the details of Puritan beliefs and practices. I read up on it when I discovered, through genealogy, that one of my grandparents had several ancestors who were Puritans in the MA and CT colonies. Some were deacons and a few were ministers. I hadn't known about that until doing the genealogy search.
Like most American kids, I'd been taught, too, that those Puritans came to America for religious freedom, but they were, as you said, actually looking for a place to establish their own exclusive religious community for themselves. Initially, the MA Bay Colony was run like a theocracy, where only church elders were eligible to be civil magistrates and only full church members were allowed to vote for them. That was the Calvinist model that had developed in Geneva, Switzerland.
The only religious freedom in NE back then was in Rhode Island, under Roger Williams, after he left MA Bay.
Ironically, it was the British crown that enforced religious freedom in MA and CT. The soldiers that they sent to the colonies for protection from the French were members of the C of E. When Puritan colonists refused to allow C of E churches or services for the soldiers, the British ordered them to.
But Calvinists are just one branch of Protestantism and Protestants are just one branch of Christianity. Not all follow those literalist doctrines. Also, two of the most liberal Christian denominations in the US today had their origins in Calvinism, but no longer teach the predestination of their ancestors or interpret the Bible literally.
Those early Puritans remind me of modern literalists and evangelicals who think that the "End Times" or "Rapture" are imminent. The Puritans of NE believed that the European "discovery" of America was divinely ordained as a forerunner to the return of Jesus. They believed that it was their mission to conquer or convert all of America to prepare for it. To them, America was the new Biblical Canaan and they believed that they had a new Covenant with God, like ancient Israel, to conquer America as the new Promised Land. That was the first notion of Manifest Destiny, long before it became the motivation (excuse) for conquering the "Wild West" to the Pacific.
It's past time for American schools to teach the factual history of the nation instead of the myths. In order to mature as a nation and democracy, we need to sort fact from fiction in our development.
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