Puritan’s Political Ideas
BY: Randy, Samantha, Liseth and
Jackie
Political Structure of Religion
• In New England strictly speaking there was no
such thing as “the church.”
• Must be a church member to gain political
rights, but did not lose them if he is not a
member anymore for any reason.
• Did exercise admonition over its members by
admonition and excommunication.
Politics in New England
• They favored autonomous congregations of
churchgoers over a national, centralized
church which is what separated them from
the Presbyterians.
• Though serial town settlement was ultimately
a laboratory for the democratic system that
would flourish after the American Revolution,
it also possessed conservative tendencies.
The Way Of Ruling
• Ministers in colonial Massachusetts were forbidden by
law from holding office, so that there could be no
interference of politics with their spiritual duties.
• The law mandated that states enforce religious
devotion, and all towns were required to establish a
Congregationalist church and support a minister by
levying taxes.
• Anyone who practiced witchcraft, committed
blasphemy, or worshipped a god other than the one
acknowledged by the Puritans was subject to death.
Puritans Political Way of Life
• Wherever a new town emerged it was in fact designed
to reproduce the same agrarian system governed by
strict rules and adhering to common Puritan values and
customs.
• This ordering of society, of souls and of the
environment, was viewed at the time as a fulfillment of
the Puritans' holy mission.
• Orderly and civilized expansion was the Puritans'
righteous justification for having left England to
establish a "city upon a hill" as an upright and pious
society that could serve as a model to the rest of the
world.
Bibliography
• http://www.nd.edu/~rbarger/www7/puritans.
html
• http://books.google.com/books?id=pWiBcosYHIC&lpg=PP1&ots=L37U0nJD8N&dq=politic
al%20puritan&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false
• http://www.shmoop.com/new-englandpuritans-pilgrims/politics.html