Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH COLONIAL LITERATURE
While the Puritans were only one of many groups settling the English colonies,
they were the one with the most cultural power. For that reason, it is necessarily
to understand who they were and how they saw the world to understand many of
the readings of this section. The Puritans were groups who felt that the Church
of England, otherwise known as the Anglican Church, retained too much of the
doctrine and culture of the Catholic Church after the Protestant reformation. Their
name derived from their desire to purify the church of these Catholic vestiges. There
were also non-separatist and separatist groups within the Puritans as a whole. The
non-separatists, like John Winthrop’s company, believed that the Puritans should
remain within the Anglican Church and correct it from within the system; the
separatists, represented by William Bradford’s Plymouth company, felt the Church
of England was a lost cause from which the Puritans should separate themselves.
The restoration of King James I to the throne and the subsequent persecutions of
dissenters made the distinction moot. The only way to safely practice views that
diered from the orthodoxy was to put considerable distance between oneself and
English authorities, which both Winthrop’s and Bradford’s groups did.
The Puritans came to the new world with the goal of building a community
constructed around religious principles that could stand as a model—a “city upon
a hill,” as Winthrop put it—for a Christian community. The Puritans subscribed
to Calvinist theology, and Calvinism’s assumptions about humanity and its
relationship to God inuence their works. First, Calvinism held that mankind was
born depraved as a result of Adam’s original sin. The presence of sin within the
human soul meant that all of man’s impulses, desires, and beliefs were tainted. As
John Calvin put it in his Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536):
Let it stand, therefore, as an indubitable truth, which no engines can shake,
that the mind of man is so entirely alienated from the righteousness of God that
he cannot conceive, desire, or design any thing but what is wicked, distorted,
foul, impure, and iniquitous; that his heart is so thoroughly envenomed by sin
that it can breathe out nothing but corruption and rottenness; that if some
men occasionally make a show of goodness, their mind is ever interwoven with
hypocrisy and deceit, their soul inwardly bound with the fetters of wickedness.
Congenitally incapable of righteousness, humanity was incapable of achieving
salvation on their own. Only God’s intervention could save people from the
damnation they deserved.
According to Calvinism, some of the faithful will be saved because of
unconditional election. Election, or God’s decision to replace a person’s original
depraved spirit with a clean one capable of understanding and following God’s
will, could not be earned through good behavior; it was unconditional in that it had
nothing to do with choices the person made or would make. It was also limited to a
relatively small number of people rather than all of humanity. A logical outgrowth
of these points of theology was the concept of predestination, which Calvin
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