Providence and Puritan Deceit: John Davenport's Forgery Revisited

Abstract

Many scholars have told the story of how John Davenport (bap. 1597, d. 1670), a prominent Congregationalist minister in New England, was fatally discredited as a fraudster when a letter he had forged was exposed in 1669. However, no one has analyzed how this extraordinary scandal fits into the larger narrative of puritan providentialism and its disenchantment. Focusing on the manipulation of providential language, this article shows that intra-Congregationalist conflicts over church polity could often be more political than theological. God-talk, or ‘providential pragmatism’, empowered New Englanders to navigate the ecclesiological ambiguities inherent in the Congregational system in a way that most benefited themselves. Davenport's scandal, precisely because it was the most blatant form of such pragmatism, offers a case study of a pattern of self-contradiction and double standard already observable in similar cases of schisms over church membership and infant baptism in late seventeenth-century New England.