other’s necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other, make other’s conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community of members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us as His own people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of His wisdom, power, goodness and truth, than formerly we have been acquainted with (Winthrop 216).But Winthrop also argues that a new society dedicated to “the preservation and good of the whole” requires “some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in subjection” (Winthrop 206).
They arrived in a land barren of the props and trappings of
civilization, and in a few short years of diligent work, they built villages
that prospered and grew exponentially in population: “In high hope that God was
guiding them and would find their efforts acceptable, they had proposed to form
a new society. Now God had demonstrated
His approval...By staying his wrath for so long and allowing them to depart in
peace, by delivering them safe across the water, He had sealed a covenant with
them and given them a special responsibility to carry out the good intentions
that had brought them into the wilderness”
(Morgan 70).
The overall material prosperity unknown to the Puritans in
the Old World was evidence enough that God was pleased with his chosen people:
“The Lord had lead the Children of Israel into a land flowing with milk and
honey, and it was to be expected that in the new Canaan He wished His people to
enjoy the good things He had provided for them”
(Wertenbaker 83). But the
Puritans did not practice toleration and imposed on others the hostile
oppression they sought to escape in Europe.
Ignoring Christ’s simplification of natural law from the 613 diverse
laws and ordinances of the Hebrews to the Golden Rule, the Puritans believed
God demanded perfect obedience. Perhaps failing to understand that even piety
carried to an extreme turns evil, the colonists refused to make a distinction
between severe crime and minor infraction. “When the gathering of firewood on
the Sabbath was punished with the same severity as adultery or theft, adultery
and theft lost some of their flagrancy” (Wertenbaker 170). The rigid standards
were upheld by snooping neighbors who believed it to be their duty to spy on
the townsfolk to ensure they were living in accordance to the community’s code.
As time passed, the spread of Renaissance humanism crowded
the Puritans, a group of people “ignorant of steam-power, electricity,
photography, chemistry, geology, the barometer, the thermometer and pendulum,
and of a vast number of principles, inventions, and appliances essential to
modern life and comfort, even in the lowest social sphere” and who believed in
“[c]harms, amulets, incantations, magical preparations, and the touch of the
king’s hand” to heal (Goodwin 4). New
splinter groups, like the Deists who incorporated Enlightenment ideals in their
spiritual beliefs, formed and weakened the Puritan body. “All around him
[Bradford] saw the decline of piety and the spread of the cancer of
sectarianism. He recalled better days when the Pilgrims first lived at Plymouth
and had tried to walk in God’s ways, when men had not argued angrily about what
those ways were” (Langdon 70). Moreover, their children and grandchildren
did not share their fervor:
It was a great and high undertaking of their fathers, they said, when they ventured themselves and their little ones upon the rude waves of the vast ocean to follow the Lord into New England. To find a parallel one would have to go back to ancient history, to the journey of Abraham from Ur, or that of the Israelites from Egypt. In the American wilderness the Puritans had been the recipients of God’s peculiar mercies. He had turned the desert into a fruitful land, He had cast out the heathen...But now, after many years of the Lord’s favors, His people were forgetful of the errand upon which he had sent them to America...The people who had left their homes in England to follow the pillar of light into the New World were for the most part pious, good men and women; but they were ordinary human beings with ordinary desires and instincts. These desires and instincts they might hold in subjection, but they could not eliminate them nor prevent their children from inheriting them. And the children, lacking the religious zeal which comes from the original discovery and persecution, tempted to self-indulgence by increasing prosperity, failed to uphold the original standards (Wertenbaker 181-182).
Jonathan Edwards’ sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry
God," is a last gasp reaction to the falling away from obedience to God, whose
wrath is imminent, according to a most literalist reading. Edwards warns, “the
foolish children of men miserably delude themselves in their own schemes, and
in confidence in their own strength and wisdom; they trust to nothing but a
shadow” (Edwards, 501-502). He chastises the community: “Your wickedness makes
you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and
pressure towards hell; and if God should let you go, you would immediately sink
and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf, and your healthy
constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and all
your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out
of hell, than a spider’s web would have to stop a fallen rock” (Edwards 503).
The escape to the New World and the union of peace the
Puritans imagined ended in a terror of God’s displeasure: “O sinner! Consider
the fearful danger you are in: it is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and
bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand
of that God, whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you, as
against many of the damned in hell. You hang by a slender thread, with the
flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it,
and burn it asunder....” (Edwards 504) To the up-and-coming generations,
embracing the new science and reason of the Enlightenment, the threat was
archaic and weak. The people turned away from the founding ideals of the
Puritan fathers and toward a secular humanist attitude. “Before the end of the seventeenth
century, although the ideals of the founders still exercised a powerful
influence upon the minds and hearts of the people, the experiment of a Bible
commonwealth had definitely failed” (Wertenbaker 77).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bradford, William.
“Of Plymouth Plantation.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature,
6th ed, Volume A. Baym, Nina et al., eds.
New York: W.W. Norton &
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Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With A Thousand Faces. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1949.
Carroll, Robert & Stephen Pricket, eds. The Bible: Authorized King James
Version. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Edwards, Jonathan.
“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” The Norton Anthology of American
Literature, 6th ed, Volume A. Baym, Nina et al., eds. New York:
W.W. Norton & Company, 2003.
498-509.
Goodwin, John A. The
Pilgrim Republic. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1970.
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Pilgrim Colony. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966.
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Puritan Dilemma. Boston: Little, Brown
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Bradford of Plymouth.
Philadephia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1951.
Wertenbaker, Thomas Jefferson. The Puritan Oligarchy. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947.
Winthrop, John. “A
Model of Christian Charity.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 6th
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