Puritan Church Research Articles

Puritanism and Democracy

I have been invited to present to you my thesis regarding Puritanism and Democracy in seventeenth-century England. The thesis in question is simple and obvious, though some of its ramifications are (I hope) neither simple nor altogether obvious. The period of the Puritan revolution was one in which religion and even theology dominated the common modes of thought and expression. Lord Acton, who (unlike some historians) was sufficiently unenlightened to know theology when he saw it, described the period as “the middle ages of Protestantism”. It follows that the concepts whether of liberty or of authority which the Puritans developed, can be fully understood only if they are studied in their proper setting, and their native terminology. Dogma formed that terminology and the Puritan church organization constituted the setting. Without denying the validity of other approaches (the constitutional approach for example, in which the liberals have long had their own way, or the economic, in which the Marxists are, I understand, taking theirs)—without denying the usefulness of these approaches, I suggest the value to the student who would know what really happened, of a third, namely the religious approach. For the Puritan concept of democracy, if it did not spring from Puritan religion, at least sprang up in closest contact with it. Puritan religion constituted the climate of opinion in which the concept was born and nourished. The religious approach has one advantage (shared in measure with the constitutional): it can stay within the period under discussion, and it can afford to rest its case on the actual words used. It does not require a transposition of terms, whereby theology is shown to be a roundabout way of saying economics, and St. Mark's gospel gets spelled with an x. Nor does it ask us to make any large assumptions—to believe that Calvin built better than he knew: he intended a church and it turned out to be a bank! One will no doubt be told that some of the theological argument with which the pamphlets in the Thomason Collection are filled, and most of the reasons urged in the Councils of the Army at Putney and Whitehall, are what are now called “rationalizations”, and that we gain nothing by refusing to recognize this fact. So be it. But if these are rationalizations they involve the terms in which the Puritan viewed his world and they rest upon the convictions with which he was prepared to face not only his fellows, but his Maker. We shall gain nothing by brushing those terms and those convictions aside, though to comprehend them requires patient study and a modicum of historical sympathy. “Nothing”, says Lord David Cecil, “is more baffling to the imagination than the religion of another age.”