Americans know that America was founded, as it were, by Puritans—or maybe it was the Pilgrims. Most of us don’t know the difference, and we’re not sure it matters. What we know is that they were both groups of pious Christians who came to North America for reasons that centered on religion. But similar as we might think those groups are, they were profoundly different, and those differences matter for Protestants, and particularly Reformed Protestants in the twenty-first century. This article attempts an explanation of those differences and seeks to illustrate why we ultimately have to choose between a Pilgrim legacy or a Puritan legacy.
In his 1645 speech to the Massachusetts General Court—the colony’s governing body—governor John Winthrop worried about a rising misunderstanding over the nature of political liberty that he thought threatened the commonwealth. He observed a “great mistake” concerning liberty. There was, he declared, “a twofold liberty, natural (I mean as our nature is now corrupt) and civil or federal.” Natural liberty, he argued, was
common to man with beasts and other creatures. By this, man, as he stands in relation to man simply, hath liberty to do what he lists; it is a liberty to evil as well as to good. This liberty is incompatible and inconsistent with authority, and cannot endure the least restraint of the most just authority.
Winthrop feared natural liberty, and thought it needed to be governed:
The exercise and maintaining of this liberty makes men grow more evil, and in time to be worse than brute beasts . . . This is that great enemy of truth and peace, that wild beast, which all of the ordinances of God are bent against, to restrain and subdue it.
Winthrop called the second kind of liberty
civil or federal; it may also be termed moral, in reference to the covenant between God and man, in the moral law, and the politic covenants and constitutions amongst men themselves. This liberty is the proper end and object of authority and cannot subsist without it; and it is a liberty to that only which is good, just, and honest.
The Puritan commonwealth and its people were to stand for civil or federal liberty “with the hazard (not only of your goods, but) of your lives, if need be. Whatsoever crosseth this is not authority but a distemper thereof.” True liberty was “maintained and exercised in a way of subjection to authority…” Winthrop’s assertions rested on a confident contention that his Puritan commonwealth lay on a safer footing than had the previous attempts by English colonists to create a godly society. The Pilgrim fathers who founded neighboring Plymouth Colony, for example, never seemed able to convince their fellow Englishmen, their Dutch neighbors, or perhaps even themselves that their cause was righteous.
Puritans might have made the United States into the diverse but stable republic it became by the twentieth century, but Pilgrims could not.
The difference between the story of the Pilgrims of Plymouth and the story of the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay is instructive for Protestants and Americans broadly in the twenty-first century. That the two groups were not synonymous may surprise some readers, but they had different assumptions about the nature of religious freedom. The respective stories of the Pilgrims and the Puritans have informed two different dialectics regarding the development of religious freedom in the United States. The Pilgrim story is one of separation of church and state, and near limitless religious freedom. The Puritan story is one of ordered civil liberty and a paradigm in which church and state mutually inform the Christian conception of moral, political, and social government. American Protestants in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have often claimed both Pilgrim liberty and separationism alongside Puritanism’s commitment to a religious voice in politics and the Puritans’ longtime civil and political regulation of vice. The tidy story wherein Protestants appeal to both Pilgrims and The Puritan vs. the Pilgrim Heritage Puritans, however, is ultimately both ahistorical and intellectually difficult to reconcile. America could not be, and has not been, both fully Pilgrim and fully Puritan: one group would have to be the dominant force in the American republic’s practical political theology. Put simply, Puritans might have made the United States into the diverse but stable republic it became by the twentieth century, but Pilgrims could not.
The Puritan conception of liberty echoed John Calvin’s. Deference to political authority marked the truly free citizen and the free churchman. The Puritan proposition necessarily demanded not only Christian obedience to the state, but a Christian awareness of the state’s moral actions and properties. Genevan Calvinists and Puritan New Englanders alike had to think about the state as much as they had to think about the church. But here arises a specter, a common ghoul. New England Puritanism was not, to be sure, theocratic in the strict sense of the word. The church was not—à la the Roman Catholic hierarchy of the High Middle Ages—the de facto state. But it is evident that, for the Puritan, religion did inform politics. By the Puritan light, religion and politics could never be separated. The Pilgrims, however, believed that true liberty and pure religion demanded separation.
The widely told story of the Pilgrims who came to North America in the Mayflower in 1620 is that they came to the shores of New England piously searching for unadulterated religious freedom. In his 1921 Pulitzer Prize winning The Founding of New England, James Truslow Adams poured cold water on one of the principal assertions of this Pilgrim narrative: the Pilgrims weren’t, Adams argued, victims of persecution. Known in their own time as Brownists because they were followers of radical English separatist Robert Browne (ca. 1550–1633), the Pilgrims were, Adams reminded his readers, hassled more by their neighbors than they were by the established church or the institutional state. They were simply strange and unpopular sectarians who understandably elicited mockery from their culturally, ecclesiastically, and socially better-adjusted neighbors. The persecution of the Pilgrims before they traveled to Holland “was, in the main, from neither church nor state, but only such as they had to suffer from the scoffs and jeers of their more easy-going and more commonplace neighbors and companions” (91). In 1607, some were ordered to appear before ecclesiastical authorities, and were released without further trial. Fines were imposed upon the others for non-appearance, but beyond that no action seems to have been taken. The Anglican authorities allowed non-oath-taking Pilgrim neighbors to appear without taking the required oaths, and they were released after a short confinement, without any further legal repercussions. “According to the standards of the day,” noted Adams, “they were treated with leniency, and there is little to indicate that they were ‘harried from the land,’ or that either the civil or ecclesiastical authorities were anxious to interfere with them” (The Founding of New England, 87). John Fiske, a prominent historian of Early New England active at the end of the nineteenth century, laughed at the idea that the Pilgrims were persecuted for religious reasons. The erstwhile Pilgrims pushed radical politics with their religious radicalism, and Fiske noted that charges of outright sedition were not fanciful. It was worthy of note, according to Fiske, that the accusations of being political revolutionaries instead of pious believers— accusations “warmly resented” by the Pilgrims—were true. Their religious radicalism was unquestionably joined to political radicalism that their neighbors believed was revolutionary and dangerous. It was the citizenry, not the state or the ecclesiastical hierarchy, that attacked the Pilgrims. “Their meetings,” Fiske noted flatly, “were broken up by mobs” (The Beginnings of New England, 67).
Appropriation by Evangelicals
Evangelical Protestants have reflexively affirmed the grand narrative of American history that tells the tale of pious Pilgrims coming to North America looking for religious freedom from their oppressive political and spiritual overlords. James Truslow Adams proposed that the Brownist pilgrims were not victims of en masse persecution. Adams overstated his case—perhaps because he was descended from, and admired, his own Puritan ancestors who were themselves much more likely to be accused of persecuting, rather than being persecuted. For evangelical Protestants who see themselves as downstream from the Pilgrims—Brownists, for example, were prominent in the establishment of English Baptist churches—religious liberty became a more or less total value by which the state could not establish a church and could not legislate on religion whatsoever. The Brownists created the aggressive separationist tradition that found its spokesperson in Thomas Jefferson, and which many Americans assumed was the primary influence on questions of church and state in the founding era. The strict separationist founding was what, so the story goes, led to the entrenchment of liberal values like the absolute separation of church and state through religious disestablishment. For evangelical Protestants who trace their ecclesiastical lineages to Puritan New England, however, celebrating absolute separation becomes a messier intellectual and theological proposition.
Separationism for Pilgrims and Puritans
Brownist Pilgrims who founded Plymouth Colony made separation the raison d’être of their ecclesiastic, social, and political existence. The church had to be irrevocably separated from the state, to the point that there was no way in which either church or state could exert even moral influence on the other. The Pilgrims might sincerely have believed they had a pure church, just as pure as Baptist rebel Roger Williams had, and they might also have sincerely believed they had completely separated church and state, and religion from the civil order. But if the Pilgrims had accomplished this, they had created exactly the type of political order where natural liberty—that brutish expression of unlicensed human barbarity—governed society. For the Puritan, Pilgrim separationism was nothing more than political antinomianism.
Puritan governance rejected the separationism of the Pilgrims, but they did not adopt an entirely corporatist political framework that annihilated individual civil liberties. In a recent textbook on American political theory and practice, the late Alin Fumurescu of the University of Houston and Anna Marisa Schön of Duke University argued that “both the liberal apprehension of the people, as a collection of equal individuals, on the one hand, and the republican understanding of the people as a corporate and hierarchically structured whole, on the other hand, came to be practically acknowledged throughout the settlements of New England” (Foundations of American Political Thought, 93). The Puritan settlement, therefore, upheld certain types of individualism and also maintained the social hierarchy that Early Modern Protestants believed all governments—monarchical or republican—relied on for long-term stability.
Implicit in the relationship between liberalism and republicanism is the degree to which they are symbiotic. And that symbiosis is somewhat difficult for some evangelical Protestants—brought up on a steady and unchallenged diet of polemics about individual liberty and individual salvation—to reconcile. Evangelicals join the chorus of Americans—secular and religious—who sing of the Pilgrim founding. This presents a historical dilemma for Protestants, especially those who would appeal to the legacy of New England Puritanism. There is no meaningful tradition of separationism to be had in the Puritan tradition, a fact very much recognized by historians. The American Revolution, noted Perry Miller, created a new world order on questions of religion and politics.
For the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire religion could be separated from politics, doctrinal orthodoxy divorced from loyalty to the state, and the citizens of a nation be permitted to worship in diverse churches and to believe different creeds without endangering the public peace. (Errand into The Wilderness, 141–42)
Puritans and their successors might, and eventually did, embrace disestablishment, but they did not, and indeed could not, divorce religion and politics, nor could they concede a merely natural or neutral political order. Religion, and even the church, placed demands on the state that the state was bound to listen to.
Puritan Political Theology
Puritan political theology could make peace with the American order of 1789 and the fundamental law of the United States. It could not make so easy a peace with the Jeffersonian revolution. Miller reminded his readers that “Puritan opinion was the opposite pole from Jefferson’s feeling that the best government governs as little as possible” (Errand, 143). New England’s political theorists “thought of society as a unity, bound together by inviolable ties; they thought of it not as an aggregation of individuals but as an organism, functioning for a definite purpose, with all parts subordinated to the whole” (Errand, 143). Puritans did not think that the governments and states were “merely an umpire, standing on the side lines of a contest, limited to checking egregious fouls but otherwise allowing men free play according to their abilities and the breaks of the game” (Errand, 143). A state that umpired a merely natural human society was one that essentially oversaw human wickedness run amuck: slavery, brutishness, might makes right, and subjugation of women were all hallmarks of the longue durée of human society. And Puritans—standing in the glow of Calvin’s own politics—would not allow natural human liberty to govern without the interceding moral control of Christianity and a Christian-catechized state. Puritans expected laissez-faire approaches to politics
to result in a reign of rapine and horror. The state to them was an active instrument of leadership, discipline, and, wherever necessary, of coercion; it legislated over any or all aspects of human behavior, it not merely regulated misconduct but undertook to inspire and direct all conduct. (Errand, 143)
New England’s Puritans eventually made their peace with disestablishing state churches, but they never ceased treating the state as an active instrument of leadership, discipline, and even coercion in the service of moral order. By 1833, every New England state had disestablished its state churches, but the Benevolent Empire of voluntary societies devoted to moral reform actively took up the slack where the church lost influence. Abolitionism, for example, rendered much of its rhetorical power from New England’s Puritan past. So too did attempts to regulate vice that characterized northern cities in the Gilded Age.
Twentieth-Century Debates
In the twentieth century, mainline intellectuals noted that the Puritan past was what secured the United States’ ability to maintain relative moral and social stability even as it became more ethnographically diverse. Sidney Mead argued that religious sentiment—and Mead’s work implied that sentiment was broadly Protestant and narrowly rendered from the Puritans—“permeated our tradition until, as Chesterton said, America is ‘a cosmopolitan commonwealth’” (The Nation with the Soul of a Church, 63). Religion, therefore, was what allowed America to maintain a balance in its essential moral, political, and religious unity. The United States’ Puritan-informed
synergistic cosmopolitanism lies at the heart of its nationalism—that a definitive element of the spiritual core which identifies it as a nation is the conception of a universal principle which is thought to transcend and include all the national and religious particularities brought to it by the people who come from all the world to be Americanized. (The Nation, 63)
Mead summoned Philip Schaff’s observation that America from Broadway to the markets of San Francisco presents “an ethnographic panorama.” What Schaff, and later Mead, found so remarkable about America was that “over this confused diversity there broods after all a higher unity, and that in this chaos of people the traces of a specifically American national character may be discerned” (The Nation, 63).
The roots of America’s national character, for thinkers as varied as Mead, Schaff, Tocqueville, Perry Miller, and Mark Noll to some degree lay in the Puritan legacy. Tocqueville wrote that Puritanism was not merely a religious doctrine, but it corresponded in many points “with the most absolute democratic and republican theories” (Democracy in America, vol. 1.29). Perry Miller and Thomas Johnson argued that “without some understanding of Puritanism, it may safely be said, there is no understanding of America” (Miller and Johnson, The Puritans, 1).
Modern Debates
Modern debates in Protestant and Reformed circles over political theology often celebrate the Puritans while simultaneously shying away from their political theology. Fears that the so-called postwar liberal order might be attacked by overly enthusiastic young ministers, scholars, and lay-people interested in Protestant retrieval have, it seems to me, led to a doubling down of a sort of “Pilgrim theology” that treats every institution beside the church as essentially adiaphora. Even so-called confessional Protestants—who should be the most ferocious institutionalists in every aspect of life— limit their institutional commitments to the church. In this, modern confessionalists sometimes seem more like their modern evangelical co-religionists than the Puritans.
It is a common refrain that evangelicals don’t believe in any institutions. Unhealthy confessionalism—in the shadow of Brownist Pilgrims—only believes in one institution: the visible church. Mark Noll notes that for all their faults, the Puritans believed in a multiplicity of institutions.
Although Puritans stood against Catholic and Anglican formalism, salvation for the Puritans was still mediated by institutions—family, church, covenanted society; in evangelicalism (at least in American forms), salvation was in principle unmediated except by the written Word of God. (America’s God, 173–74)
Although the Puritans
protested against nominal ecclesiastical life . . . they still treated institutions of church and society as given; American evangelicals created their own communities, at first ecclesiastical, then voluntary. (America’s God, 173)
New England Puritans “accepted authority from designated leaders; American evangelicals looked to authority from charismatic, self-selected leaders” (America’s God, 173). Puritans fenced the potential for enthusiasm with
formal learning, respect for confessions, and deference to traditional interpretations of Scripture; American evangelicals fenced in enthusiasm with self-selected leaders, individualistic Bible reading, local grassroots organizations, and intuitively persuasive reason. (America’s God, 174)
It was this Puritan penchant for institutions, combined with their commitment to a specific type of moral government, that created the American theopolitical order that could protect both devotees of the Puritans and those who favored the Pilgrims. Had the Pilgrims won out, it’s unlikely either legacy would remain today.