Our New World with Mayflower
The Gist: Due in July!
Come this summer, we’ll have another little pilgrim in our family: our daughter, Mayflower. While this gets us above the replacement rate, I don’t think we’re going to quite get to the 9 children had by the average couple in the first few generations of Plymouth Rock.
Figure 1. Perhaps his best film.
Still, our family feels like we (and our society) can learn a lot from those devout Christians who sought to forge a new Jerusalem, “as a city upon a hill, [with] the eyes of all people… upon us.” Let’s accept their invitation to look upon them, with the help of Wheaton professor Leland Ryken and his excellent book, Worldly Saints.
Some brief background: In the 1500s, the English King Henry VIII took over the local religious institution from Rome in order to be able to divorce his older wife, the aunt of the Holy Roman Emperor whose support the Pope very much required, and with whom he had not conceived a surviving son (not just a vain concern, but a real problem given how a succession crisis had torn apart England a generation prior). Henry enjoyed the additional benefit of being able to acquire a great deal of property for the crown - but his heart was never really with the Reformation and he very probably would never have gone along with the whole secession had he been simply granted an annulment. The Puritans were devout Protestants who wanted to purify the Anglican Church of its lingering Catholic influences (it was only “halfly-reformed”) - but some were convinced that there was no hope for that and became separatists, rejecting the royal institution altogether and adopting a congregationalist or presbyterian self-governing structure. A portion of those fled England for an “errand in the wilderness,” the first group signing the Mayflower Compact, essentially America’s first constitution. Inspired by congregational agreements, the Mayflower Compact promised equally applied laws from a democratic polity’s interpretation of the general Good and glorification of God.
Figure 2. I’ve always been amused by the British 1936 abdication crisis, in which King Edward gave up the crown to marry a twice-divorced American; the church he led was founded on divorce. By 2018, the Anglicans had rediscovered their roots by permitting Harry to marry a (once) divorced American.
What I most appreciate about the Puritans is their total commitment to the constant presence (and sovereignty) of God in their lives: “There was for them no disjunction between sacred and secular; all creation, so far as they were concerned, was sacred, and all activities, of whatever kind, must be sanctified, that is, done to the glory of God.” Religion was no mere Sunday event, nor even just extended to grace before meals and a prayer before bed - for Puritans, religion was life itself. Indeed, on Sundays, the Puritans pointedly referred to going to “meeting houses” because they understood places of worship to be wherever they were at any time and the “church” to constitute any group of believers, no specific building or even institution but a body led by Christ himself. “Spiritual complacency and mediocrity were the greatest of all Puritan aversions.” The Cambridge historian Patrick Collinson captures this ethos: “the life of the puritan was in one sense a continuous act of worship, pursued under an unremitting and lively sense of God’s providential purposes and constantly refreshed by religious activity, personal, domestic and public.”
Moreover, the Puritans did not cultivate merely a vague spiritual companionship: being the children of the movement whose members literally died to bring God’s written word into English (and other local languages) so that it could be read, they were extraordinarily committed to enjoying this blessing, and created the most literate society in the world. The Canadian theologian J.I. Packer says,
“By Scripture, as God’s Word of instruction about divine-human relationships, they sought to live, and here too they were conscientiously methodical… Knowing themselves to be creatures of thought, affection, and will, and knowing that God’s way to the human heart (the will) is via the human head (the mind), the Puritans practiced meditation, discursive and systematic, on the whole range of biblical truth as they saw it applying to themselves… in meditation the Puritan would seek to search and challenge his heart, to stir his affections to hate sin and love righteousness, and to encourage himself with God’s promises, just as Puritan preachers would do from the pulpit.”
Figure 3. The Puritans founded Harvard - with an original slogan of not just ‘veritas’ (truth), but ‘truth for Christ and the Church. Then, because Harvard had was felt to be not sufficiently hardcore, they founded Yale. Does rather seem like they needed to keep at it…
The Puritans wanted each person to be reformed - and not just in the sense of embracing Calvinist theology, but as Packer says, “the essence of this kind of ‘reformation’ [revival, renewal] was enrichment of understanding of God’s truth, arousal of affections Godward, increase of ardor in one’s devotions, and more love, joy, and firmness of Christian purpose in one’s calling and personal life.” People of all walks of life committed to “long, strong prayers” before anything of importance.
Most significantly, moderns do not understand the incredible joy of the Puritans. Moderns get lost and disheartened by the notion of universal sin but “Puritanism postulated a threefold view of the person: perfect as created by God and therefore good in principle, sinful by virtue of Adam’s original sin imputed to them and their own evil choices, and capable of redemption and glorification by God’s renewing grace.” The literal meaning of the “Gospel” is the “Good News” and the Puritans were keen to be grateful for it every single day - as well as celebrate it in feasts of thanksgiving.
Figure 4. Moderns live awash in material comfort yet rely on anti-depressants and doomscrolling to cope with existential dread -- yet somehow the Puritans are the dour ones.
Despite living with a mortality rate that would terrify most modern Americans, Puritans insisted that “God would have our joys to be far more than our sorrows” and “joy is the habitation of the righteous.” The English Puritan “Thomas Gataker wrote that it is the purpose of Satan to persuade us that ‘in the kingdom of God there is nothing but sighing and groaning and fasting and prayer,’ whereas the truth is that ‘in his house there is marrying and giving in marriage,…feasting and rejoicing.’” Governor John Winthrop urged his community: “We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body.” Packer notes “Knowing also the dishonesty and deceitfulness of fallen human hearts, they cultivated humility and self-suspicion as abiding attitudes, examining themselves regularly for spiritual blind spots and lurking inward evils.” This was not a recipe for retching guilt. Instead, “they found the discipline of self-examination by Scripture… followed by the discipline of confessing and forsaking sin and renewing one’s gratitude to Christ for his pardoning mercy, to be a source of great inner peace and joy.”
Figure 5. It’s true they were wary of celebrating Christmas - but that was because they were so intent on ensuring that such a holiday never forgot its religious roots, which seems… an entirely fair worry. Also, contrary to the popular image (including the one generated by gpt!), the Puritans’ “daily dress was colorful.”
What Puritans had in abundance were sources of meaning in their lives. Despite an intense Christian education that would outclass that of many modern preachers, the Puritans very much intended it for everyone - and further, they very intentionally conveyed that anyone in any legitimate profession was as engaged in holy work as those who were preaching, a contrast they drew against a Catholic-ascribed view that monks and nuns were closer to God in their work. “God calls every person to his or her vocation. Every Christian, said the Puritans, has a calling. To follow it is to obey God. The important effect of this attitude is that it makes work a response to God.” (emphasis added). How can one discern one’s vocation? With the advice of your parents and through the understanding of the talents and interests gifted to you by God. “When God hath called me to a place, he hath given me some gifts for that place.” Obviously there were moral limits, and if something was more beneficial to the community of God, one ought to do that. But when you have a calling from God Almighty, you ought to do your very best. Moreover, diligence was “God’s appointed means of providing for human needs.”
And yet, paradoxically, the Puritans did not attribute their success to their hard work or self-reliance. Rather, “whatever tangible rewards come from work, they are the gift of God’s grace.” The legendary Cotton Mather explained “In our occupation we spread our nets; but it is God who brings unto our nets all that comes into them.” John Robinson, the Mayflower passengers’ pastor in the Old World, brought it together: “If goods be gotten by industry, providence, and skill, it is God’s blessing that both gives the faculty, and the use of it, and the success unto it.” This perspective did not lead to fatalistic resignation; instead, it fostered virtue and gratitude. Packer relates that they “depended utterly on God to work in and through them and who always gave God the praise for anything they did that in retrospect seemed to them to have been right; gifted men who prayed earnestly that God would enable them to use their powers, not for self-display, but for His praise.”
With God-given success came obligations and expectations: wealth was merely “that which God hath lent thee” to steward during your time on earth. Puritans were called to be fair and honest in all dealings and to save and avoid debt in order to provide not only for themselves, but to give charitably. John Calvin observed that “For the richer any man is, the more abundant are his means of doing good to others.” It was only the love of money that was the root of all evil; money itself was not bad but “exists ‘for the Glory of God and the good of others.” Yet that 1 Timothy verse did warn of the dangers to the rich: they must always remember their purpose and why they were successful. Divinely called to work hard and save, the Puritans became much more prosperous than their “stranger” peers. And ultimately, “the crucial issue was not how large a person’s income was but how much money was spent on oneself.” They exercised considerable thrift, but they were not ascetics, they permitted themselves comfortable surroundings, advising that “we must follow the example of the most sober-minded and the most modest in our social class and of about the same age as ours.”
In the Puritans' embrace of prosperity, they rejected what they saw as the Catholic glorification of poverty. Poverty could be assigned by God to even stout believers but it was not a virtue to remain poor and “poverty also hath its temptations… For even the poor may be undone by the love of that wealth and plenty which they never get: and they may perish for over-loving the world, that never yet prospered in the world.” The poor were subject to their own sins, including, according to a list from the English nonconformist Richard Baxter, “‘overmuch care about their wants and worldly matters,’ discontent, covetousness, envy of the rich, neglect of spiritual duties, and neglect of ‘the holy education of their children.’” Baxter also bluntly stated that “It is swinish and sinful not to labor.” The minister William Ames offered a gentler perspective, emphasizing that the Puritans had no prosperity gospel that imagined the rich alone were chosen: “Poverty in itself hath no crime in it, or fault to be ashamed of: but is oftentimes sent from God to the godly, either as a correction, or trial or searching, or both.” Nevertheless, it was not to be embraced. Ames “denounced the monks’ vows of poverty as ‘madness, a superstitious and wicked presumption’.” The Puritans were determined to end poverty when and where they could, and through private action: God allowed inequality to test both our mercy and our goodness. “Richard L. Greaves’s massive survey of the primary sources reveals that the Puritans ‘asserted that no direct correlation exists between wealth and godliness.…Not riches [nor poverty], but faith and suffering for the sake of the gospel are signs of election.’”
Figure 6. The American pilgrims actually started out with communal property whose incentives helped lead to starvation - but that early decision was due to the conditions of their non-Puritan investors, who wanted to emphasize their preferred returns; the Puritans themselves wound up breaking their agreement and dividing property into individual plots, which was considerably more successful.
Amidst “signs of election,” what would surprise moderns is that Puritans were skeptical of both “tradition” and “morals.” “Tradition was something that they treated with scorn; they equated it with superstition when speaking of Roman Catholic ceremonies in worship.” The Puritans were first-principles oriented, asking on every occasion what should be done if done best and in contemplation of the Bible, rejecting the excuse that it had been done another way for a long time prior. Despite their sharp theological disagreements with Catholicism, "Puritans did not generally deny that many Catholics had been true Christians." Indeed, they were grateful that true faith had been preserved by some body of believers since Christ's time. This nuanced view reflects their focus on genuine faith over institutional affiliation. Ryken reports prominent, common, positive words for the Puritans included reformed (in the sense of renewed), “godly, well-ordered, the adjective learned, plain, profitable, simple, grave, and painful,” the last being used in the sense of “painstaking, meticulous.”
Meanwhile, “the word ‘moral’ was a negative term for the Puritans because it suggested works without faith.” And that was damning: “One Puritan writer insisted ‘a man may be clothed with moral virtues—justice, prudence, temperance—and yet go to hell. If we must be pure in heart, then we must not rest in outward purity.’”
The Puritans' position created another paradox like the meritlessness of wealth: they believed God was responsible for an individual’s life outcomes "yet" worked diligently and became prosperous for their era; similarly, they warned against excessive focus on morality as potentially distracting from faith, "yet" their deep faith naturally manifested in virtuous living. Their theology resolved this tension by positioning good works as the fruit—rather than the root—of salvation. Faith produced both prosperity and morality as byproducts rather than as meritorious achievements. Nevertheless, this emphasis on faith's primacy didn't prevent them from establishing strong community standards and punishing immoral behavior.
Here is where we arrive finally at the modern objection to the “Puritanical” regime of intolerance and shaming. There’s no doubt: the Puritans were intolerant - but of what? Sin and heresy that they believed threatened people’s eternal souls while damaging them here on earth. The Puritans did not live and let live; “The Puritans were comfortable with such social involvement because they regarded society as part of God’s order for life in this world.” For them, community standards weren't merely about maintaining social order but about creating environments conducive to godliness and spiritual flourishing. Packer observes “the Puritans prayed and labored for a holy England and New England—sensing that where privilege is neglected and unfaithfulness reigns, national judgment threatens.” In his review, they managed to be “laworiented without lapsing into legalism, and expressive of Christian liberty without any shameful lurches into license.” The English Puritan Richard Sibbes thought the activities of a true church (meaning community of believers) included “sound preaching of the Gospel, right dispensation of the sacraments, prayer religiously performed, and evil persons justly punished.” “Anything that had even the appearance of unrestraint raised their ire” - the Puritans wanted, in their own communities, the “freedom to do right.” Ryken reports
“When the English Puritan preacher Richard Rogers was lecturing at Wethersfield, Essex, someone told him, ‘Mr. Rogers, I like you and your company very well, but you are so precise.’ To which Rogers replied, ‘O Sir, I serve a precise God.’”
The most infamous Puritan misstep, tragically close to the only lingering impression we have of the Puritans at all, was the Salem witch trials. The Bible specifically alludes to and condemns witchcraft (Deuteronomy 18:10-12), giving believers legitimate theological grounds for concern about such practices. The trials occurred in a particularly quarrelsome town during a period of political uncertainty at the tail end of perhaps thousands of executions across Europe of alleged witches. Twenty-five people died - nineteen by hanging, one pressed to death, and five in prison awaiting trial. What’s crucial to understand is that the Puritans themselves nearly immediately understood that there had been a tragic mistake at the center of the proceedings. The president of Harvard, Increase Mather, specifically condemned the use of "spectral evidence" - accusations based merely on visions or dreams. Individuals repented their roles and the community fasted and took responsibility, including paying restitution to victims’ families. This self-correction reveals a more nuanced picture of Puritan justice than popular memory suggests.
But what of their Scarlet Letters? Nathaniel Hawthorne’s book, the most extended study of Puritans that moderns get, to the degree even that is assigned anymore amidst ever-lower reading level expectations, was written two centuries after its setting, as a work of fiction, specifically an allegorical critique of his own 19th century society. In this fictional universe, adultery served as grounds for permanent social ostracism. In reality, adultery was shamed and sometimes physically punished, but genuinely repentant sinners were generally welcomed back into the community. The actual Puritans were complex human beings navigating moral imperatives, not one-dimensional caricatures of hypocrisy. You may or may not be surprised to know that, based on marriage and birth records, we know that about 1 in 10 New England brides were pregnant at their wedding - but it also is one of the lowest incidents we have recorded in cultures with an expected marriage culture. One might reasonably question whether modern society has improved by adopting increasingly casual attitudes toward marital fidelity. In modern parlance, ‘Puritan’ means something like excessively strict in moral judgment. But perhaps ‘modern’ should mean inadequately strict in moral judgment.
Figure 7. Of course, because the Marvelverse is a completely accurate depiction of the views and life practices of the medieval Norse and World War II era soldiers, perhaps we can introduce a new Captain Puritan to get people excited about the group again.
Puritans understood that in each person was planted the urge to multiply and marriage was God’s ordained means of satisfying that. “A couple should engage ‘with good will and delight, willingly, readily, and cheerfully.’” Only today’s uncapped desires can treat that as sex-negative. The Puritans were not against sex - remember they had 9 kids each - they just thought sex was significant; the tenor of today is not so much sex positivity as sex insignificance. They “taught that sex is private, not because it is bad, but because of its inherent nature as a total union between two people who commit themselves to each other permanently.” Indeed, “When a New England wife complained, first to her pastor and then to the whole congregation, that her husband was neglecting their sex life, the church proceeded to excommunicate the man.” Part of this positive view of marital sexuality derived, ironically given the (no longer correct) stereotype of large Catholic families, from their objection to the Catholic-ascribed celebration of virginity, and not just among the clergy. Ryken notes that the church of Rome “kept multiplying the days on which sex was prohibited for married people until half of the year or more was prohibited, with some writers going so far as to recommend abstinence on five of the seven days of the week.”
There's also a fair argument that the Puritans helped cement the expectation for ordinary people to experience romantic love with their spouses. Ryken argues that much chivalrous poetry was about forbidden love, whereas Puritans celebrated passionate devotion within marriage. Regardless, the Puritans certainly celebrated marriage. Winthrop wrote that his wife was “the chiefest of all comforts under the hope of salvation.” Ryken lists example after example:
“A good wife, claimed Henry Smith, is ‘such a gift as we should account from God alone, accept it as if he should send us a present from heaven with this name on it, The gift of God.’... According to John Wing, a husband’s love to his wife “must be the most dear, intimate, precious and entire that heart can have toward a creature; none but the love of God…is above it, none but the love of ourselves is fellow to it, all the love of others is inferior to it.” … [The Connecticut minister Thomas Hooker wrote] “The man whose heart is endeared to the woman he loves…dreams of her in the night, hath her in his eye and apprehension when he awakes, museth on her as he sits at the table, walks with her when he travels.…She lies in his bosom, and his heart trusts in her, which forceth all to confess that the stream of his affection, like a mighty current, runs with full tide and strength”
And of the classic secular objection of wifely biblical submission to husbands? It’s important to note that the same passage calls for husbands to be Christlike, i.e. prepared to die for their wives. “Modeled on Christ’s headship of the church, the husband’s headship, according to the Puritans, is not a ticket to privilege but a charge to responsibility.” And yet the Puritans knew we would all fall short, that when you wed, “you marry a child of Adam.”
But God created the family for us and, like your wealth, your children were also on loan from God to care for - but with far higher stakes. For the Puritans, every family was a church, “a society of Christians combined for the better worshipping and serving God.” Cotton Mather said that “parents ‘must give an account of the souls that belong unto their families.” His grandfather was more explicit:
“Richard Mather imagined children on the Judgment Day addressing parents who have neglected their training: All this that we here suffer is through you: you should have taught us the things of God, and did not; you should have restrained us from sin and corrected us, and you did not; you were the means of our original corruption and guiltiness, and yet you never showed any competent care that we might be delivered from it.…Woe unto us that we had such carnal and careless parents, and woe unto you that had no more compassion and pity to prevent the everlasting misery of your own children.”
Here again perhaps is the glimpse of the Puritans moderns would prefer not to think about, though maybe they should. The Puritans were thoughtful. They didn't drift through life following cultural currents; they staked their claim on what mattered and then reinforced it as a community over and over again. No gilded saints or incense in the air – a Puritan church was a plain wooden room, sunlight through clear glass falling on bare benches. Yet in that simple space, hearts burned with fervor - the emphasis was on the words and the Word. Whereas the mainline Anglicans read rote from the Book of Common Prayer, Puritans poured passion, intellect, prayer, and all their being into their sermons. Richard Baxter insisted, “it is no small matter to stand up in the face of a congregation, and deliver a message of salvation or damnation, as from the living God, in the name of our Redeemer. It is not easy matter to speak so plain, that the ignorant may understand us; and so seriously that the deadest hearts may feel us; and so convincingly, that contradicting cavillers may be silenced.” The purpose of the sermon was to forget the preacher and to live in the Bible itself; families “attended church twice each Sunday and assembled after dinner and/or in the evening to repeat the key points of the sermons.” Ryken relates an incident in England that tests attention spans:
“Chaderton has preached for two hours. He is about to conclude and says something to the effect “that he would no longer trespass upon their patience.” But the audience will not allow the preacher to stop. “For God’s sake, sir, go on, go on,” they urge… The incident is noteworthy, not because it was rare during the Puritan movement, but because it was common.”
This hunger for deep engagement with biblical truth reflects the Puritan commitment to substance over style, to transformed hearts over mere ritual observance. JI Packer says that the Puritans “were great believers, great hopers, great doers, and great sufferers.” They were imperfect for they were human beings, but they pursued a perfect God every waking hour of every day and we who believe can be inspired by their example.
Figure 8. Imagine the tossing decks of the Mayflower (and later ships) as these pious families huddled and prayed through Atlantic storms. They likened themselves to the Israelites crossing the Red Sea – leaving oppression behind, heading toward a promised land. Check out Leland Rycken’s Worldly Saints today!