II. PROTESTANT ROOTS OF AMERICAN CULTURE
|
THEME: Although diverse religious influences
have shaped American culture, the dominant tradition has been Protestant Christianity.
This topic deals with the currents of English Protestantism
that most heavily influenced the colonial background to the American nation. |
THE ENGLISH REFORMATION
English Christianity, 1520-1620
The Reformation in England was
first of all a political act. In the 1520s King Henry VIII and his
Parliament took the governance of the English Church from the
pope, declaring the monarch as its head. [Act of Supremacy, 1534].
He also closed the kingdom's many monasteries and convents,
confiscating their land to use as political patronage. Otherwise
King Henry, who disapproved of Protestant ideas, left religious life
pretty much intact. This was the beginning of the Anglican branch of
Christianity which eventually came to be marked by both Catholic and
Protestant features.
After Henry's death (1547)
Church reformers like Thomas Cranmer,
with the approval of Henry's teenage son,
Edward VI,
(1547-1553), brought the Anglican Church towards Protestant piety
and theology, reforms reflected in Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer.
When
Edward died, his older and devoutly Catholic sister,
Mary Tudor
(1553-1558) returned England to the
Roman Catholic fold and made
martyrs of
Protestant-minded church leaders by driving them into exile or
executing them. But like her young half-brother, Mary's reign
was short.
She was succeeded by her
younger half-sister,
Elizabeth
(1558-1603), sympathetic to some of Cranmer's reforms and eager to
bring stability to her kingdom. Her
religious settlement was a blend of Catholic tradition and
Protestant reform. During her long reign the pendulum swing
between Protestant and Catholic identities stopped and England
entered a kind of golden age (the
Elizabethan
Age).
Despite Elizabeth's attempt at
a balanced religious settlement, there were still people in Britain
who missed the older Catholic ways and still others who wanted to
push further towards Protestantism. These more radical reformers who
wanted a "purer" more Protestant church, though a diverse bunch,
came to be known as Puritans. [Rise of
Puritanism]
The new monarch,
James
I (1603-1625), in whose reign the foundation of England's
American colonies was laid, faced ever more vocal demands from
Puritans. By the 1620s and 1630s it was clear that the
Reformation in Britain had laid the roots for a contentious
religious diversity that by the 1640s would lead to Civil War. This
was the religious background to the founding of the English
colonies, to what historian Perry Miller has called "Errand Into the Wilderness."[Read it in Porterfield, #1.]
There is a wealth of more
information on the Reformation in England at this BBC site:
Reformation. |
ERRAND INTO THE WILDERNESS
English Protestantism in the New World: City on a Hill
 | PLANTINGS: 17th century Virginia, New England, & In Between
 | How important were Puritanism & the
New England
Way? |
| Unity and Diversity:
[Note how Marty (chap. 5)
stresses the differences between Virginia, New England, and the Middle Colonies.
] |
|
| PURITAN SPIN ON THE PROTESTANT PERSPECTIVE
| Conversion Experience
 | Hearts pierced by the Word: "They whose hearts are pierced by the ministry of the
word they are carried with love and respect to the ministers of it."
(Thomas
Hooker
(1586-1647), Repentant Sinners and Their Ministers) |
| Transformed Personalities |
|
Thomas Shepard as a Case History of the Puritan Experience
|
| Emanuel College, Cambridge, 1620s (3rd generation of English Protestantism) |
| Pattern of his conversion experience (See
excerpts in the Shepard document.)
Note that his account, in both form and
images, is like a sexual seduction;
(note male and female images)
| The Way Down |
| The Pit |
| Stumbling out and up |
| Acceptance of grace and the Covenant; he saw God's mercy as free and
himself as passive in coming to Christ. He also saw Christ as his antithesis. he also saw
that he was elected for this gift of becoming completed united to his antithesis. (Again,
note the sexual imagery.) |
|
|
| Puritan Theology to Fit the Experience: The major Protestant theologian
for Puritans was John
Calvin, although they drew on others as well.
| Justification and Sanctification (See John Cotton
document on the Covenant of Grace.)
| Divine Sovereignty and Will |
| Human Depravity & God's Grace |
| Separation of Nature and Grace:This is perhaps the most important
Protestant departure from traditional Christianity. (See Consecration
of Nature) |
| The Elect & Predestination: See the
Calvin
document..
|
|
| Covenant & Community of Saints (See
Winthrop in Porterfield)
| A person, once convinced of being touched by grace, made a
covenant with God and a covenant with other saints to gather into a church. For them the
church was not everyone within a parish boundary but rather those who had the experience
of grace. Thus the Puritans saw themselves as apart from the rest of society, a vanguard
called to lead the way towards God's kingdom. |
| The Church
for a people of covenant.
|
|
| Vocation (calling) and Mission
| Calling was an important part of the Puritan experience. It is
remarkable that although they believed in predestination, once
convinced they were favored
with God grace, they were relentlessly activist. |
| God and Humankind as active forces in history |
|
| Eschatology & Millennialism
|
| Puritan
Resources |
| Cotton Mather Home Page |
|
|
|
RELIGIOUS CHALLENGES TO SOCIAL ORDER
THE NEW ENGLAND WAY: A Polity for a City Upon a
Hill.
The Puritan's theology of justification,
experience of grace, covenant, and church led them to develop in New
England a particular political and social order to serve Winthrop's vision
in The Model of
Christian Charity. By 1648 the ideas that shaped the New England Way
were expressed in the
Cambridge Platform.
| Only those admitted to full membership in the
church could fully participate in government. |
| The Church was the moral compass for society
and its rules and moral teachings were enforced by the government. The
government protected and supported the church and the church served the
political order. |
| Religious diversity and disrespect for
established social order and traditions were not to be tolerated.
|
CONSCIENCE & THE PURITAN DILEMMA
The Protestant emphasis on the individual
experience of grace quite naturally led some to question institutional
authority. Indeed, the major Protestant reformers (Luther and Calvin)
recognized the problem and tried to deal with it in various ways. For the
founders of the New England Way, the problem manifested itself early in
what came to be called the Antinomian Crisis. (Antinomian is based on
Latin for "against law or rule".) The crisis was centered on the
activities and views of an extraordinary woman in Boston, Anne Hutchinson.
But the problem, which was fundamentally the issue of the rights of
individual conscience vs. the requirements for institutional authority and
communal order, was also seen in the ministry of Roger Williams, the
founder of Rhode Island.
| The New England Way Bedeviled
Towards the
end of the 17th century fears of witchcraft troubled some New
England communities, most famously Salem in Massachusetts. Although
the persecution of alleged witches is strictly speaking not an issue
of dissent, it does illustrate the way troubled communities can pick
on individuals perceived to be deviant to use as scapegoats.
Here are three essays on recent views about
the witchcraft hysteria. Note how historians have been exploring the
social dimension of the topic.
|
Here are two
sites offering various materials:
|
Witchcraft in Salem
Village [a rich archive of materials on the trials.
BEWARE - one can get swamped with so fascinating information.] |
| Salem Witchcraft
[a Salem city guide with information for tourists and students.] |
|
|
