This is something that the writers of the books about the Puritans should have stressed-but the ones I read were too infatuated with the same ideals and therefore perpetuated my false impression. Which is not the same thing as how they actually lived-not because they were insincere, but because they were no more consistent in matching their beliefs to their actions than anyone else is. What I didn’t understand in my early encounters with the Puritans was that their writings were ideals, the way they thought life should be lived in relationship to God. The general theme was that these people were closer to God than we are in modern life, and the closer we modeled our relationships and daily activities after theirs, the better off we were spiritually.
And the books about these Puritans to which I was exposed held them up as role models, in some cases to an extreme. Puritan writers were fervent, earnest believers who urged their readers to piety. Among the most famous of these colonists was Jonathan Edwards, an influential eighteenth-century preacher. Their separatist nature was one of many factors that led significant numbers of Puritans to emigrate to the American colonies.
These were English Protestants who were first called “puritan†in a pejorative sense because of their stance that the Church of England had capitulated too much to Rome, and many among them followed the teachings of John Calvin. In my high school and college years, I read a lot of books by and about the Puritans. Book Review: The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle
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