Puritanism in New England
The geography of colonial America was kind to English dissenters, for distance from the church establishment—and from intensifying persecution under Stuart monarchs James I (1603–25) and Charles I (1625–49)—allowed groups stifled in England increased freedom to develop institutional forms.
In the New England environment, Congregationalist Puritans transformed an Indian landscape which they considered a “wilderness” to reflect their vision of religious, political, social, and moral order. They, too, were transformed, from an oppressed minority to a dominant majority, and from a set of clandestine practices to a well-ordered and, for a time, hegemonic administration.The first group of migrants, the fabled Pilgrims, were actually not Puritans but Congregational separatists who broke with the Church of England and briefly sought haven in the Netherlands before removing to Plymouth in 1620. Nor was the importance of Plymouth—the first colony of Congregationalists and the first substantial colony in New England—anything more than symbolic. It remained small in population and short of clergy until its 1684 absorption into its larger and more historically significant neighbor, the Massachusetts Bay colony. Established in 1630 by nonseparating Puritans under the leadership of John Winthrop (1588–1649), Massachusetts Bay received a “great migration” of about 16,000 Puritans during the 1630s, set the tone of New England religious life for at least a century, and had a lasting impact on American culture. Its founders sought escape as much from economic depression as from religious persecution, but understood their venture as a divinely driven transoceanic exodus for the purpose of establishing a model religious society in the untamed setting of New England.
Three nearby settlements—Connecticut (1636), New Haven (1638), and Say brook (1643), which merged in 1662—varied in organizational detail but were similarly conceived, and the migration of Massachusetts and Connecticut families to New Hampshire, first founded in 1630, gave that colony a Puritan stamp as well.
The Puritans based church, state, and society in New England on their reading of biblical precept. Their church ideals, codified in the 1648 Cambridge Platform, included a congregational polity and the restriction of church membership and suffrage to the “saints”—those elected by God to salvation—who alone could be entrusted with the colony’s affairs. In a departure from English Puritan practice, they sought to ensure purity of church membership by requiring that applicants receive congregational approval of a publicly presented spiritual confession. They codified biblical law in state law—including required church attendance by all inhabitants—and charged civil magistrates, who had to be “saints” (but could not be ministers), with enforcing it. They understood their personal and social commitments as holy “covenants”—between the individual and God, the group and God, and among themselves—deriving the concept from the Old Testament, medieval contract theory, and Calvinist theology, but giving it added emphasis as they sought to order their new environment.
They Puritanized and, in their fashion, sacralized the “wilderness” in several ways. They intermittently evangelized the local Indians, and John Eliot (1604–90) worked among the Massachuset to create fourteen villages of Anglicized “praying Indians.” But within a half-century of settlement they had largely decimated and subdued the native population through English-borne disease and such violent confrontations as the Pequot War (1637) and King Philip’s War (1675–76), the last of which destroyed most of the Christianized villages.
They interpreted all of these developments as a providential clearing of New England for their mission. Replicating the English landscape and giving visible expression to their sense of collective mission, they built compact and homogeneous villages with meetinghouses at their centers. The meetinghouse itself was a plain structure resembling other buildings, since the Puritans believed that God could not be confined in ordinary space and was therefore not specially present in any one place. Dominated by the pulpit, it was shorn of any adornment that might distract attention from the plain and theologically sophisticated sermon that was at the heart of worship. After the meetinghouse, perhaps the most important mark on the Puritanized landscape was Harvard College, established in 1636 in order to ensure the perpetuation of the educated ministry that New England Puritans deemed essential to the success of their mission.
The seal of the Massachusetts Bay colony conveys the Puritans’ sense of religious mission and cultural supremacy.
Their effort was remarkably successful. By 1640, there were already more than twice as many Congregational churches in Massachusetts Bay as there were Anglican churches in Virginia, and, by 1700, Congregationalists had the greatest number of churches in the English colonies: 120 in New England alone, 77 in Massachusetts, 35 in Connecticut, 6 in New Hampshire, and 2 in the portion of Massachusetts that later became the state of Maine. They were weak south of New England—there were only scattered churches in Long Island, Dutch New York, Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia—but they dominated the northern third of English North America well into the 18th century.
Of course, their hegemony there was neither unchallenged, universal, nor permanent. As early as the 1630s, two vocal dissenters—Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams—were banished for religious views deemed threatening by the Puritan establishment.
Williams established the colony of Rhode Island in 1636, settling at a place he called Providence. This small colony, sandwiched between Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut, was the only one in New England without a Congregational establishment and became a magnet for dissenters from the “New England Way.” Later in the century, persecuted English Quakers who had sought refuge there made forays into the surrounding colonies, where their alternative religious message earned them severe punishment at the hands of the establishment.There were also problems among the Puritans themselves. More favorable English circumstances ended the great migration in the 1640s, leaving zealous Puritans an increasingly small minority among a diversity of religious groups, a growing number of commercially minded settlers, and a new generation of Puritans born in New England and far less prone than their immigrant parents to intense religious experience. This second generation forced a relaxation of church membership standards by 1662. Conservative Puritans began soon thereafter to express fears of decline that had at least some basis in reality. A decisive blow to the Puritan establishment was the English government’s recharter of Massachusetts Bay in 1691, requiring religious toleration, ending the religious requirement for suffrage, and installing an Anglican governor and administration. The Salem witch trials of the following year testified to Puritan anxieties over the rapid changes of the late 17th century. In the 18th century, Puritan orthodoxy was threatened by growing theological liberalism; a liberal takeover of the Harvard administration sparked the founding of Yale College by conservative Congregationalists in 1701. The Great Awakening of the 1740s further undermined Puritan influence. A new brand of piety—promoted among others by Yale-educated Congregationalist minister Jonathan Edwards—encouraged enthusiastic preaching and emotional conversion over the plain sermon and theological precision and encouraged criticism of the establishment. Congregationalists became bitterly divided between opponents and supporters of the revival, the latter often bolting to the evangelistic Baptist denomination.
Congregationalism remained vital. The conspicuous involvement of many of its ministers in the agitation of the American Revolution enhanced its reputation in the new nation, and Congregational establishments survived well into the 19th century in Connecticut (1818), New Hampshire (1819), and Massachusetts (1833). Likewise, the Puritan ideology left lasting legacies in American culture in its commitment to education and literacy and its rhetoric of national mission. But by the close of the 18th century, Puritan religion had been highly attenuated and Congregationalism reduced to only one of several denominations amid New England’s burgeoning Protestant pluralism.
