“I think I can see the whole destiny of America contained in the first Puritan who landed on these shores,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835.
Back then, it was an almost humdrum observation. Foreigners and Americans took it for granted that the peculiar characteristics of the United States, private property, ornery individualism, devolved government, and, indeed, republicanism, derived from its Protestant origins.
That idea is no longer in fashion. In the 1930s, the U.S. was redefined as “Judeo-Christian” (a word that had previously meant “a Jewish convert to Christianity”). Now that label, too, is considered exclusionary.
Exactly 400 years have passed since the first Puritan landed. Perhaps, as with the New York Times’s 1619 Project (but without its inaccuracies), it is worth reflecting on that foundation.
It is certainly an inspiring story. One hundred and two religious separatists set out from England. Two babies were born en route, one of whom died, along with three of the other passengers. By the time the Mayflower sighted land in 1620, her stores were depleted, her drinking water was rank, and the few animals that had not been devoured were worn out, unable to produce eggs or milk. The settlers knew that their hardships were just starting, but they preferred the risk of starvation to what they saw as the idolatry and superstition of an only half-reformed English church.
One thing we shouldn’t call them, if we want to be accurate, is “Pilgrims.” That label came into use only after 1798. Seventeenth-century Puritans thought of pilgrimages as popish, a medieval lusting after old bones and relics. For them, a pilgrimage was not a literal walk to a shrine, but a personal journey of faith. “Go on pilgrimage unto thine own heart, and there pray,” William Tyndale said.
Those earliest New Englanders were not pilgrims but exiles. Their first exile, to the Dutch town of Leiden, had not worked out. Some were drifting back to England, others assimilating with the Dutch. Their leader, Edward Winslow, feared “to lose our language and our name of English.” So they became exiles a second time, a theme familiar from their Psalms.
They did not choose America as such; they just needed space to make a “New England.” In marked contrast to Spanish and Portuguese colonists, they showed little interest in converting indigenous people. Catholic missionaries worked with feverish speed, convinced that soul by soul, they were saving people from hell. But Puritans, being Calvinists, believed in predestination — the sobering doctrine that, at the beginning of time, God had marked everyone out for either salvation or damnation. That being so, why bother converting anyone?
Like all exiles, they pined for home. Their colony remained tiny until John Winthrop arrived with a larger contingent in 1630 — exiles, again, from a Church of England that was bringing back altar rails, priestly surplices, rich music, and other supposedly Romish practices.
After 1640, though, the situation in Great Britain changed. First, Scottish Presbyterians and then English Puritans took up arms against King Charles I. All manner of outré Protestant sects began to flourish. Some New Englanders rushed across the Atlantic to fight against the king. Others simply drifted back because they could. This part of the story is usually left out but, between 1640 and 1660, more people left New England for the mother country than the other way around (unlike in relatively secular Virginia). Only the return of bishops under Charles II after 1660 revived the Massachusetts colony.
Looking back over those preceding paragraphs, we find a story that is indeed Protestant in its essentials. We see the cussedness of the first colonists, their determination to follow their consciences, their dislike of authority, and, not least, their belief in divine providence — which was to grow, in the New World, into the notion of Manifest Destiny. We see their emphasis they placed on covenants. Winthrop, in his famous “City upon a Hill” sermon, used lawyerly language to convey the idea of a pact with God. “We are entered into covenant with Him for this work. We have taken out a commission. The Lord hath given us leave to draw our own articles.”
The truly extraordinary thing (miraculous, we might almost say) is that those hard-bitten Puritans, who had no interest in religious liberty beyond their own and who harbored a deep fear of Catholicism, eventually created the first society on Earth where there was true pluralism — not just religious toleration, which had existed in many places, but freedom for each denomination to proselytize.
In the end, the logic of separatism, of allowing each man to follow his conscience, made for the open society that Tocqueville’s first Puritan may have foreshadowed, but could not have foreseen. So say it with force in this quadricentennial year: God bless America.
