1630: Puritans

Puritan Text vs. Catholic Pope

• Consider Protestant investment in God's word (the Bible), not God's church (with the Pope in Rome)
• "... [Luther's] larger message became the core ethos of Protestantism: the Bible, not an earthly pope, is the highest authority" (Vowell, 6).
• In John Calvin's Geneva Bible, "the one the Calvinists on the Mayflower and most travelers in the Winthrop fleet carried with them to America," the Pope is referred to as "the Antichrist" and "the beast in the bottomless pit . . which hath his power out of hell" (Vowell, 40).
• ". . . Puritan lives were overwhelmingly, fanatically literary. Their single-minded obsession with one book, the Bible, made words the center of their lives--not land, not money, not power, not fun" (Vowell, 13).

Puritans vs. Anti-intellectualism

• Vowell describes the Puritans in Boston as "communitarian English majors" (13) and poitns out that they founded Harvard. 

Puritans as Intellectuals

Winthrop makes sure to back up what he sees with what is found in scripture. It is filled not just with his opinion on how people should live their lives and treat other people, but with Bible verses, as well. For example, he writes that “if the time and occasion be ordinary he is to give out of his abundance.” Following this, he writes to “let him lay aside as God hath blessed him,” which comes from the First Book of Corinthians, chapter sixteen, verse two.

Faith and Imperialism

• Consider Winthrop's admonition: "We must not look only on our things, but also on the things of our brethren" (56) A call to community or a call to imperialism?
• While reading The Wordy Shipmates, I was surprised that the seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony displayed an Indian saying, “Come over and help us” (Vowell 27). The Puritans’ idea of their importance to the world was heavily inflated, and it was the Indians who ended up needing to help the Englishmen who came over to the New World in 1620. I wonder if the Puritans were aware of this fact. This self-importance is also seen in the sense of entitlement that the Puritans had towards the land in New England. John Winthrop wrote, “God hath thereby cleared our title to this place,” concerning the plague that wiped out ninety percent of the Indians in the New World. (Vowell 31). They believed themselves to be chosen by God to enter what would be America just as God chose the Israelites to enter the promised land. 
• “The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief” (Vowell 1). This is the opening line of Vowell’s book, and it seems it is also the best summary. She goes on to explain what she means in the next few sentences. . . . the Puritans’ idea of being God’s chosen people was passed onto America with its ideas such as Manifest Destiny. Vowell even says her reason for writing the book is because “the country [she] lives in is haunted by the Puritans’ vision of themselves as God’s chosen people” (24). . . . 

Puritans vs. Other Protestants vs. Arminianism

• Arminianism (supported by King Charles and Bishop Laud): "the dogma that a believer's salvation depends merely on faith, is at odds with the Puritans' insistence that salvation is predetermined by God" (Vowell, 9).

• 1620: Mayflower Separatists (more radical) to Plymouth. The Plymouth colony, known formally as "The colony of New Plymouth," was the first permanent settlement by Europeans in New England. The town as founded by Pilgrims, religious separatists who fled England first to the Netherlands and then to North America.

• 1630: Arbella (Winthrop and Bradstreet) Non-Separatists (less radical) to Massachusetts Bay. Want to reform the Church of England from the inside. “Reform” meant purging the church of remnants of Roman Catholicism (e.g. clerical hierarchies and “kneeling” for communion)

John Winthrop

John Winthrop, a lawyer (born in 1588) wanted to reform the Church of England from within (he was not a separatist)

Winthrop sailed from England to Massachusetts with other Puritans on the Arbella to Massachussets in 1630 and, it was long believed, drafted " A Model of Christian Charity" on board.  

John Winthrop called upon colonists to join each other and God in a covenant to build “a Citty [sic] upon a Hill” to be witnessed by “the eyes of all people.” 

Winthrop guided the colonists on his arrival in North America in 1630 and was elected governor 12 times during the period from 1631 to 1648. 

He was an influential Puritan voice in Massachusetts Bay Colony and imposed a rigid system based on group discipline and individual responsibility.

Opposition against him built up after a few years and dissidents kept challenging Winthrop’s system in the mid- and late 1630s.

Though widely respected, Winthrop was criticized for opposing the formation of a representative assembly (1634), and the colony’s limitations on religious freedom were decried by Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson (see below). The Puritans banned Williams from Massachusetts in 1636, and Hutchinson was excommunicated in 1638.

Winthrop  was irritated when the freemen (voters) insisted in 1634 on electing a representative assembly to share in decision making.

By 1640 Winthrop had become the custodian of Massachusetts orthodoxy, suspicious of new ideas and influences and convinced that God favoured his community above all others.

In 1641 Winthrop helped write the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, the first legal sanctioning of slavery in North America. Indeed, Winthrop owned at least one Native American slave, taken during the Pequot War (1636–37). (As slavery grew in New England, it was more typical for Native American slaves to be sent to the West Indies, where they were exchanged for enslaved Africans.)

Roger Williams

Wintrhop found Roger Williams’s criticism of church-state relations intolerable. Williams was banned from Massachusetts Bay Colony for “dangerous views,” including the beliefs that the only just way to gain title to land was to purchase it from Native Americans and that the magistrates had no right to interfere in matters of religion. Williams went on to found the town of Providence and colony of Rhode Island, which became a refuge for Anabaptists and Quakers.

Winthrop secretly helped Williams to flee to Rhode Island in 1636.

Anne Hutchinson

In 1638, Anne Hutchinson was excommunicated from the Boston church for her questioning of clerical authority, including the belief that that individual intuition—rather than the observance of institutionalized beliefs and the dictates of ministers—was the path to reaching God and attaining salvation. Hutchinson found refuge in the new colony of Rhode Island.

Anne Bradstreet
Anne Bradstreet wrote poetry while rearing eight children in the Massachusetts Bay Colony; unbeknownst to Bradstreet, her brother-in-law took her poems to England, where they were published in 1650 as The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America.