Chapter 7: Shaming the Faces of God's People. As we read in the previous chapter, John Winthrop had told his fellow Puritans, "If we shall deal falsely with our God, we shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God and of all professors for God's sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants." And that's exactly what happened. Religious Intolerance. Jesus never forced His gospel on anyone.
The New Testament provides churches with methods for keeping the church pure, but those methods don't include imprisonment, public whippings, and hangings. For the first 300 years of Christianity, Christians never used the sword either to spread Christianity or to keep the church holy. Yet the church remained holy, and the gospel spread rapidly. In contrast, the Puritans depended upon the strong arm of the state to keep the church pure. By their reliance on the state, the Puritans showed a lack of trust in God.
Sadly, the Puritans were more intolerant than the Church of England they had left. If anyone started a church in Massachusetts or Connecticut that went against Calvinistic doctrine, the government would close down the church and perhaps banish the minister from the colony. If the minister didn't leave, they threw him in prison. So throughout most of the 1600s, there was no freedom of religion in Puritan New England.
Because the system of church government in New England was congregational, the Puritan churches were called Congregationalist churches. Any group of Puritans could start a new Congregationalist church if they wanted to, but the congregation had to be pastored by a state-licensed minister, and that minister had to hold to orthodox Calvinistic doctrine. Roger Williams arrived in Boston in 1631, just a year after John Winthrop had come.
Although Williams was a strict Puritan himself, he publicly advocated three things that he felt the colony should practice: 1) Freedom of religion, 2) Separation of church and state, and 3) Fair dealings with the Indians. He was right on all three points. Sadly, instead of listening to Williams, the Massachusetts authorities arrested him. They were planning to deport him to England when he escaped, fled to Rhode Island, and established a new colony there.
Instead of representing a step in the direction of religious freedom, Massachusetts and the neighboring colony of Connecticut represented a step backward. They lagged behind the other colonies in granting freedom of religion. They were still hanging Quakers when Protestant countries had quit executing people for their religious beliefs. As it turned out, it was the government of England that finally forced Massachusetts to repeal its laws that meted out the death penalty to Quakers. Salem Witch Trials.
Probably the foremost reason why Americans have a negative view of the Puritans is the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. To be fair, we must realize that at the time, witch trials were still being held throughout Europe and in the other colonies. They were not something unique to New England. The reason the Salem Witch Trials are so well-known is that the trials involved so many people, went on for so long, and eventually resulted in mass hysteria.
Sadly, in the end, it was discovered that the witch hysteria was the result of a cruel hoax. It was instigated by two girls who pretended to be horribly afflicted by demonic powers attributed to witches. The girls would shriek and roll on the floor and go into uncontrollable fits. They then accused various persons of being witches, and they said it was these witches that caused their fits. As a result of their hoax, 150 persons were arrested, imprisoned, and charged with witchcraft.
19 of the accused persons were convicted and hanged. Although we usually think of witches as being women, one in four of those hanged were men. The hysteria ended only when the Massachusetts governor finally stepped in and put an end to it all. When the people of New England realized that the whole thing had been started by a hoax and fed by hysteria, they grieved over what had happened. To be sure, the witch trials were conducted by the civil authorities in Salem, not the churches.
But because only members of the Congregationalist Church could hold public office at that time, all the officers conducting the trials were church members. As a result, once the hoax was uncovered, the church lost its credibility in the eyes of a huge number of the colonists.
In John Winthrop's prophetic words, they had "opened the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God." Yet if Puritans had only trusted in Jesus' methods, there never would have been the terrible blot on Christianity that came from those trials. The Old Testament pronounced the death penalty for witches and sorcerers, but Jesus introduced an entirely different approach to handling spiritual evils. He and His apostles cast demons out of people.
They boldly confronted Satan and his sorcerers, but they didn't kill such people. Their only weapon was the power of the Holy Spirit. Somehow, the Puritans never grasped that. If they had trusted and followed the ways of Jesus, the Salem witch executions never would have occurred, and the name of Christ would not have been blemished with the blood of innocent people. Regrettably, although the Salem witch trials have become so infamous, they don't remotely compare with the wickedness of the Golden Triangle.