Who Were the Puritans?

Who Were the Puritans?

The Puritans emerged during the English Reformation. After the Catholic Church refused King Henry VIII’s request for a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, he broke with Rome and established the Church of England.

Puritans believed the Church of England retained too much Catholic ceremony and ritual. Critics called them “Precisionists,” portraying them as people who closely scrutinized religious practice and judged the Christianity of their neighbors.

Growing tensions contributed to Puritan emigration:

• In 1608, one group left the village of Scrooby in Yorkshire for Holland.
• In 1620, some members of this group migrated to Plymouth in New England.
• About a decade later, a larger group sailed from East Anglia to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. By the 1640s, the video says, roughly 10,000 Puritans lived there.

The video cautions that not everyone who traveled to the British colonies was a Puritan: it describes only 41 of the Mayflower’s 102 passengers as Puritans.

Puritans’ strict devotional practices could also seem intolerant to other Christian groups, including Presbyterians and Episcopalians. Disagreements within the wider Puritan movement contributed to the formation of groups such as the Quakers, Antinomians, and Baptists.

Unlike earlier colonial migrants, who were often young, single men, Puritan migration to North America largely consisted of families. Their intense religious life helped them navigate what the narrator describes as the competing demands of Christian ethics in a changing world.

Puritan settlers also interpreted their presence in the New World through a religious framework. They saw it as a sign of divine favor and compared themselves to God’s chosen people in the Old Testament.

The video closes with journalist H. L. Mencken’s quip that a Puritan is someone who suspects that “somewhere someone is having a good time.”

Speakers and Sources

• Narrator — The documentary’s voice-over, which presents the history and interpretation of Puritanism.
• H. L. Mencken — Quoted by the narrator for his remark about Puritans.