What Puritan Guarantee?

Abstract

In The Puritan Origins of American Self Sacvan Bercovitch claims American Puritans believed God had made a long promised summons to them, irreversible as was irresistible, to erect New Jerusalem in (97). Eventually, their speculations about millennial site [of New Jerusalem] shifted from New England to, vaguely, America itself (xviii). This divine irreversible geographic guarantee had extraordinary implications. It meant the idea of America ... assured settlers of success.... The American Puritan self was a garden enclosed from threat even of secular failure (101). Over centuries, that Puritan guarantee evolved into a nation's divine right to expand (xvii). Cotton Mather's writings, main focus of Puritan Origins, are ideal for explicating this American Puritan guarantee because, according to Bercovitch, Mather is a come to life (68). Historians reviewed Puritan Origins enthusiastically when came out in 1975. But by time arrived at graduate school twelve years later, enthusiasm had faded. Historians had grown dubious about an American self and about New England as foundation of American history. Puritan specialists became more interested in connections between American and English Puritanism than differences. Perhaps most important, Dwight Bozeman argued persuasively intentionally world-changing Puritan errand into wilderness, millennial or otherwise, was an artifact of mid-twentieth-century scholarship (Guru). Before read Puritan Origins in graduate school, understood, as still do, New Englanders assumed no guarantee of success. God summoned New England as he had summoned ancient Israel, conditionally on holiness of region's inhabitants. As John Winthrop in A Modell of Christian Charitie in 1630 warned, if our heartes shall turne away, soe wee will not obey [God] ... wee shall surely perishe out of good land (48). The conditionality of God's relationship with New England was repeated countless times afterwards, in tones ranging from mild optimism to severe anxiety, not only by individual ministers but by ministers and laity speaking collectively. (1) Millennialism did not alter conditionality. By middle of 1630s, some New Englanders started to believe their pure churches foreshadowed millennium (Winship, Making 61-62). Puritan Origins' many quotations linking New England and millennium express no more than this foreshadowing; they could be piled up endlessly without ever conveying anything about guaranteed success or an American New Jerusalem* The prominent minister John Cotton, for example, served as a very enthusiastic emigrant around 1635 when he wrote to a friend in Holland the order of churches and commonwealth ... brought into his mind new heaven and new earth (C. Mather, Magnalia 1: 325). But Cotton emphasized New England churches needed much more holiness to participate in millennium and there was no certainty of them achieving it. The closest he came to Bercovitch's irreversible Puritan guarantee was I hope Lord will bring us to it (Churches 16, 20-22). Cotton identified New Jerusalem not with America but with coming church of those Jews who were to convert to Christianity as millennium approached (Way 10). Cotton Mather, John Cotton's grandson, was no less representative in his speculation about New England (1702) in Magnalia Christi Americana. There he suggested Christ had intended New England to be a pattern to his other churches, worried this role was finished, and asked whether Plantation may not, soon after this, come to nothing (1: 27). Mather claimed New Jerusalem would hover not over America but over earthly Jerusalem (Smolinski 375-77). Both ministers knew Israel, God's church, did not necessarily need a permanent New England Israel in order to realize prophecies in which New England appeared to play a role. …