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Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England… di Michael P. Winship

A good book on the early history of Protestantism in England and the US. The book is well written, except it gets bogged down in places with schismatic theology and English politics.One sentence shows how some of his complexity can be daunting: "Such a shattering of England's organic religious unity was unimaginable and unforgivable to many Presbyterians, especially with all the erroneous and heretical sectaries that the Congregationalists refused to disavow sheltering under the Congregationalist umbrella of Independency."
The early chapter on Puritanism in Massachusetts was very good, as is the concluding chapter on the Salem witch trials. A good book, but only for those who are interested in a deep book of Protestantism and Puritan history.… (altro)

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hadden | 1 altra recensione | Aug 27, 2020 |

Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England… di Michael P. Winship

Excellent history of the Puritans from their European origins to their ultimate population of the new world. Nothing is left out, and I have learned things about the Puritans that I didn't realize that I needed to learn.

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Archivist13 | 1 altra recensione | Mar 11, 2020 |

The Times and Trials of Anne Hutchinson: Puritans… di Michael P. Winship

This is not a book for the faint-of-heart. It is a thorough and detailed account of what was going on in the Massachusetts Bay Colony before and during the so-called Antinomian Controversy and the trials of Rev. John Wheelwright (who was convicted of sedition and banished to New Hampshire) and then Anne Hutchinson. This history is sometimes thick with Puritan theology and its accompanying rhetoric, which admittedly, I did not completely digest. But one should not be put off by my admission of “indigestion” for there is still much to take from this book. Winship does a great job setting the stage. And I thought this tidbit fascinating:

A fight was all the more likely to break out in 1636 because the puritan migration to Massachusetts produced a quite unanticipated stimulus to confrontation: success. In England, puritans, with their self-righteousness and severe program of social and religious reform, had always been a deeply resented minority. The expected as much, for the ungodly would always hate the godly. …As a harassed, fighting minority, it was easy for puritans to maintain fervor. But in Massachusetts, they faced no persecution, no bishops, no large phalanx of wicked people….Instead, puritans had a glut of what they thought they had always wanted: sermons, prayers and no limits to godly companionship. …There was a dangerously tempting way to compensate for the lack of enemies in Massachusetts: create them.

He also mentions that it has been suggested that the Pequot War against the natives in Connecticut may have been just that. Certainly, as one continues in this tale, one does wonder if all the drama was also just a means of creating an enemy.

The Puritans usually kept their church and state matters separated; the church handled moral issues, the courts handled the civil issues. In this controversy it gets fairly messy. And human nature being what it is, one can’t help seeing a bit of what was to come in Salem, and so many other controversies throughout our history.

I won’t elaborate on the complex hearings and trials here, nor will I tell you about Anne Hutchinson, but I will say that Winship puts her in historical context and attempts to get past the intentionally “semi-fictionized” picture that John Winthrop left behind. This is a worthy read; there is a lot in this small book. And if you are interested in early New England history or if any—many, in my case—of the historical characters are your ancestors, so much the better.

And, really, the book deserves a better review than this. I'm sure the Eve LaPlante book is more digestible but I choose this one because it had the endorsement of Mary Beth Norton, an historian whose works I have read (she has, in my opinion, written the best book on the Salem Witchcraft Trials.… (altro)

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avaland | Aug 23, 2017 |

Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City… di Michael P. Winship

LibraryThing, Godly Republicanism, Michael P. Winship, Harvard University Press, 2012, 7.9.13

Godly Republicanism is a sympathetic look at separatism and it influence during the 200 years before the birth of the USA. Michael Winship makes a case for godly republicanism—historically and persuasively (for application now), applying principles wisely in the status quo (almost polemical to a believer like me but objectively for the objective). He has created a model which best explains the facts (of how things work—how biblical principles can be applied for great success). KH

“What is become of the Primitive Zeal, Piety, and Holy Heat found in the hearts of our parents?” bewailed the New Englander Joshua Scottow in Old Mens Tears in 1691… As a consequence of this spiritual decline and worldly transformation, Scottow warned, an angry God had a covenant quarrel with his Protestant people in New England as he had with Europe’s Protestants, for much the same reasons, and just as he had in ancient times on many occasions with his people, the Jews of the OT… There was a critical intermediate political stage that both institutionalized and accelerated the decline of piety. 1-2

That intermediate stage consisted of church rot, stemming from neglect of what Scottow called New England’s “primitive constitution.” … Christ had intended each of his congregations to be little republics, each governed by a collective elected body called a presbytery…in place of a top-down rule of bishops appointed by the monarch. Their failure had ultimately led to the Puritan migration to Massachusetts. Now the Massachusetts churches were abandoning their own collective presbyteries. Churches were dropping the sacred requirement of choosing two ministers, a teacher in charge of doctrine and a pastor in charge of discipline… They were ceasing to preach to the people about the liberties (rights) Christ gave them, including participation in church government, and they were ceasing to visit, instruct, and thereby empower lay prayer groups in order that “all the Lord’s People might be Prophets, and that he would put his Spirit upon them.”

… Now the constitutional foundations laid by those godly “famous Patriots” were being ignored, and the laity were turning lax and worldly while ministers lusted after power. It was not just puritan piety that was in decline but puritan government. “New-England,” Scottow lamented, “is not to be found in New-England.” 2-4

Godly Republicanism focuses on Scottow’s famous patriots [early 1630’s], not their metamorphosed descendants. … Singular though Massachusetts was, its defenders extolled their creation as the culmination of radical puritan reforming efforts stretching back to the Elizabethan Presbyterians and as the ideal arrangements for churches and state alike. 4

“The churche,” asserted the Elizabethan Presbyterian Thomas Cartwright, “is governed with that kynde of government, which the Philosophers that wryte of the beste common wealthes, affirme to be the best.” The Pilgrims’ pastor John Robinson claimed that the church, once brought back to its proper NT form, was “the perfection of all polities [and] doth comprehend in it whatsoever is excellent in all other bodies political.” 5

Ecclesiastical republicanism sought to cut away al the mistakes and corruptions accumulated over the course of church history and recover the church’s original, “radical” NT order.

Opponents of the puritans, however, viewed ecclesiastical republicanism as “radical” (in the modern sense) for a more sinister reason. Given the close relationship between church and state, they insisted from the Elizabethan period onward that radical puritan’s long-term goal was not simply to remodel the Church of England but to overthrow the English and install a republic. 6

Elizabethan and early Stuart godly ecclesiastical republicanism was not homogenous, either in tactics or in aims, and this variety, too, was to shape Massachusetts. The first and most radical of the godly ecclesiastical republicans were separatists… 7

Godly Republicanism reworks the narrative of Massachusetts’s creation by properly integrating the separatists and their complex, long, and extremely creative interaction with radical puritans into this narrative for the first time. 8

As the colonists felt their way into their creation, they, or at least some of the most inspired ideologues among them, discovered in it profound possibilities for resolving age-old problems of decay and corruption in church and state alike. 8

[Pages 9-10 summarize the book by chapters.]

Religion in this period was understood to mean the worship of God. What happened in churches on Sunday was only a small part of worship, for, properly understood, worship meant obeying God’s commands in all aspects of life… 11

Puritans disagreed among themselves whether the ceremonial remnants of popery contaminating the church were absolutely forbidden by God’s laws. But they agreed that those remnants thwarted the most basic purpose of church services: spiritual edification. 16-17

Radical puritans, like Cartwright and the eventual founders of Massachusetts, took the further step of arguing that not only were these practices wrong but that the Bible outlined a comprehensive alternative system of laws for church government. Christ taught his disciples those laws in detail in the forty days between his death and ascension to heaven. He did his teaching off record, but his intentions were revealed clearly enough in the terse descriptions of that government offered by Christ himself elsewhere and by various apostles in the later books of the NT. 19

Discipline itself was the shining crown jewel of the NT churches. 20

Though the NT remained silent on the point, the early presbyterian writers consistently emphasized that the divinely mandated consensual political structures of the NT churches were barriers to tyranny. … God chose to diffuse power in his NT churches, in other words, and not concentrate it, with the express purpose of avoiding tyranny... 22

The political assumptions behind this mighty presbyterian motor of reformation—the dread of the corrupting effects of power, the fear of one-man rule, the emphasis on the consent of the people and on balanced government—were identical with those of classical republicanism, first laid out in antiquity and then rejuvenated in the medieval and early Renaissance Italian city-states. Both continental and English presbyterians accordingly described and validated their polity in terms drawn from classical political theory. It was a “mixed” government, they claimed, neither exclusively monarchial, aristocratic, nor democratic, but a mixture. … In its day-to-day running, however, it was a twofold government, possessing an aristocracy of the elders and a democracy of the people.

No one at the time would need to be reminded that such a twofold government was republican, or a “status popularis” (popular state), as one of its defenders acknowledged parenthetically. “Free state” and “popular state” were the common contemporary terms for a republic… 24-25

The political structures of Massachusetts itself, in a sense, would be a kind of formalization and amplification of the latent civic possibilities sense by radical Elizabethan puritans.

The long puritan journey from church republicanism to civic republicanism started with the growing suspicion of Elizabethan puritans that their opponents, in the process of attempting to crush Puritanism, were subverting the English monarchy. 28

More and more laypeople were anxiously scrutinizing their souls to see whether God had predestined them for salvation, while organizing their households around psalm singing, Bible instruction, and regular family prayer. 30

This alarm among Elizabethan radical puritans about a popish plot against England’s church, liberties, and limited monarchy has gone unremarked by most historians, who are very reluctant to find any inherent link between Puritanism and England’s constitutional struggles. 33

At no point in the previous half century had the categories of “legal/constitutional” and “religious” fused, for they had never been separate… 34

There [in Massachusetts] Cotton and other puritans, through pure churches, powerful preaching, strict discipline, a civil government guaranteed to be zealously Protestant, and ample checks on power in both church and state, were continuing and improving the reformation that had been aborted in England almost a half century previously. 38

Cotton’s dismissal of Barrow is echoed by the manner in which historians of puritanism dismiss separatism. By abandoning the Church of England, historians argue, separatists like Barrow opted out of the larger struggles of the Reformation for introverted, self-isolating groups. They were “doomed,” according to Murray Toulmie, “to a sterile isolation among the protestant radicals in England.” Stephen Foster claims that separatism “involved indifference or hostility to the basic Puritan goal of using the combined resources of church and state to Christianize and civilize the English people.... [Most separatist took] no interest in the state and assum[ed] that the church existed only for the tiny minority of the demonstrably elect.” At its logical terminus, separatism, in Patrick Collinson’s dramatic phrase, was “a curtain across the world so that it was no longer visible and apprehensible” and in it puritanism “flickered and died.” Separatists, Collinson claims, had lost sight of “all the wider aspirations in the exclusiveness of a gathered sect.” Elsewhere he describes separatism not as a movement for reform but as “a rational adjustment to things as they were.” 39-40

[Robert] Browne’s magnum opus, A Treatise of Reformation without Tarrying for Anie (1582) is best known for its argument that churches should be set up without the government’s permission... 47

Although Browne and his congregation had taken the first steps toward congregationalism, the decisive separatist break with Presbyterianism came with Henry Barrow (c. 1550-1593). 51

Presbyterians located the ancient fall of the church into antichristian power as beginning when one minister began to assert control over other ministers. 53

However, the benefit of having authoritative supervisory bodies like synods seemed obvious enough that they overlooked the problem that scripture provided little justification for them. 54

A synod had no power to excommunicate someone or remove a church officer or appoint one. If a church fell into error, the most that other churches could do was shun it until it repented. 55

For Barrow, it was the responsibility of every Christian, every male Christian anyway, to relentlessly police the conduct and doctrine of other members and of the church elders. 55

The medieval universities would be replaced by schools of the prophets, attached to local congregations, where the vain philosophies and lascivious poems of the heathens would be forever banished, and study of the Bible would replace the study of the corrupt theologians of the past. 58

Whatever his sources, Barrow, with his steady insistence on the political autonomy of individual churches and the people’s power of government, was the first consistent exponent of what would later be called congregationalism. 59

To ward off separatist inroads, the Presbyterians had to learn how to convince themselves and anyone else drawn to separatism that, bad as the Church of England was, the pure NT Christianity they were seeking could be found within it by those who looked hard enough. This genuine Christianity proved that the Church of England was a true church. Anyone who separated from it was therefore guilty of the heinous sin of schism, ripping apart Christ’s garment. 60

With this succinct emphasis on the ecclesiastical autonomy of individual congregations, asserted not by a ranting, puritan-loathing separatist like Henry Barrow but by a radical puritan with impeccable credentials among the godly [that is, William Bradshaw], English Puritanisme is usually taken as a critical founding document of what would become Massachusetts’s congregationalism. Over a hundred years after its publication, the prominent Boston minister Increase Mather hailed English Puritanisme as an “admirable little book” presenting “perfect Congregationalism.” 74-75

Bradshaw’s starkest emphasis on the subordination of ecclesiastical officers to civic ones—“there should be no Ecclesiastical officer in the church so high, but that he ought to be subject unto, and punishable by the meanest Civill Officer in a Kingdome”... 79

Yet the issue of how divine power flowed through a congregational church did not go away simply because Bradshaw did not confront it. That task of confrontation was left to the other founding theoretician of puritan congregationalism, Henry Jacobs (1562/3-1624). 81

... Jacob, like the separatists, insisted that a covenant whereby church members pledged to each other and to God to follow God’s ways together, was integral to the creation of a church... 83

For much the same reason that Jacob was attracted to contract theory, defenders of absolute monarchy and episcopacy loathed it. By locating the origin of political bodies in the consent of the people, it easily led to the conclusion that a monarch or a bishop needed the people’s consent in order to have the power to rule. 83

Persuasion having failed to slow down the separatists, jail sentences followed. In response, the congregation decided to take refuge in Amsterdam, with Brewster providing most of the financing. 85

Ames’s discovery of implicit genuine church covenants within the rotting hulk of the Church of England provided a license for puritans to be both Congregationalists and nonseparatists. 98

William Bradshaw, even while explaining the dire necessity of congregationalism, called any endeavor to set it up without government approval “Seditious and sinfull.” It was this inhibition that Jacob shed after experiencing congregational churches erected without official permission. He would return to England and start a congregational church himself. 100

This group was eyeing Conant’s little plantation as the nucleus for what would become the Massachusetts Bay colony. The Plymouth separatists would thereby get the economic dynamo, relatively speaking, that would pull them out of their debts, along with another opportunity to foster the puritan-separatist Congregationalist union prophesied by John Robinson. 133

There is a great deal of evidence indicating that Plymouth, far from being pathetically unimportant, was the exemplar and catalyst for Massachusetts’s congregationalism, with major short- and long-term consequences on both sides of the Atlantic. 135

… all agreed that the proper NT alternative to bishops was government by a presbytery of ministerial and lay elders. Thereafter, things would have gotten cloudy. They perhaps had some idea that the disagreements between presbyterians and congregationalists were all related, in one way or another, to how a presbytery was set up and to the nature and limitations of its disciplinary and sacramental powers. 140

The ministers acknowledged a twofold calling: an inward one from God and outward one from a company of believers joined in covenant. The covenantal context of the calling made it congregational, not presbyterian. 144

The taking of the covenant [by the church at Salem] marked the formation of a polity with self-contained, independent ecclesiastical power. That polity then passed on its power to the ministers by calling them thorough election. The church affirmed the passing on of power by laying hands on the ministers in ordination. 145

Founding a church with a covenant, for those in the know, carried with it implicitly the rest of the broad theory of congregationalist government. 153

The immigrants’ acceptance of Salem’s severely discriminatory practice happened at the very end of what is often viewed as puritanism’s golden age, when it was, in Patrick Collinson’s words, “the mainstream, ongoing thrust of the Protestant Reformation.” In that golden age, sympathetic bishops encouraged puritan evangelism, while in many parishes, puritan ministers, if discrete, would only occasionally have to abide by strict ceremonial conformity. During this golden age, there is ample evidence that moderate and radical puritans made a conscious effort to bury disagreements between themselves, the better to accomplish their sacred pursuits of piety, evangelism, moral reform, and anti-Catholicism. 160

In part this avoidance was a defensive mechanism against the radioactivity of sin; those who did not actively avoid sin would be caught up in its contamination and the wrath of God that followed. Accordingly, shunning had to be accompanied by sincere mourning for the sins in question, or else God would tie the shunner up in the guilt of those sins anyway. 162

Nonconformist ministers even suggested that the godly shun each other when necessary as a way to induce the repentance that the failed discipline of the Church of England could not generate. 163

Actual presbyterians were scarce on the ground by this point; nevertheless, the only way to rid England once and for all of the monster of puritan republicanism was to drain the vast, fetid Calvinist swamp in which it continued to lurk and await its opportunity. In 1622, James banned the preaching of predestination, and in the last years of his reign, he showed increasing favor to anti-Calvinist churchmen. 167

The emigrants were fleeing with the knowledge not only that the Church of England was trembling on the verge of destruction but that the decades-long strategy of yielding to Antichrist, the better to fight him, had been a disastrous failure. Antichrist was not retreating but becoming steadily more entrenched in England. 171

They had to do better in New England. “Whatever wee did, or ought to have done when wee lived in England,” Governor Winthrop preached to his fellow departing emigrants in 1630, “the same must wee doe, and more allsoe, where wee goe.” Winthrop followed his ominous “more allsoe” a minute or two further in his lay sermon with the most famous lines from seventeenth-century Massachusetts history: “Wee must consider that wee shall be as a city upon a hill. The eies of all people are upon us.”

One reason those lines are so famous is that Perry Miller seized upon them over 300 years later to offer a considerably more upbeat interpretation of the migration than flight from a country on the verge of divine destruction… 172

They had puritan laity and godly ministers, a combination that was sufficient to generate implicit covenants comparable to the explicit covenants of congregational churches. 173-174

[an orrery, also p. 176] The minister Ezekiel Rogers expressed Massachusetts puritan congregationalism’s delicate balance of affirmation and abasement when he praised the “special presence of God” in the churches of England before covenanting with his would-be congregation to bewail before God their sinful partaking of those churches’ corruption and to walk from henceforth in the Lord’s ordinances. 177

Perhaps some clergy accepted that emphasis as part of a total package: in the divine order of things, sacred power in independent churches had to flow through the congregation to the ministers. 181

In Massachusetts, radical puritans had an unprecedented opportunity to sculpt a civil government suited to their vision of godly republican NT Christianity. What they created was something even more unprecedented than their congregationalism: a godly republican state. 182

…the settlers had just instituted a new form of church government that drastically restrained and carefully monitored the power of church rulers and that the defenders of congregationalism insisted that all governments had to be founded on the consent of the governed. 193

In 1630, in other words, the Massachusetts colonists, left to their own devices, erected precisely what English monarchs from Elizabeth to Charles I suspected that puritans always wanted, a republican government. 194

In a period of six months, the basis of membership in the Massachusetts Bay Company had moved from purchasing shares to being a male settler to being a male church member. 195

To its godly critics, that religious requirement even smacked of Roman Catholic claims that the pope had final power over secular governments. 196

Massachusetts had been created for religious purposes. A high proportion of its population, unlike in England, could be assumed to belong to the invisible church, and the colony had church mechanisms in place for identifying those people. At this time, it was a political truism that the defense and nurturing of religion was one of government’s chief obligations. 199

Unlike many puritans, after his conversion [Roger Williams] never wrestled with doubts about his salvation. But he struggled all his life to purge sin from himself and from his worship of God. 208

For Williams, however, any time the rulers of a nation compelled people religiously, the result was the creation of a polluted national church. 209

Williams was, in reality, a striking example of how undetermined the boundaries between separatism and puritanism could be. 210

[Williams] was said to have claimed that he regarded the churches of New England as the purest in the world and Salem as the purest in New England.

There were nine of these pure churches in New England by early 1634, in raw settlements scattered for about sixty-five miles along the coast from Salem to Plymouth, with twelve minsters in office. The churches ranged from the “rigid” separatists at Salem (if that is what they had become by this time) to the “moderate” separatists at Plymouth to the puritan parishes of England, all in communion with each other. Most of the churches scrutinized their applicants for an upright life and knowledge of Christianity, but the elders at Watertown (possibly) and perhaps elsewhere were breaking new ground by probing would-be members for signs that they had experiential knowledge of their conversions. 214

In April 1634, the Court of Assistants required that all non-freemen over the age of twenty take an oath that they would obey and support the government. The Court also modified the existing freeman’s oath at this time. Among other requirements, those men joining the approximately three hundred fifty freemen in the colony would swear by the “great and dreadful name of the ever-living God” to “maintain and preserve all the liberties and privileges” of the colony. 215

As part of these preparations, the Court also launched its most ambitious campaign to date of moral reform. This campaign followed standard Christian logic for the period: God’s frowns on the colony, manifesting as danger from England, came in response to sin, and the best way to ward off God’s anger was for the state to clamp down on sin. The Court forbade smoking except by solitary individuals in private. It banned “newe and immodest fashions” and the wearing of jewelry by both men and women. All adults were supposed to rebuke these sins and, if that failed, report anyone with clothes or hair that were “uncomely, or prejudiciall to the common good” to the magistrates. 216

In the Massachusetts constitutional project, church and state were conceived of roughly as two equally important governments whose authority lay in separate spheres… This cooperative but clear separation of church and state had always been a goal for radical puritans, and the oppressively “theocratic” nature of Massachusetts’s church-state establishment can be greatly exaggerated by historians. 217

The pure churches of Massachusetts, the voluntary assemblies of the saints that the earliest congregationalists had envisioned, were beginning to take on, however faintly, the characteristics of parish churches, the arbitrary, government-enforced joining of people for worship within legally mandated fixed geographical boundaries. 224

…but as a state, a viable godly commonwealth, one willing and able to defend its liberties and privileges from outside interference and no less willing and able to define, supervise, and protect its own moral and religious standards. 227 [As a church (and family) determines its moral standards (applications), so does a state.]

Cartwright had been groping toward conceptualizing a dynamic and mutually reinforcing godly interplay of New Testament churches and state when he made that claim. The Massachusetts settlers, at least in the mind of Cotton, brought that interplay to perfection. 227

The Massachusetts colonists, by identifying the body politic as closely as possible with the body of Christ, had come up with permanent solutions to the age-old problems of decay that beset both state and church. 228

Although the original emigrants did not leave England with much of a blueprint for either their republican churches or state, by the mid-1630s the tiny republican theocracy of Massachusetts offered, at least in the minds of some of its most zealous and influential partisans, a pattern for all the world to emulate. It had become a shining city on a hill, for better or worse. 232

Congregationalists resolved their inability to come to terms with more moderate puritans by throwing in their lot with Oliver Cromwell and his sectarian-leaning New Model Army. 235

Congregationally organized churches, as in Massachusetts, disciplined their members, but few people belonged to them, and the country’s legal system was incapable of picking up the enormous disciplinary slack. 235

In the 1650’s, English puritan congregationalists still remained “non-separatists” in a certain sense. Congregationalist ministers generally did not turn their backs on their moderate puritan brethren and the parish churches entirely. Congregationalists frequently worked with the much greater number of moderate puritans on areas of common interest like evangelism, raising ministerial standards, and trying to pass legislation that would enforce Calvinist orthodoxy. They were usually willing to become parish ministers. 236

Godly republicanism self-destructed in the political turbulence of the 1650’s. 238

However, historians searching for republicanism in the Tudor and early Stuart periods did not find puritans because they were not looking for them, and perhaps the same is true here. Consider the classical republican with the greatest long-term impact, Algernon Sidney. His masterwork, Discourses Concerning Government, was a vigorous defense of the God-given right of a people to overthrow the usual outcome of monarchy, tyrannical governments. Discourses became one of the most popular books on political theory in the eighteenth century, inspiring luminaries of liberty as various as Charles de Secondat Montesquieu, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. A quotation from Discourses prefaced the first printed copy of the Declaration of Independence. 239

Sidney demonstrates that the Whig tradition represented not so much a clean rupture from the puritan theopolitics that stretched back to the Elizabethan presbyterians and created both congregationalism and Massachusetts but in many ways, a selective, evolving adaptation of it. 240

Sidney called Calvin a “glorious servant of God” and claimed he was willing to take the “reproach” of being called a puritan and a Calvinist for arguing, in conventional puritan fashion, that the Sabbath was a perpetual divine law. 242

The actions of the “spiritual man,” by contrast, proceeded from God, “in so far as he is guided by his spirit.” Sidney-242

For both [Sidney and the Massachusetts founders], history was ultimately about the apocalyptic struggles of God’s chosen people; republics provided the saints with the best environment in which to flourish, while the people of God, whom, Sidney stressed, the magistrates should support and encourage, made the best republicans. 245

Thus, if taken with no expectation of absolute closure, Sidney’s beheading on December 7, 1683, can serve as a suitable formal ending for this narrative of godly republicanism. 246

The Glorious Revolution [also called the Revolution of 1688, was the overthrow of King James II of England by a union of English Parliamentarians with the Dutch William III of Orange-Nassau (William of Orange). William's successful invasion of England with a Dutch fleet and army led to his ascending of the English throne as William III of England jointly with his wife Mary II of England. Wikipedia] deflated the theopolitical issues that had generated godly republicanism. The 1689 Bill of Rights finally guaranteed the Protestant limited monarchy that Thomas Cartwright had extolled in the 1570s, and a splintered, faded puritanism began its relatively unmolested new legal existence as a variety of now-tolerated Protestant denominational alternatives to the Church of England. Massachusetts’s second royal charter, issued in 1692, left it with a crown-appointed royal governor, religious toleration for all Protestants, and a franchise based on property. 247

Almost all congregationalists reacted with bitter resistance and hostility to the well-publicized Church of England missionaries who aggressively fanned out over eighteenth-century New England, especially since those missionaries dreamed of ending puritan schism and defeating the republican, king-killing principles they perceived as rampant in New England by capturing the region for the Church of England. 248

Given Massachusetts’s history, it is not surprising that the colony found itself at the forefront of the agitation that culminated in a more enduring republic than the one John Cotton celebrated. After the Revolutionary War, perhaps the shade of that fatalistic puritan [John Cotton] would have allowed itself to take up the widespread conviction that the new American republic’s liberty, progress, and enlightened tolerant Protestantism were carrying the world yet again into the millennium [final sentence of book]. 249… (altro)

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keithhamblen | Jul 15, 2013 |

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