Puritans vs Protestants: Puritans Were English Protestants

Puritans were Protestants. “Protestant” names the whole family of churches that came out of the Reformation, and the Puritans were one movement inside it: English Protestants of the late 1500s and 1600s who wanted to purify the Church of England of what they saw as leftovers of Roman Catholic worship. Every Puritan was a Protestant. Most Protestants were never Puritans.

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Were the Puritans Protestants?

Yes, and they never doubted it. The word “Protestant” goes back to 1529, when evangelical princes and cities at the imperial Diet of Speyer entered a formal protest against its decree on religion. What joined the churches that came after was a few convictions they wrote into their confessions. The Lutherans, in the Augsburg Confession of 1530, taught that “men cannot be justified before God by their own strength, merits, or works, but are freely justified for Christ’s sake, through faith.” The Church of England said it in its Thirty-nine Articles: “that we are justified by Faith only is a most wholesome Doctrine, and very full of comfort.” It also said that “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation.”

The Puritans believed all of this as firmly as anyone. Their quarrel was with a Reformation they thought had not gone far enough. Henry VIII broke with Rome in 1534, the Protestant cause advanced quickly under Edward VI (1547–53), Queen Mary brought England back to Rome, and many Protestants fled abroad, some to John Calvin’s Geneva. When Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558 and restored the Protestant church, the returning exiles hoped for a church reformed as thoroughly as the one they had seen. They were disappointed, and the name “Puritan” stuck to them during a quarrel in the 1560s over what clergy should wear.

What did the Puritans want to purify?

They told the king themselves. In April 1603, as James I made his way to London to take the English throne, Puritan ministers handed him a petition in the name of “more than a thousand” of his subjects and ministers, which is why it is called the Millenary Petition. They came, they wrote, “all groaning as under a common burden of human rites and ceremonies.” They asked that “the cross in baptism” be taken away, “the cap and surplice not urged”, “the ring in marriage” corrected, and that no minister be made to teach his people “to bow at the name of Jesus.” They asked for ministers able to preach, “that the Lord’s Day be not profaned,” and “that the canonical Scriptures only be read in the Church.”

A burden is a strong word for a church service, and it is a word the Gospel knows. “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest,” Jesus says. “For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28, 30). What the Puritans wanted was a church that required nothing of a believer’s conscience that Scripture did not require.

The Church of England answered from its own Articles, and it is fair to hear them. “The Church hath power to decree Rites or Ceremonies,” says Article 20, so long as it ordains nothing “contrary to God’s Word written.” Article 34 adds that ceremonies “may be changed according to the diversities of countries, times, and men’s manners, so that nothing be ordained against God’s Word.” For the Church of England, then, a surplice or the sign of the cross could be required because Scripture did not forbid it. The Puritans, in the Westminster Confession of 1646, put it the other way round: the right way of worshipping God “is instituted by himself, and so limited by his own revealed will,” so that he may not be worshipped “any other way not prescribed in the Holy Scripture.” That one difference, between what Scripture permits and what Scripture commands, runs under almost every other.

The king was not persuaded. At the Hampton Court Conference in 1604 James dismissed their grievances with a phrase that became famous: “no bishop, no king.”

Were the Puritans Calvinists?

Most were. Calvin’s theology and his model of a disciplined church were major influences on them, and the confession of the Westminster Assembly states Calvinist belief plainly. It teaches that “by the decree of God, for the manifestation of his glory, some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life.” Out of that grew what historians call their covenant theology: a sense of being chosen by God to live godly lives, alone and together.

So “Calvinism vs Puritanism” is a comparison of two different kinds of thing. Calvinism is a theology, first taught in Calvin’s Geneva and held by Reformed and Presbyterian churches far beyond England. Puritanism was an English movement that mostly held that theology and tried to rebuild the Church of England and English life around it. Not every Protestant church teaches predestination as Calvin did, and not every Puritan held it either. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1911 notes that Puritanism “could never attain a recognized dogmatic system,” and that Calvin’s doctrines “were rejected first by the Baptists and afterwards by the Quakers,” two bodies that grew out of the movement.

How did the Puritans worship?

Around the open Bible and the sermon. The Puritans believed God chose to bring salvation through preaching, so they wanted learned ministers and plain worship with little to draw the eye from the Word. They taught the faith by catechism, and the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism tells us what they believed a human life is for: “What is the chief end of man?” The answer is “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”

To enjoy him. Puritans are often remembered as gloomy people. A historian writing in 1904 said they were marked “by an aversion from gaiety and by a passionate love of civic freedom.” Yet the catechism speaks of enjoying God, and so does the psalmist: “Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee” (Psalm 73:25). All the stripping away was meant to leave room for that.

Sunday was the heart of the week. The Westminster Confession calls it “the Christian Sabbath,” kept by “an holy rest, all the day, from their own works, words, and thoughts about their worldly employments and recreations,” and given to worship, to “duties of necessity and mercy.” Not every Protestant church has asked as much.

Puritans, Separatists and Pilgrims: what is the difference?

Most Puritans stayed inside the Church of England and tried to reform it from within. Some did not want to wait any longer and chose, in their phrase, “reformation without tarrying for any.” These Separatists left the state church and formed their own congregations, bound by a covenant with God and with each other. The Pilgrims who sailed to Massachusetts in 1620 were Separatists.

The larger wave came from 1630, when as many as 20,000 Puritans left England for America. The Library of Congress calls them “non-separating Congregationalists”: unlike the Pilgrims, they still counted the Church of England a true church, but in New England each congregation governed itself, and full members were, at first, men and women who had undergone a conversion experience and could show it to the others. In 1648 the New England churches set out this order in the Cambridge Platform.

The story has its shadows, and they belong in it. In England, Puritans were removed from their pulpits, and in 1630 one layman had his nose slit, an ear cut off and his forehead branded “S.S.”, for “sower of sedition.” Yet in Massachusetts the persecuted became harsh in their turn, and the colony banished Roger Williams, who went on to found Rhode Island.

What happened to the Puritans?

For a few years they held power in England. During the civil war of the 1640s Parliament called the Westminster Assembly to reform the church; its confession and catechisms outlived it, though it could not agree on how the church should be governed. Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth favoured the Puritans. After his death in 1658 King Charles II was restored, bishops came back, and the Puritans entered a period known as the Great Persecution, until the Toleration Act of 1689 allowed dissenting churches to worship beside the established Church of England.

The name faded, but the churches did not. Presbyterian churches such as the Orthodox Presbyterian Church still confess the Westminster Confession and catechisms. The Baptists came out of the movement too, and so did the Quakers, the one radical Puritan group that Britannica counts as of lasting significance. The United Church of Christ, formed in 1957, traces one of its branches to the “Congregational Churches of the English Reformation with Puritan New England roots.” And of all Puritan books, the best loved is John Bunyan’s. In The Pilgrim’s Progress his traveller, Christian, runs with a heavy load on his back until he comes to a cross. There “his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back,” and tumbled down into a sepulchre, and Christian said, “He hath given me rest by his sorrow, and life by his death.”

That is the rest the Puritans went looking for, and it is the rest Christ still offers every one of us, Puritan or not: “Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls” (Matthew 11:29).

Related reading

• Anglican vs Protestant: Is the Anglican Church Protestant? Yes, by History and Law
• What the Church of England Is: a Prayer Book, and a Man Who Burned for It
• What Denominations Are Calvinist? Presbyterian, Reformed and Some Baptist Churches
• Presbyterian vs Protestant: Presbyterians Are Protestants Governed by Elders
• Calvinism vs Arminianism: The Five Points Side by Side