Who Were These Puritans?

Puritan is a broad term, referring to any of a number of Protestant sects that sought to "purify" the established Church of England. The English Puritans, who were part of a much larger pattern of Protestant reform sweeping Western Europe, wished to return to the simple forms of worship and church organization as described in the New Testament. Because they refused to conform to the state church's beliefs and practices, the Puritans were also called "Nonconformists" or "Dissenters”. Since the time of King Henry VIII (who reigned from 1509 to 1547), the English church had been virtually inseparable from the government; the Puritans thus represented a threat to the political stability of the nation. "I will make them conform," King James I had said of the Puritans in 1604, "or I will harry them out of the land." As it turned out, it was in the end the Puritans who harried the royal family out of the land: forty-five years later, they beheaded James's son Charles I and forced Charles II into exile in France.

Even so, many Puritans suffered persecution. Some of them left England, at first for Holland. But fearing that they would lose their identity as English Christians, a small advance group of about a hundred Puritans set sail in 1620 for the New World. There they hoped to realize their dream of building a new secular society patterned after God's word.

Puritan Beliefs.

What sort of spiritual and intellectual cargo did the Puritans bring with them on the Mayflower? They were practical, intensely committed, and convinced of the Tightness of their purpose. But strangely enough, at the center of Puritan theology was an uneasy mixture of certainty and doubt. The certainty was that because of Adam and Eve's sin of disobedience; most of humanity would be damned for all eternity. Yet, though Adam's sin was damning, the Puritans were certain that God in His mercy sent His son to earth to allow some to be saved. ;

Their doubt centered on whether a particular individual was to be one of the saved or one of the damned. In theory, a person's fate was determined by God; that is, a person could do nothing to become one of the saved. In practice, though, the Puritans strove intensely for salvation and led very pious lives. This was in part because of the consequences of this question: How did you know if you were saved or damned?

Religion for the Puritans, then, was first of all a personal, inner experience. They did not believe that the clergy or the Church should or could act as an intermediary between the individual and God. Not all Puritans felt that the state should be distinct from the Church, but most of the New England colonists were strongly against the idea of a national church. Nevertheless, religious attitudes affected the government, for Puritans believed that the sinful state of humanity made governments necessary.

The Puritans' Model: The Pilgrim

Every age has at least one figure, or heroic type, that seems to embody its ideas and aspirations. The Puritans who came to America identified so powerfully with one figure that they called themselves by that name: "Pilgrim." A pilgrim is someone who makes a pilgrimage, or journey to a holy place. But for the Puritans, the word pilgrimage took on a wider meaning—it was a journey to salvation.

For the Pilgrims, the outward journey of their lives and the specific voyage to America were also inner, spiritual journeys. "A Christian is sailing through this world into his heavenly country," the poet Anne Bradstreet wrote some years after sailing across the Atlantic to America. "We must, therefore, be here as strangers and pilgrims, that we may plainly declare that we seek a city above." In a way, each Pilgrim was acting out a tale of salvation in which he or she saw outward physical events as having inner, spiritual meaning.

The Pilgrims read their lives the way a literary critic reads a book, examining the significance of each event. John Winthrop, a governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, includes an account in his Diary of a snake entering the church during a synod, or council meeting. One of the elders "trod upon the head of it," and the snake was killed. It is perhaps not unnatural for a snake to find its way into a country church on a hot August day, but Winthrop saw far more significance in the snake's visit. "The serpent is the devil; the synod, the representative of the churches of Christ in New England. The devil had . . . lately attempted their disturbance, ... but their faith . . . overcame him and crushed his head."