New World, New Ideas

The Calvinists who settled Massachusetts Bay in the 17th century – Puritans and Pilgrims alike – lived in what we moderns might call a perpetual state of creative tension. Their worldview was founded on a belief in themselves as a community covenanted with God and bound together in a common calling; yet each member of the community had to find his own salvation alone, in prayer and reflection, while awaiting the divine gift of justifying faith. Calvinist theology told these settlers that God had predestined only a select number to find such faith. Yet they also believed in the freedom of the human will to choose between good and evil. It was a paradox that, in John Calvin's view, would liberate the faithful from the "wheel of works" preached by contemporaneous Catholicism – the need to merit salvation by doing good on Earth. For others, the paradox opened a window to antinomianism, the profoundly destabilizing belief that for the elect all things are permitted.

What we call puritan is hardly was Puritans were, it seems.

Sarah Vowell's "The Wordy Shipmates" is an attempt to recapture this world for present-day sensibilities. In the process, she was written a breezy book about 17th-century Puritans, if that is not a complete oxymoron.

She particularly focuses on 1637, a year in which the colony's fortunes were at a low ebb. First, Archbishop of Canterbury Laud launched an effort to revoke the colony's charter – but the boat carrying the English authorities sank on its way. Then the colonists fought a bloody war against the Pequot Indians – which they won by massacring an entire native town, women and children included.

And here is a familiar name:

Finally, Anne Hutchinson challenged the divinely ordained social hierarchy by publicly attacking the theological purity of virtually every minister in the colony; she claimed they had reverted to a covenant of works, one of the very ideas that Puritans had left England to avoid. If a woman preaching were not sufficient affront, Hutchinson's followers went from church to church heckling the local ministers. The imbroglio ended when Hutchinson confessed to receiving direct revelations from God and she and her followers were banished to Rhode Island, where they kept company for a time with fellow religious seeker and exile Roger Williams. As the annus horribilis ended in peace, the Puritans could be forgiven for thinking that, indeed, the Lord delighted to dwell among them.

Anne Hutchinson has a River Parkway named after her: the Hutch.

The Wordy Shipmates
By Sarah Vowell
(Riverhead, 254 pages, $25.95)