Our friend Frank Dent continues his brilliant series on the demise of the Puritans in America. He has done a great job of distilling his extensive research into clear and understandable  short essays that illuminate a crucial period of history, both for the United States and the church.

In the first post of this series, I provided an introduction to Puritanism in America, its English origins, some theological and congregationalist distinctives, and laid out the conditions that led up to the Half-Way Covenant. I do not offer these posts as a critique of the Puritans. There are myriad scholarly and popular works that tell us that the Puritans were multi-dimensional, complex, joyful, family-oriented, Godfearing, intelligent, and educated people with strong convictions about faith, piety, church, community, and country. The historical record also shows that the Puritans were not necessarily puritanical, at least not in the popular image of the prudish, sexless, self-righteous, tea-totaling, mirthless Bible-thumper often featured in American fiction. The American historian W.J. Rorabaugh quotes Rev. Increase Mather, influential New England Puritan minister, “Drink is in itself a good creature of God, and to be received with thankfulness, but the abuse of drink is from Satan; the wine is from God, but the Drunkard is from the Devil.” Similarly, sex within the covenant of marriage was an Edenic joy that, with God’s blessing, would result in the gifts of children and family life, whereas the pursuit of sex outside of it was a selfish and shameful act that made a mockery of marriage and which warranted condemnation by the community. The Puritans understood the fallen world in which humanity dwells and considered themselves reformers seeking to build a community discerning of God’s gifts and their abuse. So, to reduce Puritan culture in New England to self righteous pietism would be irresponsible, and it is not my intent.

However, the best way I know to clearly draw out the considerable differences between New England Puritanism, along with the sects and denominations that claim its legacy, and traditional, orthodox, Confessional Lutheranism is to examine New England Puritan theology, congregational polity, community politics, and social structures in bold relief with all the wonderful complexity of its social life moved to the background. That will be the main topic in the next, and final, post in the series, “Line in the Sand or Mighty Fortress?” For this post, I will examine how John Winthrop’s vision of “a city upon a hill” made the transition from a stirring shipboard covenant that declared “the care of the public must oversway all private respects by which not only conscience but mere civil policy doth bind us,” to a vibrant, boisterous, and eccentric port of call that would serve as a boiling tea pot of revolutionary fervor, and eventually to an ordered society, conscious of class, education, wealth, and breeding, that held Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes in higher esteem than it did Rev. John Cotton or Rev. Increase Mather.

2. A City Upon A Hill Becomes the Hub of the Universe
Boston, Massachusetts had not been founded when John Winthrop used the phrase “a city upon a hill” to describe his vision for a Puritan community in New England but it is this city that became the physical embodiment of Winthrop’s ideal. Although Boston proved an imperfect and short-lived reflection of that vision, because of its religious, social and geographic centrality to Puritan New England, its early importance as a seaport and its rapid transformation into a largely secular city that regarded the Puritan church as an institution increasingly concerned with itself and its own inner circle, Boston served as the funnel through which all the necessary ingredients were siphoned to incubate the dominate strains of modern American Christianity.

The Massachusetts Bay Company was a commercial enterprise chartered by King Charles as the result of efforts by Rev. John White, of Dorchester, England to establish clarity around land grants in New England. Had Charles known that the Company was becoming a means by which Puritans were planning to escape the persecution and imprisonment he so ardently supported, it is doubtful he would ever have granted the charter. Many wealthy Puritan landowners were investors in the Company and some, including John Winthrop, were taking influential roles as directors. The Puritan investors made certain that their leadership of the Company could not be contested by hostile investors at some future annual stockholders’ meeting by establishing that the location of such meetings would be in New England, not London, and that any investors in the Company unwilling to make the journey to New England were required to sell their shares to those prepared to take the risk. To ensure absolute control of the Charter they took the original copy with them across the Atlantic.¹ As a legal and commercial entity, their fortunes were now literally in their own hands.

As Puritans they also carried with them a set of Christian principles that were themselves in transition somewhere between the Thirty-Nine Articles of Anglicanism, the Westminster Confession, the Savoy Declaration, and the Second London Baptist Confession. Cut off from these diverging currents back in their native England, American Puritanism began to take on the individual character of its most influential exponents in their new land. Noteworthy among the English arrivals to New England during the Great Migration of the decade following the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were Puritan clergy. However, with the exception of Rev. John Cotton of Boston, Lincolnshire, England, and one or two others, these men were not necessarily on the New England Puritans’ list of preferred leaders. Neither was John Winthrop an ordained minister, but a lawyer and wealthy land owner who was considered something of a lay teacher. Under these circumstances, with their lives and fortunes at peril, practical necessity and Christian principles were distilled by Winthrop down to two fundamental and complementary ingredients, 17th Century English society and the Mosaic Law.

In many ways, the American Puritans were not unlike other Christian communities from the post-Apostolic era who were tasked with bringing together many disparate interests into a cohesive expression of the Christian life, among them status, property, and God.² Winthrop, as governor of the new Massachusetts Bay Colony, attempted to integrate these interests in “A Model of Christian Charity,” preserved as a sermon delivered by Winthrop onboard the Arbella, before it reached New England. Although Winthrop initiates his articulation of the Puritan utopia with the words “God Almighty,” his focus quickly shifts to more earthly matters:

God Almighty, in his most holy and wise providence, hath so disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity, others mean and in subjection.

Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity” looked very different from Paul’s description of a Christian community in Galatians 3, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Instead, “A Model of Christian Charity” is framed by the economic facts that brought this band of Christian adventurers together. They may be equal in the eyes of God, but their relative importance to the Company is measured in shares owned. That sober fact would determine each member’s status upon arrival in New England, and would be reflected throughout their community, right down to the distribution of land among them. Winthrop goes on to say that this is God’s plan:

THE REASON HEREOF: First, to hold conformity with the rest of his works. Being delighted to show forth the glory of his wisdom in the variety and differences of the creatures; and the glory of his power, in ordering all these differences for the preservation and good of the whole; and the glory of his greatness, that as it is the glory of princes to have many officers, so this great king will have many stewards, counting himself more honored in dispensing his gifts to man by man, than if he did it by his own immediate hands.

Winthrop then articulated his vision of a commonwealth, wherein each citizen would act as a moderating influence on all others, so that the rich don’t “eat up” the poor and that the poor don’t rise up against the rich, and so that the regenerate may exercise their graces. Having firmly established a society based on classes,³ Winthrop then called for bonds of brotherly affection to be knit more tightly because “every man might have need of another.” God can rightfully claim all things as his own and “no man is made more honorable than another, or more wealthy etc., out of any particular and singular respect to himself, but for the glory of his creator and the common good of the creature, man.”

Thus, classes of men, rich and poor, is God’s design, and the bonds of affection within their community will be based on four things: 1) love for each other as Christians; 2) the common necessity to survive in the wilderness; 3) to prosper so that they may do more service to the Lord; 4) and they run the risk of being punished by God if strict piety is not maintained. Winthrop’s underlying message is less inspirational than cautionary:

We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies: when he shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations: ‘the Lord make it like that of New England.’ For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill: The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world: we shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God and all professors for God’s sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us, till we be consumed out of the good land wither we are going.

In the event that any on board the Arbella were not persuaded to Winthrop’s vision, he closed his discourse by citing the exhortation by Moses in Deuteronomy 30 to choose God’s ordinance and his law as the means to life. The last words of “A Model of Christian Charity” are, “For He is our life, and our prosperity,” which would’ve been a fitting motto for Winthrop’s “city upon a hill.”

The Arbella’s first landing was in Salem, settled in 1626 by the Dorchester Company. The visit was intended to be a friendly introduction of themselves to an established Puritan community with whom they would now be neighbors. Winthrop and a small party called at the church in Salem “seeking communion for themselves and the baptism of a child born at sea.” To avail themselves of these precious sacraments upon arrival in this new and strange land, and to have them administered by the hands of a neighboring Puritan congregation, would signal that, at least spiritually, they had truly survived the long voyage and now their work to carve out a new community from the wilderness would seem less forbidding. “But Salem refused to accept them inasmuch as the church there had come to hold that the seals of the church (baptism and communion) should be offered only to covenanted members and those recommended by a similarly organized congregation.”⁴

This incident was reported to Rev. John Cotton in England, who was offended enough by the treatment of his former parishioners to write “a critical letter to the Salem minister about the church’s practices.”⁵ Thus, before ever arriving in New England, Cotton became a player in the divisions and disputes between congregations over church polity. This incident is a kind of foreshadowing of the complications that resulted from what is essentially a social movement among Puritan laymen under the formal charter of a commercial enterprise which founded itself on Biblical models. Winthrop, although their leader, could neither perform baptisms nor administer communion. Nor could he draw on any higher learning in theology or Biblical hermeneutics to help steady his hand on the rudder as such conflicts would arise. He was, by all accounts, a good man with a gentle nature, but as governor of the new colony, having delivered his band of believers to their new home, he was still very much at sea in matters of both church polity and statecraft. This lack of strong leadership by Winthrop allowed conflicting opinions to take root and create division early in the group’s life in their new home, effectively reducing his role from leader to negotiator.

Within a week of the Salem incident, another serious test of “A Model of Christian Charity” arose from the very land they had journeyed to possess. Sailing south from Salem, the Arbella weighed anchor in what would become known as Boston Harbor, and two small parties were dispatched behind the Shawmut peninsula to explore both the Charles and Mystic rivers for suitable sites. Along the Mystic River lay an appealing site, with land already cleared by Indians, which was surrounded by many acres of arable farmland complete with freshwater streams. Deputy Governor Thomas Dudley contested Winthrop’s approval of the Mystic site because he favored a different site along the Charles River. Dudley rejected Winthrop’s estimation of the Mystic site and argued that a corroborating second party should be sent to confirm the initial report. In fact, Dudley led the second exploration party to the Mystic site himself, in effect usurping Winthrop’s authority in the decision. The dispute over a site for the settlement lasted over a week, during which time the settlers remained onboard ship, anxious to disembark and get to work building their new homes. Finally, unable to resolve the dispute over the location of their permanent settlement, Winthrop agreed to a temporary solution which put the settlers and their supplies ashore at Charlestown, a point determined to be midway between the Charles and Mystic sites. There, a makeshift camp could be established on land while Winthrop and Dudley continued their wrangling over a permanent location.

This conflict, whether due to Winthrop’s moderation or Dudley’s argumentativeness, left the party vulnerable to two very serious threats that arrived almost simultaneously. Once on land, disease debilitated the newcomers, first with dysentery, then with scurvy sweeping through the camp. Unused to living in such makeshift conditions, the settlers were careless in their sanitation practices. Combined with being unaccustomed to the available native foods, living in close quarters, and sweltering under the summer sun, the settlers were terribly weakened, and succumbed in epidemic proportions. As they battled for their health, with some aide by physicians from the older communities of Plymouth and Salem, they received some chilling news.

A rumor spread from a late-arriving ship that the French were preparing to launch an attack on the infant settlement. Hastily the leaders met, “forced to change counsel.” The settlers were too weak to fortify their temporary location, too weak even to drag the ordnance they had brought from England up from the beach where the sailors had unloaded it. The only solution–the one to answer both problems of defense and disease–was to disperse.⁶

The newcomers divided themselves into seven parties. Each party headed to a separate location, thereby founding seven settlements. Seven isolated groups stood a better chance of recovering their health and would present a greater challenge to raiders than if the entire group were concentrated in one location. After a few months these settlements considered themselves separate communities. One of these communities was on the Shawmut peninsula on the opposite side of the Charles river from Charlestown, and was named Boston. Soon a regular ferry connected the towns, all accessible from the bay by river, and by December the settlers had built homes. It was understood that there would be no energy or enthusiasm for relocating the settlers into a single commonwealth community now. Each of the seven towns boasted of one or two of the most important members of Winthrop’s assistants, each exhibited the tight-knit bonds that come from sharing burdens and cooperating to overcome hardships, each had its own character and unique way of approaching the challenges of providing for their own health and well-being. Winthrop’s Massachusetts Bay Colony would never gain the critical mass of single locality, bonds of shared labor in seed time and harvest, and common divine covenant that characterized his “A Model of Christian Charity.” Instead, the civil government of Massachusetts and the inevitable transition from subsistence agricultural economy to industrial, shipping, and mercantile wealth became the common bonds that defined the survival of Puritan New England.

The ascendancy of Boston was virtually guaranteed by its geographic centrality, its suitability as a maritime port, and its designation as the seat of government with Governor John Winthrop making his home there. Everything flowed to and from Boston as markets sprang up, the population grew, ships made regular visits to port, fishing became a burgeoning industry, and the government expanded its participation in everyday life. Boston became the focus for the common defense of the region, and public works to provide a wharf and other facilities for the common good were undertaken. All the towns founded out of the dispersion of settlers profited from Boston’s success, and similar practices of civic expansion and growth were evident, on a smaller scale, throughout the commonwealth. Each town had its own church and its own minister and retained congregational polity. The ministers made efforts to stay in cordial contact, occasionally soliciting advice, or offering it unsolicited, and maintained correspondence on matters of church practice.

In all of American history, the role of Puritan congregational clergy in the life of New England was unique. Thanks in no small measure to Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity” with its commingling of 17th century English social structure and Old Testament covenant standards for personal piety, the relationship between church and government sometimes exhibited no clear demarcation. The government had full authority to prosecute citizens for all manner of offenses that would appear to us today to fall firmly within the realm of church discipline. Although not all of these laws were fully enforced, the Massachusetts government, at one time or another, required that all citizens attend church services and pay taxes to support their local congregational minister, whether they were fully regenerate members or not. The Massachusetts General Court was empowered to enforce church discipline, at the behest of the ministers, and resolve disputes between congregations. The only reservation in this alignment of church and state was that members of the clergy could not hold public office. However, it was common practice for ministers to deliver lengthy political orations in the weeks leading up to elections and to hold special public instructional meetings on the eve of an important ballot vote. Although they would forebear from actually endorsing a candidate or endorsing a specific side on a ballot question, there would be no mistaking the “correct” position that citizens were expected to take with their vote. The influence ministers wielded and the respect they were shown was disproportionate to someone who neither held government office nor possessed the authority that wealth can bring, but were simply the town minister. This position, including its financial provision, was sanctioned in the Massachusetts State Constitution of 1780.⁷

The intimacy between government and church granted them this power, but they also claimed it for themselves based on their special position as interpreter of scripture and translator of the symbols of high culture. With rare exceptions, congregational ministers were the most educated members of their communities, and they had the forced attention of their fellow citizens for several hours every Sunday for worship and teaching, but also again on Thursdays for more teaching. The sound of the congregational minister’s voice was the primary medium for both spiritual and intellectual instruction available to the average citizen. Consequently, the minister’s opinion on practically any and every topic was given particular favor, and their moral authority was unassailable. Thus, there emerged a unique social, political, and spiritual institution that became known as “The Standing Order.”⁸

The Standing Order was a closed system that influenced, if not controlled, church, state, culture, community, and wealth right through the American Revolution and into the 19th century. This coalition of the seats of authority is not hard to imagine in a culture where Rev. Cotton Mather could address the magistrates of the Massachusetts General Court with: “Syres! I have a Message from GOD unto you.”⁹ But, as seen throughout the history of human institutions, the means by which destruction comes are often contained within their very origins, and they crumble from their own weight upon an insufficient foundation. In the case of the Standing Order, its very rise revealed clues to its future disintegration. “The Cambridge Platform” is one of those clues.

By 1640, the “New England Way” of testing new members for satisfactory evidence of saving faith as the standard for membership was widely accepted, which limited adult baptism to regenerate members only, but allowed for the baptism of their children. A Half-Way covenant had been extended by some congregations to allow their own noncommunicant children to participate in worship as parish members but restricted them from communion. This practice led the Puritans to a crossroads which they labored mightily to avoid, the issue of baptism for the children of their own baptized but unregenerate children. Some churches wished to extend the Half-Way Covenant to prevent the expulsion of their own grandchildren from Christian fellowship and instruction. Where this practice was adopted, it sometimes resulted in the baptism of scores of children at a time, aged from infancy to early twenties, often with multiple baptisms in a single family. Others strictly refused the Half-Way Covenant, and this position was not without precedent. We need only recall the Salem church’s refusal to administer communion and baptism to Winthrop’s group upon their arrival. This hard line position mimicked the class-based social structure endorsed by Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity” within the spiritual ranks of Puritan congregations by distinguishing communicants from parish members. What distinguished the spiritual classes was not the possession of property and wealth but participation in baptism and communion.

There were ministers and laymen alike who thought the New England Way and its implications for the sacraments was hypocritical, and rejected the policy. At least one church, in Newbury, erected a “reformed English parish system where they admitted to baptism and the Lord’s Supper all but notorious sinners.”¹⁰ Presbyterian Dr. Robert Child challenged the New England Way in 1646, arguing for the admission of all godly men to the sacraments, and was imprisoned for it. Baptists participated in the dispute with a simple solution, “eliminate infant baptism.” Finally, a synod of Puritan ministers from Massachusetts and Connecticut was called by the Massachusetts General Court to address the question. The Connecticut delegation, perhaps sensing a power struggle with hard-line Massachusetts ministers, chose not to participate.

One product of this synod was “The Cambridge Platform” of 1648, which is noteworthy, if for no other reason, for how little it deals with the issue it was supposed to address. In fact, all the provisions for the baptism of children under the controversial Half-Way Covenant which were discussed by the synod were stricken from the final draft as a compromise necessary to produce agreement on the document. Instead of taking a position on baptism that would resolve the crisis, “The Cambridge Platform” promulgated it while making a rather dismissive gesture to those supporting the Half-Way Covenant by saying:

..If not regenerated, yet [children of the Half-Way Covenant] are in a more hopeful way of attaining regenerating grace, and all spiritual blessings, both of the covenant and seal; they are also under church watch, and consequently subject to reprehensions, admonitions and censures thereof, for their healing and amendment, as need shall require.¹¹

The strict New England Way ministers were not necessarily in the majority but they ran roughshod over those more sympathetic to the plight unfolding slowly before their eyes by condemning these sympathies as “innovation.”

Ironically, while “The Cambridge Platform” provided nothing substantive in a synodical position on The Half-Way Covenant, its preoccupation with matters of church polity unintentionally left the back door open for individual congregations to institute or extend the Half-Way Covenant anyway. “The Cambridge Platform” examined different aspects of congregational polity and purity, and declared the congregational model the only one worthy of the Church Militant in the age since Christ’s coming. It then praised the church as the assembly of the visible saints, provided for a church covenant among those visible saints, prescribed excommunication and the standards for membership, allowed for the election of church officers and the calling of pastors and teachers, but ultimately declared that the will of the congregation reigned supremely over all these offices and practices, and was second in authority only to the will of God. Since each congregation could make such decisions on its own, “The Cambridge Platform” was a kind of trojan horse that could be used for conveying all manner of invasive ideas into the heart of Puritan New England. Unwitting as this open back door was in “The Cambridge Platform,” the practice of congregational sovereignty over such matters as membership, and the seals of the covenant in baptism and communion, was already established before Winthrop’s party arrived, as their treatment by neighboring Salem brings to mind.

But, even Salem was not immune to the appeal of the Half-Way Covenant. Rev. John Higginson, who was called as minister at Salem in 1660, tested the waters in his congregation by announcing that “had he thought they would not accept their responsibility toward their children, he would never have accepted the ministry of the Salem church.”¹² With the Salem congregation’s acquiescence, Higginson baptized 433 persons over the next twelve years. In the decade prior to his ultimatum Salem had baptized a total of 156 persons. But few ministers were as daring as Solomon Stoddard,who offered open communion by 1690. Incidentally, Stoddard is also noteworthy as the grandfather of Jonathan Edwards, who succeeded him as minister in Northampton, Massachusetts.

The dissolution of The Standing Order did not occur because of “The Cambridge Platform.” The seeds had been sown long before and “The Cambridge Platform” gave nascent sects and movements latitude for justifying their drift away from the old New England Way orthodoxy toward a new Boston Brahmin orthodoxy. By the time of the Great Awakening and the rise of the New Lights ministers and theologians the back door was wide open for congregations outside of Boston to succumb to the “enthusiasm” of revivalism and Methodism, and for congregations within Boston to succumb to liberal temptations such as latitudinarianism and Unitarianism. The Standing Order, which exercised its implacable authority through the expulsion of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, the execution of the Quaker “Boston Martyrs,” the handling of John Eliot’s “Praying Indians” during King Philip’s War, and the Salem witch trials, would be unable to maintain its facade of unanimity while the fissures between and within congregations, latent since the arrival of the Arabella under the vision of Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity,” widened until it was no longer relevant.

Boston led the way in the dissolution of the Standing Order, although there was a distinctively different assault mounted by churches outside the city. There, in smaller New England towns like Northampton and Uxbridge, the Great Awakening sprang to life as something of a repudiation of the Half-Way Covenant as a means of reviving the church. Modern American Evangelicalism still bears the distinctive markings of righteousness based on works of “the Law,” a personal “born again” experience, and entertaining preaching and worship that spread throughout New England and on into the American South, thanks to itinerant preachers emulating the crowd pleasing techniques of George Whitefield.

Nothing so theatrical characterized the rise of Boston Brahmin orthodoxy, although there were many dramatic watershed events, among which can be cited the loss of Harvard College to Unitarian leadership. Founded in the wake of the Anne Hutchinson Antinomian controversy, Harvard College was established for the proper training of Puritan clergymen on New England soil. In the wake of Hutchinson’s trial, the stalwarts of the Standing Order determined that their Puritan congregationalism was vulnerable to schism brought about by heterodox interpretation of scripture and the appeal of charismatic leaders. What was needed was a more skillful, better equipped clergy, so the commonwealth founded New College for that purpose in 1636. Renamed in 1639 for its first major benefactor, Rev. John Harvard, who bequeathed his library and half his estate to the college, the first assault on this Puritan institution of higher learning came when its very first president, Henry Dunster, converted from Puritanism to become a Baptist. By the time of the American Revolution, Harvard College was the preferred educational institution for the majority of New England’s sons, but the number of students preparing for the ministry had been eclipsed by those studying law. Noteworthy among the latter group was John Adams. By the early 18th century, Harvard was considered too liberal by an influential group of alumni, including Rev. Increase Mather, who founded the Collegiate School, later named Yale College, in Connecticut, as a way of meeting the ongoing need for preparing clergymen in the New England tradition. By 1805, Harvard’s leadership was resolutely Unitarian and representative of the new Boston Brahmin orthodoxy.

Equally dramatic, though not as easily articulated, is the transfer of regard for moral authority from congregational ministers to members of the rising merchant class. As the Half-Way Covenant and other changes to church polity advanced, the insular inner circle of visible saints became surrounded by a growing number of parishioners. While the visible saints increasingly focused their attention inward, to their regard for the purity of the church, the rising merchant class were turning their attention outward to the blessings of commercial opportunity. While no less devout than the visible saints, the merchant class was also intent on making Boston more profitable. A bellwether of the rewards the merchant class enjoyed was Brattle Street Church, Boston’s fourth congregational church and the first to be built in thirty years. Brattle Street was built with merchant donations and sustained with merchant support. As a result, Brattle Street became Boston’s most exclusive church thanks to a method for financing the church’s business that much resembled how the members conducted theirs. Pews were purchased and their location in the church reflected the member’s prestige in the community. Similarly, Brattle Street operated under the direction of committees, led by parishioners, who exercised authority in cooperation with the Standing Order communicants. Since pew rents paid the bills, these wealthy parishioners carried great clout, even to the calling of ministers and the paying of their salaries. The financial power of these parishioners, the wealthy pew proprietors, extended to church doctrine as Brattle Street gradually became more liberal to reflect the refined tastes of its wealthy members. Brattle Street was perhaps the first Boston church to adopt Arminianism and reject the double-predestination of Calvinism. One would not select Brattle Street for fire and brimstone preaching as wealthy Bostonians were not paying top dollar for pew rental in order to be admonished for their depravity in front of their neighbors and the street riff-raff who may be populating the galleries of a Sunday morning.¹³

Brattle Street Church may have charted the new course but it was not alone on that drift into Boston Brahmin orthodoxy. And “drift” it was, rather than an outright revolt against the Standing Order. The new Boston Brahmin orthodoxy rather ignored the Standing Order, it simply didn’t recognize its authority, and by so doing it collected other wayfaring congregations that drifted with it. Historian Peter S. Field calls it more of a “humanitarian” than a theological change. Field quotes from Joseph Haroutunian’s Piety Versus Moralism: The Passing of New England Theology, “Boston was liberal before it became Unitarian, and its Unitarianism was primarily ethical and social.” This transition was not marked by the same fiery debates that attended the Half-Way Covenant controversy for decades under the Standing Order. Rather, it was a placid drift toward rationalism in religion, toward developing social sensibilities. The Boston Brahmin teaching was centered on enlightened ethical values over doctrinal purity, as the very term Brahmin from Hinduism refers to the exalted status of intellectual achievement.¹⁴

A new kind of preaching was needed from a new kind of minister. With money to spend, Boston churches became a beacon for up-and-coming intellectuals who had the learning and the personal charisma to hold their own in the pulpit before the monied classes. The new Brahmin minister was afforded more time for intellectual pursuits since their posh salaries eliminated the need for augmenting their income by tutoring school children, cultivating their own food, or raising chickens to provide for their family as they might have under the Standing Order. In fact, Brahmin ministers had time for literary pursuits, and many were widely published. Many became fixtures on the social circuit, with automatic entrée, by virtue of their position, to everything from gala society events to small, formal teas in the best of homes. They also served on the boards of hospitals and lobbied for the endowment of art institutions. They were important simply because their parishioners were important. Furthermore, bachelor Brahmin ministers were highly eligible candidates for marriage to daughters of the newly wealthy. In short, the social status of the Brahmin minister rose along with the status of their pew proprietors. The wealthy merchant class supplanted the inherited nobility of the Puritan founders as pillars of society. There was a parallel transfer of the basis for moral authority from the Standing Order minister as interpreter of scripture and keeper of the symbols of high culture to the Brahmin minister as the spokesman for the liberal sympathies of the wealthy merchant class with authority assumed by the minister’s association with the wealthy and powerful. The rich now wielded the symbols of high culture and became to Boston and New England what the de’Medici family had been to Renaissance Florence, Italy.

The Brahmin minister’s attitude is evident in the city’s dismissal of the so-called Great Awakening that was sweeping small New England towns like wildfire as merely so much anti-intellectual hysteria perpetrated by unscrupulous itinerants upon a largely illiterate and unsuspecting populace. “…It became evident that religious enthusiasm would wane as rapidly as it waxed. As a result, by the 1750s many [Boston] ministers concluded that the successive revivals had done much more harm than good.”¹⁵ It is doubtful that many had observed these revivals first-hand.

Gradually, the prominence of the church in community affairs was eclipsed by the prosperous and diverse population that grew the wealth that built the city that became, in the eyes of its wealthy classes, the “hub of the universe.” Although the transition was subtle and multifaceted, what happened and how it happened may be best summarized by an author neither American nor Puritan writing about an analogous transition from private piety to public power. In his “Letters Concerning the English Nation,” written in the early 1730s, the great French philosophe, Voltaire, describes his experiences observing and conversing with an English Quaker. Voltaire finds many things to admire about the Quaker and equally many things that perplexed him. At the end of his series of four letters titled “On the Quakers,” Voltaire makes a poignant observation suggesting the fate of the English Quakers, one with remarkable parallels to the Puritans in New England:

I am not able to guess what fate Quakerism may have in America, but I perceive it dwindles away daily in England. In all countries where liberty of conscience is allow’d, the establish’d religion will at last swallow up all the rest. Quakers are disqualified from being members of parliament; nor can they enjoy any post or preferment, because an oath must always be taken on these occasions, and they never swear. They are therefore reduc’d to the necessity of subsisting on traffick [trade]. Their children, whom the industry of their parents has enrich’d, are desirous of enjoying honours, of wearing buttons and ruffles; and quite asham’d of being call’d Quakers, they become converts to the Church of England, merely to be in the fashion.

As a Confessional Lutheran, I find Voltaire’s commentary eerily appropriate to the generations of Puritan offspring, how their half-way membership in Puritan congregations led to disenchantment with the faith of their fathers, how the wealth they acquired from their own industry did not gain them full membership into their parents’ church but did gain them entry to the temples of commerce, of education, of culture, of society, and of government which made their parents’ church unnecessary. However, Puritanism did not die. Quite the contrary, it gave birth to many, disparate religious movements either from its emphasis on personal piety as an outward sign of regeneration, or its self-identification under God’s law with the Mosaic covenant, or its insistence on a pure congregationalist polity. To demonstrate how disparate these Puritan progeny are, both the United Church of Christ and the Unitarian Universalist Association claim “The Cambridge Platform” as an historic foundational document.¹⁶ The end of Puritanism in America was but the birth of American Christianity.

1. Thomas H. O’Connor, Bibles, Brahmins, and Bosses (Boston: Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston, 1991).
2. Darrett B. Rutman, Winthrop’s Boston (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1972).
3. The differences between people Winthrop cites are differences by station determined by birth, not the distribution of talents and ability among all people. The differences between creatures Winthrop cites should be seen as the differences between species, as between fish and birds, and not variety between individual birds or individual fishes. For example, the wealthy brought servants with them onto the Arbella, and once in New England their servants worked, but as a practice it would be below their station for noblemen to labor. Certainly, if a tradesman were accomplished and successful he could purchase more land and enjoy his wealth but members of the nobility could simply award themselves more land by virtue of their station. Consider how talents and gifts are distributed within a single modern Christian congregation. We certainly wouldn’t declare a newborn infant to be an ear or an eye in the body of Christ at birth.
4. Rutman.
5. Rutman.
6. Rutman.
7. Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1780. Article III of “A Declaration of the Rights of the Inhabitants of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”
8. Peter S. Field, The Crisis of the Standing Order (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998)
9. Field.
10. Pope.
11. “The Cambridge Platform,” 1648. Chapter XII, Section 7.
12. Pope.
13. Field.
14. Field.
15. Field.
16. See www.uuworld.org and www.ucc.org for how these two organizations value “The Cambridge Platform.”

By Pat K

Denise Spencer gives an update on her husband Michael’s condition over at InternetMonk

“It is with a heavy heart that I bring my latest update on Michael. We have learned that his cancer is too advanced and too aggressive to expect any sort of remission. Our oncologist estimates that with continued treatment Michael most likely has somewhere between six months and a year to live. This is not really a surprise to us, though it is certainly horrible news. From the very beginning, both of us have suspected that this would prove to be an extremely bad situation. I don’t know why; perhaps God was preparing us for the worst all along by giving us that intuition.”

Please continue to pray for our brother and his family.  On the right hand side of Imonk’s blog, Denise has posted her contact info for those who wish to donate to help them keep their insurance and pay their bills.

This news has hit us hard at NRP. We grieve and we pray….

By Pat K