First Founders: American Puritans and Puritanism in an Atlantic World

Conclusion: Civil Society and the Godly Kingdom

Conclusion Civil Society and the Godly Kingdom W hat unites virtually all of the stories of the men and women (I’m not sure about sarah Keayne here) is their commitment to fashion themselves into godly individuals and to reform those around them. They did not all agree on what doctrinal beliefs constituted a true faith. Indeed, some of them viewed their lives as a pilgrimage not only in search of grace, but of understanding. And they trusted their fellow believers to find their own way. Certainly some were found to have abused their freedom to seek God, to have crossed the boundaries of acceptable beliefs, and such individuals were banished or worse if they would not conform to the community consensus . But what is truly remarkable is how little hierarchical control existed in this society. Magistrates were elected annually, and not even a John Winthrop could be assured of being returned as governor. Every colony had a legislature which was assured of meeting regularly—unlike the world they had left where until the Puritan revolution the king and the king alone determined if a Parliament should be called. Laws had to be approved by the people’s representatives meeting in those legislatures. At the local level it was town meetings of the residents that decided who was to hold local offices, how land was to be divided, and issues such as where a bridge over a local stream would be built. suspicion of established hierarchical authority shaped the formation of church life. Congregationalism meant that the lay believers chose their ministers and could dismiss them. Admissions to the church had to be approved by the believers, not simply the elders. Changes in church policies required congregational approval, and the debates over the HalfWay Covenant provided many examples of lay believers rejecting the 270 First Founders advice of long-established clergy. As the previous pages have shown, over the course of the seventeenth century there was a movement to vest greater authority in the hands of the clergy, and eventually this would succeed. But the movement was contested as clergy such as John davenport and laymen such as John Leverett fought to preserve the participatory elements of church polity. Part of the religious legacy of these men and women was the belief that at the essence of Christianity was the commandment to love one’s neighbor. A godly kingdom was one in which, as John Winthrop expressed it, each was expected to “delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together—always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.” or, in Anne Bradstreet’s words, “God will have us beholden one to another.” To advance the common good meant that each person and each family must proclaim godly values and live according to those values. True liberty was constrained by an obligation to care for others. one consequence of this was a determination to subject public affairs to moral scrutiny. Another was the insistence on insuring that all individuals—rich and poor, free and unfree, women as well as men—were taught to read and given access to the scriptures and to copies of the laws. Because, as the Massachusetts school Law of 1642 expressed it, “the good education of children is of singular behoof and benefit to any Common-wealth,” each colony required parents to see that all in their households learn to read, and mandated the employment of schoolmasters to facilitate that policy. Every step taken in establishing this legacy was contested, and that is one of the lessons of approaching the larger story through the individual stories of men and women who made their own unique contributions to the society’s evolution. An analysis of other lives, beyond those treated in this book, would reveal additional nuances in the shaping of New England. But such stories would also contribute to an understanding of what makes colonial New England important in the shaping of American values. The seventeenth-century puritans were truly founders in that they imparted to future Americans an insistence on the importance of self-examination and self-improvement, on the importance of participa- Conclusion 271 tory government in state and church, and on the need for individuals to sacrifice for the advancement of the common good. They subjected public behavior to the demands...