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Puritanism—a term rarely used by Puritans themselves, but rather by their critics and opponents—originated as a reformist movement within the sixteenth and seventeenth-century Church of England. Puritans were English Protestants dissatisfied with the extent of reform in the English church after its break with Rome under Henry VIII. They sought the purging of remaining Romish or popish residues in the Church (e.g., an Episcopal system overseen by bishops and archbishops, ornate church buildings, and liturgies); emphasized personal piety, devotion, and the experience of personal conversion; and supported an educated ministry.

Drawing on the example of the primitive Christian church as a model for their own times—and understanding the church to be a gathered congregation of visible saints not confined to the geographical or parish boundaries of Anglicans or Catholics—Puritans supported a significant degree of congregational autonomy within the structure of a national church. Yet many views held by so-called Puritans (e.g., salvation by faith alone, or providentialism) were not fundamentally different from those held by their Reformed contemporaries, and Puritan and Anglican did not always denote hard and fast categories in early modern England.

As the seventeenth century progressed, Puritans opposed increasingly assertive Anglican royalism, as in Charles II’s personal rule—or rule without calling Parliament— between 1629 and 1640, and distrusted Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud’s ceremonialism as unacceptably popish. During the civil wars of the 1640s, Puritans generally supported Parliament against the king. With the parliamentary victory, however, the unifying effects of opposition began to wear off, and sects proliferated under the rule of Oliver Cromwell, whose theological leanings were deeply Puritan. After the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660, and the reestablishment of the Anglican Church, Puritans tended to refer to themselves as Nonconformists or Dissenters and moved into a more explicitly oppositional role outside the national church structure.

Puritanism played an important role in America as well, and scholars have long noted the significance of the “great migration” from Puritan strongholds in England to New England during the 1630s and 1640s. Reflecting their Anglican roots, Puritans in New England set up a system in which church and commonwealth worked closely to ensure godly behavior and social order; reflecting more specifically Puritan commitments, they sought to maintain congregational autonomy in matters of church discipline and stressed the importance of covenants as the basis of such congregations, and indeed of the political order itself. Though never espousing theocracy—clergy did not hold elective office—American Puritans believed that civil magistrates and covenanted churches should work together to build a godly community in the American wilderness and to suppress vocal religious dissent. Thus they were deeply dismayed to see their English counterparts embracing religious toleration during the English Civil War (1642–1651) and under Cromwell’s regime.

Puritanism in America was never short of critics: Anabaptists, Quakers, and other sectarians denounced New England Puritans as merely replicating the coercive church establishments of Europe. Emerging commercial elites also took issue with Puritanism’s attempts to control social life and mores, although the relationship between Puritanism and commerce is certainly more nuanced than the strident rhetoric on either side might suggest. In addition, worries about “Indianization” and its effect on the religious foundations of New England life were never far from Puritans’s minds.

The importance of Puritanism to American culture and politics has constituted one of the more enduring themes in scholarship about the development of the United States as a national community and an international power. Yet, as many other scholars have pointed out, Puritanism is not the entirety of America, but one among many influences—including those of Southern thinkers, American Catholics, and the importance of the frontier—that have informed and shaped Americans’s approach to politics and society.

Bibliography:

Archer, Richard. Fissures in the Rock: New England in the Seventeenth Century. Hanover: University of New Hampshire Press, 2001.
Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Puritan Origins of the American Self. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975.
Canup, John. Out of the Wilderness: The Emergence of an American Identity in Colonial New England. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1990.
Collinson, Patrick. The Elizabethan Puritan Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
Fisher, David Hackett. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Foster, Stephen. The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
Greene, Jack P. Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
Innes, Stephen. Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of Puritan New England. New York:W.W. Norton, 1995.
McKenna, George. The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.
Morgan, Edmund S. Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea. New York: New York University Press, 1963.
Morone, James A. Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

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