Godly What? Two Recent Interpretations of the Form of Government in New England

Abstract

The Reformation was a transatlantic phenomenon. In sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century England, Protestants in general and non-conformists in particular sought to eradicate the pernicious influences of Catholicism; during the process, they attacked the Church in Rome vehemently—the Pope was denounced as the Antichrist, and the Christian clergy was deemed as incapable or, worse still, corrupt. On the other side of the Atlantic, puritan settlers in New England struggled to carry the religious movement to fruition by establishing their own churches and governments—based on their interpretation of God’s message. The two books reviewed here, David D. Hall’s A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England (Knopf, 2011) and Michael P. Winship’s Godly Republicanism: Puritanism, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill (Harvard, 2012) are two recent studies that attempt to understand what really happened in these nascent settler societies. Hall’s and Winship’s task is a challenging one because these reformist endeavors were launched against the backdrop of early modern nationalism. In other words, the Reformation was never simply a religious movement; issues such as sovereignty also had a role to play. The period had witnessed many controversies that were theological as well as political. Henry VIII divorced from Roman Catholicism not only because he wanted a divorce, which the Pope under pressure from Charles V (Catherine’s nephew) refused to grant, but also because he desired fuller control over domestic matters; Foxe’s Book of Martyrs was widely distributed and officially endorsed by the Church of England because it promoted the right kind of doctrine and the right kind of ideology. Such an intertwined relationship between reformation, Vol. 19 No. 1, May, 2014, 124–133