Puritanism

Puritanism. Puritanism has been defined variously in intellectual, political, or cultural terms, but it is best understood as a religious sensibility centered around conversion—the Holy Spirit's regeneration of the soul—and the concomitant determination to restore the purity of the apostolic church and reform society according to God's laws. Theologically, Puritanism represents an emphasis within the Reformed Protestant (Calvinist) tradition on intense personal devotion and extreme ethical probity. During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, English divines described how during conversion those whom God elects to save (the saints) undergo a protracted spiritual experience in which they regret their sins, despair of obtaining eternal life, discover that they are redeemed by their faith in Christ alone, and celebrate the assurance that through him their salvation is absolutely secure. This “new birth” instills in the elect feelings of spiritual power and a zeal to demonstrate their love to God and to fellow saints by carrying out the Lord's commands. Puritan piety was characterized by a veneration of the Bible as the rule for living righteously and a pervasive sense that God providentially supervises all human affairs.

Puritanism emerged in Elizabethan England among a minority of ministers and laypeople upset that the Church of England had neither fully eliminated “papist” practices nor organized itself according to what Puritans considered the proper biblical pattern. The ecclesiastical hierarchy and the government resisted their efforts to, for example, eliminate ornate clerical vestments, and with the suppression in 1590 of the classical movement, which advocated using local ministerial boards instead of church courts to administer discipline, most Puritans gave up direct institutional challenges, instead concentrating their efforts on encouraging conversion and assembling “the godly” into parish groups for mutual edification and moral oversight. A few hundred Separatists left the Church of England completely, holding it to be false; one such band, the Pilgrims, settled Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts in 1620. William Laud's rise to power, culminating with his becoming archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, once again crystallized Puritan discontents; Laud championed a different theology, forbade Puritan liturgical practices, and harassed nonconforming ministers. Puritans interpreted his ascendance along with Charles I's dismissal of Parliament, economic depression, and social dislocation as signs of God's displeasure with England. The voyage to Massachusetts of Governor John Winthrop and seven hundred colonists in 1630 inaugurated the decade‐long “great migration” during which thousands traveled to New England hoping to erect a properly constituted church and a morally ordered society.

Once in America, Puritans developed an ecclesiastical government along lines advised by the Puritan ministers John Cotton (1584–1652) and Thomas Hooker (1586–1647). Formally codified in the Cambridge Platform of 1648, it granted each Congregational church autonomy over its own business, expanded the laity's disciplinary power, revised the liturgy, and obliged the state to support the churches—by such means as punishing heresy, for example—without giving the magistrates authority over religious practice. Churches were gathered by laymen who covenanted together to worship with and watch over each other, and who then called a minister to lead them. Every person within a town was obliged to attend services, but only regenerates—individuals who had demonstrated that they had been born again—received the sacraments. The clergy and membership admitted new members after scrutinizing their behavior, conversion experience, and knowledge of doctrine, and excommunicated any found to be ungodly. Public worship focused on the sermon and also included singing from The Bay Psalm Book; private devotion featured family prayers and individual meditation. Each church ruled itself, although clergymen did meet informally to discuss issues of mutual concern. The magistracy upheld church order by punishing immorality, convening ministerial synods to resolve doctrinal disputes, and suppressing unorthodoxy, banishing dissenters like Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson.

Having set up their ecclesiastical and devotional order, Puritans struggled to sustain it in the face of their children's declining conversion rate, congregational contentions over such issues as clerical salaries, and the appearance of a competing folk culture manifested in gaming and immoderate drinking. In response, Puritans reasserted traditional values, stepped up campaigns against misbehavior, and devised novel means of recruiting churchgoers. Preachers warned audiences against breaking New England's special relationship with God and urged magistrates to intensify their vigilance against immorality. Spurred by Increase Mather, the leading Puritan minister of Boston, the Reforming Synod of 1679–1680 cataloged the population's sins and demanded redress; in its wake, churches renewed their covenants to revitalize personal piety and families refurbished domestic spiritual exercises, abetted by the growing availability of imported devotional manuals. In 1702, Cotton Mather (the son of Increase) founded a male society to help suppress social disorder in Boston, the prototype of moral‐reform associations. To ensure continuing church discipline, the Half‐Way Covenant (1662) allowed baptizing the children of regenerate grandparents even if the childrens' parents had not been born again. Solomon Stoddard (1643–1729) opened the Lord's Supper to unregenerates in hopes of converting them, and he led his Northampton, Massachusetts, congregation in five “refreshings,” periods of intensified spirituality that heightened church membership. These devices obtained mixed results. The number of Congregational churches expanded, conversions increased, and Puritan moral values continued as New England's norms. Nevertheless, Saints remained a minority of the population, rival denominations gained adherents, secular cultural forms thrived, and England's growing imperial presence destroyed the magistrates' ability to support the Congregational churches exclusively.

Puritanism made a substantial impact on Anglo‐America. Seventeenth‐century New England possessed a far more powerful religious establishment than did other English colonies. The Puritan method of gathering churches through voluntary lay action, replicated in the formation of town meetings, helped stimulate popular participation in politics. Puritan moral values made New England a watchword for sobriety—it had a lower percentage of illegitimate births than other regions—and may have instilled habits of economic discipline that abetted commercial growth. More generally, Puritanism underlay the colonies' dominant religious style; from its doctrinal and experiential matrix issued not only New England Congregationalism, but also varieties of Presbyterian and Baptist practice. Updated by Jonathan Edwards in the mid–eighteenth century, Reformed Protestantism became America's leading theological tradition. Finally, the awakenings generated by Stoddard, Edwards, and others evolved into one type of religious revival, the most potent evangelical mechanism in American religious history.
See also Baptists; Colonial Era; Mather, Increase and Cotton; Protestantism; Religion; Revivalism; Salem Witchcraft; Society of Friends.

Bibliography

Charles E. Hambrick‐Stowe , The Practice of Piety, 1982.
Charles L. Cohen , God's Caress, 1986.
Harry Stout , The New England Soul, 1986.
David D. Hall , Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment, 1989.
Stephen Foster , The Long Argument, 1991.
Richard Gildrie , The Profane, the Civil, and the Godly, 1994.

Charles L. Cohen