How Did Puritan Beliefs Shaped American Society

Liberty was the key issue for the Puritans. It was liberty, or the lack of, that pushed men to find safe haven, and it was freedom that enticed them to create a new society that never put state and the church hand in hand. By having a taste of liberty, they were introduced to ideas of equality and democracy which became an important part of the community they built and to the future nation that they will create. The foundation of Puritan principles such as piety, democracy and republican freedom, spread its influence over all the colonies, enlightening the “whole American world”. Many historians contend that the Puritans founded America by establishing biblical principles as the basis of political life. Puritan covenants were the major theoretical

Most local and state governors and politicians had leanings toward Christians and had preference for the Protestant church. Leaders were Christians such as Patrick Henry, the governor of the largest and most important state, Virginia. In Massachusetts, the required tax support for the locally sanctioned church continued for many decades, demonstrating the continued preference for the church. Education was nearly almost only for training for clergymen and ministers, producing Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and Princeton.9 (Hebrew 363). Religion had become the center of people’s daily lives and the common Christian identity brought the community centered on the church. Christian faith and belief permeated domestic life, and Puritans “invested family life with religious values.”10 The church had become not only a center of worship, but also of identity and of culture. Communal life was played out centered in the church, and the “village church [was ] both the locus of religious activity and the focal point of the culture, the institution through which communal ideas and values achieved their fullest expression”11 Identifying with the Christian faith enabled the community to come together and become a society and then to become a state. Christianity had become a way of life and way of identification with the New World that was now predominantly Christian, and as stated earlier, the federal government does not determine the will of the people, but rather it is the local government that is the true voice of the