the puritans
The political culture of the United States was founded on puritan idealism. President Reagan used often to quote John Winthrop's statement that the new colony of Massachusetts, which he founded in 1630, must be "a city set on a hill". What Jesus actually said was: "A city that is set on a hill cannot be hig." The US is a very large and diverse nation. Unless its held together by shared idealism, its hard to suppose that it can long be held together at all. When a President runs a morally defective Administration, that will have an impact on the coherence of the nation.The Puritans dream was to create a model society for the rest of Christendom. Their goal was to make a society in every way connected to god. Every aspect of their lives, from political status and employment to even recreation and dress, was taken into account in order to live a more pious life. But to really understand what the aspirations of the puritans were, we must first understand their beliefs. "Their goal was absolute purity; to live with out sin in a sinful world was to them the supreme challenge in life. They were derisively called Puritans because they sought to purify the Church of England of the popish and antichristian stuff with which
The Puritans kept growing more and more in number and started to expand west and south into present day Connecticut where they formed two new colonies. The Puritans dreamed of creating the perfect god fearing society as a model for the entire Christian world. Even the "wearing by men of long hair" was enough to bring them under suspicion of being subversive to the church. To make this dream realizable, the Puritans created severe penalties for breaking the laws. This does not mean, however, (as many people have believed) that the Puritans did not allow themselves to be comfortable and happy. "Every act and thought was either a glorification of god or its opposite. they believed the simplicity of the primitive Christian church had been encrusted. The Puritans believed that they were God's select few that could carry out his original orders the way he had intended. Their idea was that everybody, even if they weren't part of the church, should be very religious. They created a government in New Haven even stricter than the one in Boston. For example, they believed that if you are not working with the church, you are working against it. Pride, complacency, and gratification of the senses could not be permitted if they captured the place in the mind reserved for the Almighty. In actuality, the Puritans were waging war upon certain human propensities that they regarded as evils: covetousness, materialism, the love of ostentation, and concern with the externals of religion rather than with the things of the spirit. He believed that the Massachusetts church should sever all allegiance to the Church of England. The answer is that they succeeded, and then failed.
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Acceptance Essays
