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WHY THEY MATTERED: THE RETURN OF POLITICS TO PURITAN NEW ENGLAND

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2013

MARK PETERSON
MARK PETERSON*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of California, Berkeley E-mail: mark-peterson@berkeley.edu
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Extract

Puritans had big stories to tell, and they cast themselves big parts to play in those stories. The fervent English Protestants who believed that the Elizabethan Church urgently needed further reformation, and the self-selecting band among them who went on to colonize New England, were sure that they could re-create the churches of the apostolic age, and eliminate centuries’ worth of Romish accretions. By instituting scriptural forms of worship, these purified churches might have a beneficial influence on the state as well, and bring about the rule of the godly. If a purified English church and state could inaugurate reformation across all of Christendom, spread the gospel to infidels around the globe, and usher in the millennium, then all the better. In 1641, an anonymous tract called A Glimpse of Sions Glory announced that the new puritan-controlled Parliament would bring on “Babylon's destruction . . . The work of the day [is] to give God no rest till he sets up Jerusalem in the praise of the whole world.” The leading minister of colonial Boston at the time, John Cotton, predicted that as soon as 1655, as Michael Winship summarizes Cotton:

the states and Christian princes of Europe, under irresistible supernatural influence, would have instituted congregationalism [Massachusetts’ form of church polity] and overthrown Antichrist and Muslim Turkey. The example of their churches’ pure Christianity would have brought about the conversion of Jews and pagans across the globe. Thereafter, the churches of Christ would enjoy the millennium's thousand years of peace before the climactic battle with Gog and Magog at the end of time.

Those are big stories.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , November 2013 , pp. 683 - 696
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

1 Cited in Hall, David D., A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England (New York, 2011), 98Google Scholar,

2 Winship, Michael P., Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill (Cambridge, MA, 2012), 233CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 It may be telling that the novelist Hilary Mantel (Wolf Hall (2009), Bring up the Bodies (2012), and a third volume yet to come in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy) is arguably today's most important and popular interpreter of early modern English history.

4 Edmund S. Morgan, review of Heimert, Alan, Religion and the American Mind from the Great Awakening to the Revolution, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series 24/3 (July 1967), 459Google Scholar.

5 One historian from an evangelical Christian university appeared on Glenn Beck's Founders Friday program, touting a hyper-simplified version of the Heimert thesis, leading Beck to declare that George Whitefield was an American “Founder” without whom the Revolution would have been impossible. See www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,592997,00.html.

6 Bradford, William, History of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647, 2 vols. (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1912), 2: 117Google Scholar.

7 Miller, Perry, Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 1630–1650 (Cambridge, MA, 1933)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Cartwright had written in 1574, “As the hangings [drapes] are made fit for the house, so the common wealth must be made to agree with the Churche, and the governmente thereof with hir government” (Winship, 13).

9 It should be noted that Massachusetts, a self-selecting group of migrants that included almost no aristocrats, did not face the same challenges that the Levellers aimed to resolve. By leaving behind in England the worst problems of social injustice, New England's puritans gained the luxury to focus first on church reform.

10 On this point, Hall differs from some of the revisionist scholarship in England concerning the Levellers, beginning with Davis, J. C., “The Levellers and Christianity,” in Manning, Brian, ed. Politics, Religion, and the English Civil Wars (London, 1973), 225–50Google Scholar; and Tolmie, Murray, The Triumph of the Saints: The Separate Churches of London, 1616–1649 (Cambridge, 1977)Google Scholar. These and subsequent works locate the roots of the Leveller movement in the same separatist circles that Winship's book traces, and see the Levellers’ social concerns as part and parcel of their desire to create a godly society.

11 Pocock, J. G. A., The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975)Google Scholar.

12 One historian of the English Reformation has likewise explored the deep connections between “godly” and “civic” republicanism, but argues that this striving toward moderation was as likely to produce form of repression as forms of freedom: see Shagan, Ethan H., The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion, and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 My own inclination is to think of it as something more like the monarchical republic of Tudor England, with an elective monarchy substituted for a hereditary one.