What Puritan Guarantee?

In The Puritan Origins of the American Self Sacvan Bercovitch claims that American Puritans believed God had made a “long promised summons” to them, “as irreversible as it was irresistible, to erect New Jerusalem in America” (97). Eventually, their “speculations about the millennial site [of the New Jerusalem] shifted from New England to, vaguely, America itself ” (xviii). This divine irreversible geographic guarantee had extraordinary implications. It meant that “the idea of America . . . assured the settlers of success. . . . The American Puritan self was a garden enclosed from the threat even of secular failure” (101). Over the centuries, “that Puritan guarantee evolved into a nation’s divine right to expand” (xvii). Cotton Mather’s writings, the main focus of Puritan Origins, are ideal for explicating this American Puritan guarantee because, according to Bercovitch, Mather is a “representative emigrant come to life” (68).

Historians reviewed Puritan Origins enthusiastically when it came out in 1975. But by the time I arrived at graduate school twelve years later, the enthusiasm had faded. Historians had grown dubious about an American self and about New England as the foundation of American history. Puritan specialists became more interested in connections between American and English Puritanism than differences. Perhaps most important, Dwight Bozeman argued persuasively that the intentionally world-changing Puritan errand into the wilderness, millennial or otherwise, was an artifact of mid-twentieth-century scholarship (Gura).

Before I read Puritan Origins in graduate school, I understood, as I still do, that New Englanders assumed no guarantee of success. God summoned New England as he had summoned ancient Israel, conditionally on the holiness of the region’s inhabitants. As John Winthrop in “A Modell of Christian Charitie” in 1630 warned, “if our heartes shall turne away, soe that wee will not obey [God] . . . wee shall surely perishe out of the good land” (48). The conditionality of God’s relationship with New England was repeated countless times afterwards, in tones ranging from mild optimism to severe anxiety, not only by individual ministers but by ministers and laity speaking collectively.¹

Millennialism did not alter conditionality. By the middle of the 1630s, some New Englanders started to believe that their pure churches fore-shadowed the millennium (Winship, Making 61–62). Puritan Origins’ many quotations linking New England and the millennium express no more than this foreshadowing; they could be piled up endlessly without ever conveying anything about guaranteed success or an American New Jerusalem. The prominent minister John Cotton, for example, served as a very enthusiastic “representative emigrant” around 1635 when he wrote to a friend in Holland that “the order of the churches and the commonwealth . . . brought into his mind the new heaven and the new earth” (C. Mather, Magnalia 1: 325). But Cotton emphasized that the New England churches needed much more holiness to participate in the millennium and that there was no certainty of them achieving it. The closest he came to Bercovitch’s irreversible Puritan guarantee was “I hope the Lord will bring us to it” (Churches 16, 20–22). Cotton identified the New Jerusalem not with America but with the coming church of those Jews who were to convert to Christianity as the millennium approached (Way 10).

Cotton Mather, John Cotton’s grandson, was no less “representative” in his speculation about New England (1702) in Magnalia Christi Americana. There he suggested that Christ had intended New England to be a pattern to his other churches, worried that this role was finished, and asked “whether the Plantation may not, soon after this, come to nothing” (1: 27). Mather claimed that the New Jerusalem would hover not over America but over the earthly Jerusalem (Smolinski 375–77).

Both ministers knew that Israel, God’s church, did not necessarily need a permanent New England Israel in order to realize prophecies in which New England appeared to play a role. Although Bercovitch asserts otherwise, they were well aware that God had not necessarily “consecrated America for the New England Way” (100). They were “a part of Israel, though but a part,” Jonathan Mitchel conventionally pointed out in 1667 (18). As Increase Mather warned succinctly, “Christ . . . ever will have a Church...