Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Tuesday, October 5, 2021

Homebrewed Christianity - Walking with Soren Kierkegaard, Part 1


Soren Kierkegaard (May 5, 1813 - November 11, 1855)
Danish journal writer, theologist and philosopher.


Homebrewed Christianity -
Walking with Kierkegaard, Part 1
In preparation for Tripp's class on the Life and Theology of Soren Kierkegaard I am publishing several posts to help readers become acquainted with the lauded Danish writer. Soren carries several titles in life, including that of the common man's philosopher which is gleaned through his writings and journals over his foreshortened lifespan of 42 years.

I've included Stephen Backhouse's dialogue with Tripp Fuller from several years back and cannot recommend it enough in its helpfulness and heartening fellowship. So much so that Stephen Backhouse has become one of my most endearing theologians of late. He's concise, clear, glib, and thoroughly versed in the bible world of Soren's Danish/European culture of the 1800s in transposing Soren's thoughts to us today in the postmodern era of the 21st century. 
An era in which we live with the church's evangelical confusion with difference and plurality; the biblical inadequacies of Christiandom in its white nationalism bannered by God and Country logos; and the lostness of today's modernistic church attempting a transition from what it is to what it might become if focused on the love of God shared in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, our Savior.
Christians, caught within the melee of associating Christ with an ungodly, unloving, Christian culture full of loud words and abhorrent social policies combined with ungodly political and ideological iconography shouting God, Guns, Flags, and Xenophobia, Christianity is as conflicted as it has always been and exactly on the wrong side of love and liberty once again. Soren's view of the church in his day may help in our reflection and counter-reactions to the worldly church of our day. Thus today's insightful video.
Lastly, let me say that I enjoyed getting to know Backhouse has he and Tripp speak to a resurrected Christian worldview less attached with religious unkindness, unthoughtfulness, and idolatry. And for all this I believe Soren Kierkegaard would assuredly say "Amen and Amen. Thus saith the Lord!"
R.E. Slater
October 5, 2021

Kierkegaard: A Single Life Kindle Edition
Amazon Link


Kierkegaard: A Single Life by Stephen Backhouse
Discover a new understanding of Kierkegaard’s thought and his life, a story filled with romance, betrayal, humor, and riots.
Kierkegaard, like Einstein and Freud, is one of those geniuses whose ideas permeate the culture and shape our world even when relatively few people have read their works. That lack of familiarity with the real Kierkegaard is about to change.
This lucid new biography by scholar Stephen Backhouse presents the genius as well as the acutely sensitive man behind the brilliant books. Scholarly and accessible, Kierkegaard: A Single Life introduces his many guises—the thinker, the lover, the recluse, the writer, the controversialist—in prose so compelling it reads like a novel.
One chapter examines Kierkegaard’s influence on our greatest cultural icons—Kafka, Barth, Bonhoeffer, Camus, and Martin Luther King Jr., to name only a few. A useful appendix presents an overview of each of Kierkegaard’s works, for the scholar and lay reader alike.


Why Go Kierkegaard
with Tripp Fuller & Stephen Backhouse
Oct 25, 2016


About Stephen Backhouse 
Stephen Backhouse is the Director of Tent Theology, a venture bringing theology to local churches and networks. He was a Dean at Westminster Theological Centre, and before that Lecturer in Social and Political Theology at St Mellitus College, London. He has published a number of books and articles on religion, history, national identity and Kierkegaard. Originally from Canada, he now lives in the United Kingdom, with extended time in the United States.



Books by Stephen Backhouse

Zondervan Essential Companion to Christian History Kindle Edition    The Compact Guide to Christian History (Compact Encyclopedia) Paperback 






Ecological Civilization - Red China is Turning Green


Urban background solar panels, Shanghai, China. | Photo: iStock



Red China is turning green
In the rush to modernize, China neglected its environment, but now its growing middle class is demanding environmental responsibility.
February 25, 2019

“Even an entire society, a nation or all simultaneously existing societies taken together are not owners of the earth, they are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as boni patres familias [good heads of households].” – Karl Marx, Das Capital, Vol 3

China is a country of big numbers. Every year it has between 80,000 and 180,000 “public disturbances.” The government stopped releasing most protest statistics several years ago, when the annual number of “mass incidents” surpassed 100,000. Among these incidents are many environmental protests against heavy-metal pollution, dangerous chemicals, toxic waste, and pipelines, while corrupt bureaucrats playing footsie with environmental regulations. The Chinese government routinely condemns the protests, but it is often forced to react to the “will of the people.”

In one celebrated case, the authorities in the industrial city of Dalian ordered the immediate shutdown of a controversial chemical plant after thousands of people took to the streets to protest. In the Sichuan city of Shifang, thousands of residents rioted for three days against the proposed construction of a molybdenum-copper-alloy plant. After police arrested several protesters, residents besieged city hall demanding their release. The next day, the city announced that it would scrap plans to build the plant. Similar incidents have been reported throughout China.

Most protests are organized spontaneously on social media. They lack an obvious leader, making it hard for the government to arrest “ringleaders.”

Even documentaries on environmental issues can shame the government into taking action. Last year Chinese cinematographer Wang Jiuliang produced Plastic China, a documentary on China’s import of waste from mostly Western countries. The movie went viral on the Internet after having been shown at the Sundance Film Festival. Chinese authorities blocked Internet access to the movie, but a few days later, the country banned all import of foreign waste.


Plastic China | Trailer | Available Now
Jun 7, 2017


Journeyman Pictures
A portrait of poverty, ambition and hope set in a world of waste.

Sundance-Selected Documentary Plastic China available on:

For downloads and more information visit:

Wang Jiuliang: Besieged by waste
Aug 8, 2011


China Daily Global

Between 2008 and 2010, he visited more than 460 landfills around Beijing and took about 10,000 photos. In 2011, his first documentary film about waste, Beijing Besieged by Waste, showed audiences the state of waste pollution in Beijing. Wang Jiuliang is a 34-year-old photographer who spent all of his money to document the landfills around Beijing and draw people's attention to problems caused by waste. In an interview with China Daily, Wang talked about his experience shooting the documentary and his opinion about waste pollution and consumption behavior.

In the rush to modernize, China neglected its environment. Now that it has lifted 700 million people out of poverty and raised living standards dramatically, people start demanding clean air, clean water and clean food. The middle class in China’s large urban centers have started to embrace organic farming after a series of food scandals that included bacteria-infected vegetables, melamine-injected milk, counterfeit baby formula, and pollution-poisoned fish.

Throughout China, farmers are reverting to traditional farming methods without modern fertilizers. Farmers in Huinan county, Jilin province, raised 5,000 ducks in rice fields, feeding them on grass and prawns. It eliminated the needs for manual weeding and chemical pesticides. In southern China, farmers discovered that a native breed of spiders leaves webs among the vegetables and feed on hard-to-detect whiteflies, eliminating the need for harmful insecticides. Grass that co-exists with crops functions as a regulating factor of the microclimate by keeping the soil humid. Farmers on the outskirts of Shanghai found that trees, bushes, grass, insects, birds and cattle can co-exist. They are turning their farms into natural habitat.

Ecological civilization

President Xi Jinping has also jumped on the green bandwagon. In a major change in government policy, he announced that the country would pursue an “ecological civilization” to ensure “harmony between human and nature.” Sounding like a true Taoist, Xi added:

“We, as human beings, must respect nature, follow its ways, and protect it. The government will encourage simple, moderate, green, and low-carbon ways of life, and oppose extravagance and excessive consumption.”

He added that the government would “step up efforts to establish a legal and policy framework that facilitates green, low-carbon, and circular development, promote afforestation, strengthen wetland conservation and restoration and take tough steps to stop and punish all activities that damage the environment.”

Xi’s speech could have been written by John B Cobb Jr, an American theologian, philosopher and environmentalist who is highly influential in China. Cobb is the pre-eminent scholar in the field of process philosophy and process theology that emphasizes ecological interdependence – the idea that every part of the ecosystem is reliant on all the other parts. His ideas have resonated with Chinese thinkers. Cobb is co-founder the Center for Process Studies in Claremont, California, which now has 30 academic institutions throughout the world, 23 of which are in China. Cobb has taken a leadership role in bringing process thought to the East, most specifically to help China develop a more ecological civilization. This goal is now written into China’s constitution.

Several years ago, while China’s ecological crisis was making global headlines, Cobb sounded a contrarian note. “The hope of ecological civilization lies in China,” he said, pointing at four factors that give China unique advantages to realize its goal.
First, China has a long tradition of emphasizing the harmony of nature and humanity, which has enabled Chinese civilization to survive for thousands of years.

Second, unlike the US, China still has thousands of traditional villages and hundreds of millions of farmers who continue doing small intensive and meticulous farming.

Third, China’s political system is able to mobilize massive social forces to cope with major crises such as the ecological one.

Fourth, the Chinese government has shown its determination to create an ecological civilization by writing this goal into both the party’s constitution in 2012 and China’s national constitution in 2018.

Greening the planet

Cobb could have added that China is now the world’s largest player in clean-energy development. The country makes 60% of the world’s solar panels and surpassed Germany in 2015 as the world’s largest producer of photovoltaic energy. In January it pledged to invest US$367 billion in renewable power generation – solar, wind, hydro and nuclear – by 2020. The investment will add about 10 million jobs to the already existing 3.5 million jobs in the sector. China already produces nearly half of the world’s wind turbines, at a rate of about two every hour.

In 2017, China stopped or delayed work on 151 planned and under-construction coal plants, in response to flat-lining of demand for coal power. The affected coal power plants have a capacity equal to the combined operating capacity of Germany and Japan (95,000 megawatts) and cost around $60 billion. The boom in China’s renewable industry and a slowdown in energy demand has left China with hundreds of coal plants it doesn’t need. Newly increased targets for solar power, five times the current US capacity, will put more pressure on coal-fired plants.

China also plays a key role in the greening of the planet. Data from US National Aeronautics and Space Administration satellites have revealed an increase in global foliage. A research team studying NASA satellite images found that global green-leaf area has increased by 5% since the early 2000s, an area equivalent to all of the Amazon rainforests. At least 25% of that gain came in China, the result of its ambitious tree-planting programs. Overall, one-third of Earth’s vegetated lands are greening, while 5% are growing browner. The study was published on February 11 in the journal Nature Sustainability.

The Chinese government first used the term “ecological civilization” at the 17th Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2007. Growing environmental protests and China’s opportunity at global leadership in the renewable technology sector made the aim of ecological civilization a timely step. Xi noted that the focus on gross domestic product is a great obstacle to ecological civilization, adding,

“We shouldn’t judge one to be hero or not merely according to GDP. Instead, we should look at welfare improvement, social development and environmental indicators to evaluate leaders.”

Marx would have agreed. In 1844 he wrote: “Man lives on nature, [which] means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.”


JAN KRIKKE

Jan Krikke is a former Japan correspondent for various media, former managing editor of Asia 2000 in Hong Kong, and author of Leibniz, Einstein, and China (2021). More by Jan Krikke



Saturday, October 2, 2021

The Puritans and Their Influence in America




The Puritans and Their Influence in America

A 2-day conference was recently held at Calvin College Seminary presenting aspects of Puritanism, the Puritan spiritual life, and its resonance, or not, for today's contemporary discussions. Here is the presentation in chronological order of speaker. - R.E. Slater 

Due to an error on the recording of Margaret Bendroth’s opening presentation, “Why the Puritans Still Matter and Why They Might Not: Thinking About Historical Legacies in the 21st Century,” this presentation has been lost and is not available for viewing. As substitute the following dialogue has been inserted by myself. - R.E. Slater

The Spiritual Practice of Remembering
by Margaret Bendroth
May 6, 2021

On Friday, December 11, we hosted author and historian of religion Margaret Bendroth to discuss the nature and importance of memory in the Christian life and tradition. In her luminous work "The Spiritual Practice of Remembering," Bendroth argues that “remembering is an act with spiritual meaning... the past tense is essential to our language of faith; without it our conversation is limited and thin  - and growing thinner all the time.” The very act of noticing and remembering reconnects us to the Great Story. We hope this conversations helps you to think about the importance of remembering to the life of our faith.

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Comment: In this lecture Dr. Richard Muller discusses the natural theology of the Puritans. As a process theologian I noticed immediately how Puritan ideation of God and nature departed from process natural theology. As example, at the end of the lecture the Calvinist idea of lapsarianism was discussed. In process thought there can be no discussion of this subject as the Hebraic legend of Creation and the Fall is not actual. This means that the problem of evil began contemporaneous with the issuance of God's command to create, wherein was birthed love giving agency to creation and with agency came the ability to depart from God, love, and fellowship with all. The nuance  then addresses theodicy without necessitation biblical literalism. - re slater

The H. Henry Meeter Center
John Preston on the Purpose and Place of the Natural Knowledge of God
by Dr. Richard Muller
Sep 30, 2021


This presentation was given by Dr. Richard Muller (Calvin Theological Seminary) at our conference on The Puritans and Their Impact (September 24-25, 2021).  A brief summary follows below:
"John Preston’s sermons, most notably those in his Life Eternall, exemplify the early seventeenth-century development of an English Reformed homiletical theology in which hortatory elements were combined with fairly detailed theological argumentation, both positive and apologetic - intended for the edification of an educationally receptive laity. In the context of his sermons and in the process of formulation of a full homiletical body of divinity, Preston provided an analysis of the problems of faith and reason and of the use of natural knowledge of God illustrative of an approach that was neither fideistic nor rationalistic. His approach to formulation evidences the impact of the more technical scholastic development of Reformed thought at the same time that it adapts doctrine to its practical application—both following out the programs of William Perkins and William Ames and adumbrating the rise of homiletical theologies among the Puritans and exponents of the Dutch Nadere Reformatie."
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The H. Henry Meeter Center
"A publiq spirit for Sions sake": 
Puritan Activism in the Early Restoration
by Dr. Adrian Weimer
Sep 30, 2021

This presentation was given by Dr. Adrian Weimer (Providence College) at our conference on The Puritans and Their Impact (September 24-25, 2021).  A brief summary follows here:

"After the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660, New England colonists were faced with an imperial metropolis intent on consolidating its power. Drawing on resources from the Protestant Reformation and the English civil wars, colonial men and women mobilized around protecting their local institutions, forming a robust constitutional culture. This culture was marked by an ideal of public-spiritedness, a capacity among ordinary people to identify and critique arbitrary rule, and widespread mobilizing through petitions and fast days."
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The H. Henry Meeter Center
The Wars of the Lord: How the Puritans Conquered America's First People
by Dr. Matthew Tuininga
Sep 30, 2021

This presentation was given by Dr. Matthew Tuininga (Calvin Theological Seminary) at our conference on The Puritans and Their Impact (September 24-25, 2021). A brief summary follows here:

"The Puritans came to New England believing they were establishing the kingdom of Christ in a new world and that their Christianity would liberate its people from darkness. But their version of Christianity also played a major role in leading them to dominate the natives. A conquest they foresaw as spiritual, peaceable and benevolent devolved into a military conquest that was virtually genocidal. Puritan theology shaped how this unfolded and how it was justified, from beginning to end."
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The H. Henry Meeter Center
The Decline of Doctrine in Seventeenth-Century Cambridge
by Chad Van Dixhoorn
Sep 30, 2021

This presentation was given by Dr. Chad Van Dixhoorn (Westminster Theological Seminary) at our conference on The Puritans and Their Impact (September 24-25, 2021). A brief summary follows here. This paper deploys John Arrowsmith’s newly translated "Plans for Holy War" as a lens through which to study the perceived decline of the importance of doctrine in mid-seventeenth century Cambridge University. In "Plans for Holy War," a work of astonishing scholarship written by a dying Cambridge don - contemporary events led Arrowsmith to argue that Christian warfare must be waged in the world of theology. Exploring the dangers seen by Arrowsmith entails the intricate work of reconstructing local and national politics and understanding criticisms of Oxbridge academic theology in his own day.
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The H. Henry Meeter Center
Remembering the Puritans
by Abram Van Engen
Sep 30, 2021

This presentation was given by Dr. Abram Van Engen (Washington University, St. Louis) at our conference on The Puritans and Their Impact (September 24-25, 2021). A brief summary follows here. Heroes and villains. The beginning of religious toleration and the extension of religious oppression. Refugees fleeing persecution for liberty and opportunity abroad; settler colonialists taking land in acts of war and genocide. The Pilgrims and Puritans have been remembered and remade in countless ways in American history, literature, and culture. This talk considers how, why, and when they came to national fame, looking in particular to the role they have played as an origin story for a nation they never conceived.
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The H. Henry Meeter Center
Puritans Conference Speakers Panel
Sep 30, 2021

Here is the concluding panel of our conference, featuring all six of our conference speakers: Margaret Bendroth, Richard Muller, Adrian Weimer, Matthew Tuininga, Chad Van Dixhoorn, and Abram Van Engen.


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SUGGESTED CONFERENCE READINGS





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Dave Roos | Lambert/Getty Images


What’s the Difference Between
Puritans and Pilgrims?

July 31, 2019 | updated March 16, 2021

Both sought a different religious practice than what the Church of England dictated, but they were otherwise distinct groups of people.

Many Americans get the Pilgrims and the Puritans mixed up. Common thinking is: They were both groups of English religious reformers. They both landed in modern-day Massachusetts. And they were both stuffy sourpusses who wore black hats, squared collars and buckled shoes, right?

Well, maybe not the buckles.

To understand the biggest differences between the Pilgrims and the Puritans, one has to go back to the Protestant Reformation, which swept across Europe after Martin Luther (supposedly) nailed his “95 Theses” to the church door in 1517. 

Thanks to the printing press, non-clergy had access to the Bible in their native languages for the first time. They began to question why the Roman Catholic worship services were so different than those of the primitive Christian church.

The Reformation was slower to arrive to the British Isles, but England had its own split from the Roman Catholic church in 1534 when King Henry VIII wanted a divorce and the Pope wouldn’t grant it. The newly created Church of England was similar to Catholicism in every way, except instead of the Pope carrying divine authority, it was the British Crown.

Who Were the Pilgrims?

Every British citizen was expected to attend the Church of England, and those who didn’t were punished by the state. One group of farmers in Northern England, known disparagingly as the Separatists, began to worship in secret, knowing full well that it was treasonous.
“Once they decided that the only way they could be true to their conscience was to leave the established church and secretly worship, they were hunted and persecuted, and many of them faced the loss of their homes and the loss of their livelihood,” says Donna Curtin, executive director of the Pilgrim Hall Museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts. “When it became impossible for them to continue in this way, they began to seek another place to live.”

Pilgrim leader William Bradford, later the Governor of Plymouth Colony, reads the Mayflower Compact on board the Mayflower off the coast of what became known as Massachusetts. | Pilgrim leader William Bradford aboard the Mayflower. Credit: MPI/Getty Images

Pilgrims Look to the New World

The Separatists first fled to the Netherlands, a wealthy maritime superpower that was far more religiously diverse and tolerant. But while life in Holland was peaceful, it wasn’t English, and the Separatists feared that their children were losing their native culture. They decided that the only way to live as true English Christians was to separate even further and establish their own colony in the New World.

Not all of the Separatists could make the cross-Atlantic journey, including their spiritual leader, Reverend John Robinson. Writing years later in Of Plymouth Plantation, William Bradford recounted the tearful farewell at the docks in Delftshaven, where a ship would take the Separatists to meet the Mayflower in London.
“So they left that goodly and pleasant city which had been their resting place near twelve years; but they knew they were pilgrims, and looked not much on those things, but lift up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits.”
Curtin points out that Bradford didn’t name his community “Pilgrims,” and wouldn’t have heard the term in his lifetime. The first usage of capital-P “Pilgrim” appeared around 1800, when a group of citizens in Plymouth proposed the creation of a Pilgrim Society to organize the annual celebration of the founding of the Plymouth Colony in 1620. Before 1800, the Separatists who landed at Plymouth Rock were known as the “first-comers” or “forefathers.”

The Pilgrims, led by Bradford, arrived in New England in December. Roughly half of the 102 passengers on the Mayflower died that first winter from starvation, exposure and disease. With the help of the native Wampanoag people, the Pilgrims learned to fish and farm their new lands, resulting in the famous feast of Thanksgiving attended by natives and new arrivals in 1621.



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Nawrocki/ClassicStock/Getty Images


The History of the Puritans

October 29, 2009 | Updated July 30, 2019

The Puritans were members of a religious reform movement known as Puritanism that arose within the Church of England in the late 16th century. They believed the Church of England was too similar to the Roman Catholic Church and should eliminate ceremonies and practices not rooted in the Bible.

Puritans felt that they had a direct covenant with God to enact these reforms. Under siege from Church and crown, certain groups of Puritans migrated to Northern English colonies in the New World in the 1620s and 1630s, laying the foundation for the religious, intellectual and social order of New England. Aspects of Puritanism have reverberated throughout American life ever since.

Puritans: A Definition

The roots of Puritanism are to be found in the beginnings of the English Reformation. The name “Puritans” (they were sometimes called “precisionists”) was a term of contempt assigned to the movement by its enemies. Although the epithet first emerged in the 1560s, the movement began in the 1530s, when King Henry VIII repudiated papal authority and transformed the Church of Rome into a state Church of England. To Puritans, the Church of England retained too much of the liturgy and ritual of Roman Catholicism.
Did you know? In keeping with their focus on the home, Puritan migration to the New World usually consisted of entire families, rather than the young, single men who comprised many other early European settlements.
Well into the 16th century, many priests were barely literate and often very poor. Employment by more than one parish was common, so they moved often, preventing them from forming deep roots in their communities. Priests were immune to certain penalties of the civil law, further feeding anticlerical hostility and contributing to their isolation from the spiritual needs of the people.

The Church of England

Through the reigns of the Protestant King Edward VI (1547-1553), who introduced the first vernacular prayer book, and the Catholic (1553-1558), who sent some dissenting clergymen to their deaths and others into exile, the Puritan movement–whether tolerated or suppressed–continued to grow.

Some Puritans favored a presbyterian form of church organization; others, more radical, began to claim autonomy for individual congregations. Still others were content to remain within the structure of the national church, but set themselves against Catholic and episcopal authority.
As they gained strength, Puritans were portrayed by their enemies as hairsplitters who slavishly followed their Bibles as guides to daily life or hypocrites who cheated the very neighbors they judged inadequate Christians.
Yet the Puritan attack on the established church gained popular strength, especially in East Anglia and among the lawyers and merchants of London. The movement found wide support among these new professional classes, who saw in it a mirror for their growing discontent with economic restraints.

During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, an uneasy peace prevailed within English religious life, but the struggle over the tone and purpose of the church continued. Many men and women were more and more forced to contend with the dislocations–emotional as well as physical–that accompanied the beginnings of a market economy.

Subsistence farmers were called upon to enter the world of production for profit. Under the rule of primogeniture, younger sons tended to enter the professions (especially the law) with increasing frequency and seek their livelihood in the burgeoning cities. The English countryside was plagued by scavengers, highwaymen and vagabonds–a newly visible class of the poor who strained the ancient charity laws and pressed upon the townsfolk new questions of social responsibility.

Puritans in New England

In the early decades of the 17th century, some groups of worshipers began to separate themselves from the main body of their local parish church where preaching was inadequate and to engage an energetic “lecturer,” typically a young man with a fresh Cambridge degree, who was a lively speaker and steeped in reform theology. Some congregations went further, declared themselves separated from the national church, and remade themselves into communities of “visible saints,” withdrawn from the English City of Man into a self-proclaimed City of God.

The Reformation

One such faction was a group of separatist believers in the Yorkshire village of Scrooby, who, fearing for their safety, moved to Holland in 1608 and then, in 1620, to the place they called Plymouth in New England. We know them now as the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock.

A decade later, a larger, better-financed group, mostly from East Anglia, migrated to Massachusetts Bay. There, they set up gathered churches on much the same model as the transplanted church at Plymouth (with deacons, preaching elders and, though not right away, a communion restricted to full church members, or “saints”).

Differences Between Pilgrims and Puritans

The main difference between the Pilgrims and the Puritans is that the Puritans did not consider themselves separatists. They called themselves “nonseparating congregationalists,” by which they meant that they had not repudiated the Church of England as a false church. But in practice they acted–from the point of view of Episcopalians and even Presbyterians at home–exactly as the separatists were acting.

By the 1640s, their enterprise at Massachusetts Bay had grown to about 10,000 people. They soon outgrew the bounds of the original settlement and spread into what would become Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Maine, and eventually beyond the limits of New England.

Who Were the Puritans?

The Puritan migration was overwhelmingly a migration of families (unlike other migrations to early America, which were composed largely of young unattached men). The literacy rate was high, and the intensity of devotional life, as recorded in the many surviving diaries, sermon notes, poems and letters, was seldom to be matched in American life.

The Puritans’ ecclesiastical order was as intolerant as the one they had fled. Yet, as a loosely confederated collection of gathered churches, Puritanism contained within itself the seed of its own fragmentation. Following hard upon the arrival in New England, dissident groups within the Puritan sect began to proliferate–Quakers, Antinomians, Baptists–fierce believers who carried the essential Puritan idea of the aloneness of each believer with an inscrutable God so far that even the ministry became an obstruction to faith.

Puritanism in American Life

Puritanism gave Americans a sense of history as a progressive drama under the direction of God, in which they played a role akin to, if not prophetically aligned with, that of the Old Testament Jews as a new chosen people.

Perhaps most important, as Max Weber profoundly understood, was the strength of Puritanism as a way of coping with the contradictory requirements of Christian ethics in a world on the verge of modernity. It supplied an ethics that somehow balanced charity and self-discipline. It counseled moderation within a psychology that saw worldly prosperity as a sign of divine favor. Such ethics were particularly urgent in a New World where opportunity was rich, but the source of moral authority obscure.

By the beginning of the 18th century, Puritanism had both declined and shown its tenacity. 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 Protestants.

More recently, the word “Puritan” has once again become a pejorative epithet, meaning prudish, constricted and cold–as in H. L. Mencken’s famous remark that a Puritan is one who suspects “somewhere someone is having a good time.”

Puritanism, however, had a more significant persistence in American life than as the religion of black-frocked caricatures. It survived, perhaps most conspicuously, in the secular form of self-reliance, moral rigor and political localism that became, by the Age of Enlightenment, virtually the definition of Americanism.


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