Whatever happened to Puritans, the 17th-century radicals and religious zealots who are credited with founding the country, giving us its work ethic and being the bulk of the Pilgrims who gave us the first Thanksgiving?
Contemporary scholars say their keystone concept of religious community contributing to create a better society lives on in modern denominations, including Congregationalists, United Church of Christ, Low Church Anglicans, some strands of Presbyterians, Salvation Army, Methodists, United Reformed Church, Society of Friends (Quakers) and, some say, some of today’s evangelicals.
When a religious community goes on a mission to uplift society at large, “it is the ghost of the Puritans” that’s manifesting, said Mike Shea, editor of .
Echoes today
They also are credited, for better or worse, with creating the national conscience.
“The overt remnants of Puritanism did not die out in New England until well into the 19th century, and it echoes in American society today,” wrote Hartwick College English professor David Cody on The Victorian Web.
Puritanism was a 16th- and 17th-century movement to reform the Church of England, which, in the minds of those electrified by John Calvin and the continental Protestant Reformation, had not gone far enough to stamp out popery and what they perceived as the other sins and excesses of the Roman Catholic Church.
Puritans were radicals who wanted to re-create pure Christianity. They wanted a church and society based on biblical principles — a spiritual community stripped of the “idolatry” of incense, bells, statues, feast days, saints, paintings, sacraments, rituals, vestments, priests and bishops.
The Puritans’ views made them unpopular in England, where bishops still held sway and threats to the state religion were not always tolerated. Puritans fled persecution, and among them was a group of Puritan separatists called Pilgrims.
British author G.K. Chesterton famously commented: “In America, they have a feast to celebrate the arrival of the Pilgrims. Here in England, we should have a feast to celebrate their departure.”
To America in 1620
One group fled to the Netherlands in 1608. That congregation voted in 1617 to travel to the wilds of America, where members could shape society in their image.
Leader William Bradford was perhaps the first to describe his group of separatists bound for America on the Mayflower as Pilgrims, according to .
The Pilgrims made their famous landing at Plymouth Rock, or thereabouts (depending on the historian) on Dec. 21, 1620.
What is now considered to be the first Thanksgiving feast was a celebration of Pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians of a bountiful harvest (after earlier starvation) at Plymouth Plantation. It most likely took place in September 1621, said University of Colorado history professor Chris Lewis.
The oft-told story of Pilgrims and Indians befriending each other is more myth than truth, Lewis said.
“The two groups tolerated each other out of necessity,” Lewis said. “Our Thanksgiving holiday is a kind of cultural ritual that embodies both real people and real history. But really we’re celebrating (a mythical) union between Indians and English peoples that we would like to think somehow symbolizes the hope of American society.”
Electa Draper: 303-954-1276 or edraper@denverpost.com
