The Congregational Church is in many ways America's church.  Here is a short history:

Pilgrims and Puritans: Background Context and Developments

THE PILGRIMS

The immigration of the Pilgrims to New England occurred in stages. But that they

had to go somewhere became apparent soon enough. Theirs was the position of the

Separatist: they believed that the reforms of the Anglican church had not gone

far enough, that, although the break with Catholicism in 1535 had moved some way

toward the Puritan belief in and idea of religious authority grounded solely in

Scripture, by substituting king for pope as the head of the church, England was

only recapitulating an unnecessary, corrupt, and even idolatrous order (Gill,

19-21). In one basic respect, the Pilgrims are a logical outcome of the

Reformation. In its increasing dissemination of the Bible, the increasing

emphasis on it as the basis of spiritual meaning, the subsequently increasing

importance of literacy as a mode of religious authority and awareness, a growing

individualism was implicit. This individualism may then have easily led to an

atomization or dispersion of authority that the monarchy duly feared, and that

later generations of Americans could easily label democratization. As a writer

in 1921 put it, "They accepted Calvin's rule, that those who are to exercise any

public function in the church should be chosen by common voice" (Wheelwright,

vii). However much this might emphasize the democratic qualities of the

Pilgrims, as dissenters they do suggest at some level the origins of democratic

society, in its reliance upon contending and even conflicting points of view,

and in its tendency toward a more fluid social structure.

But theirs was a religious, not a political agenda; moral and theological

principles were involved, and from their perspective, there could be no

compromise. For them 2 Corinthians made it clear: "Come out from among them and

be ye separate, saith the Lord." To achieve and preserve a simplicity and

'purity' that they felt had been lost amid the some of the surviving features of

Catholicism--the rituals which continued through into the Anglican Church and

were epitomized in its statement, "'I believe in...the holy Catholick Church'"

(Gill, 19). To establish themselves as rightful interpreters of the Bible

independent of an inherited social and cultural order, they removed from the

Anglican Church in order to re-establish it as they believed it truly should be.

This of course meant leaving the country, and they left for Holland in 1608.

After 12 years, they decided to move again. Having gone back to England to

obtain the backing of the Virginia Company, 102 Pilgrims set out for America.

The reasons are suggested by William Bradford, when he notes the

"discouragements" of the hard life they had in Holland, and the hope of

attracting others by finding "a better, and easier place of living"; the

"children" of the group being "drawne away by evill examples into extravagence

and dangerous courses"; the "great hope, for the propagating and advancing the

gospell of the kingdom of Christ in those remote parts of the world"

(Wheelwright, 7-8). In these reasons, the second sounds most like the Pilgrims

many Americans are familiar with--the group that wants to be left alone and live

in its own pure and righteous way. Behind it seems to lie not only the fear of

the breakdown of individual families, but even a concern over the dissolution of

the larger community. The concern seems to be that their split with England was

now only effecting their own disolution into Dutch culture. But it is also

interesting to note the underlying traces of evangelism in, if not the first,

certainly the last of the reasons. On the one hand, this strain would find its

later expression (and perversion) in such portrayals of the Pilgrims as the

Rotunda fresco, where the idea of conversion is baldly fashioned within the

image of conquest; here, the Indian is shown as subdued before the word of the

"kingdom" even as the Pilgrims are landing, and the Pilgrim is seen as an agent

of domination, a superior moral force commanding by its sheer presence. On the

other hand, such a portrayal suggests an uneasy tension with the common (and

seemingly accurate) conception of the Pilgrims as a model of tolerance. Indeed,

the first of their reasons for sailing to America is fairly passive--they want

to "draw" others by the example of their prosperity, not necessarily go conquer

and actively convert. Such an idea reflects the one that would be expressed

explicitly by the Puritan John Winthrop, where the New World would become a

beacon of religious light, a model of spiritual promise, a "citty upon a hill."

In any case, from their own point of view, they are 'agents' only insofar as

they are agents of Providence, and as Bradford strives to make clear throughout,

the narrative of their actions is only an interpretation of the works of God.

Thus, in a remarkable instance when a "proud and very profane yonge man" who

"would curse and swear most bitterly" falls overboard from the Mayflower and

drowns, it is seen as "the just hand of God upon him" (Wheelwright, 14). So too

when a member of their party is saved from drowning, or when the initial landing

party finds the corn and beans for seed, or with their safe arrival at Plymouth

Bay in general, is the "spetiall providence of God" evinced. And Bradford seems

to self-consciously maintain this version of the Christian perspective as an

historical one, never allowing the reader or student of the Pilgrims to forget

that their story is one with a trajectory--coming from its beginnings England,

and moving through the beginnings of the 'New World'. This is an emphasis that

will serve histories and memories alike, especially in viewing the Revolution

and the increased democratization of the United States as some necessary

fulfillment of the Pilgrim promise.

the mayflower compact

Naturally, the primary text for later interpreters would be the Mayflower

Compact, which Bradford gives:

In the name of God, Amen. We whose names are underwriten, by the loyall subjects

of our dread soveraigne Lord, King James, by the grace of God, of Great

Britaine, Franc, and Ireland king, defender of the faith, etc.

Haveing undertaken, for the glorie of God, and advancemente of the Christian

faith, and honour of our king and countrie, a voyage to plant the first colonie

in the Northerne parts of Virginia, doe by these presents solemnly and mutually

in the presence of God, and one another, covenant and combine our selves

togeather into a civill body politick, for our better ordering and preservation

and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by vertue hereof to enacte,

constitute and frame shuch just and equall lawes, ordinances, acts,

constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meete

and convenient for the generall good of the Colonie, unto which we promise all

due submission and obedience. In witnes whereof we have hereunder subscribed our

names at Cap-Codd the .11. of November, in the year of the raigne of our

soveraigne lord, King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth,

and of Scotland the fiftie-fourth. Anno Dom. 1620 (Wheelwright, 32-33)

Bradford writes of the Compact, that it developed partly in response to "the

discontented and mutinous speeches" of some of the "strangers"--colonists who

had travelled with them but who "were uncommitted to church fellowship"--and

that it asserted and firmed the Pilgrims' "owne libertie; for none had the power

to command them, the patente they had being for Virginia, and not for New

england...." The Compact thus arose out of a need to maintain social and civic

coherence, to ensure that the officials elected and the group as a whole would

have some legitimation against challenges to its "legal authority" (McQuade,

140; Wheelwright, 32). Michael Kammen, however, notes a "tradition" in the early

19th century "in which the Compact was viewed as part of the repudiation of

English domination" (Kammen, 64). Surely there are evident democratic tendencies

in the text, wherein a code established from the consent of the people becomes

the underpinning of a society of "just and equall lawes," where the officials

and figures of authority are all elected. But as "loyall subjects" to the "dread

soveraigne Lord, King James," their task is twofold: to maintain a degree of

independence that would allow them to live in accordance with their Separatist

views, but also to keep the ties to England strong enough so that those who did

not share their religion nevertheless would be bound by an order ultimately

traceable to the Crown. The misreadings that Kammen notes will be discussed

further in following sections.

thanksgiving and the indians

The first few months were grueling for the Pilgrims. Half of their 102 members

perished: "of the 17 male heads of families, ten died during the first

infection"; of the 17 wives, only three were left after three months. When such

devastation is seen against the following summer, when conditions improved so

that Bradford would write of "all things in good plenty," the sincerity of

'Thanksgiving' becomes apparent. Regardless of how far removed one may be now or

even may have been when it was established as a national holiday in 1863, the

sense of Providence had undoubtedly been heightened to an extreme pitch for the

Pilgrims. After such devastating sickness, everyday survival itself was probably

seen as cause for gratitude, but when given a full and prosperous harvest (with

the help and instruction of Native Americans such as Squanto), the previous

ordeal could be understood as a trial by God, a test of faith, the heavenly

reward prefigured by an earthly one.

The institutional--by which is meant primarily the Capitol's--portrayal of

Native Americans throughout the establishment of Plymouth Plantation stands in

curious relation to Braford's narrative. First of all, there is the initial

landing party, with its description of the men led by Captain Miles Standish,

firing shots into the darkness at "a hideous and great crie." This they mistook

for a "companie of wolves, or such like wild beasts," until the next morning's

skirmish--when the "arrowes came flying" and one "lustie man, and no less

valiente" who "was seen shoot .3. arrowes" and "stood .3. shot of a musket..."

(Wheelwright, 25-26). This is hardly the humble servant offering up the corn at

the mere sight of the Pilgrim's arrival (see the Rotunda fresco). And when

Samoset, the first representative of the Indians, comes to speak (in "broken

English") with the Pilgrims, "he came bouldly amongst them" (emphasis added);

and having had previous contact with Europeans, he presumably knew as much or

more about the Pilgrims than they about him. Squanto, who had been to England

and could communicate well with the colonists, and who taught them "how to set

their corne, wher to take fish, and to procure other commodities," is understood

by the Pilgrims as "a spetiall instrument sent of God for their good beyond

their expectation" (Wheelwright, 41). Regardless of the sense of utility in such

an expression (all things being for them the effect or instrument of God), there

is an undeniable gratitude, and even the sense of dependence that those must

have before one who would provide aid and instruction. The treaty with Massasoit

was initiated not by the Pilgrims but by the sachem himself, who had already

made an equivalent pact with earlier explorers. The success of the treaty during

Massasoit's lifetime suggests an equality, fairness, and tolerance that would be

idealized and wistfully re-presented in various remembrances of the overall

colonial experience. It allows both the positive exemplar of the 'Indian' in

Massasoit, and reassurance of European good-faith in dealing with him. It

follows:

 .1. That neither he (Massasoit) nor any of his, should injurie or doe hurt to

any of their peopl(e).

.2. That if any of his did any hurte to any of theirs, he should send the

offender, that they might punish him.

.3. That if any thing were taken away from any of theirs, he should cause it to

be restored; and they should do like to him.

.4. If any did unjustly warr against him, they would aide him; if any did warr

against them, he should aide them. He should send to his neighbours

confederates, to certifie them of his, that they might not wrong them, but might

be likewise comprised in the conditions of peace.

THE PURITANS

The most obvious difference between the Pilgrims and the Puritans is that the

Puritans had no intention of breaking with the Anglican church. The Puritans

were nonconformists as were the Pilgrims, both of which refusing to accept an

authority beyond that of the revealed word. But where with the Pilgrims this had

translated into something closer to an egalitarian mode, the "Puritans

considered religion a very complex, subtle, and highly intellectual affair," and

its leaders thus were highly trained scholars, whose education tended to

translate into positions that were often authoritarian. There was a built-in

hierarchism in this sense, but one which mostly reflected the age: "Very few

Englishmen had yet broached the notion that a lackey was as good as a lord, or

that any Tom, Dick, or Harry...could understand the Sermon on the Mount as well

as a Master of Arts from Oxford, Cambridge, or Harvard" (Miller, I: 4, 14). Of

course, while the Puritan emphasis on scholarship did foster such class

distinction, it nevertheless encouraged education among the whole of its group,

and in fact demanded a level of learning and understanding in terms of

salvation. Thomas Hooker stated in The Application of Redemption, "Its with an

ignorant sinner in the midst of all means as with a sick man remaining in the

Apothecaries shop, ful of choycest Medicines in the darkest night: ...because he

cannot see what he takes, and how to use them, he may kill himself or encrease

his distempers, but never cure any disease" (qtd. in Miller, I: 13).

Knowledge of Scripture and divinity, for the Puritans, was essential. This was

an uncompromising attitude that characterized the Puritans' entry into New

England, according to Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson, whose thematic

anthology, The Puritans (1932, 1963), became a key text of revisionist

historicism, standing as an influential corrective against the extreme

anti-Puritanism of the early twentieth century. Following Samuel Eliot Morison,

they noted that the emphasis on education saw the establishment, survival, and

flourishing of Harvard College--which survived only because the entire community

was willing to support it, so that even the poor yeoman farmers "contributed

their pecks of wheat" for the continued promise of a "literate ministry"

(Miller, I: 14). And again, to their credit, Puritan leaders did not bolster the

knowledge of its ministry simply to perpetuate the level of power of the ruling

elite. A continuing goal was to further education among the laity, and so ensure

that not only were the right and righteous ideas and understandings being held

and expressed, but that the expressions were in fact messages received by a

comprehending audience. An Act passed in Massachusetts in 1647 required "that

every town of one hundred families or more should provide free common and

grammar school instruction." Indeed, the first "Free Grammar School" was

established in Boston in 1635, only five years after the Massachusetts Bay

Colony was founded (Miller, II: 695-97). For all the accusations of superstition

and narrow-mindedness, the Puritans could at least be said to have provided

their own antidote in their system of schools. As John Cotton wrote in Christ

the Fountaine of Life, "zeale is but a wilde-fire without knowledge" (qtd. in

Miller, I: 22).

The Puritans who, in the 1560s, first began to be (contemptuously) referred to

as such, were ardent reformers, seeking to bring the Church to a state of purity

that would match Christianity as it had been in the time of Christ. This reform

was to involve, depending upon which Puritan one asked, varying degrees of

stripping away practices seen as residual "popery"--vestments, ceremony, and the

like. But many of the ideas later associated strictly with the Puritans were not

held only by them. The Calvinist doctrine of predestination, with which

Puritanism agreed, was held by the Pilgrims as well: both believed that the

human state was one of sin and depravity; that after the Fall all but an elect

group were irrevocably bound for hell; that, because God's knowledge and power

was not limited by space or time, this group had always been elect. In other

words, there was nothing one could do about the condition of one's soul but try

to act as one would expect a heaven-bound soul to act.

As Perry Miller points out, they inherited Renaissance humanism just as they

inherited the Reformation, and so held an interesting place for reason in their

overall beliefs. The Puritan idea of "Covenant Theology" describes how "after

the fall of man, God voluntarily condescended...to draw up a covenant or

contract with His creature in which He laid down the terms and conditions of

salvation, and pledged Himself to abide by them" (Miller, I: 58). The doctrine

was not so much one of prescription as it was of explanation: it reasoned why

certain people were saved and others were not, it gave the conditions against

which one might measure up one's soul, and it ensured that God would abide by

"human conceptions of right and justice"--"not in all aspects, but in the main"

(Miller, I: 58). The religious agency for the individual Puritan was then

located in intense introspection, in the attempt to come to an awareness of

one's own spiritual state. As with the Pilgrims, the world, history, everything

for the Puritan became a text to be interpreted. One could not expect all of

God's actions to be limited by one's ideas of reason and justice, but one at

least had a general sense, John Cotton's "essentiall wisdome," as guidance. And

of course, one had the key, the basis of spiritual understanding, the

foundational text and all-encompassing code, the Bible.

salem witchcraft

It was because the Puritan mode of interpretivity--with its readings of

providence and secondary causes--could reach such extremes that the Salem

witch-trials broke out. Of course, as Thomas H. Johnson writes, the belief in

witches was generally questioned by no one--Puritan or otherwise--"and even as

late as the close of the seventeenth century hardly a scientist of repute in

England but accepted certain phenomena as due to witchcraft." But the Puritan

cosmology held a relentless imaginative power, especially demonstrated in

narratives wherein Providence was shown to be at work through nature and among

human beings. The laity read and took in such readings or demonstrations of

Providence, and the ministry felt compelled by a sense of official

responsibility to offer their interpretations and explain the work of God in the

world (Miller, II: 734-35).

Johnson notes the "lurid details" of Cotton Mather's Memorable Providences,

Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions (1689), which helped generate an

unbalanced fascination with witchcraft. This would prove both fire and tinder

for Salem Village, so that "by September, twenty people and two dogs had been

executed as witches" and hundreds more were either in jail or were accused

(Miller, II: 735). Yet to envision the Puritan community at this point simply as

a mob of hysterical zealots is to lose sight of those prominent figures who

stood against the proceedings. Granted that they did not speak out too loudly at

the height of the fervor, but then to do so would be to risk exposure to a

confusion of plague-like properties, where the testimony of an alleged victim

alone was enough to condemn a person. But it was the injustice of this very

condition against which men such as Thomas Brattle and Increase Mather wrote.

Brattle's "A Full and Candid Account of the Delusion called Witchcraft...."

(1692) argued that the evidence was no true evidence at all, because the forms

of the accused were taken to be the accused, and the accusers, in declaring that

they were informed by the devil as to who afflicted them, were only offering the

devil's testimony. His was an argument which seemed wholly reasonable to many,

but it led Brattle to the fear "that ages will not wear off that reproach and

those stains which these things will leave behind them upon our land" (In

Miller, II: 762). Mather wrote in 1693, in Cases of Conscience concerning Evil

Spirits, that "it were better that Ten Suspected Witches should escape, than

that one Innocent Person be Condemned" (Qtd. in Miller, II: 736).

Beyond this is as well is the journal of Samuel Sewall, which records his

fascinating approach to what had happened. This complicates the idea of the

'Puritan' on another level because while Brattle and (Increase) Mather may have

offered challenges to any conception of the homogeneity of Puritan belief,

Sewall reminds one of the variability within an individual. It introduces an

axis of time by which the measure of the 'Puritan mind' must be adjusted. On

Christmas Day, 1696, one reads the terse opening, "We bury our little daughter."

And three weeks later is a transcript of the notice Sewall had posted publicly.

It relates that "Samuel Sewall, sensible of the reiterated strokes of God upon

himself and family...Desires to take the Blame and Shame of [the Salem

proceedings], Asking pardon of Men..." (In Miller, 513). This is once again an

interpretation of the "reiterated strokes of God" which has brought the sense of

shame to his consciousness, and it suggests that, at least for Puritans such as

Sewall, these readings of nature and events are not merely those of convenience

or self-justification. There is at least the indication here that if some

Puritans stood ready to see the guilt in others, some of those same people at

least made their judgments in good faith and with honesty, giving credence to

their understanding of the ways of God, even when they themselves were the

object of judgment. Sewall's example suggests a kind of Puritan whose Puritanism

not only carries him to almost inhuman extremes, but also relentlessly brings

him back, full circle, to humility.

the revealed word, antinomianism, individualism

What also must be emphasized is the absolute ground of religious understanding

that the Biblical text represented for the Puritans. The Bible was the Lord's

revealed word, and only through it does He directly communicate to human beings.

While the natural world may be studied and interpreted in order to gain a sense

of His will, He is not the world itself, and does not instill Himself directly

into human beings by means of visitations or revelations or divine inspirations

of any sort (Miller, I: 10). The antinomian crisis involving Anne Hutchinson

focused on this issue. John Winthrop records it in his journal:

[October 21, 1636] One Mrs. Hutchinson, a member of the church of Boston, a

woman of ready wit and bold spirit, brought over with her two dangerous errors:

1. That the person of the Holy Ghost dwells in a justified person. 2. That no

sanctification can help to evidence to us our justification....(In Miller I:

129)

What the Puritans faced in Hutchinson, or in the Quaker idea of "inner light"

which allowed every person direct access to God, was an outbreak of "dangerous"

individualism, one which threatened the foundation of their social order. It was

not simply a matter of letting Hutchinson spread her ideas freely--not when

those ideas could carry the Puritan conception of grace to such an extreme that

it translated into an overall abandonment of any structured church, which is to

say, the basis of a Puritan society. Miller states how the followers of

Hutchinson became caught up in a "fanatical anti-intellectualism" fed by the

original Puritan "contention that regenerate men were illuminated with divine

truth," which was in turn taken indicate the irrelevance of scholarship and

study of the Bible. Both possibilities were potentially destructive to the

Massachusetts Bay colony, and both only carried out Puritan ideas further than

they were meant to go (Miller, I: 14-15); the individualistic tendencies that

was embedded in the Pilgrim community, exists as well with the Puritans. In

reference to Tocqueville's use of the term in volume II of Democracy in America,

Ellwood Johnson goes so far as to say, "The anti-traditionalism and de-

ritualization of society that he named Individualisme had their sources in

Puritan culture. This Puritan individualism had survived especially in the habit

of judging others by their characters of mind and will, rather than rank, sex,

or race..." (Johnson, 119). Of course, as Johnson notes, Tocqueville's

experience in America was limited both in time and geographic location. But

Hutchinson and her followers were banished, after all, and while Puritanism did

substitute the more simplified approach of Ramean logic to replace the overly

recondite and complicated mediaeval scholasticism, and while it fostered a more

personal mode of religion with its emphasis on individual faith and access to

Scripture instead of the structured ritualism and mediation of the Catholic

church, it nevertheless took for granted a society and state which relied upon

what was only a translated form of class division, and which depended upon a

hierarchy where the word of God would not become dispersed (and so, altered)

into a kind of religious precursor to democracy. The Puritans had themselves

suffered repeatedly under a society which had seemed to evince the potentially

ominous side of the relation of church and state. The king was the leader of the

church, and the state decided how the church was to function, and in 1629 when

Charles I dissolved parliament, the people found that they no longer had any

political representation, any means to act legislatively. Their secular agency

had then become a measure of their religious agency; the removal to

Massachusetts in turn was a way to gain a political voice, to create a state

that would develop according to their own beliefs and fashion itself

harmoniously with the church.

It was not an effort to establish a society wherein one might unreservedly

express what one wished to express and still hope to have a say in communal

affairs. If religion was to come to bear on the governance of the society, to

what good would a more egalitarian, democratic form come? The integrity of the

community as religious entity (Winthrop's "citty on a hill"), which had been the

purpose of their coming to America, could only be, at best, weakened and

dispersed, and at worst, be challenged to such a degree and in so many ways that

there would be no agreement, no action or political effectiveness. Their

religion itself would seem to be faced with a prospect of which kind does not

easily (if at all) admit--a prefiguration of what is now called 'gridlock.'

Despite what some later commentators would say, Puritanism and Democracy were

not coproductive ideas, no matter how much one might have anticipated, and even

allowed the eventuality of, the other.

One who stated the problems which would ultimately unravel Puritanism as a

dominant political force was Roger Williams. For one thing, Williams's critique

of the institutions being developed in Massachusetts directly illuminates the

difficulty indicated above--that of perpetuating a religion which both held the

seed of an increasingly liberating individualism and at the same time maintained

the need of a limited meritocracy. The primary point of contention for Williams

began in 1631 when he declared that the church in New England was, in its

failure to fully separate from the English church, inadequate, and tainted. He

removed to Plymouth, where he remained for a year. But even there "Williams wore

out his welcome" (Heimert, 196). Part of the reason lay in another of Williams's

critique of New England as it was developing, that the lands granted to the

colonists had been unjustly given by the crown, because they had not been first

purchased from the Indians. For his efforts, Williams was banished. His primary

response to this was one of his more threatening ideas, "that the civil

magistrates had no power to punish persons for their religious opinions"

(Miller, I: 215). This was not necessarily an over-arching argument for full

toleration, but rather implied a statement specific to Christian salvation, that

"no power on earth was entitled to prevent any individual from seeking Christ in

his own way" (Heimert, 198). For the Puritan ministry, this was far enough,

because it targeted the strongest tie between it and civil government, and thus

implied a potential disconnection between the two. As John Cotton wrote, the

question of "mens goods or lands, lives or liberties, tributes, customes,

worldly honors and inheritances" was already the jurisdiction of "the civill

state" (qtd. in Hall, 117), but the establishment of laws which fostered

Christian principles and punished threats to them-- that was only part of the

continued and increasing realization of divine will on earth.

That dissenters such as Hutchinson and Williams were banished, suggests what has

recurringly been described as a major factor in the evolution not only of the

Puritan theocracy, but of supposed national identity in general--the frontier.

Both Crevecoeur and Tocqueville portray the pioneer type, the individual who,

being away from the influence of religion and mannered, social customs, becomes

increasingly rough, and even near-barabaric. This same figure is also seen as a

necessary precursor to more and more 'civilized' waves of society. Another view

of the frontier effect comes with the increasing democratization of the United

States, where populist movements occur such as the Jacksonian Revolution,

suggesting a kind of evolutionary mode through which the American

socio-political 'self' is more and more fully realized. For Puritan society,

Miller suggests a more socio-economic effect, where the frontier increasingly

disperses communities and so disperses the effect and control of the clergy, and

where the drive for material profit begins to predominate over the concern with

"religion and salvation" (Miller, I: 17). And if the frontier demands more a

stripped-down material efficacy than the finer attributes of 'culture' and class

distinction, then so too does frontier-influenced religion lose its taste for

the nicer distinctions of theological scholarship, and move instead toward a

greater simplicity, toward the eventual evangelism of the Great Awakening in the

1740s, further out toward "fundamentalism" and other forms of belief that had

long-since ceased to be Puritan.

caveat--a note on the jeremiad

At this point one must step back with a bit of caution, and once again take note

of an important provision underlying the terminology. That is, in using the term

"puritan" above and assigning to it a set of characteristics and preponderances,

I must qualify the grounds of the (non)definition. Specifically, an argument

such as that belonging to Darrett Rutman becomes useful, even if one does not

take it as far as does he (in using specifically against the likes of Perry

Miller). Primarily, he takes issue with an approach to history that employs only

the selected writings of a selected few, in determining some "notion of Puritan

quintessence"--one which is supposed to represent all of Puritan New England,

ministry and laity alike. As he puts it, this "view of New England

Puritanism...rests upon two major implicit assumptions....that there is such a

thing as 'Puritanism'...and that the acme of Puritan ideals is to be found in

New England during the years 1630-1650" (In Hall, 110). His argument is

correlative to one which Sacvan Bercovitch will take up in The American

Jeremiad, where he points out that historians, in assuming this so-called

decline, are simply following the lead of "Cotton Mather and other New England

Jeremiahs." Taking statements such as Mather's, historians, instead of seeing it

as part of a tradition of "political sermon" (to use Bercovitch's phrase) that

could be evinced all the way from the sailing of the Arbella, have instead

interpreted them as even more historically specific, reactions against an

increasing lack of coherence between religious and secular authority, and

declarations of a failing mission. Rutman indicates the "pragmatic value" of

seeing the jeremiad this way, in that it helps isolate a model of Puritanism,

and narrows the historian's task to one of describing the thought of a specific

twenty-year period.

Rutman's basic argument rests on the recognition that, to gain a clearer

picture, one must study not only published sermons and theological treatises,

but also more wide- ranging anthropologic data--records of social, political,

and economic relations within and among individuals and communities. Into the

specifics of this, one need not go; a study in this vein of Sudbury,

Massachusetts, reveals underlying instabilities that challenge assumptions of a

dominant Puritan 'theocracy,' but then this is not so far from Miller's own

conclusion, that Puritan ideology held within it the basis of its own loss of

control. The point here is rather the point from which Rutman begins and with

which he concludes, that one must be careful not assume an essence of identity

to be described before attempting to describe simply what one finds, that such

an assumption may lead to dangerous equivocations between the ideology of

Puritanism and the history of New England (and extrapolating from that, much of

the United States as a whole).

It is the old instability--that between the religious and the secular--which the

idea of Puritanism contains. The confusion then becomes translated into the

historical perspective in terms that, as Bercovitch states, come from the

jeremiad itself: "the New England Puritan jeremiad evokes the mythic past not

merely to elicit imitation but above all to demand progress" (Bercovitch, 24).

For Bercovitch, who reads those key texts of the 'Great Migration'--John

Winthrop's "A Model of Christian Charity" and John Cotton's "God's Promise to

His Plantations"--as important transitions into distinctly American forms of the

jeremiad, this entails an "effort to fuse the sacred and profane," to

historicize transcendent values and goals into what he calls a "ritual of

errand" (Bercovitch, 26,29). Defined then not so much by pre-existing social

distinctions but rather by a continual and purposefully-held sense of mission to

which the modern idea of 'progress' is intrinsic and out of which the notion of

"civil religion" (as Kammen would say, "memory in place of religion") develops,

Puritanism, as an ideological mode and not (Rutman's) historical "actuality,"

suggests America as a modern region from the very beginnings of its

colonization.

Less so with historians than popularizers of a Puritan mythos, the evocation of

a "golden age" existing less as past fact than future promise, comes to dominate

the sense of 'Puritan tradition'. This, as Bercovitch indicates, is at the heart

of 'explaining' America, with all its promise as a New World, with its idea of

Manifest Destiny, with the kind of self-idealization of National Purpose that

Henry Nash Smith describes in Virgin Land.