Early American Puritanism Research Paper

Puritanism was a distinct historical occurrence that coincided with the founding of New England. It was also a way of being in the new world and it has resonated through American life ever since. Puritanism was a religious reform movement that was born within the Church of England in the late sixteenth century. Shortly after the birth of the Puritan religious reform movement it fell under attack of the religious people as well as the royal family. The movement grew in the 3rd and 4th decades of the 17th century to the northern English colonies in the New World. It is known as the migration that laid the foundation for the religious, intellectual, and social order of New England.

The movement first emerged in the 1560s, but its development

Some of these disagreements make the history of American Puritanism seem like a story of family spite and disintegration. But Puritanism as a basic attitude was remarkably durable and can hardly be overestimated as a developing element of the early American life. Among its cognitive contributions was a psychological empiricism that has rarely, if ever, been exceeded in categorical subtlety. It furnished Americans with a sense of history as a progressive drama under the direction of God, in which they played a role predictively aligned with, that of the Old Testament Jews as a new chosen

But if we consider Puritanism as a way of seeing the world, as an agonizing but elegant program of self-scrutiny by which the stirrings of grace might be acknowledged and the divinely sanctioned energies of the soul put to use–in both kindly and violently destructive ways–then we must account it the dominant spiritual regimen of early America. Though “the New England Way” evolved into a relatively minor system of organizing religious experience within the broader American scene, its central themes recur in the related religious communities of Quakers, Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, and a whole range of evangelical