©2026 Victor R. Claveau, MJ
The term Puritan began as an epithet hurled at church reformers in England, whom others perceived as annoyingly precise, exacting, and meddlesome in the practice of their faith. Puritans were predestinarian Calvinist dedicated to living according to “primitive” scriptural rules.[ii]
Timeline
1608 Separatist Pilgrims[iii] flee England for Holland.
1620-1640 The Great Puritan Migration from England to North America. Mayflower Pilgrims land at Plymouth.
1629 King Charles I grants a charter to the Massachusetts Bay Company. Puritans established the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
1642-1651 English civil war between Puritans and Royalists.
1630-1740 Puritans exert almost complete control over governmental policies in New England and influence other colonies on the eastern coast of North America.
1630 John Winthrop migrates to North America with 700 Puritan colonists to become governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony.
1635 Puritans established the Saybrook Connecticut Colony.
1636 Harvard College is founded to train Puritan ministers.
1636-1638 Anne Hutchinson[iv] is the primary voice of the Antinomian Controversy,[v] defending her belief in the supremacy of God’s Grace in salvation against Puritan authorities.
1637 Puritans were the first to import Negro slaves to America.[vi]
1638 Puritans established the New Haven Colony.
1641 The Puritans codified slavery.[vii]
1692 Salem witch trials by the Puritan leaders begin.[viii]
The Puritan’s Basic Religious Beliefs:
- Total Depravity: Puritans took the concept of Original Sin to mean total depravity.
- Unconditional Election: Puritans believed that God chose who would be saved and who would be chosen for eternal damnation.
- Limited Atonement: Like other Christians, Puritans believed that Jesus Christ died to atone for the sins of man. Puritans, however, believed that Christ’s atonement did not extend to everyone. Only those whom God elected received the salvation benefits of Christ’s atonement. Those elected were part of an exclusive group, and not all Puritans were necessarily considered saved.
- Irresistible Grace: Puritans believed that, once God chose to elect someone for salvation, that person could never resist God’s grace.
- Perseverance of the Saints: A person elected by God’s grace would never depart from the path to salvation. The person would have complete power to understand the word of God, and would never turn towards evil.
The New England colonies were largely formed as havens against religious persecution in England. The Puritans sought to form highly regulated religious communities that would protect them and enforce their doctrines.
The Great Migration of Puritans to New England was primarily an exodus of families. Between 1630 and 1640, over 13,000 men, women, and children sailed to Massachusetts. Puritans played the leading roles in establishing the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629, the Saybrook Colony in 1635, the Connecticut Colony in 1636, and the New Haven Colony in 1638. Every congregation was founded upon a covenant, signed by all church members, in which they agreed to uphold congregational principles, to be guided by the Bible alone in their decision making, and to submit to church discipline.
Puritans believed that the state was obligated to enforce moral standards and ensure true religious worship was established and maintained, to protect society from heresy, and empowered to use corporal punishment, banishment, and execution. Mercy was not in the vocabulary of these pseudo-Christian ministers and Puritan legislators.
Freedom of Religion for the Select Few.
Puritans migrated to America for religious freedom, even though they denied it to others. Anyone who was not a Puritan was a heretic, including Catholics, Lutherans, Anabaptists, Antinomians, Quakers,[ix] Ranters[x]… in short, anyone who was not a Puritan.
Freedom of religion applied only to the Pilgrims.[xi] Enslaved Negroes, Indians, women, Catholics, and especially British loyalists were not worthy of the same protections and freedoms they enjoyed.[xii]
The Puritan church governed every aspect of life in the colony. During the 150 years after the settlement of the Pilgrims in America, invariably, the only sources of religious education were the pastors and congregations of the Calvinistic churches. Church leaders dictated what people could wear and how they should behave both in public and in the privacy of their own home. The Old Testament was the foundation of civil law. Anyone convicted of violating one of the Ten Commandments was punished by hanging. Anyone who simply questioned the official faith was treated as a criminal.
Puritanical intolerance began in 1629 when two brothers, lawyer John (about 1579 -about 1629) and merchant Samuel Browne (about 1600- ?) arrived in Salem on June 29, 1629. The Browne’s supported the liturgy of the Anglican Church and refused to conform to the Calvinistic tenets. A church was established after the manner of the Episcopal Church of England, using the Book of Common Prayer in the administration of the sacraments. This brought them into conflict with Governor John Endecott who had been charged to preserve the unity and simplicity of the Puritan Church. They were denounced as traitors their worship prohibited and they were banished to England on September 19, 1629.
The Right Reverend John Tracy Ellis wrote, “a universal anti-Catholic bias was brought to Jamestown in 1607 and vigilantly cultivated in all the thirteen colonies from Massachusetts to Georgia” and “The Anglican ministers of Virginia and the Puritan divines of Massachusetts Bay were often worlds apart in their theology, but there was nothing that would cause them to close ranks more quickly than a supposed threat from the Church of Rome.… Certainly, the anti-Catholic bias brought to this country with the first English settlers has proved to be one of the sturdiest and most lasting of these qualities.”[xiii]
In 1631, a law was passed by the Puritans of Boston and Salem that no one should be allowed to exercise the rights of citizenship, to vote, to hold office or to have any voice in political matters, who was not a member of one of the Calvinistic churches.
Roger Williams (c. 1603 – 1683) was an English-born New England Puritan minister, theologian, and author who refused to conform to the tenets of the Puritans and persisted in speaking his mind. In 1636, after great persecutions and personal trials, he was banished from the province and founded Providence Plantations, which became the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations and later the State of Rhode Island. He was a staunch advocate for religious freedom, which he termed “liberty of conscience”, separation of church and state, and fair dealings with the Native Americans. In 1638, he founded the First Baptist Church in America in Providence.
Another prime example of Puritan bigotry was their treatment of the Quakers. Between 1659 and 1661, Quakers William Robinson, Marmaduke Stephenson, Nicholas Davis, William Leddre, Wenlock Christison, and Mary Dyer were hanged by the Puritans on Boston Common for repeatedly reentering the colony.
Executions ceased by royal decree after the restoration of the English monarch, Charles II in 1660. Quakers settled and flourished in outlying areas: Salem and Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and what is now southern Maine.
The legal name of Sunday is the “Lord’s Day.” This sense is apparent in the Latin Dies dominica and in modern languages derived from that stock. Among the early Christians, Sunday was a time of prayer, of rest, and of honest recreation, wherefore it was forbidden to fast or to kneel upon that holy day; whence come our practices of anticipating a vigil and of saying the Angelus standing.
The Puritans, however, to confirm and perpetuate the hostility between them and the Catholics, ordained that Sunday, or the “Sabbath,” as they erroneously styled it, should be kept holy, not only by the absence of all work, but also of every kind of amusement. Their customs in this regard were rigid to the extreme.
In 1671, the Province of Massachusetts Bay, codified the following law with respect to the Sunday Sabbath in its charter:
“That whosoever shall profane the Lords-day, by doing unnecessary servile work, by unnecessary travailing, or by sports and recreations, he or they that so transgress, shall forfeit for every such default forty shillings, or be publickly whipt: But if it clearly appear that the sin was profoundly, Presumptuously and with a high hand committed, against the known Command and Authority of the blessed God, such a person therein despising and reproaching the Lord, shall be put to death or grievously punished at the Judgement of the Court. “
Historian Alice Morse Earle (1851-1911) describes a typical Puritan Sabbath:
“All the New England clergymen were rigid in the prolonged observance of Sunday. From sunset on Saturday until Sunday night they would not shave, have rooms swept, nor beds made, have food prepared, nor cooking utensils and table-ware washed. As soon as their Sabbath began, they gathered their families and servants around them…and read the Bible and exhorted and prayed and recited the catechism until nine o’clock, usually by the light of one small ‘dip candle’ only…. Sweet to the Pilgrims and to their descendants was the hush of their calm Saturday night, and their still, tranquil Sabbath, — sign and token to them, not only of the weekly rest ordained in the creation, but of the eternal rest to come.”[xiv]
Puritan Sabbatarianism spread to the New World. When Lord De La Warr (1576-1618) became governor of Virginia in 1610, he established strict Sabbatarianism in the colony:
“All were required to attend divine service, preaching, and catechizing on Sunday, and were forbidden to “violate or break the Sabbath by any gaming, public or private abroad or at home.” Transgressors suffered the loss of provisions for a whole week. Second offenders lost their allowance and were whipped. Death was the penalty for third time offenders.”
The Irish rebellion of October 1641, was an attempt to drive Protestant settlers off Catholic land. Contrary to previously held beliefs, the settlers, numbering in the thousands, were not massacred by the Irish during the rebellion. The supposed massacre prompted the notorious Oliver Cromwell (1599 – 1658) to subsequently take revenge on Ireland and commence a brutal military campaign. Over 50,000 Irish Catholics were transported by Oliver Cromwell. to America. The majority of the men were sent to the West Indies, but a great number of the women and children were sold as slaves in Virginia; and in 1652 the Commissaries of the Commonwealth of England ordered Irish women to be sold to merchants and shipped to Virginia.
In Virginia, prior to the Declaration of Independence, Catholics were not allowed by law to hold office under the government, to vote at elections, to keep arms, to own a horse worth more than five pounds, or to be witnesses in civil or criminal cases.
Quakers in Pennsylvania and Catholics in Maryland traditionally felt some responsibility for the welfare of their fellow man, but the dominant Calvinistic strain in New England was more inclined to believe that God helped those who helped themselves.
In 1659, the Great and General Court of Massachusetts (the Puritan legislature) banned Christmas for twenty-two years. This was due to their intense hostility towards the “Romish Church,” and the Church of England, charged with following “popish” practices.
This same legislative body also forbade the importation of any “Irish persons whatsoever” into the colony, and instituted oaths of allegiance for all public officials that specifically included denunciations of the pope. “Break the Pope’s Neck” was a popular game for children. The New England Primer—the “hornbook” with which children learned their ABCs with little phrases for memorizing the alphabet—offered as its phrase for the letter A, “Abhor that abhorrent Whore of Rome”[xv]
Pilgrim Children were not allowed to have a Santa Claus, a Christmas tree, or a vacation from school on Christmas day. Adults were not allowed to feast, to dance, or to refrain from work on the 25th day of December. Such actions were punishable by fine or imprisonment. The Pilgrims boasted that they worked on Christmas. Samuel Sewell, famous for the diary he kept, noted in his chronicle, covering the years 1623-1729, many of the hostile acts against the observance of Christmas. He recorded with satisfaction the number of stores open on Christmas days and the carts coming to town. “Some,” he says, “somehow, observe the day, but are vexed, I believe, that the body of the people profane it; and blessed be God!”
Cotton Mather[xvi] and other leaders of the Pilgrims pronounced as “blasphemy” the keeping of “Holy Days.” They wanted no “wanton Bacchanalian Christmases,” spent “dicing, carding, masking [taking part in a masquerade], mumming (superstitious ceremonies), consumed in compotations [drinking, carousing], in interludes, in excess of wine, in mad mirth.” If they stopped there, the sympathies of most Christians would be on their side. But these dour immigrants to New England, who were known by their gait, dark clothing, lank hair, and sour demeanor, did not want any merry-making at Christmas whatsoever, for they hated all things Catholic, as the Devil hates holy water. Because of their Puritanical hatred of Christmas, Thanksgiving was made a prominent holiday. All the usual foods associated with Christmas in “Merri England” were rejected in favor of the indigenous turkey, Indian pudding, and pumpkin pie. Christmas carols were tabooed.
The enemies of the greatest Christian feast of the year attacked these and many more innocent joys, merely because they were of Catholic origin.
As for the Puritans, one of their descendants covers the whole ground when he said: “The Puritans nobly fled from a land of despotism to a land of freedom, where they could not only enjoy their own religion, but could prevent everybody else from enjoying his.”[xvii] Thankfully, the Puritans are no more.
On the other hand, the Church, and the holy feast of Christmas continues to flourish in certain circles and do honor to the Babe of Bethlehem on December 25 of each year.
While Christmas is no longer banned in America, it is under serious attack, not only by modern paganistic and commercializing practices, but by the Anti-Christian left doing everything they can to remove all semblance of Christmas from our society.
On October 14, 1657, Massachusetts enacted a law against the “cursed sect of heretics lately risen up in the world, which are commonly called Quakers…” It declared that any shipmaster bringing a Quaker into the colony would be fined £100. Any colonist possessing a Quaker book would be fined £5.
Another anti-Quaker law was passed on 20th of October, 1658:“Every person, or persons, of the cursed sect of the Quakers, who is not all inhabitant of, but is found within this jurisdiction, shall be apprehended without warrant…They shall have a legal trial: and being convicted to be of the sect of the Quakers, shall be sentenced to be banished upon pain of death.”
Quakers defied the Puritan laws. They did not approve of war, and refused to serve in the militia. It was against their beliefs to swear an oath. When in public, the Quakers refused to doff their hats as a token of respect the colony or government officials. They disdained pagan and Catholic rituals of all kinds, including the days of the week, preferring to use ‘First Day’ for Sunday and so on.
Quakers were ridiculed and ostracized, the most persecuted minority in the 1660s and 1670s.
Governor John Endicott (b. before 1600-died, 1664 or 1665), authorized a law requiring that all Quakers be banished from the Colony, all Quaker books be burned, and any Quaker arriving from England would be jailed.
The “Cart and Whip Act” of 1661 ordered that any Quaker found within the jurisdiction of the colony would be arrested, stripped naked from the waist up, whipped, and transported out of the colony without conversing with anyone.
The general laws and liberties of the Massachusetts colony, issued in 1672, included the following anti-Quaker provision:
“Whereas there is a pernicious sect, commonly called Quakers… whose actions tend to undermine the authority of civil government as also to destroy the order of the churches,…they have not been deterred from their impetuous attempts to undermine our peace and hasten our ruine; For prevention thereof, this court doth order and enact, that every person or persons of the cursed sect of the Quakers, who is not an inhabitant of, but found within this jurisdiction, shall…come before the magistrate, who shall commit the said person or persons to close prison, to remain there without baile until the next Court of Assistants where they shall have a legal trial by a special jury, and being convicted to be of the sect of the Quakers, shall be sentenced to banishment upon pain of death.”
The period 1658–1692 saw the execution of Quakers, the imprisonment and banishment of Baptists, the antipathy towards Catholics, and the kidnapping of Indian children from their families in order to convert them to Christianity. Quakers were initially banished by colonial courts, but they often returned in defiance of authorities. The Boston martyrs is the name given in Quaker tradition to the three English members of the Society of Friends, who were condemned to death and executed by public hanging for their religious beliefs under the legislature of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1659, 1660 and 1661. Several other Quakers lay under sentence of death at Boston in the same period, but had their punishments commuted to that of being whipped out of the colony from town to town.
As the Quakers became more defiant, Governor Endicott instituted harsh penalties Any person who declared himself a Quaker would have an ear cut off. If he refused to leave the colony or to abandon his religion, he forfeited the other ear. Woman received whippings for the first two offences. Conviction of blasphemy resulted in the branding on the forehead with the letter “B”. Puritan officials pierced the tongues of some Quakers with hot irons to prevent them from ever speaking again.
In 1683, Mass was first offered in Philadelphia in a log or wooden chapel, at the corner of Trout and Walnut streets.
William Penn and Toleration.
In 1708, William Penn wrote from England to James Logan, his Governor in Philadelphia, in these words: “There is a complaint against your government that you suffer public Mass in a scandalous manner. Pray send the matter of fact, for ill use is made of it here.” And in a subsequent letter, he wrote: “It has become a reproach to me here with the officers of the Crown, that you have suffered the scandal of Mass to be publicly celebrated.”[xviii]
In 1733. St. Joseph’s chapel was erected on Fourth street, Philadelphia, by Joseph Greaton (1679–1753), an English Jesuit who came to Philadelphia from Maryland in 1729 to establish a mission. Father Greaton, had three years before entered the city disguised as a Quaker. The authorities took umbrage at this, and Deputy Governor Patrick Gordon (c. 1644 –1736) reported to the Council that the Catholics had erected a Roman Mass House, contrary to the statutes. The right of Roman Catholics in the Province of Pennsylvania to worship at the Chapel was challenged by Gordon the following year. The Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly ultimately decided not to ban celebration of Mass.
[i] The term Puritan originated with Mohammed, who called himself a Hanyf, i.e., Puritan, Reformer. Luther and Calvin adopted this same title of Puritan, and many of their followers retained it.
[ii] The Encyclopedia of New England, p. 1274.
[iii] Though often used interchangeably, the terms Puritan and Pilgrim, describe two groups within the early New England settlers. Pilgrims are English separatists who heavily criticize the corruption within the Church of England and seek to form independent local churches. In contrast, Puritans hope to “purify” the Church of England through reform.
[iv] Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643) was a religious reformer, Puritan preacher, midwife, and alleged prophetess whose beliefs and influence brought her into conflict with the magistrates of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, especially its governor John Winthrop (1588-1649). The disagreement, also known as the Free Grace Controversy, centered on the primacy of God’s grace over good deeds or as the preeminence of a Covenant of Grace over a Covenant of Works. Hutchinson was excommunicated, In 1638, by the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1642 she moved with six of her children to a Dutch settlement on Long Island where she and all but one daughter were murdered by Native American Indians.
[v] Antinomian from the Greek “against the law.”
[vi] According to the Colonial Records of Massachusetts, “two members of the church of Boston,” James Smith and Thomas Keyser, first imported Negro slaves into New England in 1637. These men brought these slaves from Providence Isle in the Salem ship Desire; so that we may trace the origin of negro slavery in New England to members of a Puritan church of Boston. Puritanism was often the advocate and defender of human bondage and of the slave trade. Slavery was legal in every colony prior to the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783), and was most prominent in the Southern Colonies. Between 1525 and 1866, in the entire history of the slave trade to the New World, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 millionAfricans were shipped to the New World. 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America. Of these 10.7 million Africans, only about 388,000 were shipped directly to North America.
By this time, human slavery had been abolished by the persistent efforts of the Catholic Church throughout continental Europe. The slave trade between Africa and America was never sanctioned by the See of Rome.
[vii] Wood, Betty, Origins of American Slavery (Hill & Wang, 1997), p. 103.
[viii] The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. Today, many people in Salem like to point out that the witch episode really began in Salem Village, or modern-day Danvers.
[ix] The Religious Society of Friends, commonly known as the Quakers, is a denomination of Protestant origin whose distinctive belief is that direct communication between the believer and the Holy Spirit is both available and necessary. The first Quakers in New England arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1656. The Society rejects sacraments and affirms ethical testimonies against bearing arms and for simplicity and human equality. Called Quakers because they “Quaked” during intense religious practices as the spirit moved them.
[x] A member of an antinomian Christian sect in England during the mid-17th century which denied the authority of scripture and clergy.
[xi] The Pilgrims were English Protestant refugees who established Plymouth colony in 1620. As Puritan Separatists, they thought the Church of England was beyond reform and choose to leave the established church and form new congregations of devout believers. During the reigns of Elizabeth I (1553-1603), James I (1603- 1625), and Charles I (1625-1649), the Crown and religious authorities saw this a direct challenge to their “legitimate” authority and the established Protestant religious doctrine; in response instituted a series of persecutions. Unwilling to compromise, the Pilgrims fled persecution by emigrating to the more tolerant Dutch Republic, where they lived for over ten years, before arriving at Cape Cod.
[xii] Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill: a City, a Siege, a Revolution, (New York: Penguin Books, 2013), p. 121.
[xiii] John Tracy Ellis, American Catholicism, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), p. 19-20.
[xiv] Alice Morse Earle, The Sabbath in Puritan New England (New York: Scribner, 1909), pp. 254, 257.
[xv] Mark S. Massa, S.J., Anti-Catholicism in America, (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 2203), p. 19.
[xvi] Cotton Mather (1663 – 1728) was an American child prodigy, clergyman, theologian, and writer. Beginning his Harvard College undergraduate education at age twelve, he is the youngest person ever to be admitted there. In 1685, he joined his father, Increase Mather, who eventually became the sixth President of Harvard, as minister of the Congregationalist Old North Meeting House of Boston. He preached there for the rest of his life. Cotton Mather is remembered as one of the most influential Puritan ministers of his day, and was overall, a highly influential figure in early America.
[xvii] Artemas Ward (1727-1800) was an American Major General in the American Revolutionary War and a Congressman from Massachusetts.
[xviii] The Metropolitan Catholic Almanac, and Laity’s Directory, for the year of Our Lord 1860, (Baltimore: Lucas Brothers).