![]() A dynamic, nonlinear historical process, “Puritanism,” therefore, emerges from a scholar’s inclusive and exclusive choices, its nature significantly determined by interpretations of what it became: variously monolithic, incoherent, progressive, tyrannical, and more. “Pilgrims” and “Puritans,” impossible to define positively, arguably revealed themselves most in conflicts and controversies that formed and fractured their communities. They occupied Indigenous peoples’ land featured in transatlantic exchanges regarding Christian belief and hierarchy rejected most of Catholicism’s sacraments, ceremony, and decoration and wrote texts spanning a range of genres and purposes. Although we cannot definitively say who comprised the movement or when it ended, the twentieth century reveals significant patterns in the literature. Agreeing on no clear orthodoxy, they are often best defined by what doctrines, beliefs, and practices they rejected as by those they affirmed. Favoring the “Reformed” theologies of John Calvin, they are counted among the founding generations of Congregationalism, a structure authorizing individual congregations-not bishops-to “gather” churches and appoint ministers. ![]() They were simultaneously colonial agents of a growing British empire, Christian missionaries, and advocates for substantial changes within a developing state religion. Part of these groups’ complexity follows from their blended, sometimes competing purposes. The first name was a benign adjective and the second a derisive epithet both evolved into honorific proper nouns retrospectively. Popular historical narratives often center America’s origins on these “Pilgrims”-founders of New Plymouth in 1620-and “Puritans,” who founded Massachusetts Bay in 1630. The English colonizers of New England were mostly dissenters to English Christianity’s lingering Catholic influences.
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