1620, Mayflower | Separatists

Preface: Welcome to this quick recap of the history of immigration of US. It's a good time reflect on that now, isn't it?

A Three Way Street

Henry died believing himself a Catholic — he heard Mass, believed in the corporeal presence in the Eucharist, endowed a chantry for his soul in his will. What changed under Henry was sovereignty, not soteriology: the Act of Supremacy (1534) relocates final ecclesiastical authority from Rome to the Crown. The Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536–41) is the part with actual social and economic teeth — it's a land-and-wealth transfer, arguably the largest in English history before the 19th century, and it creates a class of gentry with a vested material interest in the break never being reversed. Henry produces a constituency for Protestantism without producing Protestant doctrine. The theology has to be supplied later, but the political and economic infrastructure for it already exists by 1547.

As mentioned previously, forced into exile, Calvin wrote the first edition of the Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536 — a systematic, almost legalistic defense of Protestant theology built around one core question: if both church and state call you a heretic, how do you prove otherwise? His answer became Calvinism's backbone: ultimate authority rests with God alone; scripture is His revealed text; predestination means salvation is decided by God in eternity, independent of human effort; and good works aren't a path to salvation but evidence that one may already be among the elect.

Luther is theologically more conservative and less systematic than Calvin. He wasn't trying to build an airtight logical system — his theology came out of a personal, almost existential struggle (his "tower experience," reading Romans) more than out of legal reasoning. Calvin, with his law training, took Luther's core insight (faith alone, scripture alone) and pushed it into a fully worked-out system with predestination as the load-bearing doctrine and much harsher implications for church hierarchy. Puritans descend from Calvin, not Luther: Lutheranism kept bishops in many of its national churches (e.g., Scandinavia) and kept a high view of sacrament, while Calvinism's logic pushed toward eldership, congregational governance, and the rejection of any clergy claiming special nearness to God. So the three-way split, in one line: Catholic, church and sacrament are necessary to salvation; Lutheran, faith alone saves, but real presence and a fair amount of traditional structure survive; Calvinist/Reformed, faith alone saves, and the logic gets driven all the way through to predestination, symbolic-at-most sacraments, and anti-hierarchical church government. I guess these are important differences to debate on, though it's hurting my head. The more I read into it, the more I realize how randomly everything happened, yet inevitably culminated toward the ultimate outcome: exile to the New World.

So between the three of them (Catholic, Calvinist, Luteran) we have:

Catholic position:

• Authority comes from three things together: scripture, church tradition, and the institutional church itself (culminating in the Pope). The church isn't just an organization that explains the Bible — it's considered a necessary part of how salvation actually works.

• Salvation runs through the church: sacraments (baptism, confession, the Eucharist, last rites, etc.) are the mechanisms by which grace is actually delivered to a person, administered by an ordained priesthood that has a special, sacramentally real status — not just a job title.

• The Eucharist is the body and blood of Christ, literally (transubstantiation).

• Salvation involves faith and works/sacraments/participation in the church's system — it's a process, not a single moment, and the church (confession, indulgences historically, prayers for the dead, Purgatory) plays an active ongoing role in it.

• Hierarchy is theologically load-bearing: bishops and the Pope aren't just administrators, they hold real spiritual authority by apostolic succession.

Protestant position (the shared core across denominations):

• Sola scriptura — scripture alone is the final authority. Church tradition and institutional rulings can inform understanding but can't override or add to what's in the Bible.

• Sola fide — justification by faith alone. A person is saved through faith in Christ directly; no priest, ritual, or institution is a required intermediary.

• The priesthood loses its special sacramental status — Protestants generally hold to the "priesthood of all believers," meaning every Christian has direct access to God without needing a clergy member to mediate that relationship.

• The Eucharist is reinterpreted — anywhere from Luther's modified real presence to Calvin's spiritual presence to Zwingli's purely symbolic/memorial view — but the literal transformation of bread and wine is generally rejected.

• Purgatory, prayers for the dead, and indulgences are rejected, because they all assume the living or the church can do something to affect someone's salvation after the fact — which contradicts faith-alone.

What Luther kept from Catholicism:

• Real presence in the Eucharist — this is the big one, and it's where Luther broke from almost every other Protestant reformer, not just Catholics. He insisted Christ is truly, physically present "in, with, and under" the bread and wine (sacramental union/consubstantiation), even while rejecting transubstantiation's Aristotelian mechanics for explaining how. He thought denying real presence was practically blasphemous. This is why Luther and Zwingli famously couldn't agree at the Marburg Colloquy in 1529 — Luther reportedly wrote "this is my body" on the table and refused to budge.

• Infant baptism, and a fairly conservative view of liturgy and church ceremony generally — Luther kept a lot of traditional worship structure that he saw as not contradicting scripture, rather than stripping everything down on principle.

• A real, if reduced, role for clergy and church order — Luther wasn't trying to flatten all hierarchy, just remove its sacramental/salvific claims.

What Luther broke from Catholicism on:

• Sola scriptura and sola fide — these are his, originating from his own crisis over whether he could ever do enough to earn salvation, and his reading of Paul's letters (especially Romans) convinced him salvation was a gift received through faith, not something earned through works or merited through the church's sacramental system.

• Rejection of the Pope's authority and of indulgences specifically — the 95 Theses were narrowly about indulgences (paying to reduce time in Purgatory), which is the spark, even though the implications grew much larger.

• Priesthood of all believers — direct access to God without a required clerical intermediary.

The Half-assed English Reformation

It lasted about 25~30 years, if we count from 1534 (Act of Supremacy) to 1559–1563 (Elizabethan Settlement). It wasn't one steady process, it zigzagged hard by monarch. Protestant under Edward VI, reversed back to Catholic under Mary I, then settled into the Protestant-but-compromised form under Elizabeth. Elizabeth's compromise: a church that was Reformed in doctrine but that preserved certain characteristics of medieval Catholicism, such as cathedrals, church choirs, a formal liturgy contained in the Prayer Book, traditional vestments and episcopacy. This is the deal that satisfies almost no one fully — Catholics lose, but the returning reformers feel cheated too, since the doctrine went Calvinist but the structure (bishops, vestments, ceremony) stayed recognizably Catholic.

Once the Settlement disappoints the reformers, they don't leave — they argue. The word "Puritan" appears for the first time in the early 1560s, used as an insult for these malcontents. The first real flashpoint wasn't doctrine, it was clothing: the 1566 Vestiarian Controversy, when the Bishop of London demanded clergy wear the surplice and other prescribed vestments, and dozens refused, calling them the leftover garments of popery. Thirty-seven of the ninety-eight clergy summoned were suspended for non-compliance — and in a real sense, the Puritan movement as an organized faction was born from that confrontation, not from any single theological dispute. Exiles who had experienced the reformed Calvinist order of churches in Frankfurt, Strasbourg, Basel, Zurich, and Geneva returned to England hoping the Church would go further, and while few quarreled with the Calvinist doctrine in the Thirty-Nine Articles, some questioned whether keeping bishops and church courts really matched the structure of the early church.

The vestments fight was about appearance, not structure — you could refuse a surplice and still believe in bishops. Cartwright broke that ceiling. In 1570, lecturing at Cambridge on the Book of Acts, he argued that the early church had no bishops at all, just elected ministers and local presbyteries — Calvin's Geneva model, transplanted wholesale. Episcopacy wasn't just unreformed, in his reading; it was unscriptural. That's the moment Puritanism splits into factions over how far to push reform — between those who could live inside a flawed hierarchy and those who now saw the hierarchy itself as the problem. But the split wasn't a menu of options laid out all at once in 1570 — it was a sequence, each position giving up on the one before it. Conformist Puritans were the starting condition: Calvinist in doctrine, willing to work inside the Church of England's existing structure, the people the Settlement was more or less designed for. Presbyterian Puritans, Cartwright's line, pushed further — reform the national church from within, but replace its bishops with Geneva-style elderships. It took another generation of that project stalling — censored preaching, punished nonconforming clergy, a monarchy treating any challenge to bishops as a challenge to the Crown itself — before the third position became thinkable: Separatists, who concluded the Church of England wasn't reformable at all, and walked away from the idea of a state church altogether. There were Conformist Puritans, Presbyterian Puritans, and Separatists / Brownists.

Between the 1580s and 1620s, Elizabeth and then James I treat structural challenges to bishops as challenges to royal authority itself — James said it outright at the 1604 Hampton Court Conference: no bishop, no king. Puritan preaching gets censored, nonconforming clergy get punished, separatist gatherings get banned outright. But the road to Mayflower runs through Holland first, not straight off the dock in England. A Separatist congregation centered on the Nottinghamshire village of Scrooby — William Brewster, John Robinson, a teenage William Bradford among them — faced raids and arrests starting around 1607, and fled in stages to Amsterdam, then Leiden, where they lived in exile for over a decade. It was a second crisis, not English persecution directly, that finally pushed them across the Atlantic: a 1618 political shift in the Netherlands threatened to outlaw their independent congregation there too, and Leiden's Dutch culture was steadily absorbing their children. Cut off from England and now uncertain even of Holland, in 1620 a minority of that congregation — something like 40 of the roughly 100 final passengers, the rest hired strangers — sailed for the New World. 🌻