The Impact of Puritans on the Development of America and its influence on modern society
The Puritans came to America in search of greater freedom for religious liberty. They felt unable to worship and practice their theological perspectives as long as they were under the umbrella of the Church of England. The puritans views with the Church of England began differ greatly and they felt they could no longer be under their control. The Puritans decided that they needed to break free from the Church of England and find a place where they could practice their religion without persecution or interference. The new world in the American colonies provided a great opportunity for the Puritans to branch out and form their own communities with their own religion and government. During this time there were two prominent figures in the growth of the Puritans movement in America, Jonathon Winthrop and Roger William. Jonathon Winthrop was the first governor of Massachusetts and served as such for twenty years. Winthrop’s brand of Puritan theology was one of setting up communities and purifying it of all non-believers. Winthrop believed that the government should be ruled with a theocracy and imposed laws with this view in mind. Roger Williams differed in Winthrop’s in that he believed everyone should have freedom to worship as they saw fit and not just the Puritans themselves.
“Williams was a spiritual or theological separatist whose relentless quest was to separate the true church from theological impurity and the unclean world. (Williams, his critics said, even refused fellowship with his own wife when he thought she was insufficiently pure in her spiritual life.) He contested an essential premise of the Puritans’ New England commonwea...
... middle of paper ...
...e have left a lasting footprint on many aspects of the heart of America. They introduced to us the political, social and cultural freedoms that we enjoy in our modern society. The idea that government and individual freedom could coexist and become a cohesive unit became a reality for these men. The legacy of the Puritans can still be felt today as freedom loving Americans exercise their freedom to worship and pursue the dream of happiness as they see fit.
Works Cited:
Barry, John M. “Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty”. Viking Press, 2012
Bercovitch, Sacvan. "The Biblical Basis of the American Myth." The Bible in American Culture”. Philadelphiaa: Fortress Press, 1983.
Rothbard, Murry N. The Puritans "Purify": Theocracy in Massachusetts. Volume 1 (Mises Institute, 1999 [1975], pp. 174-181.
The puritans traveled from England on the Arabella in January of 1630 to escape to a place where they could instill their own religious and political values into their society; Stephen Foster writes about the puritans in the narrative entitled Puritanism and Democracy: A mixed Legacy. Stephen grants the puritans with creating a society based off of religious freedom and reformation of the English church. Their social constructs consisted of hierarchies and accepted inequality. The puritans are credited with laying the foundation to the democratic system of America along with early aspects of political and social constructs found in current day America.
In the 1700’s the Puritans left England for the fear of being persecuted. They moved to America for religious freedom. The Puritans lived from God’s laws. They did not depend as much on material things, and they had a simpler and conservative life. More than a hundred years later, the Puritan’s belief toward their church started to fade away. Some Puritans were not able to recognize their religion any longer, they felt that their congregations had grown too self-satisfied. They left their congregations, and their devotion to God gradually faded away. To rekindle the fervor that the early Puritans had, Jonathan Edwards and other Puritan ministers led a religious revival through New England. Edwards preached intense sermons that awakened his congregation to an awareness of their sins. With Edwards’ sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” he persuades the Puritans to convert back to Puritanism, by utilizing rhetorical strategies such as, imagery, loaded diction, and a threatening and fearful tone.
A Puritan lawyer, John Winthrop, immigrated to New England because his views on religion were different from those in England. Even though Puritans are Protestants, Puritans tried to purify the English Church. In 1630 on board of the Arabella on the Atlantic Ocean on way to Massachusetts, he wrote “A Model of Christian Charity” which gave his views on what a society should be. ‘…the condition of mankind, [that] in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity, other mean and in subjection….[Yet] we must knit together in this work as one man.’ (Doc. A). In this he is saying that men may be different but to make a new world work, they must work together. All through his speech he mentions God. For example, he opens his sermon with ‘God Almighty in his most holy and wise providence…’. This shows that in New England, the people were very religious.
8.Puritans— ‘Followers' of Puritanism, a movement for reform in the Church of England that had a profound influence on the social, political, ethical, and theological ideas in England and America. In America the early New England settlements were Puritan in origin and theocratic in nature. The spirit of Puritanism long persisted there, and the idea of congregational democratic government was carried into the political life of the state as one source of modern democracy.
The puritans were very religious. They wanted to show everyone what happens if you are good and believe in god and the heavens. If you do bad things you would be punished or be killed. If you do good things you can be hand chosen to go to heaven.
In distinction to the early eighteenth century, the small groups of integral Puritans families dominated the economic, military, and political leadership of New England. The Puritans agreed that the church composed many families and wasn’t isolated people. The Puritan family was the major unit of production in the economic system each family member expected an economically useful benefit and the older children worked in some family industries, trending gardens, forcing animals, rotating wool, and protecting their younger brothers and sisters. Wives needed to supervise servants and apprentices to keep their financial accounts, enlightened crops, and to display goods. The Puritans had faith in the larger community that had a compelling duty to secure the families and to see their functions.
Religion was the foundation of the early Colonial American Puritan writings. Many of the early settlements were comprised of men and women who fled Europe in the face of persecution to come to a new land and worship according to their own will. Their beliefs were stalwartly rooted in the fact that God should be involved with all facets of their lives and constantly worshiped. These Puritans writings focused on their religious foundations related to their exodus from Europe and religions role in their life on the new continent. Their literature helped to proselytize the message of God and focused on hard work and strict adherence to religious principles, thus avoiding eternal damnation. These main themes are evident in the writings of Jonathan Edwards, Cotton Mathers, and John Winthrop. This paper will explore the writings of these three men and how their religious views shaped their literary works, styles, and their historical and political views.
The Puritan principles and standards inherently shaped the evolution of the New England territories, both intentionally and coincidentally. Despite the Puritan's prearranged attempts to control all perspectives in New England society through their strong persevering mentality, informational structure, and united government, truly the coincidental effects had more imperative whole deal impacts as the Puritan "way of life" transitioned into a secular society before the conclusion of the 1660s. Politically, the Puritans got a greater measure of political and religious adaptability on account of discontent from total control. Monetarily, the abundance of trademark resources and strong Puritan persevering state of mind incited a trade developed
The church and Christian beliefs had a very large impact on the Puritan religion and lifestyle. According to discovery education, “Church was the cornerstone of the mainly Puritan society of the 17th century.”( Douglas 4). Puritan laws were intensively rigid and people in society were expected to follow a moral strict code. And because of Puritans and their strict moral codes, any act that was considered to go against this code was considered a sin and deserved to be punished. In Puritan theology, God h...
In 1630, the Massachusetts Bay Company set sail to the New World in hope of reforming the Church of England. While crossing the Atlantic, John Winthrop, the puritan leader of the great migration, delivered perhaps the most famous sermon aboard the Arbella, entitled “A Model of Christian Charity.” Winthrop’s sermon gave hope to puritan immigrants to reform the Church of England and set an example for future immigrants. The Puritan’s was a goal to get rid of the offensive features that Catholicism left behind when the Protestant Reformation took place. Under Puritanism, there was a constant strain to devote your life to God and your neighbors. Unlike the old England, they wanted to prove that New England was a community of love and individual worship to God. Therefore, they created a covenant with God and would live their lives according to the covenant. Because of the covenant, Puritans tried to abide by God’s law and got rid of anything that opposed their way of life. Between 1630 and the 18th century, the Puritans tried to create a new society in New England by creating a covenant with God and living your life according to God’s rule, but in the end failed to reform the Church of England. By the mid 1630’s, threats to the Puritans such as Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, and Thomas Hooker were being banned from the Puritan community for their divergent beliefs. 20 years later, another problem arose with the children of church members and if they were to be granted full membership to the church. Because of these children, a Halfway Covenant was developed to make them “halfway” church members. And even more of a threat to the Puritan society was their notion that they were failing God, because of the belief that witches existed in 1692.
In the New World, colonies of Europeans were forming rapidly across the east coast. These colonies were seemingly founded on the ideas of oppression as well as dreams of wealth and glory, except for one particular group of religious colonists who dreamed of creating“the city upon the hill”. But who were these people and how did their ideas and beliefs affect Early America? In England a religious group of people known as the Puritans were finding themselves unhappy with the Anglican Church. The Puritans, numbered 102 men women and children, found themselves relocating to America and settling near Cape Cod in southeastern Massachusetts to escape the church and practice their own religion. Their mission was to build a society of independent farm
Winthrop had decided to leave England to found a godly community in the new world. Like most Puritans, Winthrop was extremely religious and subscribed fervently to the Puritan belief that the Anglican Church had to be cleansed of Catholic ritual. Winthrop was convinced that God was going to punish the English Puritans for its heresy against God. As the leader of the party heading for the new world he believed in creating a society based on a moral code that was rooted in the bible. Winthrop and the other Puritans hoped to establish in the new world a pure church that would offer a model for the churches in England, thus purifying the Anglican Church from within. "They sought homogeneity, not diversity, and believed that the good of the community outweighed protecting the rights of its individual members".
The first leader of the Puritans ,John Winthrop, main purpose was to create a “city upon the hill”, which in terms is meant as a religious statement. The Puritans wanted to make the Anglican Church pure and wanted people to follow their ideas and values. They wanted to build a religion based colony.The puritans were known as the congregationalists, they wanted to run the church and have the power to hire and fire the preacher and have the power of taxes. They believed man was born sinful. Puritans believed in a concept called , Doctrine of the elect, which consisted of the Puritans believing that they were preselected for heaven or hell. The Puritans believed their ideas and values would influence the community and positively affect the
A colonial Puritan minister, Thomas Shepard, nicely summarized the paradox of the Puritan religion when he noted that “The greatest part of Christian grace lies in mourning the want of it.” Shepard suggests, in this passage, that good Christians should spend their days, indeed their entire lives, exploring and proclaiming their own depravity and sinfulness, their “want” of Christian grace. Paradoxically, only this kind of a life could lead, ultimately, to the possibile attainment of God’s grace and thus entrance into heaven. For the Puritans, such a formula posed a never-ending, internal conflict: good Christians who hope for grace can never believe that they are worthy of such grace. Indeed, Puritans who want to be moral and upright must constantly keep in mind the fact that they are sinful and wicked and not deserving of God’s attention, much less admittance to heaven.
Puritanism as a religion declined, both by diluting its core beliefs and by losing its members. This phenomenon was at work even in colonial days, at the religion’s height, because it contained destructive characteristics. It devolved into something barely recognizable in the course of a few generations. We can observe that the decline of Puritanism occurred because it bore within itself the seeds of its own destruction.