Shaping the New England Way

Abstract

While separatist and non-separatist puritans were wrestling with issues of church formation and governance in England and the Netherlands, beginning in 1620 other reformers were dealing with the same issues on the other side of the Atlantic. In that year members of John Robinson’s Leiden congregation settled at Plymouth, along Cape Cod in New England, and organized their own congregation. Later in that decade members of that Plymouth church traveled up the coast to Salem to offer material and spiritual assistance to the first settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Freed from the close supervision of English bishops and Dutch authorities, New England puritans crafted a religious culture that offered lay believers considerable power. Indeed, the decades of the 1620s and 1630s in New England can be judged to have witnessed the fullest expression of lay empowerment in the history of puritanism. By the early 1630s one colonist claimed that “the order of the churches and of the Commonwealth was so settled, by common consent, that it brought to his mind the new Heaven and the New Earth, wherein dwells righteousness.”1