Divining America: Religion and the National Culture from the National Humanities Center


Puritanism and Predestination
Christine Leigh Heyrman
Department of History, University of Delaware
Ntional Humanities Center
October 2002

Part 1 of 2


Colonial Puritan ministers


The Puritans were a varied group of religious reformers who emerged
within the Church of England during the middle of the sixteenth century.
They shared a common Calvinist theology and common criticisms of the
Anglican Church and English society and government. Their numbers and
influence grew steadily, culminating in the English Civil War of the
1640s and the rule of Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s. With the restoration
of the Stuart monarchy in 1660, Puritanism went into eclipse in England,
largely because the movement was identified with the upheaval and
radicalism of the Civil War and Cromwell's tyrannical government, a
virtual military dictatorship.

But it persisted for much longer as a vital force in those parts of
British North America colonized by two groups of Puritans who gradually
cut their ties to the Church of England and formed separate
denominations. One group, the Congregationalists, settled Plymouth in
the 1620s and then Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and Rhode Island in
the 1630s. Another group, the Presbyterians, who quickly came to
dominate the religious life of Scotland and later migrated in large
numbers to northern Ireland, also settled many communities in New York,
New Jersey, and Pennsylvania during the late seventeenth century and
throughout the eighteenth century.

Gregg/Dugganenlarge image

Increase Mather, "The Wicked mans Portion," 1675

"That excesse in wickedness
doth bring untimely Death."

Puritans in both Britain and British North America sought to cleanse the
culture of what they regarded as corrupt, sinful practices. They
believed that the civil government should strictly enforce public
morality by prohibiting vices like drunkenness, gambling, ostentatious
dress, swearing, and Sabbath-breaking. They also wished to purge
churches of every vestige of Roman Catholic ritual and practicethe
ruling hierarchies of bishops and cardinals, the elaborate ceremonies in
which the clergy wore ornate vestments and repeated prayers from a
prescribed liturgy. Accordingly, New England's Congregational churches
were self-governing bodies, answerable to no higher authority;
mid-Atlantic Presbyterian churches enjoyed somewhat less autonomy
because a hierarchy of "presbyteries" and "synods" made up of leading
laymen and clergymen set policy for individual congregations. But both
Congregationalist and Presbyterian worship services were simple, even
austere, and dominated by long, learned sermons in which their clergy
expounded passages from the Bible. Perhaps most important, membership in
both churches was limited to the "visibly godly," meaning those men and
women who lead sober and upright lives. New England Congregationalists
adopted even stricter standards for admission to their churchesthe
requirement that each person applying for membership testify publicly to
his or her experience of "conversion." (Many Presbyterians also regarded
conversion as central to being a Christian, but they did not restrict
their membership to those who could profess such an experience.)

Guiding Student Discussion

Library of Congressenlarge image

Puritan catechism in The New-England Primer, 1646


"I was conceived in Sin &
Born in iniquity."

Explaining most of the above to your students will be easy enough,
except, of course, this matter of conversion. At the very mention of
that term, a sea of blank faces will shimmer before your unhappy eyes.
Nonetheless, gamely pursue the subject with them. Pull out all the stops
to convey what conversion meantbecause it is key to understanding the
spirituality of the Puritans (as well as all later evangelicals). What's
more, explaining this religious experience is a surefire way to get
students thinking and talking. No matter how confused they seem at
first, most will "get it" and even "get into it" if you give them a
chance.

You might tell them about the Puritan belief in predestination, which
provides the wider context for understanding conversion. This doctrine
was first elaborated by John Calvin and then adopted by
Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and a variety of other religious
groups. Calvin held that human beings were innately sinfulutterly
depraved by inheriting the original sin of Adam and Eve, the biblical
parents of the human race.

Worcester Art Museum

Elizabeth Clarke Freake and Baby Mary,
Boston, ca. 1670 (artist unknown).

"a profound sense of inner
assurance that they possessed
God's 'saving grace'"

But Calvin also taught that God, in his infinite mercy, would spare a
small number of "elect" individuals from the fate of eternal hellfire
that all mankind, owing to their corrupt natures, justly deserved. That
elect group of "saints" would be blessed, at some point in their lives,
by a profound sense of inner assurance that they possessed God's "saving
grace." This dawning of hope was the experience of conversion, which
might come upon individuals suddenly or gradually, in their earliest
youth or even in the moments before death. It is important to emphasize
to students that, in the Calvinist scheme, God decided who would be
saved or damned before the beginning of historyand that this decision
would not be affected by how human beings behaved during their lives.
The God of Calvin (and the Puritans) did not give "extra credit"nor,
indeed, any creditfor the good works that men and women performed
during their lives.

Once you have gotten this far, some students will be wondering (aloud,
with any luck) why any sane person would accept the doctrine of
predestination. The gist of their objections will be, to echo some of my
own students, that predestination "is, like, TOTALLY unfair." Some may
observe that the Puritans' God was a distinctly undemocratic sort of
deity, an unfeeling tyrant rather than a loving parent. Many more may
notice that the Puritans' God offered no incentive for upright moral
behavior: this deity had decided who will be saved or damned before the
beginning of human history, and no good actions on the part of men and
women could change that divine decree and alter their preordained fates.
(The brighter kids may also point out that Calvinist theology denied
human beings any free will.) That being the case, lots of students will
ask you why the Puritans didn't sink into despairor decide to wallow in
the world's pleasures, to enjoy the moment, since they could do nothing
to affect their eternity in the afterlife.

Library of Congressenlarge image

Title page (detail) of the 1560 "Geneva Bible," which
reflected Calvinist doctrine and was probably the Bible
taken by the Puritans to the New World. Scriptural verses
surrounding the image:

"Great are the troubles of the righteous;
but the Lord delivereth them out of all."
Psalms, 34:19

"FEARE YE NOT, STAND STIL, AND BEHOLDE
the salvation of the Lord,
which he will shewe to you this day.
THE LORD SHALL FIGHT FOR YOU; THEREFORE
holde you your peace."

Exodus 14:13-14

Once students have aired these opinions (and it's important to let that
conversation run its course, perhaps even writing their objections on
the blackboard), your most important job is to REFOCUS the class
discussion. You can do that by emphasizing one simple factnamely, that
many men and women, in both Europe and America (the Puritans among
them), wholeheartedly embraced the belief in predestination. Indeed,
they often referred to predestination as "a comfortable doctrine,"
meaning that it afforded them great solace and security. What's crucial
here, in other words, is that you encourage students to shift from
talking about why Puritanism doesn't appeal to them and into speculating
about the HISTORICAL QUESTION of WHY, indeed, it DID appeal to so many
early modern Europeans and British colonials. What you're striving for
here is to encourage your students to develop EMPATHY with people in the
distant pastto get them to IMAGINE the sort of historical
circumstances, the kind of social existence, that might have made
predestination a compelling (and reassuring) belief for large numbers of
men and women.