Puritanism in the New World

1. Puritanism in the New World The development of Puritan ideology

2. The Pilgrims • “The CE is not reformed enough” • “Come out and be ye separate” • Holland 1608/ Mayflower 1620 Puritanism in the New World

3. The Pilgrim ideology • A logical outcome of the Reformation • Increasing literacy • The Bible as a mode of spiritual meaning • A growing individualism • Atomization/ democratization • A religious (not political) agenda Puritanism in the New World

4. The Mayflower compact • Escape from worldliness (England and Holland) • John Winthrop: “A city set on a hill” • Bradford “just and equal laws” Puritanism in the New World

5. What about the native Americans? • Conquerors/ colonists or co-habitors? • Early accounts • Historical Revisionism • The devastation of the community • “Thanksgiving” Puritanism in the New World

6. Later Puritan arrivals 1630+ • Still part of the institutional church, but with much more emphasis on Scripture • Educational emphasis (Harvard etc). An Act passed in Massachusetts in 1647 required "that every town of one hundred families or more should provide free common and grammar school instruction." • Indeed, the first "Free Grammar School" was established in Boston in 1635. Puritanism in the New World

7. Salem witchcraft • The idea of Providence • Context: “Even as late as the close of the seventeenth century hardly a scientist of repute in England but accepted certain phenomena as due to witchcraft." • Cotton Mather's Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions (1689), which helped generate an unbalanced fascination with witchcraft. This would prove both fire and tinder for Salem Village, so that "by September, twenty people and two dogs had been executed as witches. Puritanism in the New World

8. Brattle's "A Full and Candid Account of the Delusion called Witchcraft...." (1692) • Brattle argued that the evidence was no true evidence at all, because the forms of the accused were taken to be the accused, and the accusers, in declaring that they were informed by the devil as to who afflicted them, were only offering the devil's testimony. His was an argument which seemed wholly reasonable to many, but it led Brattle to the fear "that ages will not wear off that reproach and those stains which these things will leave behind them upon our land" • Mather wrote in 1693, in Cases of Conscience concerning Evil Spirits, that "itwere better that Ten Suspected Witches should escape, than that one Innocent Person be Condemned" Puritanism in the New World

9. The revealed word, (Antinomianism, individualism) • NOTE: The absolute ground of religious understanding that the Biblical text represented for the Puritans. • God does not speak by means of visitations or revelations or divine inspirations of any sort • The antinomian crisis involving Anne Hutchinson focused on this issue. John Winthrop records it in his journal: • [October 21, 1636] One Mrs. Hutchinson, a member of the church of Boston, a woman of ready wit and bold spirit, brought over with her two dangerous errors: 1. That the person of the Holy Ghost dwells in a justified person. 2. That no sanctification can help to evidence to us our justification Puritanism in the New World

10. Consequences • Hutchinson’s Quaker strain: which allowed every person direct access to God, was an outbreak of "dangerous" individualism, • It translated into an overall abandonment of any structured church, which is to say, the basis of a Puritan society. • The followers of Hutchinson became caught up in a "fanatical anti-intellectualism" fed by the original Puritan "contention that regenerate men were illuminated with divine truth," which was in turn taken indicate the irrelevance of scholarship and study of the Bible. Puritanism in the New World

11. “The anti-traditionalism and de- ritualization of society that he named Individualisme had their sources in Puritan culture. This Puritan individualism had survived especially in the habit of judging others by their characters of mind and will, rather than rank, sex, or race..." (Johnson, Puritanism in the New World

12. The Puritans had themselves suffered repeatedly under a society which had seemed to evince the potentially ominous side of the relation of church and state. The king was the leader of the church, and the state decided how the church was to function, and in 1629 when Charles I dissolved parliament, the people found that they no longer had any political representation, any means to act legislatively. Their secular agency had then become a measure of their religious agency; the removal to Massachusetts in turn was a way to gain a political voice, to create a state that would develop according to their own beliefs and fashion itself harmoniously with the church. Puritanism in the New World