Category: Puritans

Did the Puritans believe in witchcraft?

Part 3 of our Truth v. Myth series on the Salem Witch trials asks this question: did the Puritans believe in witchcraft?

I will go out on a limb with an absolute statement to say that every discussion of Salem, no matter how scholarly, includes at some point the assertion that the Puritans believed in witches, witchcraft, the devil, the spirit world, etc. To them, say the articles, the spiritual world was as real as the flesh-and-blood world around them, and their deep belief in Satan and his power over the earth made it easy as pie for the Puritans to believe in witchcraft and persecute innocent people as witches.

As usual, the reality is not so clear-cut. The Puritans of 17th-century New England did indeed believe there was a devil who roamed the earth creating sin. Interesting work has been done showing how the Puritans who left England defined salvation as the presence of God, but over time, their New England descendants saw it more as the absence of Satan. In the difficult world of New England, where people who had never farmed suddenly had to feed their families by farming poor land, hardship and danger must have made Satan a more palpable presence than God much of the time.

Since the devil roamed the earth, looking for people to betray, there were minor evil spirits who roamed with him.  The idea that angels might be sent by God to protect people was far less popular–almost non-existent–than it would become much later in the 19th century. People had to pray for God’s strength to protect them. The Puritans saw events in their lives as evidence of success or failure to follow God’s way. In their official documents, such tragedies as losing a child, a bad harvest, fire, or epidemic were seen as God’s punishment or, as they might put it, “correction.”

But these are the official documents. We don’t have many private journals written by Puritans, but from the few we have, and from the gravestones they left, we can see that in their hearts, Puritans suffered and understood personal tragedies more or less as “the way of the world.” I don’t think there’s a lot of proof that they thought God was punishing them for specific sins when their children died. Children, sadly, were very vulnerable to disease in the time of the Puritans; no family was immune to bereavement, and it seems that when most Puritan people grieved they comforted themselves that God had called their beloved children home to Heaven so that those children would never have to suffer on Earth. There is no fire-and-brimstone lesson to be learned. It just happens.

This is the point I’m working toward: that while the Puritans did believe God intervened in human affairs, and that Satan was always present to betray people, they were also immensely practical people who understood that life was full of the real pitfalls of disease, accident, and financial disaster. They lived in the real world. These were very shrewd and practical business people whose legislative records focus exclusively on real people, their conflicts, and the intellectual solutions to problems.

Thus, when witchcraft comes up, we have to consider that while the Puritans believed in Satan and his power, they rarely felt completely sure that a human being was sharing in that power. There are many judicial records of an aggravated party accusing someone of being a witch; there is usually a pro-forma inquiry and then a logical settlement of the problem. Calling someone a witch in Puritan New England may have been like calling someone an s.o.b today—a way to insult someone, blow off steam, express your anger, and invite remediation.

That’s what makes Salem so unusual. There, in 1692, accusations of witchcraft did not wither away with the application of legal solutions. And there the whole social order was turned upside-down as children held power over adults. Young girls called adult women who were full members of their churches witches and those women were put in jail and tried. This goes against everything the Puritans believed in. To them, God gave complete authority over children to adults, and no child was allowed to make any statements in a court, or even be present. You might believe in witchcraft as a Puritan, but you were not going to let some children decide who was a witch.

Also unusual was the fact that it was fully integrated members of society who were accused and tried and executed. There were always one or two people in a town or village who separated themselves from the group, casting scorn on church-going and on the General Court, laughing at the customs of their fellows and refusing to help out in times of trouble. These people were grudgingly endured by the rest, and open to accusations of witchcraft because of their alarming ways. But even these troublemakers were rarely persecuted as witches. So to have respectable, church-going, child-raising, fully integrated, fully employed adults on trial for witchcraft was very, very unusual.  

The upshot is that while the Puritans did believe in witchcraft and evil spirits, they rarely associated any real person with those beliefs, and even more rarely persecuted people as witches. And they put a lot more stock generally in real-world problems and solutions than spectral ones. And, finally, no belief in spirits would usually lead Puritan New Englanders to overturn their entire social order to let children persecute adults. Salem cannot be explained away as just another consequence of the Puritans’ terrible and ignorant religion. It was an anomaly, it was seen as one at the time, and should be seen as one now.

Next time: a roundup of theories on the witch scare

The 1692 witch scare: why Salem?

Welcome to part 2 of my Truth v. Myth series on the Salem witch scare of 1692. Here we take a look at Salem before the scare to see what was happening, and why Salem ended up as the site of this tragedy.

Salem was not just any old town in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Salem was the site of first settlement for the New England Puritans. When John Winthrop and his famous band of Puritan settlers arrived in 1630, they first sheltered in Salem before heading south to found Boston. (Remember, as we show in Pilgrims v. Puritans: who landed in Plymouth?, those people who landed in 1620 were not Puritans but Separatists.) A small group of unfunded Puritans had left England in 1626 and founded Salem. Therefore it was the first Puritan settlement in New England, and as such had planted the first Reformed Anglican (Congregational) church in the New World.

So Salem had clout. It was literally the mother of all Puritan churches in the New World, and its community was very proud of its standing. The church in Boston became very powerful, but the Salem congregation was always a kind of Queen Mother to it, and the advice of Salem’s ministers and congregation was always important to Boston.

Salem was always a frontier town. It was closer to southern Maine than to Boston, and southern Maine was a battleground from the 1630s on between France, ever-encroaching southward from Canada, and the English settlers in MBC and Plymouth. The English created settlements and trading posts in this area, notably Agawam, as buffer zones against French expansion. The French, who had a good track record of keeping their hands off (Native) American land in Canada, were easily able to enlist Abenakis, Acadias, and Penobscots to fight the English settlers, who clearly needed and took lots of land in New England. So while the French built forts in the north from which to sweep down into New England, their Native American allies (particularly the Abenakis) would raid English settlements in southern Maine and northern MBC, armed with French weapons and given sanctuary in French-controlled land.

Trouble for Salem, with the French, Native Americans, and England itself, began in 1686, just six years before the witch scare. In that year, King James II of England established the Dominion of New England (read more about that here), which took away MBC’s political independence, its self-rule, and its religion. This grossly unfair and unpopular regime was overthrown by the New Englanders in 1689, when they got word that James II had been deposed in favor of William and Mary. But they were not able to get their independence back; MBC would remain a royal colony with a royal governor who was appointed by the king rather than elected by the legislature.

So just three years before the scare, Salem, along with all the MBC, has had its religion, land rights, and governance challenged and not fully restored. But worse was to come–the new king immediately brought his war with France to New England.

King William’s War (1689-97) was fought by English forces in Europe, but the violence came to New England. Because their home nations were at war, the French in Canada launched new attacks through their Native American allies on English settlements. Native American night raids on small Maine villages were terrifying and unsparing. The worst attack was on York, Maine on January 25, 1692; the first accusations of witchcraft in Salem came weeks later.

Salem, again, was close to Maine, and actually received many refugees from the violence, particularly children. Salem was on constant alert for Native American attack, and sent militia to defend Maine itself.  Salem’s neighboring towns of  Andover, Haverhill, Amesbury, Newbury, and Rowley (now Georgetown) were attacked.

In the midst of this external stress and tension,  Salem was also undergoing internal strife. Salem was made up of Salem Village, the original farming settlement, and Salem Town, a newer development of mostly merchants and business people.  The old Puritan law of “one village, one church” had been upheld in Salem long after it was clear that Salem Town was large enough, and its people far away enough, to have its own congregation. But this was not just any church splitting. This was, remember, the Mother Church of New England; Salem Village did not want to split its historic church and lose the esteem this gave them. There was resentment in the farming Village of the wealth of the merchant Town; all the Village had was its church, and did not want to lose it. Finally, however, it was forced to release Salem Town from its obligations to First Church in Salem, and in 1689, the same year MBC became a permanent royal colony, Salem’s historic church was split.

So we have in Salem, by 1692, very high tensions over Native American attack, royal governance, and internal economic and religious division. On the eve of the scare, Salem was just waiting for a spark to ignite an explosion of violence. In the next segment, we’ll talk about why witchcraft became that spark.

Next time: Did Puritans believe in witchcraft?

Truth v. Myth: The Salem Witch Trials

Welcome to part one of my Truth v. Myth series on the Salem Witch Trials and the whole witch scare that took place in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692. This is perhaps the most famous Puritan moment in American history, the one thing most people think of when they think of the New England Puritans. Usually, it is seen as shocking proof of the damage the Puritans’ hateful religion could do, and serves as a reminder that church and state must be kept separate if justice is to be done.

As a scholar of the Puritans, particularly the Massachusetts Bay Colony group, I spend a lot of time and ink explaining how they actually lived and governed themselves, and I have some sympathy for their experiences, goals, and achievements. The proto-democracy they established was a direct precursor to the full democracy of the United States. And they actually believed firmly in separation of church and state when it came to daily legislation. So I start by noting that the Salem event is actually an anomaly in the history of their colony. Here are some points that are often overlooked:

–There was only ever one “witch scare” in the Puritan colonies. For the roughly 60 years that Puritan theology and law dominated New England, only one time were dozens of people persecuted and some executed as witches.

–The scare did not spread. It stayed local to the Salem area, and did not create a prairie fire of persecution across New England.

–It generated almost no popular reaction in New England at the time. It was not celebrated as a victory of God over Satan, or condemned as unjust. It almost seems as if all New England wanted to forget about it as soon as possible.

–The scare itself is set in the midst of violent political upheaval in New England and especially Massachusetts, and cannot be separated from it.

–There is no one single cause we can pinpoint for the scare; just as there is never just one cause for any major event, there were multiple factors leading to murder in Salem.

The research into what really happened in Salem in 1692 and why has been prolific for the past 10 years, as scholars recruit modern science to try to answer some questions. This series does not make any claims to being the final word on what happened. But a good round-up of new theories, along with some satisfying myth-busting of old ones, will be good enough work for us.

Next: Setting the scene at Salem

John Winthrop, villain?

You can imagine our surprise to find this question in the list of prompts typed into search engines that led eventually to this blog.

It took us a moment to realize it must be about Anne Hutchinson; for those of you who are looking for evidence of Winthrop’s villainity, check out our Truth v. Myth series on Mrs. Hutchinson. Rest assured, you will find that Winthrop was no villain, Hutchinson no angel, and the Puritans more complex people than you might have imagined.

New Calvinists give Old Puritans a bad name

I see that a movement called “New Calvinism” is trying to sweep the nation, led most notably by someone named Mark Driscoll in Seattle. They claim to have rehabilitated the teachings of John Calvin, particularly the ideas that all humans are damned and unable to earn salvation, and that God has chosen just a few to be saved, no matter what they do, and most to be damned, no matter what they do.

Calvin did believe that every person’s fate–heaven or hell–was set before time began, in the mind of God, and that nothing you did could change that. His belief that you could not earn salvation by leading a good life was adopted by the English Puritans. “Justification,” or God’s grace/salvation, could not be bought by “sanctification”, or good works.

Still, a Puritan had to live a good life and perform good works, in order to: 1) show God’s goodness to the world; 2) help themselves to be open to and focused on God’s grace if/when they might receive it; and 3) because they loved God and wanted to do good.

The “New Calvinists” article I read begins by saying these present-day Americans believe in election of the few and damnation of the many, but then I didn’t see any proofs of it. They mostly preach the same old thing I heard growing up in the 70s in a Protestant church: women must submit to men, everything is in God’s hands and we can’t understand it and shouldn’t try, and you must fear hell at every moment. They fail to live up to the standards of my old church by stating that living a good life is not necessary.

They’re not truly Calvinists, of course; no one can recapture a historical moment. Calvin and his followers were born because of their socio-political moment; even the English Puritans who adopted Calvinism changed it. Living religion always changes. It’s clear that their leader in Seattle is no Calvinist, since he believes God talks directly to him, telling him who to marry and what career to enter into.

The difference between New and real Calvinists is that the first Calvinists were not trying to recapture something. They were revolutionaries, exacting the same kind of harsh punishments on dissenters within their group that any political revolutionary group does. They were thinking for themselves and coming up with a new religion in response to both the old Catholic church and the new Lutheran one. The Seattle “Calvinists” are making up a casserole of hodge-podge beliefs from all corners in order to shock with a new-yet-old doctrine.

The Puritans weren’t trying to shock anyone with their faith, and they were extremely thoughtful about their religion. It was a very intellectual religion, relying on soul-searching, Bible reading, prayer, and a rationally laid out progress toward reaching a point where Grace, if it was coming to you, could be known to you. They didn’t have “star” preachers who trampled the rights of their congregations; the congregation was a democratic body that asserted its control over its pastor and teachers, and there was a love and respect between the leadership and the congregation that is missing in today’s version.

This isn’t a blog about religion, but you know that when someone brings up the Puritans in today’s news, I have to be there. I fear they are sullied by the connection to “New Calvinism,” which sullies our understanding of an important founding group in America.

Puritans v. Quakers in the battle for our sympathy

I just finished my Delbanco book and it strikes me that most historians who write about the Puritans just don’t like them, deep down inside, and this colors their history.

Of course, it’s not as if liking a group makes your history better than disliking a group. Ideally, you try to be as objective as possible.

But that objectivity is hard to come by when you’re reading about the Puritans. A schadenfreude creeps in and eventually sets the overall tone fast in a kind of head-shaking ruing of the Puritans and their crazy ways. Almost any book you read about the Massachusetts Bay Colony gives you the feeling that it was an immediate failure, that the moment those people set foot on shore in America they started betraying their own values. Blame is laid at the door of their religion, inevitably; a religion that crazy was just bound to fail.

It’s funny, because MBC was very successful. It established dominance over all New England, Boston was the major American port for decades, and overpopulation was almost immediately a problem. The MBC Puritans finally codified their religion in writing (the New England Way), something that had eluded or been deemed impossible by English Puritans, they settled two strong challenges to their Way (Antinomianism and the Halfway Covenant), created a representative legislature and judiciary, and wrote down a code of civil law (something the English Parliament tried to force the king to do to no avail).

But in most religious histories of the Puritans of the MBC, they are portrayed as psychologically tortured, religiously intolerant, crippled by self-doubt, paralyzed by uncertainty and fear of eternal punishment. You’d never know this was the place that invented flip, the fun rum drink with sizzling cream.

Meanwhile, the other crazy zealots in America, the Quakers, come off as lovely and wonderful, and full of success, when in fact their single colony immediately and completely betrayed its founder’s principles as soon as he died, and the Quaker faith henceforth had nothing to do with the government of Pennsylvania.

Because the later, 18th and especially 19th century Quakers were antislavery pacifists, we like them. We’re in sympathy with them. We ignore that fact that in the 17th century, they were as unpleasant and dictatorial about religion as any Puritan might be. I am greatly indebted to Tom Van Dyke at American Creation for this description of 17th-century Quakers in America:

[Roger] Williams spent much of his final decades in protracted debates with Quaker missionaries and refugees to Rhode Island, and what caused him to be so exasperated with his Quaker opponents was primarily their violation of [the] aspect of civility, the need to conduct public conversation respectfully. …Williams was taken aback by his Quaker opponents’ boisterous behavior and abandonment of common courtesy during the debates. He vehemently objected to their habit of interrupting his arguments, shouting him down, attempting to humiliate him personally with name-calling and ridicule, misrepresenting his convictions, and displaying a noted lack of truthfulness in their own arguments. …[To Williams] this behavior was not, as the Quakers insisted, an acceptable exercise of free conscience. Instead it was a moral violation of the basic requirements of civility, a signal of deep disrespect and a transgression of the procedural rules for public deliberation that Williams held with the highest esteem, so much so that he was willing to entertain the possibility that violators of civility like the Quakers should be subject to legal restrictions.

If you could get Roger Williams so far on your bad side that he was willing to restrict your liberties, you know you’re pretty extreme.

So while of course you can never completely erase your own biases when studying anything, including history, we need to at least be upfront about them. If only Puritan historians would just include a Foreword saying, “Look, I hate these people, but they’re an important part of American history, so we need to study them, but frankly I’m glad they got what they deserved in the long run–oblivion.”

My foreword would be different…  as you can guess!

(For more on the battle between Puritans and Quakers, see The Puritans and Freedom of Religion.)

The Puritans and their ridiculous beliefs… in 1776

I’m reading The Puritan Ordeal by Andrew Delbanco, and while the book is focused on the Puritan religious beliefs in the 17th century, one can’t help reading it as a treatise on American political beliefs in the 18th century.

–The Puritans “impute all faults and corruptions, wherewith the world aboundeth, unto the kind of ecclesiastical government established.” And in 1776, all faults and corruptions would be imputed to the kind of political government established.

–“[The Puritans] had a deep desire to believe in human moral capability. …Virtue, like a muscle or a limb, required continual strengthening through exercise.” Just as the Founders believed in the ability of humans to improve themselves and their condition, and believed fervently in the need for regular exercise of democratic virtue.

–“[Some contemporaries of the Puritans felt] they were fanatics who held out the fantastic promise of renovating human nature by effecting institutional change [within the church].” In 1776, it was institutional change in government that offered the ridiculous promise of utterly changing mankind.

In short, the Puritan conviction that the right religious practice could perfect the human soul, end poverty, curtail crime, alter human nature, and change the course of human history, putting it on a teleological path to utopian paradise on Earth, is almost indistinguishable from what the Founding generation believed the right form of government, in this case representative democracy, could do.

It is natural for us today to feel the Puritan reliance on religion was personal and uninformed, while we honor the Founders’ identical beliefs because the Founders transferred the process of perfecting humankind from religion to politics.

But Puritan religion was political, in the sense that the original New England Puritans developed their own social and political structures based on their religion. The small town, unified around one church, representing its people at regular intervals in town meeting, which was adopted across the nation over the course of centuries is the legacy of the Puritans. The New England Puritans also created a chief legislature in Boston (the General Court), to which towns elected representatives.

This social and political structure reflected the Puritan religious belief in the independence of the individual, and the right of people to associate and represent themselves freely, which had been denied them in England.

It is no great leap to see that these religious beliefs in New England morphed slowly into political ones. It’s a quick and easy step to go from Puritan fervor for a religion that upholds individual liberty and self-representation to Founding fervor for a form of government that does the same.

Everything that can be said slightingly about the Puritans’ wacky religious beliefs, then, can be said admiringly about the Founders’ inspiring political beliefs. You just become fully aware of how the lens of religion affects your opinion. Primed to dislike people who were religious fanatics, and who have gained a reputation for intolerance and violence, we find the Puritans’ beliefs that the religious practice they invented could change the very nature of humans to be ridiculous, typical of religious zealots. Primed to admire people who founded this nation and introduced representative democracy to the modern world, we find the Founders’ beliefs that the political system they invented could change the very nature of humans to be thrilling, and self-evident.

I have to believe that thousands of New Englanders living in the Founding period, who came from Puritan stock, inherited their ancestors’ passion for perfectablility, expressing it through politics rather than religion. As we know from our own experience, politics can be a powerful religion.

The Puritans and Freedom of Religion

There’s a kind of sucker punch in many presentations of American history, wherein we are told that the Puritans left England for America because they had suffered religious persecution—and then the Puritans persecuted other religions here! The hypocrisy is apparently meant to shame Americans about their founding.

Let’s explore this situation. Yes, the Puritans did leave England because they had been persecuted for their religion.  For the whole story go to parts 1 and 2 of the Truth v. Myth series on the Protestant Work Ethic. Here, the story in a nutshell is that the Puritans were members of the official state church of England, the Anglican Church, but they felt it needed to be reformed and restructured (purified) to be more Protestant. For their loud and continual protests and complaints against the Anglican Church, the church hierarchy, and even the English monarch and Parliament, the Puritans were disliked and marginalized throughout the late 1500s and early 1600s. When Charles I took the throne and in 1630 made William Laud, a pro-Catholic, anti-Puritan church leader the Archbishop of Canterbury (and thus basically in charge of the Anglican Church), the bulk of England’s Puritan population fled England. Laud harried them out, putting a price on the heads of more outspoken and powerful Puritan ministers, making it a criminal offense to attend Puritan worship services, and generally doing his best to squash all opposition to the Anglican Church.

So in 1630 the Puritans headed to what is now New England. There was already a small outpost of Puritan settlers in Salem (now part of Massachusetts) to welcome the group headed by John Winthrop. But Winthrop’s group soon headed to what is now Boston, and formed the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

So why were the Puritans in New England? Because they had been forced out of England. They were forced out because they wanted to reform human civilization through religion, to wipe out poverty, and to make a heaven on Earth in which everyone was free to discover God’s will for themselves. But these were not generalized goals; that is, the Puritans did not believe that any or every religion, diligently applied, could result in such a paradise. They believed that only their reformed version of Anglican Christianity could put such goals within reach.

They were not completely crazy for thinking so. In the world they knew, the world of European and especially English Christianity, the Puritans were the only group calling for an end to poverty, the only group demanding that all people, even women, be taught how to read (so they could read the Bible, God’s word), and the only group that required its members to work hard to improve the world on a person-by-person basis. Puritans were supposed to live exemplary lives in every respect so that anyone they dealt with—their customers, friends, even strangers they met—would see God through them, and be inspired to seek God themselves.

Thus the Puritans might be excused for thinking their religion was the only one that could save the world. In their limited experience of the world, theirs was the most actively reformist faith. They left England to preserve that faith, so that Puritanism would not be diluted or destroyed. They left England to create a place where Puritanism could thrive, and eventually grow so strong that when England was destroyed by God for its apostasy, the fugitive Puritans would be left to re-establish Christian civilization.

Now we see why the Puritans did not encourage religious diversity or practice religious tolerance in New England. It was not because they were terrible, hateful people. It was because they were on a mission, and they feared God’s wrath upon themselves if they failed in that mission to create a holy nation on Earth. They left England to establish a Puritan state where Puritan Anglicanism—Congregationalism—could be practiced. They did not leave England to establish a state where people were free to practice whatever religion they wanted. It is incorrect to say the Puritans wanted freedom of religion; they did not. They wanted to be able to practice their own religion freely. Those are two very different things, and we should not misrepresent the Puritans by claiming they believed in freedom of religion.

The Puritans in New England broadcast their intentions, making it as clear as they possibly could that people of other faiths were not welcome there. They made no secret of their hostility to outside religious presence. When people of other faiths insisted on entering New England, the Puritans boiled over with anger.

The question we ask ourselves at this point is, why did people of other faiths go to New England when they knew the situation there? Because they were just as zealous and single-minded about their own faiths as the Puritans. We tend to think of the Quakers who were persecuted in New England as gentle innocents who did no wrong. But Quakers in the 17th century were the most radical Protestant sect in England, maybe even in Europe. They entered Puritan towns banging pots and pans, screaming and singing, entering meeting-houses during Puritan worship and yelling to the congregation to hear their words. Sometimes Quakers stripped themselves naked in the center of town to call attention to the need to strip oneself of earthly attachments. They got the derisive nickname “Quakers” because they would go into convulsive fits during their worship services.

The Quakers, then, were a radical and alarming people who went into New England with the express mission to destroy the Puritan way and introduce their own religious beliefs. They were just as feverishly devoted to Quakerism as the Puritans were fanatically devoted to Puritanism. What we have are two radical groups with zero tolerance for other beliefs who were, once the Quakers entered New England, trapped in the same space. Persecution of the Quakers  followed, in Boston as it did in London.

It is only if we think that the 18th-century beliefs about religious tolerance enshrined in our Constitution came directly from the 17th century, then, that we can be dismayed to find no freedom of religion in Puritan New England. Almost no one in 17th-century Europe believed in freedom of religion or freedom of conscience. The Quakers did not, the Puritans did not. Almost all sects believed they alone had the truth of God and that they alone should exist. It took 150 years of religious co-existence in America to get to the point where freedom of religion could be put forward as a basic human right.

Instead of shaking our heads over the religious intolerance of the Puritans, we are better served by understanding the passions, fears, hopes and dreams that competed for the soul of Europe from the grey shores of the New World.

The first separation of church and state–ever!

…well, at least in the western world. It happened in Rhode Island, in 1663.
 
This was the year that the colony received its royal patent. In 1643, Roger Williams had received a charter from Parliament, during the interregnum. When Charles II came to the throne, Rhode Island received a new patent from the king. It is a remarkable document. There’s no room to get into all the details here, but pick up Early New England, A Covenanted Society by David Weir for a terrific in-depth discussion.
 
In the 1663 patent, for the first time the English king/government acknowledged not only that there were religious conflicts in New England, but that differences in religious opinion were unavoidable–and even valid. Here is how the charter describes the people who left Massachusetts Bay Colony and the Connecticut colonies for Rhode Island “…some of those oure subjects not being able to beare, in these remote parties, theire different apprehensions in religious concernements, and inn pursueance of the afforesayd ends, did once againe leave their desireable stationes and habitationes, and with excessive labour and travell, hazard and charge, did transplant themselves into the middest of the Indian natives…”
 
Here, for the first time, the crown acknowledges that the religious beliefs of its people are truly heartfelt, and real. These are not seditious traitorous rabble-rousers, but people who leave their desirable stations in life and their homes for the excessive labor and hazard of the wilderness. The king will justify and honor those beliefs and actions with this patent.
 
With religious diversity up-front as the founding cause of the Rhode Islanders, the charter goes on to allow the people of Rhode Island to travel safely into other colonies where their views are unwelcome, and, most importantly, the freedom to set up a society that rejects the state religion of England itself. “[A] most flourishing civil state may stand and best bee maintained among our English subjects, with a full libertie in religious concernements; and true pietye rightly grounded upon gospell principles will give the best and greatest securiety to sovereignetye, and will lay in the hearts of men the strongest obligations to true loyaltye.”
 
This is truly remarkable. It is indeed the first time in the west that a government “[legally] separated the civil magistracy from civil religion and an established state church. We should note that civil religion is not the same thing as the established state church. The state church is an institution with records, buildings, financial dealings, and personnel; civil religion is something more amorphous, and can be described as a cluster of ideas that can be sustained by the state church (or by the state itself) and that form the often submerged foundations of societal life” [Weir 53].
 
In granting its charter, the crown recognizes that in Rhode Island, civil religion was the antithesis of the English state religion, and was not even uniform itself–many religions were tolerated in Rhode Island, and each contributed to the cluster of ideas that created the civil religion there. The crown also sees that maybe people who are allowed to live according to their deepest religious beliefs will be the most loyal citizens, as they will be grateful to the king for granting them that freedom.
 
The big news here is that it is no longer treason to challenge the Anglican church. Religious freedom is not heresy (so long, of course, as one’s religion is still Christian), or political treason, or anything but a private, personal matter.
 
What’s unusual is that this great religious freedom was granted to America at the same time the crown was clamping down hard on religious freedom in England itself. The laws of the Clarendon Code maintained uniformity and orthodoxy. The Corporation Act of 1661 required all town officials to be Anglicans. The 1662 Act of Uniformity required the clergy in England to use only the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. The Conventicle Act of 1664 forbid groups of five or more people holding dissenting religious views to gather together. And the Five Mile Act of 1665 made it illegal for a dissenting minister to live within five miles of a town unless he had taken the Oath of Allegiance, which was unlikely. These measures sent more English Puritans to America.
 
So why did the crown decide to grant religious freedoms in America that it was actively stamping out in England? Perhaps the answer lies in the distance between them. We know that Charles II, leaning more and more towards Catholicism, and later converting on his deathbed, hoped to create more religious tolerance in England. But Parliament, wary of another religious convulsion, took away the king’s power to make religious law altogether, and embarked on its coercion of uniformity. Events in the small and still financially unimportant colonies in New England were not as pressing to Parliament, trying to keep things under control at home after the Restoration.
 
But a precedent was set in New England by the Rhode Island royal charter. Massachusetts Bay colonists would never accept people of different religious beliefs to live amongst them, but they did trade with Rhode Islanders, hold markets together, and allow them to travel through and stay overnight in MBC. Gradually MBC, with its natural, un-coerced uniformity, came to be seen as the anomaly–even by its own people! And generations of Americans grew up not only expecting religious diversity to be tolerated, but, crucially, expecting civil religion, not state religion, to be the order of the day.
 
Therefore it was no stretch 100 years later to set up a government in which religion was important but uncodified by law. Americans were used to this kind of separation of church and state, and comfortable with the primacy of civil religion over state religion. Belatedly, in the late 20th century, attempts were made to open up the public to the idea of state religion, but it will likely be an uphill battle to convince Americans to accept this 17th-century idea.

The Protestant work ethic debunked!

The final installment of my Truth v. Myth series on the Protestant or Puritan work ethic is here. Let’s examine the idea that the prosperity of the United States was founded on Puritan hard work.

We’ve seen that the Puritans left England when their ambitious social reforms—most notably eradicating poverty—came to nothing in the early 1600s. England was in the grips of an anti-Puritan campaign originally launched by King James by the time the Puritans set sail for America in 1630, and there seemed to be no hope of reforming any part of English society.

When they arrived in America, founding the Massachusetts Bay Colony with its headquarters in Boston, the Puritans did indeed work hard. But this was not really because they wanted to implement their radical social reforms. It was because hard work was required to settle the land—at least in an English way.

Remember that the Puritans were almost entirely city people. They were not farmers. Even those who had lived in the country had not been farmers. So when they arrived in America, and suddenly had to become farmers, it was extremely difficult for them. Three things were against them: first, the land was not great, being rocky and not too rich; second, they had no farming knowledge; third, they refused to adopt American farming strategies. If they had been willing to farm like the Massachusetts people did, life would have been much easier.

There are many howling complaints from early Puritan settlers about the inexplicable injustice of heathen Americans seemingly laying around all day, doing only the smallest amount of farm work, yet bringing in bountiful harvests while the God-fearing Puritans broke their backs from sunup to sundown without ever having much of a food surplus.

Puritan farmers did adopt some American tools and techniques, but mostly they struggled along, never doing very well. So that hard work was not part of a solid plan, or “work ethic,” but a reaction to stark necessity and a fruit of ignorance.

Puritans did do away with holidays in America. In England it had been impossible to block out the hordes of rabble-rousing celebrants on the scores of religious holidays, but in America they could impose a strict policy of forsaking “the observation of days.” All days were alike, all days were holy because they were given by God, and holidays were banned as excuses to get drunk and fornicate (which is, in truth. what they were to most people at that time). But Puritans did not work 365 days a year. Many days of fasting and prayer were called in Puritan Massachusetts, when problems were facing the colony, and many days of thanksgiving were celebrated in good times. On these days work was dropped or minimized. And on Sunday, of course, no work was done.

Another contributing factor to the “work ethic” was that the early Puritans (1620 to about 1684) did not engage in the slave trade in any substantive way. Rich households included enslaved Native Americans, and sometimes enslaved Africans or black Americans. But most households were too poor to purchase slave labor, and some felt it was wrong to avoid the work God gave you. Therefore, New Englanders necessarily worked more hours than, say, Virginians, who almost immediately adopted the plantation system and staffed it with indentured servants and enslaved people, and who practiced Anglicanism in its impure state, celebrating many holidays.

If the Puritans worked hard in 17th-century New England, then, it was by necessity rather than choice. This hard work kept the vast majority of families living hand-to-mouth from harvest to harvest without ever creating a lot of wealth. And Puritan farmers could not be said to have worked harder than Virginian indentured servants, enslaved people, or yeoman farmers. All farm work was hard in colonial America (for non-native Americans, at least).

So the Puritans did bring hard work to America, in the sense that they brought with them a way of farming uninformed by experience and unsuited to their new land. But it was the same hard work done in other colonial English settlements, and it was not part of a plan, or work ethic. And it is difficult to say how this hard work created a legacy that later New Englanders, and then all Americans, tapped into as they built the nation. Then why does the myth of the Protestant work ethic exist? There are two reasons.

Reason 1: In this situation, where life was hard and success elusive, some people did well. Outsiders–non-puritans–looking on decided that doing well must be a sign of God’s favor. The idea that material success was a sign of God’s approval had existed amongst Puritans back in England, and was applied to America, even though it was definitely not part of Puritan religious belief. Pastors constantly reiterated the Puritan theological rejection of the idea that anyone could earn God’s grace with their work.

Most Puritans, then, worked hard in order to avoid being singled out by others as lazy and not doing their fair share to keep settlements afloat. This was an anxiety about community, about being excluded or avoided by fellows, more than an anxiety about God.

Reason 2: It was a 19th-century reaction to Irish Catholic immigration. As “hordes” of Catholic immigrants “flooded” American cities, the usual aversion amongst prejudiced native-born Americans to any immigrants except one’s own sainted ancestors kicked in, and the largely Protestant home crowd let loose with insults about the Irish newcomers’ laziness, criminality, vice, and Catholicism. How unlike our own Protestant ancestors, said ubiquitous editorial voices, who came here and built a nation with their unceasing toil! They never asked for charity! They never sent their children begging in the streets! It’s Catholicism itself that is to blame, came the conclusion; it is a pestilent religion that breeds vice. Prejudice, then, did its work, and created a Protestant, nay Puritan, work ethic.

So between these two reasons, the Puritan fear of failing and being rejected by their community, and the anti-Catholic/anti-immigrant stance of 19th-century Americans, a myth was born. It was unfortunate in the 17th century, harmful in the 19th century, and if it is truly the reason why Americans work so many more hours than employees in other developed nations, it is still harmful today.