Why did religion shape life in the New England Colonies?

Answer 1

They hated England and left it

also called Pilgrims

wanted to break away from Angelic church

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Answer 2

Founding fathers in New America came to the new world to escape religious persecution in Europe.

Because of this notion, Puritans strongly based all of their beliefs and actions on the word of God and the application of his perfect will.

Many early laws and forms of government, were built around the idea that only those who held Christian values and beliefs should be allowed to participate in government and hold positions of leadership. Laws we based on the commandments of God which dictate the essential differences between good and evil (do not steal, do not lie, do not kill, do not commit adultery, etc.). Men were also expected to work for their keep, slacking was not allowed under any circumstance, a mans work was his pride and sense of achievement. Without hard work and determination, early settlers would have surely died in the dangerous new world.

Answer 3

The early settlement of New England, in contrast to that of Virginia, had a strong religious motive. Migrants to Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay were refugees from religious conflict in England. Calvinists of various persuasions, they wanted to escape Anglican persecution or they wished to "new-model" Christ's church as an example for Christians everywhere. Their dramatic story was not the whole story of early New England, but their self-consciousness and their idealism put a lasting stamp on New England culture and spread beyond New England to the west.

This chapter discusses these specific points:

• The chapter provides a brief portrait of English society from which the first settlers came. That English world to some degree shaped the settlers' relations with one another, though they represented a middle class fragment of that society. (The names of East Anglia towns may be found all over New England.)

• The Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth in 1620 were headed for Virginia but landed on Cape Cod.* Calvinist separatists, they were hostile to the Anglican Church and fresh from exile in Holland. Not part of any "body politick", they invented a stopgap, the "Mayflower Compact." Its premise, that authority as such should be based on a written agreement to which people gave their consent, was an expression of congregational "polity" designed to meet necessity. Here was a remarkable foretaste of later constitutional thinking. Plymouth settlement remained small and eventually (1691) merged with the Massachusetts colony.

• The Massachusetts Bay colonists, led by the remarkable John Winthrop, were a deliberate lot who shrewdly planned their migration. They knew, for example, that their destination contained few Indians because of prior disease epidemics, and they were careful to deny that they were separating from the Anglican Church. The colonists had official permission and a charter from an English government that wanted to establish another foothold to the north of Virginia. They took that charter with them. Because it did not spell out where the joint-stock company's directors should meet, Massachusetts Bay became in effect North America's first self-governing colony. Until this document was revoked and replaced by a royal charter in 1691, Massachusetts' autonomy was protected in accordance with English common law.

• Massachusetts was not all church, but for the first decades religion was a source of constant conflict and anxiety. The big questions were-who was eligible for full membership? Should attendance by all be compelled? What was the relationship between ministers and civil officials? Controversies rooted in theology could spill over because they were about essential things like salvation, God's grace, and how the true

* "Virginia" is those days extended indefinitely to the north, but not as far as Cape Cod.

church should be organized. Such disputes could readily threaten the community's understanding of itself. The most dramatic threats came from Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, two of the most interesting thinkers from the period, both of whom were banished from Massachusetts.

• The great migration to New England was from the start a migration of families and households. (In contrast to the colonies around the Chesapeake, Massachusetts did not rely upon the labor of indentured servants or, later, slaves.) The migrants were more literate and better educated than the norm in England. Women enjoyed higher status than women in England.

• In 1692, Salem, an old town north of Boston with a population already sharply divided, held the colonies' most famous witch trials. Nineteen people, mostly women, were executed, one uncooperative man crushed to death by large rocks. This outbreak of fear and recrimination was neither unique in New England, or to New England, but it was the most widely publicized and the most embarrassing episode to most of the colony's elites.

• With succeeding generations, with the rapid growth and geographic dispersion of population into not only farming but also international trade, the religious aspirations of Massachusetts' founding generation seemed more and more stringent and unrealistic. But the old religious idealism had a built-in and enduring response. New England had fallen away, "declined" from their covenant with God; its people could not escape so easily from God's (and the ancestors') disapproval. In the middle of the 1700s, New Englanders and many others experienced an emotional revival of religious feeling, which took place largely outside of the established congregations. This "Great Awakening"-whose most famous North American leader was Jonathan Edwards-was the first appearance of what later become Evangelicalism.

Answer 4

Jake paul