Godliness, Property, and the Franchise in Puritan Massachusetts: An Interpretation

Abstract

THE connection between church membership and political rights in early Massachusetts is a well known, even a famous, fact of the colony's history. From time to time, present-minded historians have rebuked or praised the colony according to the resemblances they saw or did not see between the Massachusetts system and what they felt was a desirable public policy. In the nineteenth century, liberal historians tended to criticize the Puritans for imposing a religious test in political matters and implied that these new Americans were somehow betraying what would later become the American approach to religion and politics. More recently, some historians have decided that the Puritans were probably only doing what the majority of the settlers wanted them to do and that the political and religious system had the support of most of the inhabitants. It has been suggested that Puritan society was, in many ways, democratic and that Puritan political practices anticipated lines of political development characteristic of later American history.' Such arguments can, of course, be loosely supported and equally loosely attacked. There was a religious test applied to voters and office-holders; the elders and ministers of the churches played a part at the General Court and in advising the governor and assistants which nineteenth-century Americans could hardly accept. Both religious and political discrimination was a fact