I thought the movement largely died out in this country, but apparently I was wrong. I found a couple of Puritan sites, mostly this one: http://members.tripod.com/puritan55/id71.htm
And now I’m confused-does the Puritan movement still exist?
Would the Amish be considered Puritans?
I was reading that most of the descendants of the Puritans became part of the Congregationalist churches and many of their descendants joined what is now known as the Unitarian Universalists.
The Congregationalists had several offshoots. One, as noted was the Unitarian branch of the Unitarian-Universalists, another is the present day United Church of Christ. Some of the individual churches are pretty traditional, but I don’t think any of them would call themselves Puritan.
The Puritans morphed into the Unitarian-Universalists? From a close minded group to one of the most open-minded? Weird
Er, no, not “morphed” into. “Moved over to”. We’re talking “sects” here. Some Puritans broke away from the Puritan Church and started the Congregational Church, and then some Congregationalists broke away from the Congregational Church and started the Unitarian Church.
Like that. Getting a little bit more liberal with each move. It’s not the same thing as “the Puritans morphed into the Unitarians”.
And no, the Amish would not be considered “Puritans”.
Guin, FWIW, I’ve never, ever heard of the Puritans as a still-existing denomination. The only mention of them on the Adherents website is in a historical context, “how many members they had back in 1640”, etc.
http://www.adherents.com/Na_543.html#3293
Your Tripod link that you found is apparently a Jewish Christian website–it certainly isn’t “Puritan”.
http://members.tripod.com/puritan55/id62.htm
First, don’t confuse “Puritans” with “pilgrims.” They weren’t the same thing. The Pilgrims were Calvinists who’d broken away from the Church of England. The Congregationalist Church in the U.S. is directly descended from the Pilgrims’ churches.
Now,ear in mind what the word “Puritan” meant! Literally, it referred to members of the Church of England who wanted to “purify” their church of its remaining Catholic elements. Anglicans who opposed the Catholic elements in thei religion are often called “high churchmen,” while the Puritans were called “low churchmen.”
Get it? “Puritan” was not the name of a religion or church- it was a nickname for a particular group of Anglicans. If you had asked Oliver Cromwell his religion, he would not have said he was a Puritan- he’d have said he beloned to the Church of England. The Puritans agreed with much of what the Pilgrims said, but they didn’t leave the Church of England. They elected to fight for change from within.
So, of course there’s no “Puritan” church today. The Puritans’ descendants were lo-church Anglicans… and after the American Revolution, they became low-church Episcopalians.
There are still people in MANY churches, of course, who have attitudes often mocked as “puritanical,” but that’s another subject.
Correction: Anglicans who REVERE the traditional, Catholic elements in their religion are the high churchmen! The low churchmen were the quasi-Calvinists who opposed all things Papist
I had read that the pilgrims were actually correctly referred to as ‘Seperatists’, their desire being to seperate themselves from the traditonal Church of England. They apparently objected to the lingering elements of Catholicism present in Anglican practices of worship, namely the pageantry of the mass and the influence of ‘wordliness’ they saw in the congregation. (I’m thinking of the big ‘No Popery!’ riots in London in the early and mid-1600’s.)
‘Puritan’ is a term coined by the detractors of the various sects, since they seemed to want to purify the Church of England. This seemed to come down to doing away with anything that smacked of Roman Catholicism.
The American Puritans, although often held up as shining examples of dour and restrictive old men, were actually not that way at all, by most standards. True, they objected to holidays such as Christmas, but they were basically objecting to what we today lament as the commercialism of the holiday. Basically, they wanted a return to veneration of holy days instead of the riotous public free-for-alls many holidays had become in England. (They were also instrumental in doing away with the famous London Bartholomew Fair, complaining of popery, i.e., Saint Bartholomew Fair, plus the crime, drunkeness, and general licentiousness the Fair inspired.) But the Puritans also drank like fish, practised ‘bundling’, (allowing an engaged couple to sleep in the same bed while swaddled in cloth and with a board between them; not as much of a deterrant to ‘experimentation’ as you’d think) and it has been recorded in various books (Bill Bryson comes to mind here, strangely enough) that by the year 1700, fully one-third of all births in Massachusetts, long a ‘Puritan’ stronghold, were out of wedlock.
‘Puritans’, despite their severe reputation, were sort of the anti-establishment ‘hippies’ of their day.
ratty writes:
> . . . it has been recorded in various books (Bill Bryson comes to
> mind here, strangely enough) that by the year 1700, fully one-
> third of all births in Massachusetts, long a ‘Puritan’ stronghold,
> were out of wedlock.
I think the statistic that you’re looking for is that, at marriage, some large proportion of women were already pregnant (to judge by when the first child was born). Sources I’ve read say that this proportion was somewhere between 10% and a third. First, under the usual definition of that term, a birth less than nine months after birth is not a birth out of wedlock. Second, even if we take the larger proportion, saying that one-third of the first children of marriages are conceived before marriage is not the same thing as saying that one-third of all children are conceived before marriage.
Yes, there was lots of pre-marital sex back then. Think of it as being like it was in the U.S. in the '50’s (at least, the way it supposedly was in the '50’s). There was lots of pre-marital sex, but when a woman got pregnant, she was supposed to immediately marry the father, and it wasn’t much discussed that the child was born less than nine months after the marriage.
Well, just to nit-pick, the Pilgrim seperatists only really established themselves in Plimoth. Massachussets and Connecticut were settled by Puritans, who, like you said, should be considered low-church Episcopalians. (in fact, there were some settlers who sailed back to England to fight for Cromwell during the Civil War) However, low church Episcopalianism was always more congregationalist in structure than high church Episcopalianism, and that was moreso the case in America, where a lot of decisions had to be made at the local level. That, combined with the religious backlash of the Restoration was enough to turn most of New England Congregationalist.