Preface: How did Puritans move to the New World?

1) The Reformation

To understand England at the start of the sixteenth century, begin with its institutions. Around 1500, England belonged religiously to what historians call Latin Christendom: the community of Western European Christians under the Roman Church, from the late Middle Ages into the early modern period. It was not simply a community of faith. It was a system of governance in which religion, law, culture, and politics overlapped almost completely. "Latin" here does not refer to ethnicity. It refers to an institutional language. Liturgy, scripture, church documents, legal instruments, and theology were all conducted in Latin. A single language meant a single authority: whoever controlled the Latin system controlled interpretation. This is where Latin Christendom's highly centralized power came from.

Latin Christendom was not the whole Christian world. Its center was Rome, and its authority rested on the pope, the Latin language, and canon law. The center of Greek Christianity was Constantinople, today's Istanbul, and its authority rested on Orthodox tradition, the Greek language, and the emperor. Rome dominated Western Europe; Constantinople dominated the eastern Mediterranean and Eastern Europe. After the Great Schism of 1054 divided the two, England, France, the German lands, and Spain all belonged to the Latin branch.

Within Latin Christendom, the pope was the supreme religious authority, and his power reached far beyond religion. He ruled on doctrine and heresy, and he had the final word on whether a marriage was valid. That was not a private matter. It decided inheritance, property, and dynastic succession. In effect, the papacy combined what today would be a supreme court, an agency of social regulation, and a certifier of political legitimacy. Within this system, England was one regional church among many.

Canon law was a transnational legal order. Church courts stood apart from royal courts, and clergy could claim the right to be tried by the church, known as "benefit of clergy." Even within a kingdom's own territory, the state's sovereignty was incomplete. In England, France, and Spain before the sixteenth century, two court systems generally coexisted. Royal courts handled secular affairs; church courts handled marriage, wills, morals, and other "matters of the soul." The boundary between them was contested for centuries. English kings fought to limit church jurisdiction, from Henry II's Constitutions of Clarendon in 1164 to the Statutes of Praemunire in 1353 and 1393, which restricted appeals to Rome. But the church's courts remained, and cases could still be carried beyond the kingdom to the papal court. Stated abstractly, this was overlapping jurisdiction. In practice, it cut into the state's judicial power.

The church also had its own economic base outside royal control. It owned vast lands and property and collected the tithe, a compulsory payment of one-tenth of income or produce. The tithe drew on the Old Testament practice of giving a tenth of the harvest to God. By the Middle Ages it was fully institutionalized, and refusing to pay was an offense that church courts could punish. Nearly every household paid, from peasants and artisans to merchants and some landowners, in grain, wine, livestock, wool, milk, and later in cash. Tithes mostly supported local parishes, monasteries, and dioceses. Other payments, such as annates (a new bishop's first year's income) and Peter's Pence, went to Rome. None of this passed through the royal treasury.

From the crown's point of view, the problem was plain. Subjects already paid taxes to the king, yet they also paid the church, and that money could not be audited or requisitioned by the state, and part of it went abroad. This weakened royal finance, military mobilization, and administration. Ordinary people were caught between two fears. If they did not pay, they feared for their souls. If they did, the burden in this life grew heavier, especially in years of famine, war, or bad harvests. Anticlerical resentment ran deep, but it had no legitimate outlet.

A king's legitimacy did not rest on bloodline alone. It also required the church's recognition. The pope could confirm a ruler's legitimacy or deny it, and could cripple a reign through excommunication. Excommunication was the gravest religious and political sanction the medieval church could impose. Issued by the pope or senior church courts under canon law, it could fall on anyone: commoners, nobles, bishops, even kings. The excommunicated were barred from the sacraments and publicly declared to be in spiritual danger. Oaths sworn to them could be treated as void, and subjects released from obedience. Others could lawfully shun them, cutting off trade, marriage, and legal dealings. For a monarch, it could be devastating. In 1208, during a dispute with Pope Innocent III over the appointment of the archbishop of Canterbury, England was placed under interdict. Church services stopped, and most sacraments, including church burials, were suspended. In 1209 the pope excommunicated King John himself. By 1213, facing rebellious barons and a threatened French invasion, John submitted, and made England a fief of the papacy.

For a state taking modern shape, this was intolerable. A kingdom should not be declared illegitimate by a foreign authority, a king should not lose his right to rule under religious law, and law and allegiance had to be rooted at home. Yet in the early sixteenth century England still recognized Rome's religious supremacy, still had two parallel legal systems, still had vast resources outside royal control, and still depended on papal rulings for its most important decisions. Latin Christendom had been built in the Middle Ages. Now it faced the rise of the modern state. As kings moved to unify law, taxation, and armed force, the papal system became a structural obstacle. The English Reformation was, at its core, England's exit from Latin Christendom.

The trigger was a marriage. In 1527, Henry VIII asked Pope Clement VII to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, who had not given him a male heir. The pope, whose power in Italy then depended on Catherine's nephew, Emperor Charles V, refused to grant it. Henry answered with statute. The Act in Restraint of Appeals (1533) ended appeals to Rome, and the Act of Supremacy (1534) declared the king Supreme Head of the Church of England. Between 1536 and 1541 the monasteries were dissolved and their lands passed to the crown. Doctrine swung back and forth under his children, Protestant under Edward VI and Catholic again under Mary I, until the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 fixed the Church of England's shape: Protestant in doctrine, but still governed by bishops and keeping much of the old liturgy.

That compromise produced the Puritans. From the 1560s onward, they demanded that the church be "purified" of what they saw as Catholic remnants. They objected to elaborate ritual, vestments, and religious images, and many rejected government by bishops. They insisted on the supreme authority of scripture and the individual's direct relationship to God, and practiced strict moral discipline. Over time the Puritans divided. Moderates stayed inside the Church of England and worked to reform it from within, still accepting it as the national church. Radicals concluded it was beyond saving and separated from it entirely. In 1620, some of these Separatists sailed for North America on the Mayflower.

2) Protestantism

"Protestantism" is an umbrella term for the family of Christian traditions that emerged from the European Reformation of the sixteenth century. It is not a single church or denomination but a collection of reform movements. What they share is not identical doctrine but a systematic rejection of the Roman Church's structure of authority. Protestants deny that the pope holds supreme religious authority. They hold that scripture, not church tradition, is the final standard of faith. They believe salvation comes through faith itself, not through the mediation of the church, its sacraments, or good works. And they hold that believers can stand directly before God, with personal conscience playing a role in matters of faith that the church cannot fully replace. The name itself came a little later, from the "Protestation" that Lutheran princes presented at the Diet of Speyer in 1529.

The conventional starting point is 1517. That year, the German theologian Martin Luther circulated his Ninety-five Theses in Wittenberg, questioning the church's sale of indulgences. It was a theological and academic challenge, not a political revolt. Its historical weight lies in the fact that, for the first time, it openly placed conscience and the authority of scripture above the authority of the church, shaking the foundations of Latin Christendom.

This was not an accident of timing. Europe had long resented the church's financial privileges, legal immunities, and moral corruption. Printing had weakened the church's monopoly over texts and knowledge. Territorial states were growing stronger, and lay religious consciousness was deepening. Luther's challenge set off a chain reaction because it put these long-standing tensions into theological terms and spread them at the speed of the press.

Protestantism was never a single church. The Reformation took different routes in different places. In Germany and Scandinavia, the Lutheran tradition formed around Luther. In Switzerland and French-speaking regions, the Reformed tradition developed around figures such as Zwingli and, above all, Calvin. In England, the Church of England was created under the direction of the crown. These traditions differed sharply in church government, worship, and their relationship to political power. They were grouped together because they all rejected the pope as the supreme religious authority.

At bottom, the line between Protestant and Catholic is not whether one believes in God. It is the final source of authority. Catholicism holds that church tradition and papal authority are central to faith. Protestantism returns final authority to scripture, understood and practiced through personal conscience. That shift changed the religious map of Europe and shaped the modern state, legal systems, and ideas of individual responsibility.

Martin Luther was born in 1483 in Eisleben, in Saxony. He was an Augustinian friar trained in rigorous scholastic theology and, from 1512, a professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg. He was entirely an insider of the Latin church, not a marginal figure or a political rebel. He lectured on scripture for years, especially Paul's letters to the Romans and the Galatians. His ideas came not from popular anticlericalism but from sustained theological study.

His temperament matters. Luther was no casual reformer. He was a man tormented for years by the question of how a sinner can be saved before God. He felt his own sinfulness acutely and could never find inner certainty in the path to salvation the church offered. Out of that intense, inward anxiety he gradually reached the conclusions later seen as revolutionary.

On October 31, 1517, Luther sent his Ninety-five Theses to Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz. Tradition says he also posted them on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, though historians debate whether that happened. The theses were not a revolutionary manifesto. They were propositions in Latin for academic debate, meant for the university and the clergy. Their subject was specific: the indulgences then being heavily promoted in Germany, especially by the Dominican preacher Johann Tetzel. An indulgence, bought with money, was said to reduce the time the buyer, or a deceased relative, would spend being punished in purgatory. The practice had become frankly commercial, summed up in the jingle attributed to Tetzel: "As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs." Luther insisted that true repentance is an inward turning, not a transaction. The church had no right to turn forgiveness into commerce, still less to promise spiritual results in exchange for money.

Luther did not deny the pope's authority outright. But he argued that even the pope could only declare what God had already forgiven. He could not create forgiveness on his own authority. This sounded modest, but its logic was devastating, because it denied the church's active control over salvation. On the surface, the theses attacked an abuse. Underneath, they raised a fundamental question: did the church hold a monopoly on mediating between human beings and God? If salvation depended on faith and not on the institution, the church's authority was no longer indispensable. If individuals could understand their faith directly through scripture, the clerical hierarchy lost its theological foundation.

Luther's motive was not political resistance but conscience. He believed indulgences misled believers and gave them false security, letting them think they could buy their way out of true repentance. The conviction behind his challenge, reached through years of study, was that people are saved not by works or merit but by faith alone, the doctrine later summarized as justification by faith (sola fide). The times magnified what he did. Printing spread his words across Germany within weeks, and German princes, long resentful of Rome's financial demands, were willing to shelter a religious dissenter. The academic dispute Luther had in mind quickly became an open and irreversible conflict.

In 1517, Luther did not think he was founding a new tradition. He hoped the church would correct itself, and he always saw himself as faithful to the core of Christianity. It was Rome's response that pushed him out: the investigation, the condemnation, his excommunication in January 1521, and his outlawing by the Edict of Worms that May. In that process, Luther turned from a reformer into the starting point of a historic rupture. He did not set out to destroy religion. He was a theologian who refused to accept that institutions and money could substitute for faith. What he challenged was not only indulgences but whether the church held final authority over salvation. Once that question was asked in public, the history of Protestantism had begun.

3) The Reformations Compared

Before Protestantism proper, Europe had already seen reform movements that anticipated it. The most important were the Hussites. They arose in Bohemia in the early fifteenth century around the theologian Jan Hus, who drew heavily on the English reformer John Wycliffe. Hus held that scripture stood above church authority. He attacked church corruption, indulgences, and clerical privilege, and called for preaching in the vernacular. He did not try to found a new church. He challenged the Roman Church's structure of power directly. After Hus was burned at the stake at the Council of Constance in 1415, Bohemia was torn by the Hussite Wars (1419–1434), and a theological dispute became a political conflict entangled with Czech national identity. The Hussites never developed a complete Protestant theology, but they proved, a century before Luther, that Rome's authority could be challenged. They are often called "Protestants before Protestantism."

The first Protestant tradition to take shape was Lutheranism, which grew directly out of Luther's reforms in Germany. Its theological core is justification by faith: salvation depends entirely on faith, not good works or church institutions. It firmly rejected papal supremacy but was relatively conservative in church structure and worship, keeping much of the outward form of the medieval church. Politically, it accommodated secular rulers, holding that the state was responsible for maintaining church order. It became the state church across much of Germany and Scandinavia, and it was socially stable and less prone to moral or political radicalism.

The Reformed tradition, often called Calvinism, went further in both theology and discipline. It took shape in Switzerland and the French-speaking world, beginning with Huldrych Zwingli in Zurich, and was given systematic form by John Calvin in Geneva. It stressed the absolute sovereignty of God and the doctrine of predestination: whether a person is saved is not their own choice but God's will. For that reason it placed great weight on church discipline and moral order, and rejected any ritual or decoration without clear scriptural warrant. In Geneva, Calvin helped build a tightly ordered religious community in which the church governed not only belief but daily life. The English Puritans, the Scottish Presbyterians, the Dutch Reformed Church, and the New England tradition all descend from this line.

England took a different path, producing the Church of England, or Anglicanism. It was driven not by a theologian but by the crown. It affirmed the authority of scripture and rejected papal supremacy, which placed it in the Protestant camp. But in organization and worship it kept much Catholic tradition: bishops, sacraments, and vestments. The compromise was politically stable but religiously unsatisfying to many. Out of that tension came the Puritans, who never stopped accusing the Church of England of an unfinished reformation.

The most radical, and least tolerated, wing of the Reformation was the Anabaptists, who emerged in Zurich in 1525. They rejected infant baptism, holding that only adults who consciously chose faith could be baptized, and so they baptized one another again, which is what "Anabaptist" means. This challenged not only church tradition but the way states used the church to register and govern their populations. Many Anabaptist groups refused to swear oaths or bear arms, and some rejected the authority of secular government altogether. After radical Anabaptists seized the city of Münster in 1534–35, both Catholic and Protestant rulers treated them as dangerous and persecuted them brutally. Yet their ideas about voluntary faith, religious freedom, and the separation of church and state became common sense centuries later.

If the Anabaptists challenged the alliance of church and state, the antitrinitarians, later called Unitarians, challenged Christianity's core doctrine. Their movements took shape in the second half of the sixteenth century, chiefly in Poland, in Transylvania, and among exiled Italian intellectuals such as Fausto Sozzini. They denied the Trinity, insisting on the oneness of God and seeing Jesus as a divinely chosen moral exemplar rather than of one substance with God. This made them heretics in the eyes of Catholics and mainstream Protestants alike.

Their best-known forerunner, the Spanish physician and theologian Michael Servetus, was burned in Geneva in 1553 for denying the Trinity, a case often flattened in the retelling. Before he reached Geneva, Servetus had already been condemned to death by the Catholic Inquisition in France and burned in effigy after escaping. In Geneva, Calvin was not a neutral bystander. The formal complaint was filed by his secretary, Nicolas de la Fontaine, and Calvin supplied the case against Servetus's theology. But the sentence belonged to the city council, and Calvin asked that Servetus be beheaded rather than burned, a request the council refused. The case says less about Calvin's personal cruelty than about the whole age. Catholics and Protestants alike treated heresy as a capital crime. Luther urged the princes to crush the rebelling German peasants in 1525. Zwingli supported the drowning of the Anabaptist Felix Manz in Zurich in 1527. In England, the Catholic Lord Chancellor Thomas More pursued Protestant heretics, several of whom were burned during his chancellorship. Servetus's death does not reveal the limits of Protestant tolerance in particular. It reveals the limits of sixteenth-century Europe as a whole.

Seen together, these movements divide the work. The Hussites challenged the legitimacy of church authority and prepared the way. Lutherans and the Reformed answered the questions of how one is saved and who holds the right to interpret scripture. The Church of England resolved the conflict between national sovereignty and religious order. The Anabaptists challenged the premise that church and state should govern society together. The antitrinitarians tested the outer limit of what Christian theology could tolerate. Their breakthroughs, failures, and divergences together made up the untidy, tension-filled formation of Protestantism.

4) The Puritans in the New World

The Reformation settled, within Europe, the question of who held final authority over interpretation. It did not settle a more practical question: where should reformers go when they could not win at home? For the Puritans, the Church of England's compromise, separated from Rome in doctrine but still governed by bishops, was never an end point. It was an open wound.

The core of the group that sailed on the Mayflower in 1620 came from Puritanism's most radical wing: Separatists who had concluded that the Church of England could not be saved and that the only answer was to leave it and build their own church. Many had already fled to Leiden in the Netherlands around 1609. Even so, they made up only about a third of the ship's 102 passengers; the rest, whom they called "Strangers," were recruited by the London merchants who financed the voyage. William Bradford, the colony's governor, later wrote that they "knew they were pilgrims," but the name "Pilgrims," or "Pilgrim Fathers," became standard only around two centuries later. They saw themselves as people forced to leave a homeland they considered unclean. Plymouth Colony was not an act of expansion. It was the end point of a flight.

The main body of English Puritanism did not follow the Separatists. Ten years later, in 1630, John Winthrop led a far larger fleet, eleven ships carrying some 700 colonists, part of a migration of about a thousand people on seventeen ships that year, and founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony. This group kept its distance from Plymouth, not only geographically but in principle. The Separatists denied the Church of England's legitimacy outright. Winthrop's Puritans still saw themselves as reformers within the national church, who had gone overseas to find ground where they could stay inside it without compromising with it. The two migrations were close in theology but opposed in political identity, a continuation of the same fracture the Reformation had opened. In England, the separatist and Independent strands would later feed into the Civil War and Cromwell's Commonwealth. In Massachusetts, Winthrop's logic produced something else: a new church that answered, in practice, to its own authority.

Massachusetts Bay thus took on a contradictory shape. In resisting one church hierarchy, it built another that was just as intolerant. Roger Williams, a minister at Salem, argued that the colony's churches should separate completely from the Church of England, that magistrates had no business enforcing religious duties, and that the king's charter gave no right to Native land. He was sentenced to banishment in 1635, fled in early 1636, and founded Providence, the start of what became Rhode Island. In 1637, Anne Hutchinson, who held meetings in her home, first for women and then for men as well, and whose teaching on grace diverged from that of most of the colony's ministers, was tried by the colony's General Court with Winthrop presiding, and banished. These were not isolated episodes. They followed from the logic of the migration itself. A group driven out by church authority, once it held unchecked power of its own, quickly rebuilt the same structure, with "elder" and "governor" in place of "pope" and "bishop." The Reformation, at its core, had never been about abolishing authority. It had been about who would hold it. In New England, the Puritans did not end that contest. They moved it across an ocean, from a fight against Canterbury to the building of a new Canterbury that answered to no one but itself. 🇺🇸