The Puritans: beliefs and texts

The Puritan vein of Christianity erupted out of the strict Episcopalian Church of England, established under King Henry VIII that was based more upon the hypocrisy of England’s king than it was upon any religious scruples. The Puritans believed that due to Original Sin – when Eve stole the apple from the Tree of Knowledge and thus got herself and Adam banished from the Garden of Eden – human kind was destined to live at the mercy of God’s wrath for ever after. This meant that men had to live life at the bare minimum, not allowing themselves to be coerced into merriment, fun, or love; life was but a mere appeal to God not to send them to Hell until their lives were over and they had begotten more forgivers into this world. Yes, this implied that even living as good citizens of God’s cruel world, we could still not go to Heaven, because our ancestors had committed too evil a crime to ever be acquitted -- although there did exist some who held a divine and inexplicable right to be in god’s favor, and were therefore appointed as priests and ministers to interpret God’s messages.

Often times, looking back on the past of Christianity, we see that those that appointed themselves at the top of a religious hierarchy, were not necessarily the most honest or pious people. We see, many times over, the Pope setting rules for Christians that had no roots in the scriptures, ministers seeking glory from poor and illiterate but god-revering peasants, whole sects of a religion forming on one man’s illusionary idea, and a whole population following it as the truth. Many Puritans got their ideas of purity from the Swiss reverend John Calvin (famous for Calvinism, one of the earliest forms of Protestantism) who started the idea of predestination, which said that people were selected to heaven by birth, not by behavior, and that only a certain elite could ever dream of seeing the gates of heaven. Though the Puritans leaders had these ideas, it was more over the determination and durability of the Puritan settlers in Massachusetts that allowed them to live for many winters, alone and self-sufficient, yet still hopeful for a bountiful society, that makes them so important in our American history.

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, a sermon delivered by the Massachusetts minister Jonathan Edwards, is a prominent example of the belief system that was drilled into the Puritan population of early America. The whole sermon is an explanation of how awful humans are, how ugly they are in god’s eyes, how god is merely “holding us over a fiery pit with two fingers.” The real Christianity comes in with the fact that we are supposed to have an undying love for this God, because he does not drop us into the screaming pit of hell that we really deserve (due to the famous Original Sin). The idea of this sermon was to make people see themselves through God’s eyes, which, says Edwards, is like looking at the grossest monsters and beasts that we can imagine; the sermon was to try to make the people understand our true natures; but moreover, to scare a generation of people into not really living.

Why did a religion that so explicitly tells us to hate ourselves, that explains to us that we are natural failures no matter what we do, and that sorrow and pain are the only feelings we are worth feeling, appeal to such a group of people? How did this idea come about? Though the Puritans were taught so much of this self-denial, they still had children, which means they obviously couldn’t have followed the rules as strictly as they would have if they thought a living hell equaled the truth. But why is it that whole groups of people can just be led around through life by others?

There must have been some merits to their system though, because they did live pretty able lives after they had sailed to America. In William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, his account of the lives of the newly settled pilgrims, the settlers are a dedicated community: friendly with the natives, willing to learn from others to fix their erred ways, and communal in life. After all, their community started with small hundred or so persons and lost about half of those in the first winter, so they must have been a tightly knit group.

Bradford’s account is another good example of Puritan literature, because, starting the minute the group arrived on land, his words are filled with blessing, thanking and marveling the power and grace of God: “they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of Heaven who had brought them over the fast and furious ocean.” Everything that happens to them, like their treaty with the natives, is gift from God, and everything they do is for the Advancement of the Christian Faith (though this is normal for a religious spokesman) yet also the community also has a great faith in each other. It is interesting to see such a strong community, and we wonder whether this strength would have been the same in a community that didn’t have a religious concordance...

Its interesting to see how easily the English found the natives of this land, even thought of it as a blessing that they had met native’s who spoke English even, and yet the settlers still had no qualms towards taking over the entire land as if it were a vast, empty wasteland. The English are our ancestors, they are whom we study in our textbooks, and yet American natives populated so much of America that the settlers could run into them blindly. How is it possible that our cultures can so proud that we can’t even notice another culture that doesn’t have our same skin color as being a culture? The Puritan communities knew that their neighbors were not stupid; the natives impressed them (“...Indian came boldly amongst them and spoke to them in broken English, which they could well understand but marveled at...”) and yet they could trample them down to near extinction, as if they were ghosts. No wonder William Bradford recognized “this is men's corruption.... seeing all men have this corruption in them,” (and the Puritan in him continues) “God in His wisdom saw another course fitter for them.”

It is obvious in both the studied texts the Total Depravity aspect of Puritan life made surviving quite difficult for those first settlers in America, yet it was also this dedication, in their simple lives that kept them alive (for if they had not busied themselves on work, who knows if we would be here today...). They also received harrowing teachings about their own innate evil by the “saints” and “chosen ones” of God, their religious interpreters, who could only make their sad situation worse.