The Importance of Religion to the Community of Salem

The Puritan life basically revolves around the church which influenced how they lived their everyday lives. They had to go to church twice a week, attend long sermons, and avoid dancing which was deemed as a sinful act. There were events that led up to the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. Europeans strongly believed in devils practice which gave certain humans the ability to harm others in return for loyalty. The Puritan life in the village of Salem was harsh because they were dealing with the after-effects of the British war which occurred in France, a smallpox outbreak took place, and they feared attacks from a neighboring Native American Tribe.

It was the main reason most people even ventured out to this part of the world in the first place. Many people had religion intolerance over in England and didn’t like it. With all of the disease and famine going on, they believed God wanted them to venture out to this new land to be safe and secure in their lives. Others just wanted to bring their knowledge of their God to the Native’s, to spread their religion as far as it could go. Once people arrived at the New World, things were more tolerable than England.

David Underdown didn't live in this time period, but his work was a work of history and his ideas coincided with those of the Puritans. He uses these ideas to take a position on the Puritan's side and to better explain the good they were trying to achieve. The Puritans of Dorchester as we have learned about  our reading, were a very religious group who wanted to create the perfect society. Their mission in Dorchester was to make extinct all the sinful acts of the townspeople. The struggle they started soon ended in failure.

John Wycliff stirred up controversy in teaching the freedom of religious conscience of the individual believer, who stood in faith directly before God in 1370. Wycliff's followers, contemptuously called "Lollards," preached reform in England. Also, Wycliff's movement made much of the bible available to the masses in its English translation from the Vulgate. This gave the people a more personal relationship with God because they could educate themselves by reading the word. The church did not like this nor did they like Wycliff's movement.

A lot of themes varied from religion and if someone w... ... middle of paper ... ...emy’s side but also from their own. But the hired troops did something very important – they saved lives. No captain wished to waste his men, so the level of bloodshed dropped and the diplomatic talks became more frequent. All this violence made the people more susceptible to religion. After every slaughter, people would repent and pray and try to be the model of Christianity.

Because of its roots as a sanctuary, freedom of religion has always been a core value for the United States, drawing a wide variety of religious groups to plant roots in this country. Each of these religious groups believed strongly in endogamy (the idea of marrying within one’s social group, thereby rejecting others on the basis of being unsuitable for marriage), and the people have therefore faced many hardships in attempting to marry someone from another religion. Catholic and Protestant Churches would refuse to recognize interfaith marriages; Tradition requires that a non-Jew must first convert to Judaism in order to marry within the Jewish community. In 2010, the Jewish community was up in arms over the marriage of fellow Jew ... ... middle of paper ... ...ings. Retrieved February 2012, from New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/04/us/04interfaith.html Chinitz, J., & Brown, R. A.

The Puritans generally were not wealthy, with many leading simple lives and using their time to help others in their community. John Winthrop, the first governor of the New England colony, constructed the society around family and religion. Puritans established many churches in the hopes that England would copy their model. The religious influences in the society were clear in the New England Primer, a textbook for Puritan children, in which they described the persecution of their people. The discrimination against the Puritans created a s... ... middle of paper ... ...rn as much as the Chesapeake agricultural business.

The communal values evolve around religious events, having family honor and virginity. “Although the Church’s betrayal is many-sided, the bishop’s arrival symbolizes its failure most clearly.” (pg 195, Arnold Penuel). Everyone was concerned with his/her own forgiveness and being blessed by the bishop. Even the priest did not prevent the murder because of the distractions from the bishop. It seems that they did a lot of preparations, trying to please the bishop, to free themselves from the sin that was about to happen later that day.

I also question this because I think it is ironic that both Romeo and Juliet seem to be fairly religious, since the first person Romeo went to for help was Friar Lawrence, and a few scenes in the play took place in or around the church. I think that this hatred is especially bad in the case of the Capulets and the Montagues, because I was always under the impression that the families had been feuding for so long that no one really knew why they hated each other anymore. This was the beginning of the problems for Romeo and Juliet. They had a moral decision to make. Should they stay true to their families, and deny their love, or should they stay true to their feelings and disgrace their families?

Dimmesdale tries to cover up his sin by preaching to the town and becoming more committed to his preachings, but this only makes him feel guiltier. In the beginning of the story, Dimmesdale is described by these words; “His eloquence and religious fervor had already given earnest of high eminence in his profession.”(Hawthorne,44). This proves that the people of the town looked up to him because he acted very religious and he was the last person that anyone expected to sin. This is the reason that it was so hard for him to come out and tell the people the truth. Dimmesdale often tried to tell the people in a roundabout way when he said “…though he (Dimmesdale) were to step down from a high place, and stand there beside thee on thy pedestal of shame, yet better were it so, than to hide a guilty heart through life.