Hi, I'm David Bercot, and tonight we're gonna be discussing the truth about Puritan New England. Now, the New England Puritans are typically painted in one of two ways. First, the conservative evangelical Christians portray them as this wonderful, godly group of people who were the real founders of America. And they paint the scenario that if we could only return to the glory days of the Puritans, America would be greatly blessed by God.
In contrast, the secular world and liberal Christians typically portray the Puritans as harsh, unloving, and superstitious. Life in Puritan New England was grim without any fun. And secularists and liberals want to make sure that the religious right in the United States don't get back into power, as they can think of nothing worse than to return to the way things were in Puritan New England. So what's the truth?
Well, as is usually the case in situations like this, the truth lies somewhere between these two extremes. When John Winthrop, who would become the governor of Massachusetts, arrived at Salem Harbor in 1630 aboard the flagship the Arbella, he gave a sermon to the approximately 1,000 colonists who had come with him to settle there in Massachusetts. And one of the statements he made in that sermon is often quoted today, particularly by evangelicals. He said, " We must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill.
The eyes of all people are upon us. 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 byword 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. " John Winthrop's words proved to be prophetic, perhaps in a different way than he intended.
I think the whole English-speaking world knows about Puritan New England. What happened in Puritan New England flavors the view that most people have towards the Puritans in general, and it largely flavors the view that they have towards conservative Bible-believing Christians. So the question becomes, did those Puritans open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God? Or have they caused enemies of Christ to speak well of Christ and of His Church?
Did the Puritans shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants, or have they brought honor to the rest of us because of their actions? Well, that's what we want to talk about. Let's begin by talking about how Massachusetts Bay Colony got started. Now, the first English settlers in what we know today as Massachusetts were actually the separatists that our history books call the pilgrims. Now, they were there illegally.
King James had given them permission to settle in northern Virginia, and somewhat by accident, and because of the onset of winter, they ended up settling in Plymouth instead, and the king didn't make them move. The legal colonization of Massachusetts began in 1624, just a few years after the pilgrims, when the Puritan minister, John White, who rounded up various merchants, clergy, and other supporters, was able to obtain a grant for a large tract of land in America called Massachusetts.
The first settlement in Massachusetts, not counting Plymouth, was Salem. However, the man who founded it was not of Puritan persuasion. Rather, he was a high church Anglican. Now, the Puritans and Anglican weren't two separate churches. They both attended the same church. It was a matter of holding to different views. Well, anyway, the Puritans insisted that this Anglican either conform or get out. So he and some others chose to get out, and they moved a few miles away and started their own settlement.
So pretty quickly, you had two settlements there in Massachusetts or three counting Plymouth. Meanwhile, the company of men organized by Reverend John White had grown considerably and included a number of aristocrats, all of whom were of Puritan persuasion. However, in early 1629, they discovered that the land grant of Massachusetts included territory that had already been granted to other Englishmen. So they decided they needed to obtain a royal charter from the king that would supersede the earlier grants.
And they had to do this without spilling the beans that they didn't own all of the land that they thought they did. Now, quite a number of Puritans were aristocrats, and they had connections in the king's court. Now, the king himself, Charles I, the son of King James, didn't like the Puritans, but he did have them in his court. Well, a number of strings had to be pulled and bribes paid and a lot of other things.
But at last, this group of Puritans obtained a royal charter creating the Massachusetts Bay Company and giving it authority to rule the colony of Massachusetts. Now, King Charles didn't know that he was creating a Puritan colony. Charles, to all of our knowledge, thought he was just setting up a commercial trading company because, as I said, the Puritans and the Anglicans were all one church. They attended the same church. It was just two different persuasions, two different factions within the same church.
So the charter created a trading company, and the purpose of the venture was ostensibly for commercial gain, to spread the king's dominion, and to bring Christianity to the Native Americans. The charter granted English citizenship to the settlers and their offspring, and provided for a governor and an assembly to make and pass laws, so long as their laws weren't contradictory to the laws of England.
Now, since in less than 150 years after they got started, the colonists of Massachusetts would be embroiled in a heated dispute with England about the right to levy taxes on the colonists, I think it would be beneficial to see what the charter actually said on the subject of taxation.
It says this, that the colonists may ship armor, weapons, ordinance, munition, powder, shot, corn, victual that means food, and all manner of clothing implements furniture, beasts, cattle, horses, mares, merchandise, and all other things necessary for the said plantation and for their use in defense, and for trade with the people there, and in passing and returning to and fro, and without paying or yielding any custom or subsidy, either inward or outward to us, our heirs or successors for the same by the space of
seven years from the day of date of these presents.
Tomorrow evening, I'm going to be reading you very similar language in the Charter of Virginia, but it's very clear that it was intended that the king was going to levy customs and duties on the goods brought in and out of Massachusetts because he granted them a seven-year free period where there would be no duties levied. This would be to help them get their feet on the ground.
It does go on to say there would be one duty that would apply even during those seven years, but in general, they were going to have seven free years to get on the ground, and then they would be paying taxes, import duties, and export duties. So for the descendants of these people to later say that England had no right to levy taxes such as on tea. I mean, it was just absolutely false. It was right there from the very beginning.
Well, anyway, after obtaining their royal charter, the Puritans organized a somewhat secret exodus to Massachusetts for any Puritans who wanted to go. I say secret because again, it wasn't advertised that this was going to be a Puritan colony. They let King Charles I think he was just creating another colony like Jamestown. Well, a group of around 400 settlers almost immediately left for Massachusetts where they settled at Salem.
Well, the next year, the Massachusetts Bay Company selected a London attorney named John Winthrop to be governor of Massachusetts, and he and about a thousand others set off for Salem. As I mentioned earlier, when they landed at Salem Harbor, John Winthrop delivered a sermon to the settlers reportedly from the flagship Arbella about how they should live in this new land.
And because he ended the sermon in language similar to Joshua's about choosing whom you would serve, it's come to be known among evangelicals as the Arbella Covenant. I think it would be more accurately designated as the Arbella sermon because it wasn't a legal covenant in any sense of the word. The Arbella Sermon nevertheless is a very stirring sermon, and I want to read to you just a few excerpts from it.
He said, " Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, that is the experiment turning out to be a disaster, and to provide for our posterity is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. " For this end, we must be knit together in this work as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our surplus for the supply of others ' necessities.
We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality. 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.
Then he goes on to say, " If they do that, the Lord will be our God and delight to dwell among us as His own people and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways so that we shall see much more of His wisdom, power, goodness, and truth than formerly we've been acquainted with.
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, may 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.
As I've mentioned, those last two sentences have become very famous among conservative evangelicals, even though I would say most Americans have never heard of the Arbella Covenant. Unfortunately, John Winthrop's speech is greatly misused and misrepresented by evangelical conservatives. It's typically presented in Christian history books, et cetera, in the context that the Puritans were planning a new country, and this was their vision for this new nation for what would become later the United States.
But that wasn't the case at all. They were English citizens having come to New England under the authority of the king and in recognized subjection to the king. John Winthrop's City on a Hill message is saying that if they would live by all of the principles of the Bible, the things he set forth in his sermon, and most of them, I would say, are valid kingdom principles, then their colony would be the envy of other English colonies and settlements, like the one in Virginia.
In other words, they as Puritans would show the world what a real Christian community looks like. So the quote that, as though that was the purpose of the United States, is very dishonest. Secondly, it was simply a stirring sermon. It didn't necessarily represent what everybody there on the fleet of ships had in mind in coming to Massachusetts. And although evangelicals quote the last couple of sentences quite frequently of that sermon, they usually don't quote the beginning of it.
And that's interesting because Winthrop began the sermon by saying, " God Almighty in His most holy and wise providence has so disposed of the condition of mankind so that in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity, others lowly and in submission.
" The reason for this as follows: that he might have the more occasion to display the work of His Spirit, first upon the wicked in moderating and restraining them, so that the rich and mighty should not eat up the poor, nor the poor and despised rise up against and shake off their yoke. Secondly, that every man might have need of others, and from hence they might be all knit more nearly together in the bonds of brotherly affection.
From hence it appears plainly that no man is made more honorable than another or more wealthy out of any particular and singular respect to himself, but for the glory of his Creator and the common good of the creature, man. All men are thus by divine providence ranked into two sorts, rich and poor. Under the first are comprehended all such as are able to live comfortably by their own means duly improved. And all others are poor according to the former distribution.
So the Puritans did not hold to the egalitarian views expressed in the Declaration of Independence, nor in the kingdom teachings of Jesus Christ, of all of us being equals. Based on the teachings of John Calvin, the Puritans believe that God assigned people to different stations in life, and they should be content with their situation. God intended the upper class to rule the others and to live more comfortably than the others.
So the Puritans could not have honestly said that they believed that all men were created equal, except in a spiritual sense that all mankind are totally depraved according to their theology. So when evangelicals proudly point to the Puritans as the source of the American spirit, it's not really accurate. Now, the one thing that was different about Massachusetts than, say, Virginia and then later New York and other colonies is that they came here with a hostility towards the king.
They were leaving England on purpose because they didn't like the king and they didn't like the Church of England. That wasn't at all the case in Virginia and most of the other colonies. So it's not surprising that the American Revolution broke out in Massachusetts because, like I say, its original heritage was not one that held a favorable view towards the English crown. Well, the ideals expressed in the Arbella sermon floundered almost immediately.
The new settlers that came over with John Winthrop immediately got into arguments with the original Puritan settlers there in Salem over various church issues. So Winthrop's group moved away from Salem and they started a new settlement at Charlestown. Well, before long, John Winthrop left Charlestown and started a new settlement at what he considered to be a better location. And he named the new settlement Boston after a town in England where there were a lot of Puritans. And I would say he chose well.
He chose a very good location. Well, as persecution of the Puritans in England grew worse under Charles I, it led to what is often called the Great Migration. Up to 20,000 Puritans left England and came to Massachusetts. So it quickly became a large colony. Now, when Charles I finally realized what was happening in Massachusetts, he appointed a new governor to go over there, someone who was not Puritan, and bring things more in line with the wishes of the crown.
However, the ship that was to take the new governor to America immediately floundered before it even got out of the English coast. And Charles was now in a big crisis with parliament, short of funds, et cetera. And so Massachusetts just got shoved to the background. He had much more pressing problems at home. And so things were allowed to go unattended there. Now, we've been talking about Puritans up to this point, and I've even named this message the truth about Puritan New England.
And that's because the people who left England to settle in Massachusetts, the majority of them were puritans. Not all of them were, but the majority. But as I discussed in one of the previous messages in this series, the Puritans were a movement within the Church of England. There was never a separate Puritan church. They wanted to purify the Church of England from any vestiges of what they thought was Romanism, and also of all non-Calvinistic theological teachings, such as the belief that man has free will.
But as I've said, the Puritans and the Anglicans all attended one in the same church. The struggle between them was who was going to get the ascendancy of the Church of England. To put it another way, the Puritans were Anglicans who held to Calvinistic theology and who wanted a fairly plain church buildings and church services. No stained glass, no vestments worn by the ministers, no ornate buildings, no musical instruments used in the worship.
But now once these Puritans from England settled in Massachusetts, it's really a misnomer to keep calling them Puritans. Because once they were here in America, they no longer had any interest in trying to reform the Church of England. In Massachusetts, they formed their own separate churches, and they weren't called Puritan churches, they were called congregationalist churches.
Because they spread out into various villages, almost from the very start, instead of staying together, each of their churches were independent. Each congregation ran its own church, and that's why they became known quickly as congregationalist churches. Now, that was quite different than what most of the Puritans in England had been seeking up to that time.
As I said, they wanted to gain control of the national church, and at least half or more of them wanted some type of Presbyterian government of the Church of England. They were united in that they didn't want bishops, but many of them did want a presbytery that would be over the churches instead of the churches all being independent. So the New England congregationalists were their own unique separate branch of the Calvinist movement around the world.
They, of course, had huge sympathies with the Puritans in England as being blood brothers, but they were truly a separate movement once they got founded here in America. Just as were the Scottish Presbyterians, the Dutch Reformed, the French Huguenots, and the various Swiss churches. They were all part of the Calvinist family, but they grew up differently from each other, and they often did not have goodwill towards one another. In fact, most of those groups ended up in wars with one another.
And yet I still read books that, for example, referred to ministers like Jonathan Edwards, who lived during the 1700s as a Puritan minister. That's totally absurd. Puritanism was dead by the 1700s. I mean, they had finally got control of the Church of England and control of Parliament and the English government. They ran England for a number of years. We've talked about that in an earlier message. In fact, the experiment there that John Winthrop was trying in New England, they later got to try in England itself.
And all eyes were upon them. And I would say nobody was very impressed with the result, as we've already discussed. So Jonathan Edwards was a New England congregationalist minister. He was not a Puritan. Congregationalists descended from the Puritan movement, but they were something new and they took on a characteristic of their own. So throughout this message, I'll normally refer only to the first generation of settlers as Puritans and refer to the later generations as congregationalists.
I may not be consistent all the way through with that because, like I say, it's so common to call all of them Puritans throughout the 1600s, but that's the general rule I'll be following. Now, when I say that the New England congregationalist churches were independent of each other, what I'm saying is that there was no higher church authority over the local congregation. There were no bishops and there was no national body of presbyters.
However, there was a higher human authority over the local congregations, and that was the colonial government. If a person started a church that went against normal Calvinistic doctrine, the government would come and close down that church. And any people who were making trouble, that is, who were disagreeing with Puritan doctrine, they would be sent back to England or banished from Massachusetts anyway. So there was no freedom of religion in congregationalist New England.
I mean, that's one of the big planks we associate with America, but it's wrong to associate that with what's called Puritan New England or Congregationalist New England because there was not freedom of religion there. They did not believe in freedom of religion. If they had the power in England, and once they got it, they imposed their will on everybody else. They didn't disagree with the Anglicans on that issue, that there should be just one church and everyone be a member of it.
They just wanted to be able to control that one church, which in Massachusetts, they were able to do. But there was, interestingly, the freedom to start a new congregation. There were no rules against that, but any new congregation had to be led by a state licensed minister. It couldn't be just somebody who decided to start preaching, someone who would have been like an elder or bishop in the early church, just someone chosen by the congregation who didn't have any theological training.
No, you had to be a graduate of a place like Cambridge or Oxford, or in Massachusetts, in New England, they quickly established schools like Yale and Harvard, specifically for the purpose of training their ministers. Now, American history books often refer to colonial New England government as a theocracy. Now, the word theocracy literally means God's rule. And so New England was not a theocracy in the original sense of the Word. The only kingdom that is ruled by God is the kingdom of God.
Now, God has ultimate jurisdiction over all human governments, but none of them follow His will or let Him rule them. But today, the term theocracy is generally used to mean a church-ruled state. But even in that sense, that is not an accurate description of congregationalist New England. I mean, I know I grew up with the impression that the Church in New England was the ultimate governmental authority, that it had authority even over the state. But that is not at all correct. It was the other way around.
When push came to shove, the governor and the legislature were the final authority. The first legislation passed by the colony of Massachusetts specifically stated three things. One, that it was the state's job, and not of the churches, to make sure that every church throughout the colony taught Orthodox doctrine and practiced the ordinances of Christ according to His Word. So the state basically took the place that bishops served, say, in the Anglican Church.
Number two, the state had the power to arrest and punish any church member for breaking the law, regardless of the position that that person held in the church. And three, even though churches had the right to censure a government officer for breaking church rules, this would in no way depose him from his office or degrade his authority. So the church in New England didn't have power to overturn the authority of the civil government or to try persons for crime.
That power was in the civil government alone, and it was the supreme authority in New England. Now, why people think that the church ruled New England is perhaps because the only persons in Massachusetts who were allowed to vote were the people who were members of the church. So the laws that were passed in New England tended to be laws that supported the church's teachings and discipline. For example, you had laws that compelled everyone to attend church, even if they weren't members.
But you have to remember that even in England, under the kings and queens, you had the same laws in England. Everybody had to attend church. So it wasn't something unusual. It didn't make New England a theocracy anymore than it made England one. Now the Sunday laws, for example, in New England were stricter than they were in England, but there were strict Sunday laws in England and in Virginia as well.
Now let's talk a moment about some of the democratic developments and legal rights of the inhabitants of Massachusetts. John Winthrop, the governor chosen by the Massachusetts Bay Company, when he came over to Massachusetts, he brought with him the Royal Charter for Massachusetts, but he never showed it to anyone. Finally, in 1634, the county deputies demanded that they see the charter that had been kept from them for all of those years. That would have been about four years.
Well, when they read it, they learned that the charter said that the general court should make all laws and that all freemen should be members. So the group demanded that the charter be enforced as it was written, which Governor Winthrop had not been ruling by. Well, they reached a compromise and they agreed that the general court, we would call it a legislature, would be made up of two delegates elected by each town, plus the council of advisors of the governor and the governor himself.
Well, then they voted on Governor and they voted Winthrop out of office. So the very first small New England Revolution, you might say, was complete. And it began the steps towards a more representative democracy. In 1641, the colony added its first code of laws. The list of these laws, liberties, and responsibilities were over 100 different provisions. And I would say for the time, it was quite enlightened.
I don't think anybody could look at the body of law that the Massachusetts legislature passed and say that it was oppressive or very narrow-minded for its time or anything like that. In fact, it might have been ahead of its time. Many of the things listed there are things that later would be included in the United States Constitution.
But now I don't know if these things originated in Massachusetts, if this was the first time that these liberties or rights were given to people, or if these were things already prevalent in England or things that were already being allowed in Virginia. Now, many of the laws were taken directly out of the Old Testament, and there was a good side to this, but also a bad side. On the good side were the rights of indentured servants. No person could be indentured for more than seven years.
When these servants were granted their freedom, their master could not send them out empty-handed, but had to give them enough funds to get started on their own in a new life. If a master beat a servant and permanently injured him or her, the servant would go free. In fact, if a master were mistreating a servant, that servant could flee to another house and be granted refuge there and couldn't be returned to the master without a court hearing.
Also on the good side, no one could be punished with more than 40 lashes. Now, I don't know what the law in England was at that time, but I do know that in the English army of that day, men could be given up to 1,000 lashes. Also, on the good side, there was no capital punishment for theft, which was in stark contrast to the situation in England. Furthermore, no one could be put to death except on the testimony of two or three witnesses.
Now, on the bad side, the law code in Massachusetts applied the death penalty to sins that in the kingdom should only be punished by church discipline. Among these sins that carried the death penalty were blaspheming God, worshipping other gods, practicing spiritism or witchcraft, bestiality, homosexuality between two men, and adultery with someone else's spouse. Both the man and the woman would be put to death.
As I've said before, the Puritans lived in an Old Testament world, being mostly blind to many of the laws and forgiveness that Jesus introduced. But in general, I would say most of the laws contained in their law code were advanced for their time. Here are just a few examples. No one could have their property taken from them or be arrested except by virtue of a written law that had been sufficiently published that the public knew about it. Except in capital cases, everyone had the right to post bail.
There was the right of appeal to a higher court in most lawsuits. All laws applied equally to both residents of Massachusetts and to foreigners. Now, men could be periodically conscripted for public works and also in times of war. However, when conscripted for public works, the work had to be reasonable and the men justly compensated. And men could not be compelled to go outside of the boundaries of the colony for an offensive war.
Although I'm opposed to all conscription, their law was certainly much more enlightened than our modern draft laws that send men to fight wars overseas. Citizens had the right to attend the sessions of the legislature and town meetings and to present complaints and petitions. Everyone owning property was allowed to fish and to hunt birds in any of the lakes, rivers, and bays in their community. Everyone was free to move out of the colony if they preferred to live somewhere else.
Everyone had the right to choose either trial by jury or trial by a judge. No one could be tried twice for the same crime or civil wrong. No one could be forced by torture to confess any crime against himself. The law made provisions for widows, and also made it illegal for a husband to use physical discipline or violence against his wife. It gave children the right to complain to the authorities if their parents were overly severe, what we would call child abuse today.
It made it a crime to allege more damages in a lawsuit than what you actually experienced, a law that I wish were still around today. One of the laws I appreciated the most was their Article 90, which says, " If any ships, be it friend or enemy, shall suffer shipwreck upon our coast, there shall be no violence or wrong offered to their persons or goods, but their persons shall be harbored and relieved and their goods preserved in safety until authority may be certified thereof and shall take further order therein.
" So the Puritans did do some things right. But now let's look at how they blew their witness. The first thing is that they completely disregarded the rights of the Native Americans who already lived here in America. Now, the Indians living in Massachusetts were generally willing to accommodate these new settlers from England. The goods the Puritans brought with them were beneficial to the Indians, and the local Indians could trade these items to other Indian tribes who lived further west.
So there was a benefit to having the Puritans live among them. However, since the Indians didn't own specific tracts of land the way that the English people did, but rather had general territories in which they hunted, fished, and grew crops, the English settlers tended to look at all of the Indian land as though it were open and free to take.
Now, if only 1,000 settlers had come from England, there would have been sufficient room in Massachusetts and throughout New England for both the colonists and the Indians to live together side by side. But for 20,000 Puritans to come over, it was a different matter. That really wasn't Christian, because there wasn't room for both groups of people, not when we consider the lifestyle of the Indians, which took more land per person than did the English lifestyle.
So it wasn't long before the Indians realized that they were being pushed out of their own land, and eventually they began to fight back. But when the Indians did start to fight back, the Puritans viewed this as though the heathens were unfairly and viciously attacking them. In the Puritan mind, this gave them the right to fight back, and they had much better resources to fight back with than the Indians had. One incident in particular really makes the Puritans look bad today.
That's what's known as the Mystic Massacre. It took place near the village of Mystic, Massachusetts. Now, word had reached the Puritans from another Indian tribe that the Pequots who were living there were planning to attack the Puritans. So the Puritans sneaked up upon the Pequot village during the night. Now, the village itself was protected by a palisade fence. In other words, a fence made of pointed sticks. And the Indians were all inside. This included whole families, the women, children, everybody.
Well, the Puritans, along with their Indian allies, surrounded the village, and then some of the Puritan militia went in through the gate silently, and they began slaughtering the sleeping Indians. Well, then one of the Puritan men grabbed a burning stick and threw it onto the roof of one of the huts. Now, these huts that the Indians were living in were made of woven straw mats, and they were packed very closely together. So you can imagine how quickly the fire spread almost instantly throughout the whole village.
Well, the Puritans ran out of the gate, and then they waited outside with their guns. Fairly quickly, the entire village was on fire, but if any Indians tried to flee out of the gate or climb over the fence, they were shot down. As a result, nearly all of the Indian men, women, and children were burned alive.
Well, after annihilating that main village of the Pequots, then the Puritans went out and hunted down the rest of them who were living in other small settlements, finally driving them to a swamp and giving them the choice of either dying there or being taken as captives and sold as slaves. The Indian women were sold as domestic slaves and were allowed to live there in Massachusetts.
The Indian men were sold as slaves to work in places like Bermuda and the Bahamas, or Barbados in the West Indies, cutting sugarcane where nearly all of them died in a short period of time. Well, after that, over the decades, there were other Indian wars, and eventually the Puritans and their descendants exterminated most of the Indian population of Massachusetts. In short, the Puritans had no real understanding of the kingdom of God.
They lived in this imaginary world where they were the Israelites again in Canaan, and that they were being attacked by the Philistines. But what a witness they could have given for all centuries if they had treated the Indians with love, like William Penn did later on when he founded Pennsylvania. Yes, as John Winthrop had predicted, all eyes are on Puritan New England. And instead of their actions bringing glory to God, it has done just the opposite.
Now, I do want to say this in response to the secularists who denounced the Puritans for their Indian massacres. The non-believers who came over to the colonies, and there were plenty of those in Massachusetts, they didn't treat the Indians any differently. So the secular non-believers have no cause to stick their noses in the air. Their record is no better than that of the Puritans. The second thing that has given the Puritans a black eye is their religious intolerance.
We certainly can't link the Puritans with freedom of religion. Now, to be fair, in that day and age, there wasn't a lot of religious freedom anywhere. But the Puritans were even more intolerant than the Church of England was that they left. And once again, in studying American history, every student learns about the Puritans ' intolerance. They had the opportunity to really give a good witness to real Christianity in the area of religious tolerance, and they failed miserably.
And yet it was just a few years after the founding of Massachusetts that Rhode Island was founded and religious liberty was granted to everyone, even Jews there. So the Puritans could have done it. In fact, the New England colonies were behind all of the other colonies in granting freedom of religion. I mean, they were still putting Quakers to death when no other colonies were doing that and when almost all non-Catholic countries had quit doing that.
In fact, it was the government of England that finally had to step in and make the New England congregationalists repeal their laws on hanging Quakers. And what has made the Puritans look particularly bad is the most famous dissenter in Massachusetts, and that was Roger Williams. Now, he arrived in Boston in the year 1631, just a year after John Winthrop's group. But he advocated three things that the Puritans should have initiated.
One, freedom of religion, two, separation of church and state, and three, fair dealings with the Indians. As a result, Roger Williams has had a fine testimony from non-believers through the centuries. The Puritans could have had the same thing if they had truly been as close to God as they imagined themselves to be. And ironically, Roger Williams was a separatist whose theological views were even more restrictive than that of the Puritans. So it wasn't that he was a liberal theologian.
Rather, he was like the Anabaptists in that he held to very strict spiritual views of separation from the world and separation from worldly churches. Yet, like the Anabaptists, he believed in freedom of conscience, that you don't cram Christ's teachings down other people's throats. If you can't persuade them with words, then you let them follow their own conscience. Well, as is true with nearly every religious group, spiritual decline in New England set in within one generation.
To be a member in the original congregationalist churches that the Puritans started in New England, you not only had to acknowledge and accept all of the church's beliefs, but you also had to be able to give a lengthy autobiographical testimony of a conversion that demonstrated that you were one of God's elect. Now, the Puritans and the congregationalists practiced infant baptism.
So most of the children of the first generation of colonists had been baptized because the majority of them were members at the very beginning. But although these children had been baptized, they were not allowed to share in communion or to be full members of the church as they grew older until they could relate their own personal testimony. Well, most of that second generation didn't share the same zeal as their parents, and they couldn't honestly give such a testimony.
Well, that not only meant that they weren't members of the church, it also meant that they couldn't vote. It also meant that they couldn't have their own children baptized. Well, by 1660, this is just 30 years after the founding of Boston, the vast majority of the people in Massachusetts and other parts of New England were in this situation. Since they weren't full members, their children couldn't be baptized.
Well, a number of congregationalist ministers saw that they were losing the battle, that within a few more generations, society would be totally removed from the church, even though everyone was forced by law to attend the congregationalist church, and everyone had to support it with their taxes. Obviously, this situation couldn't last very long with everyone being detached from the church and still being forced to support it. So in 1662, some ministers created what came to be called the Halfway Covenant.
This allowed the children of the original members to have their children baptized, even though they themselves weren't members. In other words, it gave them sort of a half membership in the church. Well, eventually, most of the New England congregational churches adopted this position, although there were others who strongly opposed it. But it's another reason why it's so historically inaccurate to refer to the New England colonists after, say, the year 1660 as Puritans.
The vast majority of them by then were not members of the church, and they didn't have the same religious fervor and convictions as had their parents and grandparents. Now, they were much more spiritually minded than the average American today. And nearly all of them would have believed in God, and perhaps in Christ Jesus. They just didn't believe that they were of the elect. And they were more interested in material things than in spiritual. As I said, they were New England congregationalists.
They were not Puritans. Well, probably the single episode that has given a black eye to the Puritans is the Salem witch trials. The irony is that by the time they happened, which was the years 1692 and 1693, Puritanism had long since been dead. The full members of the congregationalist church still held the political power in New England, but most of the people were caught up in material gain and weren't particularly spiritual.
Paintings of the Salem witch trials, which were made centuries later, often show the people dressed in old black and white Puritan garb that you might have seen in the 1620s, but is not at all the way people dressed in the year 1692. It should be noted that in places like England and in Virginia, probably all the colonies, they were still having witch trials there as well. It wasn't something unique to New England.
The reason the Salem witch trials are so well known is that they involve so many people and they went on for so long and because it became essentially a mass hysteria in the Salem region of Massachusetts. Also, because in the end, it was discovered to have been started by 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.
Then they accused various persons of being witches and causing their suffering. Well, as a result, 150 persons were arrested and imprisoned being charged with witchcraft, which was a capital offense in New England. And 19 of these persons ended up being convicted and hanged. Now, although we usually think of witches as being women, actually, one out of four of the ones who were hanged were men. Well, the hysteria only ended when the Massachusetts governor finally stepped in and put an end to it all.
Well, then when people realized that the whole thing had been started by a hoax and fed by hysteria, that innocent people had been imprisoned and put to death, they grieved over the injustice of it all. And the standing of the church and of Bible-believing Christians really nosedived in the eyes of the majority. And people still speak evil of Bible believing Christians today as a result of the Salem witch trials.
And yet if the members of the congregationalist church had been true kingdom Christians, they would have realized we aren't living under Old Testament law. We don't put people to death for practicing spiritism. We should excommunicate them from the church if they're not repentant. But that's it. We don't put people to death. Well, actually, by the time of the Salem witch trials, the new god of Massachusetts was mammon. People in the colonies had prospered, and their lives were wrapped up in making money.
Now, that in itself would be bad enough, but what was particularly bad was the way so many of them made their fortunes. A number of people in New England gained their wealth through smuggling. As I've mentioned, it was understood in the very beginning that England would be placing import and export tariffs on various goods. Of course, the tariff was passed on to the consumer, making those goods more expensive.
Also, the Navigation Acts that were passed by the Puritan Parliament in England required all goods going into or out of England or to its colonies to be transported in English ships. This also added more expense to the cost of goods because it meant unloading them, say, from a French or Dutch ship and reloading them on an English ship. So New England merchants and ship owners realized that they could profit considerably by smuggling in goods directly from France and Holland.
They could sell these goods more cheaply than could merchants who were obeying the law. And England didn't have the resources to police the Eastern Seaboard, so smuggling became rampant. And the smuggling industry didn't just involve the sailors and ship owners. The merchants who sold smuggled goods were an integral part of it. And so were nearly all of the New England people because they were knowingly buying smuggled goods because they could buy them at a cheaper price.
So virtually all of New England society was infected with this sin. But even worse was the sin of the golden triangle. Now, if I asked you which area of the 13 colonies took the lead in slave merchandising, what would your answer be? The Deep South? Well, that would have been my guess at one time, but no, it was New England. Pious, Calvinistic, Congregationalist, New England.
In fact, just 14 years after the founding of Boston, the first venture from New England to Africa was undertaken by an association of Boston traders who sent three ships there in quest of both gold and black slaves. Now, they found themselves in competition with the Dutch and with British slave traders. So before long, the New England ships backed off of the west coast of Africa for a while, and they began trafficking slaves from Madagascar, which was on the opposite side of Africa.
But within a few decades, things changed. The English had gained the upper hand over the Dutch and forced them out of the slave trade to a large degree. And they revoked the monopoly that had been given to the British Royal African Company on the slave trade. So this left the door wide open for New England traders, and they immediately pounced on the opportunity. And they developed what became known as the Golden Triangle.
New England ships purchased molasses in the West Indies and transported it to New England to be distilled into rum. This was the first leg of the triangle. Boston, Massachusetts had its first distillery in the year 1667, just again, 37 years after the founding of Boston. And the distillery was a huge success. Before long, the manufacture of rum became colonial New England's largest and most prosperous industry. Almost every important town in Massachusetts and throughout New England had a rum distillery.
Now I find when I tell this to people that most people are surprised to know that the Puritans and the congregationalists approved of drinking alcoholic beverages in moderation, but they did. The congregationalist minister, Increase Mather, once stated in a sermon, " 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. " So they did not forbid drinking as long as it was done in moderation.
Well, New England manufactured millions of gallons of cheap rum. In the year 1774, on the eve of the Revolution, Massachusetts boasted 63 distilleries that produced 2.7 million gallons of rum every year. I mean, even tiny Rhode Island had more than 30 distilleries. Now some of this rum was for local use because rum was very freely imbibed there in New England by most of the people. But the rum was primarily distilled because of the slave trade.
You see, the second leg of this golden triangle was for the New England ships to transport millions of gallons of rum to Africa, where they would exchange the rum for black slaves. The New England merchants could purchase an African slave for the equivalent of about four or five pounds worth of rum. In turn, they could sell that slave in the West Indies for 30 pounds to 80 pounds. When I say pounds, I'm referring to the English currency.
In other words, they got 10 to 20 times the amount they had invested in their rum. And they were able to make their rum fairly cheaply. Well, that same New England thriftiness discovered that the slave ships were most economical when they densely packed their human cargo together. So they ended up carefully laying out these slaves pretty much like spoons in a silverware case. The slaves were given only three foot, three inches of vertical space.
I mean, they would be laying down flat on their backs, chained to another slave. They had three feet, three inches above them. In the deck they were on, these ships would have many, many decks. And they had 13 inches, 13 inches wide, barely the width of a human body, and then another slave would be there. As I said, they were packed in like spoons in a silverware case.
And that was the third leg of this golden triangle, taking these black slaves to the West Indies, where they would be sold at a huge profit to spend their days slaving in the sugar fields, making the molasses that would then be transported to New England. On the eve of the American Revolution, the slave trade formed the very basis of the economic life of New England. The Massachusetts slave trade gave work to Coopers, that is, barrel makers, tanners, sail makers, distillers, sailors, carpenters, and rope makers.
Countless agents, insurers, lawyers, and clerks handled the paperwork for slave merchants. Colonial newspapers drew much of their income from advertisements of slaves for sale or hire. And it was because of the rum and slave business that the New England colonists got so upset when the British proposed a tax on sugar and molasses in 1763. The Golden Triangle made many New England families extremely wealthy, but it was one of the most wicked enterprises ever devised by man.
In conclusion, what sort of city on a hill was Puritan New England? Have people through history looked back at it and praised God as a result? Have people longed to have a society like the one in colonial New England? Not at all. All eyes have been on colonial New England, and it has blackened the name of Christianity. Today, Bible-believing Christians in the United States have very little moral voice. And this is largely due to the witness of Puritan New England.
It is just as John Winthrop predicted that if they did not behave in a godly manner, there would be consequences. His words were, " We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God. "