The United States of America is not like any other country in the world. In fact, it holds different meaning for many people. It is often referred to as “land of opportunity”, “democracy and justice”, “the land of second chances”, and most importantly “land of the free”. For the Puritans and the first settlers who arrived in Massachusetts Bay and settled New England, the New World was a tangible definition of Liberty. America provided land, religious freedom, and was a chance to start over in a land where there was no oppression. The settlers who came to New England came for religious toleration and sought to live in freedom and equality that England could not provide at the time they lived in. Coming to the New World, they brought a strong …show more content…
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed the faith crossing over from the metropolis—European Christendom—to an initially non-Christian territory. The founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony saw the American wilderness as a mission. Just as the settlers and explorers before them like John Smith, these early settlers “envisioned the virgin continent as a tabula rasa upon which they could easily their religious vision of society.”3 By coming from a state where government and religion went hand in hand, Puritans and the new settlers did not want to create the same kind of lifestyle from which they left, but as a splinter from the European Christendom continent, it was nearly impossible to be completely free of their previously known lifestyle. Christian precepts were embedded in the common law and often enforced through civil authorities, as in laws respecting the Sunday Sabbath. They called Boston the “Jerusalem of this land” themselves “Christian Israel” and England “the land of Egypt”, King James I was “Pharaoh”, the Atlantic Ocean “the Red Sea”, America “the New Canann”, “the Promised Land”, their Indian enemies were “Amalick and the Philistines.”4America began life as a seventeenth century remnant of European