As the Puritans migrated from England to the New World, they had a clear vision of what their churches should be like. Membership was restricted to those who could present evidence that they had experienced “saving grace.” This most often included a compelling description of some extraordinary experience that indicated intimate contact with God. Only those who could submit this proof were considered “visible saints” and allowed full membership in the church. In the early seventeenth century, however, few were denied membership since leaving England was considered sufficient proof of spiritual purity.

Puritans led their lives based on a group of strong beliefs, one of which was predestination. They felt that all events are foreknown and foreordained by God and that God chose who was saved and who was damned. They enjoyed life but they also had a clear picture of the fate of the damned and believed that hellfire was very real.

As was evident by their migration to the New World, Puritans also wished to purge their churches of every remnant of Roman Catholic ritual and practice, retaining only those customs and practices that the New Testament described for the early Christian church. They felt that this was their chance to build a completely new community with new institutions. Accordingly, the Bay Company congregational churches were self-governing bodies, answerable to no higher authority. The central community meeting house was dominated inside by the pulpit. This meeting house, however, was not a church in the modern sense. The Puritans believed that the whole community, when gathered, was the church. Their worship services were simple and dominated by long sermons in which their clergy expounded passages from the Bible. As in the Old Testament, the Puritans believed that if they honored God’s covenant by being faithful servants, God would in turn preserve and enrich their community.

The religious leaders of the time had a great deal of influence on society as a whole. Religious leaders were actively involved while the colony struggled to develop a form of government compatible with Puritan beliefs. Political and religious authority were often combined and voting was restricted to church members. This reinforced the Puritan belief that God sent them to cleanse the culture of what they regarded as corrupt, sinful practices. They felt that the government should strictly enforce public morality by prohibiting vices like drunkenness, gambling, and swearing. Even family life and the conduct of the home were subject to public scrutiny. There was no concept of individual “rights” to things such as privacy or freedom of thought and expression. The individual was expected to conform to the beliefs and practices of the community as defined by the elders.

Puritans felt that the beliefs and practices of the elect would carry over into their conduct of everyday life. They embraced the “Protestant work ethic,” which meant they were decidedly committed to working hard and to developing the community, in both material and spiritual ways. They enjoyed “worldly” pleasures like eating heartily, drinking, and singing, but they passed laws to make sure these pleasures did not get out of hand.

The Puritan way of life contributed greatly to the forming of American ideals. Some of the basic Puritan tenets that carried forward as society developed were those of self-government, community responsibility, the importance of education, a belief in moral excellence, and a focus on hard work and thrift. Eventually, the Puritan churches grew collectively into the Congregational Church.

Copyright 2006 The Regents of the University of California and Monterey Institute for Technology and Education