-by Jon Cotton

Here are two inconsistent yet common perceptions of the 17th-Century New England settlers:

1.  They came for religious freedom, so they were tolerant.
2.  They were not tolerant; they were strict and persecuted innocent citizens with their stringent laws of religion.

The 17th-Century New Englanders were Puritans.  The word “puritan” gives the adjective “puritanical,” used in common speech to mean “moralistic, rigid, persecutory.”  We tend to imagine the Puritans of Boston and Salem as being witch-hunters and locking people in stocks on Boston Common for uttering vulgarities or for kissing – even your spouse – in public.  These are the Puritans of The Scarlet Letter.  In contrast, we think of the “Pilgrim Fathers” of Thanksgiving’s Plimouth Colonie as laying the groundwork for religious tolerance – they “came to America for their religious freedom.”  Within the general lore of early Early New England, accordingly, lies this tension.

Quick clarification: some people make a sharp distinction between the Thanksgiving pilgrims of Plymouth, and the Boston-Salem Puritans.  The pilgrims were separatists and the puritans were not separatists.  But this is the only difference between them.  Their views of religious tolerance are indistinguishable.  Therefore I refer to the collective grouping as “Puritans.”

The thesis of the current article is, as the title suggests, that statement number two above is the more truthful of the two.  The Puritans elicit our fascination and are an intriguing people to study, a people who were sincere and interesting.  But they believed in persecutionism.  The purpose of the article is to elaborate on that.

Smithsonian Magazine says

In the storybook version most of us learned in school, the Pilgrims came to America aboard the Mayflower in search of religious freedom in 1620. The Puritans soon followed, for the same reason. Ever since these religious dissidents arrived at their shining “city upon a hill,” as their governor John Winthrop called it, millions from around the world have done the same, coming to an America where they found a welcome melting pot in which everyone was free to practice his or her own faith.

The problem is that this tidy narrative is an American myth…

The much-ballyhooed arrival of the Pilgrims and Puritans in New England in the early 1600s was indeed a response to persecution that these religious dissenters had experienced in England. But the Puritan fathers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony did not countenance tolerance of opposing religious views. Their “city upon a hill” was a theocracy that brooked no dissent, religious or political.

The most famous dissidents within the Puritan community, Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, were banished following disagreements over theology and policy. From Puritan Boston’s earliest days, Catholics (“Papists”) were anathema and were banned from the colonies, along with other non-Puritans. Four Quakers were hanged in Boston between 1659 and 1661 for persistently returning to the city to stand up for their beliefs.

We remember from school that the Pilgrims came here to escape persecution and practice their beliefs freely. But from the fact that they came here to practice their beliefs, it doesn’t follow that they believed others had the same right.  This is a logical point.  A given group may seek a place to practice its beliefs, but that doesn’t mean they believe that anyone else has the same right.  For example the Puritans did not have this belief.  The notion that everyone should have the right to practice their own religion only gained wide acceptance toward the end of the Puritan era.  Such belief in tolerance was first implemented in a major way only later during the Revolutions of France (1789) and the United States (1775).

According to PBS, John Cotton, chief spokesman of the (1630) Boston settlers, said that tolerance is “liberty … to tell lies in the name of the Lord.”  In other words, a law protecting freedom of speech is something like a government endorsement of blasphemy.  He would have repudiated the first amendment of our Constitution.  Imagine letting people talk just any way they want to about God!  Dangerous!  Such permissiveness could anger God and result in plague, crop failure, demonic possession, and myriad further horrors.  As PBS succinctly states:

Ministers like the Reverend John Cotton  preached that it was wrong to practice any religion other than Puritanism. Those who did would be helping the devil. They believed they followed the only true religion so everyone should be forced to worship as they did.

And John Cotton was not a minister of obscure standing!  He was the leader of the church in Boston England.  When he came from there in 1633 he was given charge of the main church, and because of his prominence our town was named after his town.  When he spoke, people listened.  What he believed, they believed.

The error lies in the idea that they came with the belief that all people have the right to practice a religion of their own choosing. 

The Puritans left England because their own correct view was being repressed.  The Church of England was wrong, they believed, ungodly.  They were right; God was calling them forth.  So they needed to put into practice the right view.  They believed nothing should stop them from this.  It was God who called them forth to the New World in order to perform this task (as John Winthrop’s sermon to them states).  They believed the greatest threat to putting their religion into operation was resistance from dissidents.  People who disagreed were in rebellion against God’s will for humanity.  God’s will for humanity was to establish in the New World (America) the True Church.  The true church would produce the right society, would be loving, and all the people would be happy and well.

Just as they had been a problem back home for the Church of England which demanded to impose its view, so now non-Puritans would be a problem for the Puritans who demanded to impose their view.  This required that other religions should be outlawed, for God’s will is the basis for all Law.

I have disputed the view that the original settlers were models of religious tolerance.  The opposite mistake is to think of them as unreflective oppressors, people who, if they had only reflected on it, would suddenly stop their persecutionism because it’s so obviously wrong.  This is not precisely correct either.  Their persecutionism had an identifiable, conscious motive rooted in the highest values.

They believed religious tolerance was dangerous because they had a vision of a loving society.  They gave their lives to achieve it: an inspirational “city upon a hill” that would motivate the world, by their example, to love each other and bring peace on earth.  This is the conception and hope that the original settlers had for Boston!  This vision is evident in John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill” speech, delivered to the first settlers on the ship before they arrived here.  It was their fanatical commitment to a vision of human love and unity that produced this other fanaticism of protectionism.  For their heaven on earth could only come if everyone worshiped God correctly.

The Puritans were fundamentalists, not modernists.  The Enlightenment that produced our modern ideology of politico-religious tolerance was a product of seeds planted in the 17th Century that came to wide fruition only in the 18th Century.

The greatest product of Enlightenment Tolerance is perhaps the United States Constitution in which oppositional factions are embraced within a single system through “checks and balances,” and in its (first-amendment) “establishment clause” (that the government can’t make “laws respecting an establishment of religion”).  So it’s understandable that we might be tempted to project backward in time and imagine the first New Englanders, as early Americans, shared the same philosophy as their countrymen from 157 years later.  After all, some of the ideas of the first settlers did play a role in shaping the philosophy of the constitutional framers.

Let not therefore the current article be accused either of hating or glorifying the Puritans.  They were a mix.  They were human.  My intent has been to explain the Puritan view of tolerance, and to correct a common misconception.  The worth of understanding the Puritan philosophy is that it makes clear why they persecuted heretics and witches – and yet still allows us to feel some camaraderie with the iconic Pilgrim Fathers.  If one has the conception that the Puritans were only open and tolerant, then one finds it impossible to piece together the reason for the Quakers deaths and the witch trials of Salem.  The truth is richer and more intriguing than the lore.  To reduce the Puritans to a caricature – either of stringency or of openness – is to lose insight into the soul of our country.  To dismiss them as “puritanical” pinheads, or glorify them as models of tolerance, is in each case to lose our living connection to them, and, if you’re a tour guide, to lose connection to your material.