Puritan Covenant

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Religious image, scripture, and doctrine provided individuals in Colonial America with an ideal representation of the understanding of their desires within a divine order. In the United States, political culture is based in a religious ideology through which individuals acquire within themselves a rational ordering of their desires. In doing so they achieve, in several forms, an undivided amalgamation of rational and natural interests. The religious life of Puritans is fundamentally introspective and in almost always related to representation. Ethical life, while based in religion, cannot be reduced to religion alone when examining emergence of the American state. Civic institution, in its traditions and laws makes explicit the objective rationality of the subject, the fundamental principle and right of an enlightened self-consciousness.

In America, the religious roots of the state are given explicitly rational form in Enlightenment thought. There is a remarkable transition from a Puritanism born of a strict and an exclusive obedience to a particular faith, to a tolerant Enlightened declaration and constitution.

The idea of a covenant or contract between God and his elect permeated throughout Puritan social relationships and theology. Several beliefs differentiated Puritans from other Christians. Puritans believed in a concept known as predestination. Their belief in Jesus Christ and participation in sacrament, could not by itself effect one's salvation; one cannot choose salvation, because it is the privilege of God himself. The features of salvation are determined by God's dominion, including those who will be saved, and those who will receive God's grace. In the 1600s the Church of England began to accept beliefs that were detestable to Puritans, beginning with a focus on the individual's acceptance or rejection of grace. These also included toleration of diverse religious beliefs, and an acceptance of high-church rituals and symbols.

Puritans in New England dissented not only from the Church of England, but from England's social and political order as well. Seeking alternatives to established institutions, they turned on the one hand to the scripture and on the other to their common experience for precedent. Of this learned and articulate group, no one gave more careful thought to the purposes of the Puritan's "errand into the wilderness" or the proper foundations for the colony's institutions than John Winthrop.Custom writing service can write essays on Puritan Covenant

Winthrop became increasingly disenchanted with the corrupt and oppressive Stuart regime. When Charles I decided to rule without parliamentary consent, imprisoned Puritan parliamentary leaders, and banned Puritans from the practice of law, Winthrop decided to emigrate.

While on board the Arabella, Winthrop wrote an essay on charity, which was apparently preached as a sermon, that sought to apply scriptural values to the peculiar circumstances and challenges the colonists would face in creating their new social and political order. A number of themes, which become central to American tradition, are articulated in his essay(1) Efforts to reconcile the problem of spiritual and political equality with economic inequality. () Concerns about the relations between the good of individuals and the good of the community. () The conception of community as a voluntary/contractual bond between individuals. (4) A focus on the particular obligations of the rich towards the poor. (5) The conception of mission as the basis for formulating specific intuitional goals and objectives.

John Winthrop expressed the reason for the settlement of the new world in terms of being a "City Upon the Hill" with the "eyes of all people upon us". Reflected in these words of Winthrop, is the thought that the Puritans were coming to the new world in order to construct a model community. They desired to establish the reformed society, which had been impossible to build in England. The intention of the Puritans, however, was more that the construction of a model community. Their dreams would be fulfilled when others recognized the achievement and desired the Puritan leaders' help in reforming their own communities. In coming to America, the Puritans hoped that the result would be the reforming of England.

The type of community built was another essential part of the basis of Puritan political theory. Winthrop proceeded to stipulate that the Puritans had entered into a covenant with God. The success or failure of the community would be determined by the fulfillment of their obligations of the covenant.

The Puritans summarized the structure of their political power when they contended that liberty resided in the people, authority in the magistrate, and purity in the church. Winthrop qualified the meaning of liberty of the people when he distinguished natural liberty, from civil liberty. Natural liberty was the freedom to act without regard to authority. This type of liberty, would lead to the moral decay of man according to Winthrop. Civil liberty was the freedom of man to surrender his rights to an authority. This surrender of rights occurred when man consented to form a government. The basic liberty of the people in the New England Colony, therefore, was the consent to form the government and maintain the freedom to elect the magistrate. Winthrop, moreover, believed that the peoples right of consent extended to the approval of taxation on property. Although the leaders of the Puritan community believed in the liberty of the people, this liberty must be placed within the context of authority of the magistrate.

The leaders of the later Puritans expressed the basis of society as being a contract or covenant. However, the later Puritans meant more the concept of a contract based upon natural rights, than on a covenant with God. They contended that persons were free from all authority in the natural state, but in the civil state, a person placed himself or herself under government. Then they divested themselves of their rights for the purpose of forming a government. Puritan ministers such as John Wise state that the vote of the community formed the government, and the executive received his power from the people.

Differences also existed between the early Puritans and the Founding Fathers in the authorities they cited to support their positions. The early Puritans based their government on biblical and theological principles, while the Founding Fathers expressed their theory in terms of natural rights and reason. John Wise in his Vindication cited as his sources along with scripture the works of Plutarch and Samuel Pufendorf who wrote on natural and international law. Reason and writings of the Enlightenment henceforth became the main authority. Wise wrote concerning the dictates of reason that they resulted from a person's reason, not a divine imposition. He stressed along with other contemporaries the concept of "right reason". Here was the difference between the early Puritans, and Jefferson and the Founders that reflected modernization. The early leaders brought the purpose and structure of government under the fundamental law of Bible and theology. The Founding Fathers based their government upon the authority of logic and reason. The early Puritans stressed the involvement of the magistrate in maintaining a society conducive to the individual receiving salvation, while later Puritans and the Founding Fathers emphasized the function of the magistrate to protect the rights of the individual. The purpose of government, consequently, shifted from centering on the Bible and salvation to focusing on the preservation of the rights of the individual.

An example of this is found in examining the empiricist Lockean subject that gives primacy in enactment of confidence in the right to property. Whereas the Puritan obtains merely an inward freedom through the unwarranted gift of divine grace, the Lockean subject obtains the practical guarantee of his political liberty through the appropriation of property. What is originally God's gift to all in common is appropriated by individuals and divided into several parts. The individual's property is not merely a gift but is also a product of his own activity. Further, property here is conceived in a broad sense to include "Lives, Liberties, and Estates" and the purpose of government is conceived as the preservation of property.

The rallying cry of the Revolution, "No taxation without representation", expresses American's experience of a difference in British and American interests, which poses a threat to the concrete freedom they obtain in the security of their property. This difference makes virtual representation impossible. The British insistence on an identical authority over legislation and taxation aids in the American deduction, Britain has no right to tax. Therefore if legislation and taxation are equivalent, it follows that they have no right to legislate. By executing arbitrary and absolute power over the colonies, the British parliament was thus formally identical to an absolute monarch. This identification obviously reflected poorly on King George.

The work of the Founding Fathers was thus to limit government in terms compatible with the freedom of the property owning, moral subject. A freedom known in both political and religious terms. A covenant with God and a contract with the state. The Declaration of Independence indicates why it is, in its grievances, that the British system does not contain sufficient limitations and therefore breaks its covenant and contract from which the Colonies must declare their independence.

Wise, John Vindication of Government of NE Churches 1860

Winthrop, John A Model of Christian Charity, in The American Puritans Their Prose and Poetry, Perry Miller, ed. (Garden City, N.Y. Anchor, 156), pp. 7-84.

Becker, Carl The Declaration of Independence A Study in the History of Political Ideas (New York Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1

Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government, 160. www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/l 60locke-sel.html#CHAPTER II Of the State of Nature

Elazar, David 15 Covenant and Polity Vol I Covenant and Polity in Biblical Israel, Vol Covenant and Commonwealth The Western Covenantal Tradition; Vol Covenant and Constitutionalism Modern Covenants and the New Science of Politics, Vol 4 Covenant and Civil Society. New Brunswick NJ Transaction Publishers. ISBN 1-56000-151-8.

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