Present focus—at least some of it—is rightly directed at the United States semiquincentennial this July. Let us pray that either distractions are minimal or else that the occasion itself serves as a welcome if momentary distraction. Hopefully, more comes from it than that—more than parades and proclamations. More fundamental questions should be on our minds; perhaps, the most fundamental questions of our time: What is America? Who are we? What has this all been about? The answers are more complicated than the queries. We must begin to pull threads, carefully and honestly.
In four more years, there will be cause again to celebrate another anniversary, one just as foundational to America, namely, the 400th anniversary of the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Less than six years ago, we did the same for Plymouth—a reminder that America is more than 250 years old. Looking ahead to the Bay colony is to appropriately begin our understanding of America at a more primitive stage.
Pursuit of historical understanding always risks infinite regress. We needn’t go back forever. But when our founders referred to the first men of New England, Pennsylvania, and Virginia as their “founders,” when they took on pseudonyms like “a Puritan,” or “Cotton Mather,” it’s worth peering back a little further than 1776 to try to understand ourselves. After all, Washington, Adams, and Hamilton were still corresponding with the surnames of Winthrop, Endicott, and Bradford; familiarity with seventeenth century New England figures in particular in turn makes the signatures of the Declaration of Independence or the members of the first congress more familiar.
To understand America, we must begin at the beginning. And we should consider the cause before the effect. What brought the first Englishmen to New England? What motivated them? What made them tick? This is an important, first order inquiry that, if it is asked at all, is often answered wishfully, sentimentally, and anachronistically.
We will ignore the middle and southern colonies for now, but not merely for the sake of convenience. Tocqueville considered New England—the very physiognomy of the Puritan—definitive for the resultant young republic he visited. Indeed, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in particular, was the first self-consciously political venture. (In any case, from Virginia to Pennsylvania to Massachusetts, they were all Englishmen and all Protestants—highly diverse to them but heavily homogenous to us.) We are, therefore, focused on the Bay.
Worth noting briefly, however, is that Plymouth colony, which would later be enveloped by her northern sister, is usually retroactively cast as Providence, Rhode Island, which few admired. That is, as a bastion of religious tolerance. Roger Williams was singular in his vision. Milton, Sidney, and Locke did not share his sentiments. Quite the opposite. Either way, Williams was soon forgotten, whatever the twentieth-century Supreme Court liked to imagine. Returning to Plymouth, William Bradford told us why his company left Holland, namely, to preserve the Puritan piety and English heritage of their progeny. No trace of comprehensive, egalitarian tolerance is discoverable in Bradford’s journal. Still, the Pilgrim emigration was one of necessity. They fled corruption but also persecution. They sought respite.
The Great Migration of 1630 was something different. The stories we elevate matter. The Pilgrims, whose colony remained rather stagnant and always parochial, are still remembered and beloved in part because their story more readily rhymes, if sufficiently maneuvered, with that of later immigrant stories—asylum seekers, refugees, etc. The story of the Bay Colony is less sympathetic, less familiar, but, in fact, was more formative. There we find pursuit of opportunity, a better life, but of a different kind entirely, a kind less relatable under our present moral conditions.
John Winthrop’s Model of Christian Charity sermon, delivered aboard the Arbella in 1630 is as good a place as any to begin. Every president, from Kennedy to Obama, invoked its most famous “city upon a hill” line. But that is not the essential excerpt, according to Perry Miller, who probably deserves more credit than anyone for getting Winthrop’s address back into the American consciousness. The key, rather, comes earlier:
“Whatsoever we did, or ought to have done, when we lived in England, the same must we do, and more also, where we go. That which the most in their churches maintain as truth in profession only, we must bring into familiar and constant practice; as in this duty of love, we must love brotherly without dissimulation, we must love one another with a pure heart fervently.”
“To comprehend America,” instructed Miller, “you have to comprehend this sentence. Americans would be Englishmen who attained in America what their English and European brethren were seeking. America meant opportunity because there potentiality might become act.” Blessed with a vacant continent, the company aboard the Arbella would “bring into familiar and constant practice” what “the most” could only profess or aspire to.
What was this aspiration? Complete reformation of morals and manners, piety and practice, in both church and state. Compromise had been necessitated by the practical considerations of Europe and England. The reformation had not proceeded upon a blank canvas. Sufficiently removed from these geographical, historical, and political constraints, something else might be possible for a godly people. But this was not a separatist endeavor.
Winthrop’s crew removed to New England “that therein men might draw breath to resume the fight, at that moment discouraged in England, against sin and profligacy,” says Miller. “This is what John Winthrop meant when, on the deck of the Arbella, he said we ‘seeke out a place of Cohabitation and Consorteshipp under a due forme of Government both civill and ecclesiasticall.’ The migration was no retreat from Europe: it was a flank attack.”
The city on the hill was intended to be an example to and imitated by Christendom. “These were not,” Miller continues, “refuges seeking a promised land, but English scholars, soldiers, and statesmen, taking the long way about in order that someday they, or their children, or at least their friends, might rule in Lambeth.”
The interest was international Protestantism; the impetus was God’s departure from England, no longer a vehicle for the Protestant interest. America was to be an example to Christendom of what was possible in faithful covenant with God. The project was not parochial. The first founders were, in fact, rather cosmopolitan—well-read, experienced, and traveled. New England luminaries wrote and acted with an eye fixed on foreign policy, aware always of what was being done not just in London but Geneva, Strasbourg, and Leiden too, even Rome. The writings of Hooker, Cotton, and Mather were not, as Miller puts it, for “home consumption,” but for international audiences, for a trans-Atlantic republic of letters.
Winthrop, Cotton, and Mather were men of the world. Winthrop himself was quite clear that his emigration was inspired by the chance to lead more, to gain a higher station. Cromwell once expressed similar sentiments. Fresh geography and investment presented opportunities abroad. In a sense, all the leading men of Massachusetts Bay were mercenaries, soldiers of fortune enlisted in a global conflict as much as Guy Fawkes was when he fought for the Spanish against the Dutch. New England was to incubate a replacement aristocracy, a new elite.
At the edge of civilization, the Bay was a training ground for the great war. At least to the statesmen of the colony, like Samuel Symonds, New England would also serve as a “place of rendezvous” for fellow Englishmen ambitious to conquer the Caribbean for the true faith and true discipline. Many New Englanders returned to old England during the Civil Wars to serve either in the New Model Army or in the new administration.
Cromwell’s protectorate showcased these aims of Puritan foreign policy, however briefly. Whereas James I/VI had declined to aid the Protestant cause on the continent, Cromwell (as Christopher Hill recounts) endeavored to claim the mantle of Gustavus Adolphus, champion of international Protestantism. In his laudatory biography of the Lord Protector, J. H. D’Aubigne recalls how his own Huguenot family had been saved by Oliver’s intervention; the same could not be said of his Stuart predecessors. New Englanders shared this vision of Anglo-Protestant domination of the western hemisphere and as protector of continentals. America itself would be the vanguard of Protestantism.
These were the practical, political aims for which the new world provided opportunity. It was not only socio-economic opportunity that led Winthrop, Endicott, and Cotton to the New World. Rather, it was a “positive sense of mission.” Charles had granted the charter; no one forced these Puritans out.
There was an abiding spiritual, missional animation to this grand experiment. Tudor monarchs had not been as zealous for reform as Puritans wished them to be. Stuart monarchs flirted with a return to Rome, either themselves or through their wives. The royal record of the seventeenth century was frustrating, to be sure. But for the Puritans, it was not just practical political considerations, at least not as we think of them, that controlled.
God was leaving England, for she had broken the covenant. The Bible is a record of the covenant status and performance of nations. These are the terms and units of God’s dealing. Like Israel, nations in covenant with God may succumb to idolatry, even apostatize, and forsake the covenant. It seemed to many Englishmen of the seventeenth century that their country was in danger of just that. A stunted reformation, Laudian liturgy, tolerance of popery, and failure to support the Protestant cause abroad in the Thirty Years’ War were sins at the top of the list. Even Algernon Sidney believed that England’s tolerance of Romish religion was intolerable and invited divine punishment. Both conformists and nonconformists preached warnings of God’s impending judgment on the nation, the departure of God’s favor, the reward for sin. Fast days and accompanying sermons called for national repentance.
Just a year prior to boarding the Arbella, Winthrop feared that “God will bring some heavy affliction upon this land, and that speedily.” Richard Mather warned that God might “unchurch” England and cast the civil war of the 1640s as judgment. John Cotton agreed that New England might provide refuge from judgment and a chance to save his countrymen from judgment. The errand into the wilderness would not be an act of penance, but of covenant renewal on behalf of England. There, the reign of the saints might grow up and prosper.
The original American experiment, then, was dedicated to a renewed covenant with God, to full reformation, to “pure Biblical polity” and godly political regime on behalf of—for the sake of—England and all of Christendom. There is an “unspoken assumption in the errand of 1630,” says Miller. If missed, the errand itself becomes unintelligible or, more commonly, an empty vessel to be filled with other assumptions.
“The Bay Company was not a battered remnant of suffering Separatists thrown up on a rocky shore; it was an organized task force of Christians, executing a flank attack on the corruptions of Christendom. These Puritans did not flee to America; they went in order to work out that complete reformation which was not yet accomplished in England and Europe, but which would quickly be accomplished if only the saints back there had a working model to guide them… If we succeed, Winthrop told his audience, men will say of later plantations, ‘the lord make it like that of New England.’”
This was the meaning and end of the errand, the purposes of the city upon a hill, namely, to instruct international Protestantism, even, as Miller suggests, to show Cromwell himself how to reform England. Or so they hoped and prayed. This weightiness of the mission instigated the obsession in New England with covenant maintenance. The errand was doomed absent divine aid, which would not come if the people lost focus and slipped into idolatry, nor would it come if corruptions were permitted to enter. Now the reason for the (in)famous New England jeremiad becomes clear: fear of repeating old-world mistakes, namely, lackluster moral and ecclesiastical reform and easy, egalitarian toleration. Puritan morality was not unique to them; it was their zeal for and opportunity to execute it that set the New Englanders apart.
This appears at first to us a foreign mindset. But enough introspection reveals that the mindset, the basic moral paradigm, has not left us. Rather, only the covenantal terms and conditions of their maintenance have been altered time and again.
The problem with the errand in the Bay was the same problem that America has encountered many times since: her product was not exportable, not replicable in seemingly any other environment. Instead of exporting her product abroad, foreign products were imported. Instead of changing the world, the world changed her. Better that she had intended to be and remained parochial and separate. Cosmopolitan consciousness, international aims, fueled the ambition necessary to hack civilization out of the wilderness, to brave the rough crossing, harsh winters, meager harvests, and savage warfare. The same consciousness and ambition presented vulnerabilities.
And yet, America did become the redemption of England and all Christendom, just not in the way Winthrop would have imagined. The first American experiment gave way to the second. The ideal of perfect reform gave way to the ideal of perfect unity. She would exhibit to the world the possibility of pan-Protestant peace in a way it had never been achieved on the continent or even in England. This shift was at first foisted upon America. Perhaps begrudgingly, the new Israel embraced a new ingrafting, adopting a vision of the Cromwellian liberty they had once shunned. That is, freedom for the godly party in the interest of Protestant union.
It was that interest that set the parameters of both liberty and toleration. Ironically, it was the restored Stuarts that forced redefinition of the great errand. Charles II pushed for expanded toleration to facilitate colonial settlement, profit, and stability. William and Mary codified the policy. All dissenting Protestant sects were granted free exercise, if not equal status, a development that Tories resented. The Toleration Act introduced a new principle of religious establishment, namely, multi-denominational Protestantism. Or, we might say, the concept of Christian fraternity within a single imperial jurisdiction was expanded, and what constituted the essentials of true religion were reduced.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, second and third generation New England Puritans were presiding over and endorsing Baptist ordinations, something that would not have occurred a generation prior. As I’ve shown elsewhere, this expansion of liberty was owed to practical political considerations and experience. But it was understood as a new way for America to offer covenant renewal to England and to preserve the Protestant interest. Rome was again on the march. Protestants would have to band together. Squabbles over liturgy and discipline weren’t unimportant, but they could be deleterious to a united front. America would again be the rendezvous point. The Protestant interest required purity, yes, but also peace, advised Cotton Mather. Would not the new Jerusalem have both?
“We cannot avoid having our Different Sentiments; but Peace! … There is one ingenious way to unite this people… We all have our several Schemes of things, and every man counts his own to be the Best; but I would say to every man, Suppose your Scheme laid aside, What would you count the Next Best? Doubtless we should be of One mind as to That: And if we could act by the common measures of Christianity, we should soon be united in it.”
Perhaps the perfect biblical polity would not reemerge in New England, much less be adopted worldwide. In exchange for reform, America got unity. In this way, the spirit of reformation, as Mather called it, would live on in the Theopolis Americana, a city upon a hill, a model of Christian charity. “The Kingdom here will be the Lords, and the Lord will be Governour among the Nations.”
Events of the mid-eighteenth century would test this unity and destabilize the order of things. But the ideal of America as a successor to the Protestant interest, and as a demonstration of measured ecumenism among a “gospelized” people, that experiment taken up on behalf of England and all of Christendom endured up through the occurrences we celebrate this summer.
