If Christians worshipped God, pagans worshipped the devil, who was a very real presence for the Puritans. Search Search. Home United States U. Africa 54 - November 12, VOA Africa Listen live. VOA Newscasts Latest program. VOA Newscasts. Previous Next. December 21, AM. Cecily Hilleary. More US Stories. The Day in Photos. November 12, The Bible was central to their worship. Their church services were simple. The organ and all musical instruments were forbidden. Puritans sang psalms a cappella.
The Puritans believed God had chosen a few people, "the elect," for salvation. The rest of humanity was condemned to eternal damnation.
But no one really knew if he or she was saved or damned; Puritans lived in a constant state of spiritual anxiety, searching for signs of God's favor or anger. The experience of conversion was considered an important sign that an individual had been saved.
Faith, not works, was the key to salvation. But it was not only individual salvation that mattered; the spiritual health and welfare of the community as a whole was paramount as well, for it was the community that honored and kept the covenant.
Over time this religious fervor diminished. Scholars disagree about when and why this happened. The Puritans themselves found it difficult to maintain a society in a state of creative uncertainty.
Following Christopher Columbus' voyage, Spain moved swiftly to claim and expand her territories in the New World, embarking on a moral crusade to spread Spanish culture and Catholicism to the non-Christians in present-day Mexico and the American Southwest.
Here in the brooding desert and high mesas, two sacred worlds collided: the Catholicism of the Spanish friars and the spirit-filled religion of the indigenous peoples known as the Pueblos.
As Porter Swentzell of the Santa Clara Pueblo observes, "Our whole world around us is our religion -- our way of life is our religion. The very moment we wake up in the morning to the moment we go to bed, even when we are asleep, that's our religion. The Pueblos first encountered Franciscan friars in the 15th century, but in the friars began a period of intense mission building and conversion.
Thousands of Pueblos converted, but most did not abandon their old religion; they simply added new elements to it. But for the friars, there was only one true religion: the Catholic faith. When persuasion failed to get the Pueblo people to abandon their old rituals, the friars reverted to coercion and force. In such a commonwealth, they felt, it was the duty of the civil authorities to enforce the laws of religion, thus holding a view almost the opposite of that expressed in the First Amendment.
The strength of the Roman Catholic Church made religion and government inseparable in portions of Europe during the Middle Ages, but Martin Luther challenged this hegemony in Germany when he nailed his ninety-five theses to a church door in , and the Church eventually split along Catholic and Protestant lines.
Puritans were among those intent on purifying the established Church of England. Many colonists came to America from England to escape religious persecution during the reign of King James I r.
The Puritans formally established the Massachusetts Bay Company, which operated under royal charter. The continued immigration of colonists to New England served to multiply the number of religious denominations, which led to increased conflict.
The fact that the Puritans had left England to escape religious persecution did not mean that they believed in religious tolerance. Their society was a theocracy that governed every aspect of their lives. Freedom of religion and freedom of speech or of the press were as foreign to the Puritans as to the Church of England. When other colonists arrived with differing beliefs, they were driven out by the Puritans.
For instance, the minister Roger Williams , the founder of what became Rhode Island, fled Massachusetts after his proposal to separate church and state met with Puritan hostility. The framers of the Constitution thought that one way of avoiding the religious intolerance of the Puritan era was to encourage a multiplicity of denominations; the First Amendment specifically prohibits the kind of national religious establishment that had once dominated colonies such as Massachusetts.
This article was originally published in Daniel Baracskay teaches in the public administration program at Valdosta State University. Dunn, Richard S.
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