How Did Puritan Influence In New England Change From The 1600s To The 1700s?

The Puritans were members of a religious reform movement known as Puritanism that arose within the Church of England in the late 16th century. They believed the Church of England was besides similar to the Roman Catholic Church and should eliminate ceremonies and practices non rooted in the Bible.

Puritans felt that they had a direct covenant with God to enact these reforms. Nether siege from Church building and crown, certain groups of Puritans migrated to Northern English colonies in the New World in the 1620s and 1630s, laying the foundation for the religious, intellectual and social society of New England. Aspects of Puritanism have reverberated throughout American life ever since.

Puritans: A Definition

The roots of Puritanism are to be institute in the beginnings of the English language Reformation. The name "Puritans" (they were sometimes called "precisionists") was a term of contempt assigned to the movement by its enemies. Although the epithet first emerged in the 1560s, the motion began in the 1530s, when King Henry VIII repudiated papal authority and transformed the Church of Rome into a country Church of England. To Puritans, the Church of England retained too much of the liturgy and ritual of Roman Catholicism.

Well into the 16th century, many priests were barely literate and ofttimes very poor. Employment by more than one parish was common, so they moved often, preventing them from forming deep roots in their communities. Priests were allowed to certain penalties of the civil constabulary, further feeding anticlerical hostility and contributing to their isolation from the spiritual needs of the people.

The Church building of England

Through the reigns of the Protestant King Edward 6 (1547-1553), who introduced the offset vernacular prayer book, and the Cosmic Mary I (1553-1558), who sent some dissenting clergymen to their deaths and others into exile, the Puritan motion–whether tolerated or suppressed–connected to grow.

Some Puritans favored a presbyterian form of church organization; others, more than radical, began to claim autonomy for individual congregations. Still, others were content to remain within the construction of the national church building but set themselves against Catholic and episcopal authority.

As they gained strength, Puritans were portrayed past their enemies as hairsplitters who slavishly followed their Bibles every bit guides to daily life or hypocrites who cheated the very neighbors they judged inadequate Christians.

However the Puritan attack on the established church building gained popular force, especially in E Anglia and among the lawyers and merchants of London. The move constitute wide support amid these new professional person classes, who saw in it a mirror for their growing discontent with economic restraints.

During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, an uneasy peace prevailed within English religious life, but the struggle over the tone and purpose of the church continued. Many men and women were more and more than forced to debate with the dislocations–emotional as well equally physical–that accompanied the beginnings of a market economy.

Subsistence farmers were called upon to enter the earth of production for profit. Nether the dominion of primogeniture, younger sons tended to enter the professions (especially the police) with increasing frequency and seek their livelihood in the burgeoning cities. The English countryside was plagued by scavengers, highwaymen and vagabonds–a newly visible class of the poor who strained the ancient clemency laws and pressed upon the townsfolk new questions of social responsibleness.

Puritans in New England

In the early decades of the 17th century, some groups of worshipers began to separate themselves from the main body of their local parish church building where preaching was inadequate and to engage an energetic "lecturer," typically a young man with a fresh Cambridge degree, who was a lively speaker and steeped in reform theology. Some congregations went further, declared themselves separated from the national church building, and remade themselves into communities of "visible saints," withdrawn from the English City of Human being into a self-proclaimed City of God.

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I such faction was a group of separatist believers in the Yorkshire village of Scrooby, who, fearing for their prophylactic, moved to Holland in 1608 and then, in 1620, to the identify they called Plymouth in New England. We know them now as the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock.

A decade later, a larger, meliorate-financed grouping, mostly from East Anglia, migrated to Massachusetts Bay. There, they gear up gathered churches on much the aforementioned model as the transplanted church building at Plymouth (with deacons, preaching elders and, though non right away, a communion restricted to full church members, or "saints").

Differences Between Pilgrims and Puritans

The master difference between the Pilgrims and the Puritans is that the Puritans did non consider themselves separatists. They called themselves "nonseparating congregationalists," past which they meant that they had not repudiated the Church of England as a false church building. But in exercise they acted–from the point of view of Episcopalians and fifty-fifty Presbyterians at abode–exactly as the separatists were acting.

By the 1640s, their enterprise at Massachusetts Bay had grown to most 10,000 people. They presently outgrew the bounds of the original settlement and spread into what would become Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Maine, and eventually across the limits of New England.

Who Were the Puritans?

The Puritan migration was overwhelmingly a migration of families (different other migrations to early America, which were equanimous largely of immature unattached men). The literacy charge per unit was high, and the intensity of devotional life, equally recorded in the many surviving diaries, sermon notes, poems and letters, was seldom to exist matched in American life.

The Puritans' ecclesiastical society was as intolerant as the one they had fled. Yet, as a loosely confederated drove of gathered churches, Puritanism contained inside itself the seed of its own fragmentation. Following difficult upon the arrival in New England, dissident groups within the Puritan sect began to proliferate–Quakers, Antinomians, Baptists–tearing believers who carried the essential Puritan idea of the aloneness of each believer with an inscrutable God so far that even the ministry building became an obstacle to faith.

Puritanism in American Life

Puritanism gave Americans a sense of history as a progressive drama nether the direction of God, in which they played a role akin to, if non prophetically aligned with, that of the Old Testament Jews equally a new chosen people.

Perhaps most important, as Max Weber profoundly understood, was the strength of Puritanism as a way of coping with the contradictory requirements of Christian ethics in a globe on the verge of modernity. It supplied ethics that somehow balanced clemency and self-discipline. Information technology counseled moderation within psychology that saw worldly prosperity as a sign of divine favor. Such ideals were specially urgent in a New World where opportunity was rich, merely the source of moral authorization was obscure.

By the beginning of the 18th century, Puritanism had both declined and shown its tenacity. Though "the New England Way" evolved into a relatively minor arrangement of organizing religious experience within the broader American scene, its central themes recur in the related religious communities of Quakers, Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists and a whole range of evangelical Protestants.

More than recently, the word "Puritan" has once again become a pejorative epithet, meaning prudish, constricted and cold–as in H. L. Mencken's famous remark that a Puritan is one who suspects "somewhere someone is having a practiced time."

Puritanism, however, had a more significant persistence in American life than equally the religion of blackness-frocked caricatures. Information technology survived, perchance nigh conspicuously, in the secular form of self-reliance, moral rigor and political localism that became, by the Age of Enlightenment, about the definition of Americanism.