Church, State, and Commonwealth: The Transatlantic Puritan Movement in England and America

Like most puritan divines, the Reverend John Davenport spent a good deal of his adult life explaining the subtleties of his beliefs. These conversations were often informal, but some, including his Discourse about Civil Government in a New Plantation Whose Design is Religion, found their way into print. Davenport wrote the Discourse around 1638 or 1639 in response to an unnamed correspondent who wondered "Whether the Right and Power of Chusing Civil Magistrates belongs unto the Church of Christ?"¹ In the late 1630s, the answer to that question was of great interest to English audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Puritans in Massachusetts Bay had recently embraced their own brand of congregationalism and adopted a radical form of civil government that entangled ecclesiastical and civil polities by restricting the franchise to male church members, moves that attracted intense scrutiny in England. Over twenty-four pages, Davenport expounded on his views of civil polities and their relationship to the church. Yet before delving into his intricate, six-part argument, he critiqued the inquiry itself. The wording of the question betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding. It assumed that ecclesiastical and civil polities together constituted the basic elements of society, but the real foundation was something else entirely: "Christian Communion." In Davenport's taxonomy, "Christian Communion" was the "Genus" of society, and ecclesiastical and civil polities its "Species."² Although church and state each had different objectives, they shared the goal of promoting the common welfare, of nurturing Christian Communion.

Perhaps we too have been asking the wrong questions. Twenty-five years ago, historian David D. Hall bemoaned how out of touch the "half-truths" scholars tell about puritanism in seventeenth-century New England were with recent scholarship.³ Despite a steady stream of monographs published in the intervening decades, historians and literary scholars still grapple with that disconnect. Both Abram C. Van Engen and Francis J. Bremer, for example, promote their studies in part as rebuttals to the tenacious half-truth of stern and unfeeling puritans. All three of the books under review advance a recent revival in puritan studies that is beginning to close this gap. Examining institutions, intangible feelings, and the lived experiences that knit puritans in England and America together, the authors take puritan theology and the intricate bonds between New England's ecclesiastical and civil polities seriously. In recovering the face-to-face interactions and dialogues between individuals from various points on the spectrum of puritan orthodoxy, the authors suggest how puritans moved toward the larger goal of fostering Christian Communion by negotiating relationships among themselves.

In Godly Republicanism, Michael P. Winship returns to the beginnings of the puritan movement following the ascension of Queen Elizabeth I and the restoration of Protestantism to England. Described as a "study in applied sacred political theory" (4), the book examines the republican foundations of church and state in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. Winship builds on recent English scholarship that locates the roots of republicanism not in the mid-seventeenth century but in Tudor and early Stuart England. Religion has not factored prominently in that historiography, but Winship brings to light "assumptions and webs of concern" (5) that linked puritanism to secular political ideals that we recognize as republicanism. Godly ecclesiastical republicanism and secular republicanism shared common "priorities and anxieties," namely "the dread of the corrupting effects of power, the fear of one-man rule, the emphasis on the consent of the people and on balanced government" (5). Throughout, Winship highlights the surprising and significant ways that separatists, "black sheep" (7) among puritans and their historians, interacted with radical...