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The Puritans believed that the identity of the Saints had long since been determined by God. This meant that there was nothing a person could do to win salvation. But instead of being a reason to forsake all hope, what was known as predestination became a powerful goad to action. No one could be entirely sure as to who was one of the elect, and yet, if a person was saved, he or she naturally lived a godly life. As a result, the Puritans were constantly comparing their own actions to those of others, since their conduct might indicate whether or not they were saved. Underlying this compulsive
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The Separatists believed in spiritual discipline, but they also believed in spontaneity. After the minister concluded his sermon, members of the congregation were encouraged to “prophesy.” Instead of looking into the future, prophesying involved an inspired kind of improvisation: an extemporaneous attempt by the more knowledgeable members of the congregation to speak—sometimes briefly, sometimes at great length—about religious doctrine. By the end of the service, which lasted for several hours, the entire congregation had participated in a passionate search for divine truth.
Among today's evangelicals this concept must have evolved into the noton of a "personal relationship with Jesus" which enables anyone, no matter their level of study, to consider themselves a theologian and apologist.
indeed, adversity seemed to intensify their clannish commitment to one another.
Almost cultish in feel
Time and time again during their preparations to sail for America, the Pilgrims demonstrated an extraordinary talent for getting duped.
Still a quality of evangelicals ie. Trump. For a group so proud of their pious nature, they repeatedly demonstrate a horrible judgement of charcter.
“It doth often trouble me,” he wrote, “to think that in this business we are all to learn and none to teach.”
It would be like colonizing the moon with out NASA.
William and Mary Brewster, who were accompanied by their evocatively named sons Love and Wrestling.
A sense of exclusivity was fundamental to how they perceived themselves in the world.
Although Martin had shown nothing but contempt for the Leideners at the beginning of the voyage, the disturbing developments off Cape Cod may have created an uneasy alliance between him and the passengers from Holland. Before they landed, it was essential that they all sign a formal and binding agreement of some sort. Over the course of the next day, they hammered out what has come to be known as the Mayflower Compact. It is deeply ironic that the document many consider to mark the beginning of what would one day be called the United States came from a people who had more in common with a cult
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One of the reasons they had been forced to leave England was that King James had used the ecclesiastical courts to impose his own religious beliefs. In Holland, they had enjoyed the benefits of a society in which the division between church and state had been, for the most part, rigorously maintained.
They must “become a body politic, using amongst yourselves civil government,” i.e., they must all agree to submit to the laws drawn up by their duly elected officials. Just as a spiritual covenant had marked the beginning of their congregation in Leiden, a civil covenant would provide the basis for a secular government in America.
Having undertaken, for the glory of God and advancement of the Christian faith and honor of our King and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do these present solemnly and mutually in the presence of God and one of another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation, and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient
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The Mayflower Compact
For generations to come, Monday would be wash day in New England, a tradition that began with the women of the Mayflower.
“[S]uch humorists [i.e., fanatics] will never believe…,” he wrote, “till they be beaten with their own rod.”
Captain John Smith regarding the pilgrims
They had left Holland so that they could reclaim their English ancestry. But here was troubling evidence that America was no blank slate. There were others here who must be taken into account. Otherwise, they might share the fate of this yellow-haired sailor, whose bones and possessions had been left to molder in the sand.
Faint not, poor soul, in God still trust, Fear not the things thou suffer must; For, whom he loves he doth chastise, And then all tears wipes from their eyes.
Interestingly, the Pilgrims made no mention of his skin color.
I think this proves that upon initial contact the indigenous were viewed as fellow human beings. Later, subhuman status was assigned in order to justify the wholesale slaughter and genocide. There is a willful dishonesty and self delusion to racism.
it was a crucial incident. It was now clear that no matter how it was done in England, Plymouth played by its own, God-ordained rules, and everyone—Separatist or Anglican—was expected to conform.
Still the same
It seems never to have occurred to the Pilgrims that this was just the kind of intolerant attitude that had forced them to leave England.
Saints and Strangers
This is how the pilgrims referred to the makeup of the Mayflower. The elect were saints i.e. pilgrims. Everyone else, strangers. Is it not how evangelicals view the world today? Add into this the pilgrim’s view of being victims under attack and you really can see how today’s evangelicals with their constant fear mongering about the “war on Christmas”, the absence of prayer from schools or the “rise of sharia law in America” are the direct descendants of the pilgrims.
The Merchant Adventurers, however, remained unconvinced and chastised the Pilgrims for being “contentious, cruel and hard hearted, among your neighbors, and towards such as in all points both civil and religious, jump not with you.”
Morton began to question who were now the true savages in this land. “But I have found the Massachusetts Indians more full of humanity than the Christians,” he wrote, “and have had much better quarter with them.”
Echoing Robinson’s earlier concerns, Hubbard wrote, “Capt. Standish…never entered the school of our Savior Christ…or, if he was ever there, had forgot his first lessons, to offer violence to no man.” As Morton and Pecksuot had observed, it was almost comical to see this sort of fury in a soldier who had been forced to shorten his rapier by six inches—otherwise the tip of his sword’s scabbard would have dragged along the ground when he slung it from his waist. “A little chimney is soon fired,” Hubbard wrote; “so was the Plymouth captain, a man of very little stature, yet of a very hot and angry
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Seven years after the Mayflower had sailed, Plymouth Plantation was still an armed fortress where each male communicant worshipped with a gun at his side.
As Pastor Robinson had suggested, the Pilgrims had lost more than a little of their collective soul at Wessagussett.
Massasoit had entered into a devil’s bargain with the English. By selling out his Native neighbors in Massachusetts and Cape Cod, he had cast his lot with a culture and technology on which his own people increasingly came to depend.
But as the beavers and other fur-bearing animals grew scarce, the only thing the Indians had to sell to the English was their land.
Convinced that they had God on their side, magistrates from both colonies showed no qualms about clamping down on dissent of any kind. In the years ahead, Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson were cast out of Massachusetts-Bay for espousing unorthodox views, and in 1645 Bradford angrily opposed an attempt to institute religious tolerance in Plymouth. Soon after, the Quakers, who began arriving in New England in 1655, were persecuted with a vehemence that climaxed with the hanging of four men and women on Boston Common between 1659 and 1661.
In many ways, the Pequot War of 1637 was the Puritans’ Wessagussett: a terrifyingly brutal assault that redefined the balance of power in the region for decades to come.
Led by several veterans of the Thirty Years’ War in Europe, the Puritans fell upon a Pequot fortress on the Mystic River. After setting the Indians’ wigwams ablaze, the soldiers proceeded to shoot and hack to pieces anyone who attempted to escape the inferno. By the end of the day, approximately four hundred Pequot men, women, and children were dead.
“and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God.” Bradford saw the devastation as the work of the Lord.
With the Pequot War, New England was introduced to the horrors of European-style genocide.
The colony’s seal, created even before their arrival in the New World, depicted a Native American saying, “Come over and help us.”
By immediately assuming the conflict was a racial rather than a political struggle, the English were, in effect, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But by July 1675, the hysteria of war had taken hold of New England. Shocked by the atrocities at Swansea, most English inhabitants had begun to view all Indians with racist contempt and fear. As a result, many Indians who would gladly have remained at peace were given no choice but to go to war.
In fact, when several hundred Indians surrendered to authorities in Plymouth and Dartmouth after being assured that they’d be granted amnesty, Winslow and his cronies on the Council of War refused to honor the promise. On August 4, the council determined that since some of the Indians had participated in the attacks, all of them were guilty. That fall they were shipped as slaves to the Spanish port of Cádiz.
The English had been doing this in Ireland for decades; most recently Cromwell had sent large numbers of Irish, Welsh, and Scottish slaves to the West Indies.
Bacquag River.” Known today as Miller’s River,
Only one person was killed—a man who believed that as long as he continued to read the Bible, no harm would come to him. Refusing to abandon his home, he was found shot to death in his chair—the Bible still in his hands.
Canonchet defiantly threw off his jacket and stretched out his arms just as the bullets pierced his chest.
Church personifies what would become a recurrent American type: the indignant critic of authority who, despite his best intentions, finds himself dragged into moral compromise, violence, and tragedy.
