The Puritan Dilemma

I finished reading The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop by Edmund S. Morgan, who used to be Professor of History at Yale.

Many caricaturize Puritans as drab people who mostly lead drab lives, except perhaps for insidious witch-hunting, who insisted on austere living. Professor Morgan instead presents them as real people who made the daunting decision to settle a new land, and faced a variety of challenges as they did so, especially John Winthrop, the elected governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company.

Imagine if you wanted to escape the evils of society to set up a new land where God's will and law would be followed - to be an example to the rest of the world. How would you divide the land, set up the government, set up the churches? What would be the relationship between the state and the church, between the government in Massachusetts and England, between the churches in Massachusetts and England, between believers and non-believers in Massachusetts? The Puritans, under the leadership of Winthrop, worked out solutions to these problems, though not perfectly, yet in ways that affect us down to this day, as we still graple with many of these issues, as Mr. Morgan explains in this excellent book.

The Puritans, who were part of the Church of England, but wanted to purify it, had to work through issues of separtism (those who simply wanted to separate from the Church of England), presbyterianism, and congregationalism. They also had to work through issues about what to forbid without winding up forbidding what God did not forbid. Through it all, Morgan presents a history of real people working through these real problems, with the gamut of the wise and foolish, the far and short sighted, the impetuous and the patient, and at times, these traits appeared in the same person, including Winthrop, though overall, he proved to be an admirable, though not perfect, leader of this new country.