What Does It Mean to Be a Puritan
The Puritans were members of a religious reform motility known equally Puritanism that arose within the Church of England in the tardily 16th century. They believed the Church of England was as well similar to the Roman Catholic Church and should eliminate ceremonies and practices not rooted in the Bible.
Puritans felt that they had a straight covenant with God to enact these reforms. Nether siege from Church and crown, certain groups of Puritans migrated to Northern English language colonies in the New World in the 1620s and 1630s, laying the foundation for the religious, intellectual and social order of New England. Aspects of Puritanism have reverberated throughout American life ever since.
Puritans: A Definition
The roots of Puritanism are to be found in the beginnings of the English Reformation. The name "Puritans" (they were sometimes called "precisionists") was a term of antipathy assigned to the movement by its enemies. Although the epithet first emerged in the 1560s, the move began in the 1530s, when King Henry VIII repudiated papal potency 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 often very poor. Employment by more than than 1 parish was common, so they moved oft, preventing them from forming deep roots in their communities. Priests were immune to certain penalties of the civil constabulary, farther feeding anticlerical hostility and contributing to their isolation from the spiritual needs of the people.
The Church of England
Through the reigns of the Protestant Male monarch Edward Six (1547-1553), who introduced the outset vernacular prayer book, and the Catholic Mary I (1553-1558), who sent some dissenting clergymen to their deaths and others into exile, the Puritan movement–whether tolerated or suppressed–continued to abound.
Some Puritans favored a presbyterian form of church system; others, more radical, began to claim autonomy for individual congregations. Nonetheless, others were content to remain within the structure of the national church building simply set themselves against Catholic and episcopal say-so.
As they gained force, 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.
Yet the Puritan attack on the established church gained pop forcefulness, specially in East Anglia and among the lawyers and merchants of London. The movement found wide support among these new professional 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 building continued. Many men and women were more and more forced to debate with the dislocations–emotional besides as concrete–that accompanied the ancestry of a market economy.
Subsistence farmers were called upon to enter the world of production for profit. Under the rule of primogeniture, younger sons tended to enter the professions (especially the law) with increasing frequency and seek their livelihood in the burgeoning cities. The English countryside was plagued by scavengers, highwaymen and vagabonds–a newly visible form of the poor who strained the aboriginal charity laws and pressed upon the townsfolk new questions of social responsibility.
Puritans in New England
In the early decades of the 17th century, some groups of worshipers began to separate themselves from the primary body of their local parish church 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 farther, declared themselves separated from the national church, and remade themselves into communities of "visible saints," withdrawn from the English City of Man into a self-proclaimed Urban center of God.
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1 such faction was a grouping of separatist believers in the Yorkshire hamlet of Scrooby, who, fearing for their condom, moved to Holland in 1608 and then, in 1620, to the place they called Plymouth in New England. We know them now as the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock.
A decade afterward, a larger, amend-financed group, mostly from E Anglia, migrated to Massachusetts Bay. There, they gear up upward gathered churches on much the same 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 Betwixt Pilgrims and Puritans
The chief difference betwixt the Pilgrims and the Puritans is that the Puritans did not consider themselves separatists. They called themselves "nonseparating congregationalists," by which they meant that they had non repudiated the Church building of England as a false church building. Merely in practice they acted–from the point of view of Episcopalians and even Presbyterians at home–exactly as the separatists were acting.
Past the 1640s, their enterprise at Massachusetts Bay had grown to well-nigh 10,000 people. They soon outgrew the bounds of the original settlement and spread into what would become Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Maine, and eventually beyond the limits of New England.
Who Were the Puritans?
The Puritan migration was overwhelmingly a migration of families (unlike other migrations to early America, which were composed largely of young unattached men). The literacy rate was high, and the intensity of devotional life, as recorded in the many surviving diaries, sermon notes, poems and messages, was seldom to be matched in American life.
The Puritans' ecclesiastical order was as intolerant as the one they had fled. Yet, as a loosely confederated collection of gathered churches, Puritanism contained inside itself the seed of its own fragmentation. Post-obit hard upon the arrival in New England, dissident groups within the Puritan sect began to proliferate–Quakers, Antinomians, Baptists–trigger-happy believers who carried the essential Puritan idea of the aloneness of each believer with an inscrutable God so far that even the ministry became an obstruction to religion.
Puritanism in American Life
Puritanism gave Americans a sense of history as a progressive drama under the direction of God, in which they played a role akin to, if not prophetically aligned with, that of the Old Testament Jews as a new chosen people.
Perhaps most of import, as Max Weber greatly understood, was the strength of Puritanism equally a fashion of coping with the contradictory requirements of Christian ethics in a world on the verge of modernity. Information technology supplied ethics that somehow balanced clemency and self-discipline. It counseled moderation within psychology that saw worldly prosperity as a sign of divine favor. Such ideals were particularly urgent in a New Globe where opportunity was rich, but the source of moral authorisation was obscure.
By the beginning of the 18th century, Puritanism had both declined and shown its tenacity. Though "the New England Fashion" evolved into a relatively pocket-size system 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 recently, the word "Puritan" has once again go a pejorative epithet, meaning prudish, constricted and cold–every bit in H. L. Mencken's famous remark that a Puritan is i who suspects "somewhere someone is having a skilful time."
Puritanism, however, had a more than meaning persistence in American life than as the faith of blackness-frocked caricatures. It survived, perhaps most conspicuously, in the secular class of self-reliance, moral rigor and political localism that became, by the Age of Enlightenment, virtually the definition of Americanism.
Source: https://www.history.com/topics/colonial-america/puritanism
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