Puritanism has proved a particularly vexing concept to define. Scholars have variously denominated it a program to reform the English church, an intellectual construction compounded of covenant theology and Ramist logic, a particular subset of Protestant principles, a political program and the Anglo-American scion of the Calvinist church family. A few have even denied the term’s utility, arguing that little distinguished “Puritans” from the mass of English Protestants. Puritanism is best understood, however, as primarily a religious sensibility centered around the protracted experience of conversion—the transforming encounter with the Holy Spirit grounded in God’s Word as shaped by Reformed Protestant theology—that effected a triple transformation in those so regenerated, the Saints. Religiously, conversion transformed individuals from damnation to salvation, with the assurance that they would enjoy eternal life. Ecclesiastically, it impelled them to model churches on the Scripture’s blueprint and emphasize the importance of discipline, that is, the procedures for securing the church’s capacity to proscribe unregenerates from the sacraments. Sociologically, it energized believers to obey God’s will, fashioning ministers, magistrates, and laity into a triumvirate zealous to build holy communities obedient to God’s laws. Although Puritanism’s specific doctrines, ecclesiastical arrangements, and liturgical practices changed over time, the dual imperatives to gain salvation through conversion and improve society’s morals always characterized the movement.
Puritanism emerged among English Protestants unhappy that the Elizabethan Religious Settlement (1559) had arrested the Reformation before the Church of England had achieved the “perfection” of continental churches. From the 1560s to the 1580s Puritans assayed various means to conform their institution to Geneva’s template, challenging episcopal demands that they retain “popish” practices in worship, filing bills in Parliament, and erecting clandestine presbyteries to edify ministers and impose proper discipline. All failed, withered by the opposition of Crown and church. In reaction, several hundred “Separatists” fled to the Netherlands, having concluded that the Church of England could never be made true; a portion of one such group founded Plymouth Colony (1620).
More mainstream Puritans remained within the church, however, now concentrating on preaching for conversion and covenanting with like-minded persons to cleanse the church from within. By the 1620s networks of the self-proclaimed “godly” honeycombed the English parishes. When that decade brought Charles I’s personal rule, depression in the cloth trade, and the ascendance of William Laud’s Arminian faction, which imposed a non-Reformed liturgy and persecuted nonconformists, Puritans read these troubles as signs from God to establish his “City on a Hill” in New England. Between 1630 and 1640 some 15,000 migrated, effecting the First Puritan Reformation, the construction of the purified church and society that English conditions had forestalled. Institutionally, the City on a Hill featured a church stripped of Anglican ceremonies in which the congregation (not just the clergy) controlled the disciplinary apparatus and a government chartered by the king was charged (among other tasks) with protecting the church and securing moral order. After a generation of settlement, Puritans could well believe that they had fulfilled their mission to God.
Time’s passage corroded their expectations. Population growth (which forced people in search of unclaimed land to quit town centers), the failure of children and grandchildren to own the covenant, the emergence of a counterculture averse to moral rigor, a heightening of contradictions within Reformed theology, natural disasters like smallpox epidemics, and human-made disasters like war and England’s newfound desire to govern its American possessions more jealously—all pressured the “New England Way.” Conversion rates declined and raucous jollity increased while a host of spiritual plagues—Baptists, Quakers, and witches—threatened
A painting of early New England Puritans going to worship armed (Library of Congress)
The church’s hegemony. Ministers marked the changes in the jeremiad, a rhetorical formula excoriating New Englanders for their sins and bemoaning the loss of piety, yet promising that God would renew his covenant should his people repent.
In a series of piecemeal innovations that collectively constituted the Second Puritan Reformation, Saints tried to accommodate their religious and moral program to the new conditions. The Halfway Covenant allowed baptizing the grandchildren of regenerates, thereby bringing a class of potential outcasts under church government. Ceremonies renewing churches’ original covenants sought to excite personal piety, as did calls to read the devotional tracts the nascent book trade made available with greater frequency. The Reforming Synod (1679-80) issued a comprehensive plan to redress the region’s sins, while JEREMIADS implored magistrates to perform their godly duties. Northampton’s Solomon Stoddard opened the Lord’s Supper, previously restricted to Saints, to all churchgoers in an effort to increase the number of conversions. His fervent preaching, laced (atypically) with threats of damnation, resulted in five “refreshings,” a forerunner of revivals, during which worship and new births soared. The Second Puritan Reformation reversed the decline in church membership and brought some of the worst moral excesses (like drunkenness) under control. However, in the end Puritanism as a religious movement succumbed (at least in MASSACHUSETTS) to the English state, which in 1691 issued the Bay Colony a new charter that made the governor a royal appointee and mandated toleration for certain other Protestants, thereby subverting the holy commonwealth’s political foundation. Reformed Protestant theology and its associated spirituality, however, flourished far into the 18th century.
Although Puritanism did not shape American religious development in its image, as some have claimed, it did affect colonial New England profoundly. Its ecclesiology grounded Congregational (and later Baptist) church government and contributed to the strength of popular political participation. The coordination of church and state to promote moral order effected a series of establishments that survived into the 19th century. Puritan mores dominated the region’s cultural life, and the Saints’ desire to instill God’s word in their young as early as possible contributed to the highest literacy rates and only full-fledged public school system in early America. Puritan evangelical preaching and desire for conversion grounded a type of religious revivalism and, eventually, its greatest theorist, Jonathan Edwards. Finally, the religious rhetoric perfected in the 17th century became a vehicle for revolution in the 18th as many New Englanders learned about the “Rights of Man” in the accents of God’s Word.
Further reading: David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment (New York: Knopf, 1989); Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, vol. 2. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953).
—Charles L. Cohen
World History
