Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636-1641 (review)

Controversies about the nature of grace and the constraints, if any, on where and how it might flow figured importantly in the Protestant Reformation. In England and America, where Puritans carried forward the Reformers' belief in the priesthood of all believers, and in the personal receipt of grace as the only means of salvation, these controversies centered on debates about the Holy Spirit and whether its empowerment of individual conscience might transcend clerical or even biblical authority. The ostensible target of Puritan resistance to human efforts to control the pathways of divine grace was, of course, the Roman Church and its priests and sacraments. But as Michael Winship shows, Puritans in early-seventeenth-century New England directed the real fire of their animosity against one another.

Professor Winship provides a fresh account of the famous battle between the conservative and moderate leaders of the first generation of New England Puritans—Thomas Shepard, Thomas Hooker, and John Winthrop—on one hand, and more radical proponents of free grace—John Cotton, Henry Vane, and Anne Hutchinson—on the other. This book goes beyond previous histories of the controversy in its thoroughness in tracing the escalating religious tension that almost broke up the Puritan settlement in Boston, and in its identification of crucial turning points where people might have behaved differently, and history might have taken a different course. In this highly readable book, Winship reconstructs events and motivations to the best of his considerable abilities, not oblivious to his own interpretive hand, but not invested in one theology or ideology either.

The upshot of the story is that the proponents of free grace developed in symbiotic relationship with the militant defenders of social order and religious self-discipline. Shepard's growing concern about the pretentious, self-aggrandizing, and self-deluding aspects of Cotton's theology helped create a situation in which more mystical, intuitive types, like Cotton and Hutchinson, felt compelled to defend themselves. Shepard's increasingly venomous conservatism drove Hutchinson further toward radicalism, and her growing radicalism, in turn, pulled the relatively moderate Winthrop into the fray as her chief legal opponent. Winthrop's lead role in Hutchinson's banishment generated widespread resentment in Boston, which led to his unseating as Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and to the election of the religious radical, Henry Vane. Although short-lived, Vane's governorship had the further unsettling effect of calling unfavorable attention in England, where Vane was prominent and well regarded, to intolerance and confusion in Boston.

In the most skillful way, Winship shows that advocates of free grace and proponents of religious intolerance were not simply adversaries, but also creatures of each other's imaginations. The implications of this conclusion are far-reaching. One need only think about the antagonism today between seekers and fundamentalists to appreciate the ongoing relevance of Winship's discoveries about the ways in which a tiny Puritan community in seventeenth-century New England established patterns of religious and cultural interaction that still persist in the United States today.