Abstract
While separatist and non-separatist puritans were wrestling with issues of church formation and governance in England and the Netherlands, beginning in 1620 other reformers were dealing with the same issues on the other side of the Atlantic. In that year members of John Robinson’s Leiden congregation settled at Plymouth, along Cape Cod in New England, and organized their own congregation. Later in that decade members of that Plymouth church traveled up the coast to Salem to offer material and spiritual assistance to the first settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Freed from the close supervision of English bishops and Dutch authorities, New England puritans crafted a religious culture that offered lay believers considerable power. Indeed, the decades of the 1620s and 1630s in New England can be judged to have witnessed the fullest expression of lay empowerment in the history of puritanism. By the early 1630s one colonist claimed that “the order of the churches and of the Commonwealth was so settled, by common consent, that it brought to his mind the new Heaven and the New Earth, wherein dwells righteousness.”1
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Notes
John Davenport, recalling a report from John Cotton in the 1630s; quoted in Francis J. Bremer, Building a New Jerusalem: John Davenport, a Puritan in Three Worlds (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 339.
William Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647, two volumes (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1912), I, 402–3.
Mark A. Peterson, “The Plymouth Church and the Evolution of Puritan Religious Culture,” The New England Quarterly, 66 (December 1993), 575–6. Peterson provides an excellent analysis of the church, stressing the extent to which it was dominated by the laity in its early years.
For Endecott see Francis J. Bremer, First Founders: American Puritans and Puritanism in the Atlantic World (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2012), 29–44.
Raymond Phineas Stearns and David Holmes Brawner, “New England Church ‘Relations’ and Continuity in Early Congregational History,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 75 (1965), 24.
Quoted in Geoffrey F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience, with a new introduction by Peter Lake (University of Chicago Press, 1992), 142.
Charles Gott to William Bradford in Governor William Bradford’s Letter Book (Bedford, MA; 2001 reprint), 47–9.
Williston Walker makes the case for why the formation of the church had to have come before the selection of Higginson and Skelton as officers in Williston Walker, The Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism (Boston: Pilgrim, 1960), 104–7.
The office of ruling elder was often seen as distinct from that of the preaching elders. Whether the office was jure divino or not, and whether it existed in terms of its relationship to the lay congregants and the clergy were matters of debate in both New England and in England during the 1640s and 1650s. While some scholars have argued that in New England the ruling elder, like the deacon, was a lay officer, John Cotton and others appear to have viewed the office as clerical. I am not going to explore this particular theme in the role of the laity in puritanism, but an excellent review of the issues can be found in William M. Abbott, “Ruling Eldership in Civil War England, the Scottish Kirk, and Early New England: A Comparative Study of Secular and Spiritual Aspects,” Church History, 75 (2006), 38–68.
A similar process of forming a congregation, unaided by any contact with Plymouth, took place in Bermuda, where the puritan clergyman Lewis Hughes organized a church sometime before 1617, having members of the church signify their choice of elders by a show of hands. See A. C. Hollis Hallett, Chronicle of a Colonial Church; 1612–1826, Bermuda (Bermuda: Juniper Hill, 1993), 19–20.
Richard Gildrie, Salem, Massachusetts 1626–1683: A Covenanted Community (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1975), 5–8.
Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 166–7.
The only source for these events is a letter complaining about them from John Cotton to Samuel Skelton, June 13, 1631 in Sargent Bush, Jr., ed., The Correspondence of John Cotton (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 15–41, 149. A slightly different transcription, with its own commentary, is in
David D. Hall, “John Cotton’s Letter to Samuel Skelton,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd s., 22 (1965), 478–85.
Philip F. Gura, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620–1660 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984), 37.
Stephen Foster, “New England and the Challenge of Heresy, 1630–1660: The Puritan Crisis in Transatlantic Perspective,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd s., 38 (1981), 628.
Don Gleason Hill, ed., The Record of Baptisms, Marriages, and Deaths … Transcribed from the Church Records in the Town of Dedham, Massachusetts, 1638–1845 (Dedham, 1888), 1–6.
Michael P. Winship, Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636–1641 (Princeton, 2002), 49.
See the discussion in Lewis R. Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), especially 137–8 and 158.
Michael McGiffert, ed., God’s Plot: Puritan Spirituality in Thomas Shepard’s Cambridge (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 147.
Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana: The Ecclesiastical History of New England, 2 vols (Hartford, CT, 1853), I, 554.
Cotton, quoted in Ann Hughes, “Puritanism and Gender,” in John Coffey and Paul Lim, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 298.
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Bremer, F.J. (2015). Shaping the New England Way. In: Lay Empowerment and the Development of Puritanism. Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1500–1800. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137352897_6
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