I’m surprised there is no American Reformed church in your area, the church I was raised in. They are tied to the Canadian Reformed Church I was raised in, and having relatives on my mothers side in the Christian Reformed Church, I can tell you that the American Reformed are way more extreme than the Christian Reformed.
Yes, but it’s more than just fear of shunning for nonconformity. A lot of people nowadays, when talking about Calvinism and the early Calvinist movement specifically, tend to overemphasize its sobriety and strictness. (And remember, The Scarlet Letter was written by someone who’s relationship with Calvinism was troublesome at best, and often openly hostile) There was a kind of joy and optimism there. As Paul Seaver said about Wallington and the Commonwealth:
There’s a lot of variety to CRC churches, or so I’m told by a good friend who’s a Predikant for the RCA, and quite the scholar on the church(es) too.
I’d lay odds some of our local CRC congregations would be more conservative than the CRC congregations you experienced. Some were even looked on askance by a few of the more ‘liberal’ CRC congregations (oxymoron tho that is) for being a little too into it. :eek:
Yeah, the Scarlet Letter is far from a historical document, but I don’t think it’s actually that exaggerated. I’m not sure of the application of that Seaver quote, but have you read any of Wallington’s journals? He’s not kidding around. He would write letters to neighbors if he saw them drinking to chastise them - and this wasn’t particularly odd, it was expected. He was convinced that people who didn’t go to Church on the Sabbath would all be killed sooner or later by God, and wrote pages and pages and pages explaining in gruesome detail the deaths of various people who failed to follow the Sabbath. And I’d emphasize the “gruesome” part: there was a drunk woman he watched get thrown under a cartwheel of a moving carriage so that “her brains did fall on her neck cloth,” to quote one of the tamer passages.
Now, there’s no question that the Puritans this devout were a minority, and in Britain they didn’t always form a distinct, discrete community like they often did in the colonies (but even there it could get murky). But I don’t think its a stretch to say that socializing factors were involved.
I was raised Presbyterian, but not in any sense in what you would call a strict religious household. I never did understand the TULIP theology, and I don’t remember anyone ever trying to impress it on me. As I understand it, most Christian sects require the person to accept the grace of God in order to be saved, with allowances for cases where that might be impossible. The whole idea of ‘elect’ seems to run counter to that. Of course, most religions, somewhere along the line tell believers not to evaluate divine justice by human standards, but it still seems bizarre.
The genuine intellectual drive within the religious leadership of the Massachusetts Colony is hard to comprehend nowadays when we are so quick to associate religious ardor with suspicion towards learning, and even bald anti-intellectualism. But they did found Harvard–true, at first for the purposes of educating clergy, but then they did want their clergy to be extensively and thoroughly educated by the standards of the time, rather than simply comprising men who could read the Bible and speak of sinners, buckets, and waterfalls.
There certainly was a good deal of social and religious pressure to conform. I’m not disagreeing with you there. The Puritans believed both that God would punish evildoers and that it was the duty of every Christian to encourage others, which included chastizing and denouncing them if they sinned. There was also, of course, excommunication for public and notorious violation of church laws.(And yeah, Wallington’s journals are cheerfully gruesome)
However, all that being said, there were more reasons to become Calvinist and stay Calvinist than simple fear of ostracism. The English Puritans weren’t a people walking around in fear all the time. There was a kind of hope and optimism there…they were God’s elect, living according to God’s laws for His holy purpose, a beacon to the nations.