importance of religion as a factor in the development of public attitudes toward offenders and criminal activities cannot be overstated. Religion is at the root of almost all personal and social mores, moral rules, civil law, and practical attempts to control human behavior. Even when not directly responsible, religion invariably molds the attitudes and actions applied within societal life.
The most pervasive religious force (and for a long time the dominant one) in early New England was the Puritan version of Christianity. Puritan Protestantism was only one religious tradition in New England and Connecticut, but its literalistic biblical view of law and sin, punishment and redemption, governed (sometimes unconsciously) the choice of means used to eradicate sinful behavior and guarantee salvation of the offender. Read in terms of their mission, the intention of the Puritans was to save the sinner even if the methods had to be harsh, even brutal, at times. Historian Jill Lepore reminds us that this often became a justification for a vicious application of mercy, seen most vividly in the Puritan denial of the humanity of Native Americans and a denigration of them in the American story. She writes, “The ways of the Puritans are not our ways. Their faith is not our faith. And their wars are not our wars.”8 Puritan Christianity impact on colonial and American culture was immense, but it was often rooted in values and attitudes that denied the status of human being to those deemed evil or worthless.
John Winthrop, a lawyer and organizer of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, preached a classic sermon aboard the Arabella during the voyage across the Atlantic. His message formed the foundation of the Puritans’ subsequent behavior: “They were to be knit together as a single body in which the private interests would be subordinated to public concern.”9 Only by being obedient to God’s commands could they build the “city on a hill” that was Winthrop’s ultimate spiritual goal. Puritan scholar Perry Miller, emphasizing the positive, summarizes the Puritan ethos: “The doctrines of original sin, the depravity of man, and of irresistible grace were not embraced for their logic, but out of a hunger of the human spirit and an anxiety of the soul.”10
The goal for the Puritans was distant but, in the context of their faith, realizable: to construct a harmonious community ruled by the love of God and enforced by divine commandments when necessary. It eventually became evident that Winthrop’s admonition to live lives of “Justice and Mercy” did not apply to their relationships with Native Americans, who were described as no better than “speaking apes” by the seventeenth-century English scholar, Samuel Purchas. That tendency toward saving souls even if the bodies they inhabited had to be destroyed continued to plague criminal justice in all subsequent decades.11
The Puritan settlers’ intention to create a theocratic community has had no equal in America. Though the intensity of commitment to that agenda diminished during the following centuries, many of its assumptions were sufficiently embedded in the social consciousness to remain active. Those assumptions have guided the actions of subsequent generations down to the present, even when those assumptions were no longer operative. Puritan Christianity has been considered by most historians of the era to be the most basic, the most important feature of the New England colonies and, to a significant degree, one of the most significant sources of American culture. Historian Mark Noll succinctly summarizes its impact: “They were the one group of colonists who aspired to establish an entire society on the basis of their theology and the only ones to have partially succeeded.”12
The iconic testament to the Puritan form of faith is found in the sermons delivered by John Winthrop. During his three-month long trip across the Atlantic, Winthrop served as his fellow voyagers spiritual as well as governmental leader. He preached regularly during the journey to instruct and inspire his companions. Winthrop’s best-known sermon is titled “A Model of Christian Charity.” Seeking an image to make his point clear, Winthrop draws on Saint Matthew’s version of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, urging the colonists not toward pride but toward humility. God was depending on their risky mission to succeed. It was a “holy experiment…. For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.”13
The phrasing is significant in that it postulates a divine destiny for their voyage as well as a sense of divine judgment if they failed. The Puritans at their worst were certainly characterized by an elitism that bordered on self-righteous arrogance, arising from their sense of being chosen by God. It is commendable, if not always admirable, when it is remembered that they risked everything they had for the sole purpose of establishing a biblically based church and government that would stand as an example to the world. Their goal was not economic prosperity (though it was assumed that God would take care of the faithful), nor was it just personal freedom from oppression (though they would achieve that also if they were faithful). Puritans desired with religious desperation to be such a witness to God’s glory that it would convert the Anglican Church in England, to which they still gave their allegiance, and the oppressive English government, from which they had fled, and inspire all nations for all time to come.
The idea of living under a covenant with God and subject to the scrutiny of the world gave rise to a moral theocracy within the Massachusetts colony. Their desire was to build a religious framework so strong that it would hold society together regardless of the weakness of some. “Despite the awful sinfulness of many,” the founders of Massachusetts Bay “erected civil and ecclesiastical institutions to ensure that their society would be godly even if the majority of people in it were not.”14
The metaphoric ideal of a resplendent city on a hill, dedicated to God’s glory, was a powerful source of physical and spiritual strength to a people whose survival was never guaranteed or easy. The remarks of John Winthrop faded gradually, but the concept sank deep into American consciousness. The Puritan sense of mission to become a model for the world became one of America’s characteristic ideals, lifted even higher in the nineteenth century, by the idea that God had given the United States a “manifest destiny” to spread American culture first across the eastern mountains and finally across the continent, by force if necessary.
The Puritan life, carried out as a divinely guided mission, was perhaps the reason why none of the Puritan colonies in New England embraced the transportation of offenders from England, Ireland, or Scotland as a source of labor or skills. More than twenty thousand (and perhaps two or three times that number) criminals were transported to the Americas between 1700 and 1775, most of them to Maryland and Virginia. It need not be concluded that the rationale was based on any great compassion for offenders who were available for transport. Connecticut, like the other New England colonies, simply had no need of that particular resource. Their biblical morality would be more open to the African slave trade.
Puritan Protestantism’s influence on New England society extended down the Atlantic and westward to the degree that one historian thought it not excessive to label it the “Righteous Empire.”15 As colonies evolved into states, the general Protestant culture held the upper hand politically, socially, and morally, especially in rural areas, but also to a remarkable degree in the urban regions. The Puritan clergy and laity expounding and living out this vision became the first leaders of government and society. Until the end of the seventeenth century, the civic officials, judges, schoolteachers, and business owners, as well as the resident pastors and theologians, were drawn from the Puritan churches. Well into the eighteenth century, the state governments in Connecticut, and most of New England, did not officially recognize a new town until a theologically acceptable pastor had been installed. Once in place, power does not yield its sway easily. Two centuries passed before the disenfranchisement of the Congregational Church was voted into Connecticut’s constitution in 1818. Connecticut was one of the last of the original colonies to take that step away from a virtual theocracy to allow a more democratic system to emerge. It remains one of the great ironies of the first American immigrants that, having fled persecution and oppression in Europe, they tended to be just as exclusive and oppressive as the governments and churches
