Puritanism in the New World 2 The developing ideology

Puritanism: History and Theology Roger Williams One who stated the problems which would ultimately unravel Puritanism as a dominant political force was Roger Williams. For one thing, Williams's critique of the institutions being developed in Massachusetts directly illuminates the difficulty of perpetuating a religion which both held the seed of an increasingly liberating individualism and at the same time maintained the need of a limited meritocracy. Puritanism: History and Theology

“The failure to separate” 1631 Williams declared that the church in New England was, in its failure to fully separate from the English church, inadequate, and tainted. Part of the problem lay in another of Williams's critique of New England as it was developing, that the lands granted to the colonists had been unjustly given by the crown, because they had not been first purchased from the Indians. Puritanism: History and Theology

Puritanism: History and Theology Williams was banished. His primary response to this was one of his more threatening ideas, "that the civil magistrates had no power to punish persons for their religious opinions“ This was not necessarily an over-arching argument for full toleration, but rather implied a statement specific to Christian salvation, that "no power on earth was entitled to prevent any individual from seeking Christ in his own way." For the Puritan ministry, this was far enough, because it targeted the strongest tie between it and civil government, and thus implied a potential disconnection between the two. Puritanism: History and Theology

Puritanism: History and Theology The official response As John Cotton wrote, the question of "mens goods or lands, lives or liberties, tributes, customes, worldly honors and inheritances" was already the jurisdiction of "the civill state" but the establishment of laws which fostered Christian principles and punished threats to them-- that was only part of the continued and increasing realization of divine will on earth. Puritanism: History and Theology

Puritanism: History and Theology The frontier spirit? The stereotype of the lawless pioneers. Miller suggests a more socio-economic effect, where the frontier increasingly disperses communities and so disperses the effect and control of the clergy, and where the drive for material profit begins to predominate over the concern with "religion and salvation" Puritanism: History and Theology

Towards the fundamentalism of the 1740s “Awakening”? But remember: this view of New England Puritanism rests upon two major assumptions that there is such a thing as 'Puritanism and that the acme of Puritan ideals is to be found in New England during the years 1630-1650. Puritanism: History and Theology

Puritanism: History and Theology Is this “puritanism”? The period shows: An increasing lack of coherence between religious and secular authority Declarations of a failing mission. To answer the question, one must read widely in published sermons and theological treatises, but also more wide- ranging anthropological data Puritanism: History and Theology

A study of Sudbury, Massachsetts A study in this vein of Sudbury, Massachusetts, reveals underlying instabilities that challenge assumptions of a dominant Puritan 'theocracy,' that Puritan ideology held within it the basis of its own loss of control. One must be careful not assume an essence of identity to be described before attempting to describe simply what one finds, that such an assumption may lead to dangerous equivocations between the ideology of Puritanism and the history of New England (and extrapolating from that, much of the United States as a whole). Puritanism: History and Theology

Puritanism: History and Theology Bercovitch It is the old instability--that between the religious and the secular--which the idea of Puritanism contains. Bercovitch: “The New England Puritan jeremiad evokes the mythic past not merely to elicit imitation but above all to demand progress.“ Bercovitch reads those key texts of the 'Great Migration'--John Winthrop's "A Model of Christian Charity" and John Cotton's "God's Promise to His Plantations"--as important transitions into distinctly American forms, this entails an "effort to fuse the sacred and profane," to historicize transcendent values and goals into what he calls a "ritual of errand.” Puritanism: History and Theology

“Memory in place of religion” Defined then not so much by pre-existing social distinctions but rather by a continual and purposefully-held sense of mission to which the modern idea of 'progress' is intrinsic and out of which the notion of "civil religion" (as Kammen would say, "memory in place of religion") develops, Puritanism, as an ideological mode and not (Rutman's) historical "actuality," suggests America as a modern region from the very beginnings of its colonization. Puritanism: History and Theology

Was “puritanism” a golden age? Less so with historians than popularizers of a Puritan mythos, the evocation of a "golden age" existing less as past fact than future promise, comes to dominate the sense of 'Puritan tradition'. This, as Bercovitch indicates, is at the heart of 'explaining' America, with all its promise as a New World, with its idea of Manifest Destiny, with the kind of self-idealization Puritanism: History and Theology