Puritan



Puritan

Introduction

The word puritan is taken from pure or holy. It was initially used to illustrate certain century sect of strictly legalistic letterings. At present, the word Puritan is now used unequally to a number of Protestant churches from the late 16th century to the present. Puritans were initially being harmed through the phrase. It was a term of violence that first surfaced in the late sixteen century. It was a violent in that precise men were not imperfect what is opposing to a true society. The word Puritan thus constantly referred to a type of religious belief, instead of a particular religious sect. To reflect that the term include a variety of religious bodies and theological positions, scholars today ever more prefer to use the term as a common noun or adjective. puritan rather than Puritan.

We say 1630 because the Pilgrims who arrived in North America in 1620 were not Puritans; it was the group who arrived in 1630 who began Puritan colonization. The colonies founded by these Puritans were based on the religious practice of Congregationalism, and this meant three things that are the main characteristics of Puritan New England: 1) the colonies thrived on and required religious homogeneity; 2) a proto-democratic political system was necessary to protect the unique society created in America; and thus 3) the colonists devoted themselves to evading direct rule from England in order to maintain that political system. For as long as these three characteristics were unchallenged, Puritan New England existed.

The aftermath of King Philip's War (1675-6) brought political discord between the Puritan colonies, which brought on direct rule from England, first in the form of the Dominion of New England (1686-9), during which time the Puritan colonies of Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island were restructured into one mega-colony (along with New York and East and West Jersey). It's important that during the Dominion the Puritans were enraged not just by the promotion of Anglicanism over Congregationalism but also by the destruction of the Puritan legal and political system: legislatures were no longer popularly elected, land titles were revoked, and a royal court with no jury was set up in Boston to enforce the Navigation Acts.

The Dominion was overthrown after the death of King James II, but English direct rule did not end. The Puritans who had overthrown the Dominion immediately pledged their loyalty to the new king and queen, William and Mary, and William opened the Puritan colonies to outsiders. Non-Puritans began settling in New England in large numbers, and their religious practices were protected. By 1691, when the Massachusetts Bay Colony's charter was overthrown and it became a royal colony with a royally appointed governor, true Congregationalism was rapidly becoming a blast from the past. Its dominance was certainly at an end, as it became simply one religion amongst many others.

Of course, it took decades to completely unseat the old religious ways. But an important shift was occurring after 1689: all of the fervor originally associated primarily ...