How did the Puritans construct a society from scratch, based on religious belief?.It was not easy, but the New Englanders did it. People have images of Puritans as somber, grim-faced people who eschewed pleasure in favor of hard work and sacrifice. That image is inaccurate.
Puritans were in fact very passionate people who lived their lives as fully as they could.
They often wore colorful clothes, danced, and even drank "strong waters" on occasion. They believed that sex was a blessing from God to be enjoyed to the fullest, though within the confines of marriage. They had large families. What Puritans opposed was anything that wasted time or resources. For example, they thought gambling and card playing were sinful, not because they were inherently evil but because they wasted time.
Puritans worked very hard and saw themselves as stewards of God's bounty-the so-called Protestant work ethic originated with the Puritans and is the source of folk wisdom such as "Early to bed, early to rise. . . ," "A penny saved is a penny earned," and so on. Puritans believed that if one worked hard and pleased God, one would be successful in this life, so prosperity was seen as a good thing-a measure of God's favor. Because it is safe to say that hard work will tend to make people prosperous whether or not God is involved, their prosperity-the "serpent prosperity," as they came to call it-tended to dilute their intense religiosity. Their church became the Congregational Church, a religious system that emphasized local control and independence. Religion was closely connected with the Puritan political structure, so the congregational system spilled over into their civic institutions, which gave us the famous "New England town meeting"-a form of pure democracy, though the church itself was not democratically organized.
World History
