Covenanted, communal, congregational

I had thought I was done with my personal "1620 project," an effort to learn something about my ancestors who colonized Plymouth, Massachusetts, four hundred years ago. I found accounts of that society incomprehensible from my 20th century vantage point. Knowing I couldn't understand, I was ready to let this effort go.

But I haven't, because the historian of Christianity I trust most, Diarmaid MacCulloch, offered a blurb for a little book about the Plymouth community, promising a new slant on "one of the great founding narratives of American life." This proved true for me; Francis J. Bremer has made the concerns and intentions of those settlers far more accessible in One Small Candle: The Plymouth Puritans and the Beginning of English New England. 

Starting from the first gatherings of the little groups that later became the Plymouth settlement in old England, following them to the Netherlands where they came to fear their idiosyncratic communal religious practice might be interfered with, Bremer outlines the community's evolution as it took off for and survived in a new world. He passes on his understanding of what they cared about, their deepest commitments.

... this book focuses on the religious lives and ideas of the men and women who gathered to pursue a deeper understanding of God’s will ... The story of One Small Candle focuses on a world in which the boundary between the spiritual and the material did not exist. It was a world in which people might feel the direct inspiration of God’s spirit, but also sense the presence of the devil. Rather than dismiss the puritans’ awareness of the supernatural, we need to understand what that experience meant in the lives of men and women in early modern England and New England.

Yes, they seem strange. But in their own time, they also can seem relatively open-minded. Their original leader was one John Robinson whose puritanism seems to have been distinct from the combative Calvinist persuasion that dominated among English reformers in those years, ending in temporary overthrow of the established church, regicide, and the Civil War of 1642-51. Robinson was at one with the more Presbyterian Calvinists in rejecting the authority of bishops and the pope and also what he saw as the false gods of religious images and clerical vestments. But he enjoined on his flock:

... “for things left dark in Scripture, they must be unto us [a] matter of humiliation in our natural blindness, and of more earnest meditation and prayer with all good conscience.” He sought to learn through interaction with other churches and individuals, including those who were not separatist. In Amsterdam and then in Leiden, the members of the congregation came into contact with representatives of various different faiths, including Dutch Reformed, Portuguese Jews, Scandinavian and Dutch Lutherans, and Dutch Mennonites.

Robinson did not in the end join the community's exodus to Massachusetts; in fact, the Plymouth settlement was without any clerical leader recognized in England until 1629. Instead, they took from their faith practice a communal form of both church and state governance.

One of the reasons they were scorned by people of more "orthodox" Christian practice, both from the English state church and more rigid Calvinist puritans, was their affirmation of what they called "prophesying."

Prophesying as such became a critical means by which the laity helped shape the understanding of fellow believers. It could take the form of an individual preaching “by way of prophesying” to a gathered congregation, as many laity would do in England and later in New England, particularly when a Christian group lacked the services of a clergyman. The term was also used to describe sessions in which various members of a religious community meeting privately would share their understanding of an issue before them in a form of inspired dialogue.

There is even evidence that this community was sometimes willing to listen to women in these sessions. They also differed from the more "orthodox" in holding that marriage no business of their church; it was an entirely civil practice. They seem to have had objections to capital punishment for offenses. This all seems more like what some later Quakers professed than our picture of New England puritans and indeed the Plymouth community were slightly suspicious outliers even in relation to the later Massachusetts Bay Colony. 

Alone with each other on the edge of a new world, they extended the form of religious governance they had learned in England to civil governance. In England and the Netherlands, they had formed themselves as a covenanted community, bound to each other by their understanding of how they were to approach God. 

The congregation was a community of individuals committed to following what they perceived as a godly path and forged through a series of hardships in England and on their journey to Leiden. In addition to their espousal of Calvinist theological positions, this entailed upholding a social outlook that demanded that each individual make what sacrifices were necessary for the common good, and “such was the true piety, the humble zeal, and fervent Loue, of this people (while they thus lived together) towards God and his ways, and the singleheartedness and sincere affection one towards another, that they came as near the primitive pattern of the first Churches as any other church of these later times have done.” Indeed, what most offended Robinson and the church leaders was individuals who were “cleaving to themselves and retired from the common good.”

These proved serviceable values in unfamiliar New England. Stubbornness, yes; individualism, no. On landing on the cold beaches of the new world ...

the male passengers signed a document whereby they “solemnly and mutually in the presence of God, and one of another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation . . . , and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought mete and convenient for the general good of the colony.”

From these beginnings we inherit both Congregationalist Protestantism and some suggestion of the possibility of a democratic society. There was a lot worse floating around in 1600s Europe.

Bremer provides an approachable account of their belief system and its implications. Other writers are more informative on the attitudes that made them (literally) an invading plague for region's original inhabitants and on their uneasy relationship to both England and Boston.

But since reading Bremer, I can move beyond feeling my ancestors were just repulsive. I'm glad I didn't let go my 1620 project without learning a little more.

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My 1620 project: Those Massachusetts Pilgrims
Those Plymouth puritans
Raised up by the wind in colonized Massachusetts
Enslaved people among the godly