Puritan Understanding of God
A primary part of the fate of America is shaped by the first Puritans who landed on the shores of New England Massachusetts. Exiled from England, their agenda was strictly religious. The Puritans settled, where they created an ideology that was essential in the shaping of American religion. They merely wished to influence others by their concept of faith, which John Winthrop exhibits in his sermon A model of Christian Charity. Great religious and spiritual inspiration ultimately became a guide for the New World. As displayed in Winthrop’s quote, “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill” (Winthrop 177). The mission of their ideology was to create a godly community demonstrating a life of passion and fellowship that would be symbolic to Puritans world wide. The events that led to the settlement of New England at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay derived from the religious conflict begun by Martin Luther's Reformation movement and the formation of the Protestant Church. Those in England who felt they needed to “purify” the Anglican Church were called Puritans (Source 1). They divided themselves into two groups, one of which felt it was possible to live under the rules of the Church of England, and the other which felt they could not. These were classified as “Separatists" and set out to the New World. The journey proved to be a particularly harsh one. Out of the two ships that left, only the Mayflower completed the trip and came ashore far north of the area they had originally planned. This is where God must have wanted them to land, they explained, and hence this is where they would settle. This was going to be there home, their farm land and they would also worship here. William Bradford, the first Governor of the immigrants later wrote about the despair of those early days, when he said that there were “no friends to welcome, no inns to entertain” and the land too was filled with “wild beasts and wild men”...