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Essay on puritans
The story of the puritans
Puritan society in america
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Religion was very important to the Puritans in the 1600s. John Winthrop a member of the Puritans gentry, wrote to his wife the ‘I am verily persuaded God will bring some heavy affliction upon this land.” A year later he went and lead a group of a group of puritans to New England. By the 1630s another twenty thousand Puritans would come to America. When John became governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, he told immigrants that will have to guide people toward this holy ideal or they were not welcomed.
The puritans came to New England so they could experience and practice christianity in a new form.[background] Puritans believed every word in the bible was the word of god. That said, the bible mentions Devils and witches. They believed a witch was a person who was controlled by the devil. For example, The devil can make a young girl cry in church. One way the court accepted evidence the suspect in question was a witch was when a woman confused the words when saying the lord's prayer.[background] Because of these actions more people were being accused of being a witch.
In the year of 1630, a group of people known as the Puritans arrived to America and settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in Boston. The Puritans were similar to the Pilgrims in which they were Protestants from England who thought that their reforms of their church were “too Catholic” and needed to be changed further. The Puritans being unhappy with their reforms was the primary reason for leaving England and settling in America, while the Pilgrims stayed behind and were determined to change their reforms. When they came to America, they decided to keep some of their strict rules. For example, church was mandatory and if someone missed a day,
They wanted to create pure, moral Christian society based on moral living. By hard working, integration of religion in politics, and social development of certain lifestyle practices, Puritans had a large influence on the development of the New England colonies from 1630s through the 1660s. Puritans believed in hard work as the pathway of success since they thought they were favored by God to succeed (Doc I). They tried to shun idleness and believed that being lazy is not profitable (Doc C).
The Puritans in Massachusetts were very intolerant of other religious beliefs, regardless of the fact that they had been persecuted in England for what they believed. Puritans insisted that regular church attendance was mandatory in order to receive voting privileges. This meant that in order to have a say in anything you had to be a devout Puritan. They often argued about discrepancies within their own religion, such as whether or not sainthood was passed down from generation to generation. Puritans even went as far as to exile other Puritans the did not conform to the standard version of Puritanism.
The Puritans created a religiously repressive society that greatly influenced the overall development of New England. Although their society revolved around the church, were all of their beliefs detrimental to the evolution of the colony? Regarding New England’s social development, the Puritans’ stress on community, family and education was advantageous because it caused the region to thrive with more families and small towns. Therefore, since Puritans were more likely to come to the New World’s families instead of individuals, New England had significantly more families settle there than in other regions of colonization. Additionally, Puritans emphasized the importance of a community living together and sustaining its members, which resulted in New England being marked by the development of
However, they were never successful in doing so. In nearly all of colonial America, there was some religious intolerance, with the exception of few colonial areas. In a quite ironic manner, the Puritans displayed and acted out much religious intolerance, even after facing much scrutiny concerning their religion, in England. This statement is proven, when “Puritan New England: Kahn Academy”, mentions “Although many people assume Puritans escaped England to establish religious freedom, they proved to be just as intolerant as the English state church.” The main and pretty much only, exception, would in this case be Rhode Island, seeing as though it was founded by former Puritan Roger Williams, who had been banned from the colony (in opposition to being executed), as a result of the questioning of their actions towards local Native American tribes, he decided to create Rhode Island, as a place of refuge for those seeking religious tolerance, or who had simply been banned from the previous colony they had resided
To control this while still allowing independence, they were going to have to coincide with other fellow Puritan’s opinions. According to David Hall there are 4 major questions you have to ask, whether “Puritanism was coherent, if they were authoritarians, creed and Practice, and finally how relevant and important religion was in people’s changing lives.” These questions were the very basics that lead the Puritan’s to emigrate to a society where they were able to express themselves freely, unfortunately, the religion changed along with a new generation, continuing the
The Puritan colonists were bound by laws of morality with judgments with sentences that were the base of fear. The laws were centered on the basics of not going to church daily to practicing witchcraft, adultery, even not having regular sex to procreate. There were many laws of the time with cause and effect that harmed many people. Through the seventeenth century, laws were connected to morality, reflected in the ways Puritans used religious beliefs in the process of rendering judgment and assigning punishments to keep colonists from leaving their colony and gaining freedoms of their own. Puritan Religion ~
The pursuit of religious freedom is not a contemporary idea. For centuries many have valiantly fought against oppression and persecution in order to worship freely without restraint and judgement. Some of the earliest immigrants who migrated to this country did so with the hopes of being able to worship in a manner than aligned most closely with their religious beliefs. Many of the principles that founded this nation are based on the premise of religious freedom and toleration. Undoubtedly one of the most influential and prominent religious factions to land on these shores in pursuit of this right, were the Puritans.
I do not believe that it would be easy for me to be a New Puritan while watch the 2016 campaign. Seducing America has set three standards that a New Puritan should abide by; a fundamentalist, communalist, and a futurist mentality. The idea that a New Puritan is a fundamentalist means to rely on the fundamental truths, to acknowledge the subordination of some stories, and to accept civic guilt. I don't find viewing light topics on television subordinate, it is actually a nice refresher to hear that “Bill Clinton now owns a cat” versus something devastating(Seducing America.) Additionally it would be quite hard to live a life apart from a citizenship mentality, especially in America.
New England’s economy would also be influenced by the British tax later that would cause Americans to revolt many of which trusted in their faith to guide them The Puritans who settled in Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 were also motivated by religious beliefs. They believed in the idea of a "city upon a hill," a vision of a holy community that would serve as an example to the rest of the world (American YAWP, 2.6). This belief led to a strict social order and a commitment to the moral and spiritual purity of the community. It also led to conflicts with other religious groups, such as the Quakers, who were seen as a threat to the Puritan social order.
More than 80% of Americans have Puritan ancestors who emigrated to Colonial America on the Mayflower, and other ships, in the 1630’s (“Puritanism”). Puritanism had an early start due to strong main beliefs that, when challenged, caused major conflict like the Salem Witch Trials. Puritanism had an extremely rocky beginning, starting with a separation from the Roman Catholic Church. Starting in 1606, a group of villagers in Scrooby, England left the church of England and formed a congregation called the Separatist Church, and the members were called The puritans (“Pilgrims”).
Religion is a cultural universal that affects society in so many different ways. The various teachings can give explanations of things seemingly unexplainable, it can act as a way of social control, but either way religion is an integral part of American society now and it was maybe even more so in early America. In early 17th century, the Puritans came to America in a great migration to escape religious persecution and in the hopes of creating “a city upon a hill.” They established their society in New England and Puritanism dominated the area. In Puritan colonies, there was very little distinction between law and religious decrees, and this is just one of the examples of how Puritanism was the foundation of New England culture.
Essentially, Puritans are expected to follow a strict set of religious and moral guidelines from which their actions and morality are derived. According to Hall’s A Reforming People, these moral expectations first introduced by the pilgrims were the driving force behind the power that the Puritan ministry had over society: “Ministers and laypeople looked first to congregations as the place where love, mutuality, and righteousness would flourish, and second to civil society. …Alongside love, mutuality, and righteousness they placed another set of values summed up in the word “equity.” Employed in a broad array of contexts, the concept of equity conveyed the colonists’ hopes for justice and fairness in their social world.”