Name: ______Date: ______Period: ______

The Dissenters!

Objective:Students will analyze dissent in the colonies in order to determine to what extent the dissenters were successful in eliciting change

Evaluate the notable contributions of the top four dissenters in your bracket. What was notable about their dissent)(Why are they in this tournament?) Circle the winner!

Dissenter / Notable

Closing:Evaluate the colonial dissenters as a group. How do the dissenters impact the future development of the Colonies (or future US)? Provide specific examples (dissenters) from your activity today to support your argument.

Thesis Statement:

Dissenters significantly impacted the development of the Colonies by…

(1)______

(2)______

and

(3)______.

Supportive Evidence:

  1. ______
  2. ______
  3. ______

William Bradford

Bradford expressed his nonconformist religious sensibilities in his early teens and joined the famed Separatist church in Scrooby at the age of seventeen. In 1609 he immigrated with the congregation, led by John Robinson, to the Netherlands. For the next eleven years he and his fellow religious dissenters lived in Leyden until their fear of assimilation into Dutch culture prompted them to embark on the Mayflower for the voyage to North America.

The Pilgrims arrived in what became Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1621 with a large number of non-Separatist settlers. Before disembarking, the congregation drew up the first New World social contract, the Mayflower Compact, which all the male settlers signed.

The Mayflower Compact is the written covenant of the new settlers arriving at New Plymouth after crossing the Atlantic aboard the Mayflower. It is the first governing document of Plymouth Colony and established the first basis in the New World for written laws.

Earlier New World settlements had failed due to a lack of government, and the compact was hashed out by the pilgrims, led by William Bradford, for the sake of their own survival. It was signed aboard ship November 11, 1620 OS (November 21, 1620 NS) by all 41 of the Mayflower's adult male passengers.

Bradford served thirty one-year terms as governor of the fledgling colony between 1622 and 1656. Under his guidance Plymouth never became a Bible commonwealth like its larger and more influential neighbor, the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Relatively tolerant of dissent, the Plymouth settlers did not restrict the franchise or other civic privileges to church members. The Plymouth churches were overwhelmingly Congregationalist and Separatist in form, but Presbyterians like William Vassal and renegades like Roger Williams resided in the colony without being pressured to conform to the majority's religious convictions.

After a brief experiment with the "common course," a sort of primitive agrarian communism, the colony quickly centered around private subsistence agriculture. This was facilitated by Bradford's decision to distribute land among all the settlers, not just members of the company.

Bradford did not interpret temporal affairs as the inevitable unfolding of God's providential plan. Lacking the dogmatic temper and religious enthusiasm of the Puritans of the Great Migration, Bradford steered a middle course for Plymouth Colony between the Holy Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the tolerant secular community of Rhode Island.

John Winthrop

He was an ardently religious person. From his early teens Winthrop threw himself into scriptural study and prayers, and gradually he trained himself into a full-fledged Puritan, convinced that God had elected him to salvation, or in Puritan terms to “sainthood.” His religious experience reinforced his elitist outlook, but it also made him a social activist. Like other prominent Puritans, Winthrop dedicated himself to remaking, as far as possible, the wicked world as he saw it, arguing that “the life which is most exercised with tryalls and temptations is the sweetest, and will prove the safeste.”

During the late 1620s, Winthrop felt increasingly trapped by the economic slump that reduced his landed income and by Charles I’s belligerent anti-Puritan policy, which cost him his court post in 1629. When, in 1629, the Massachusetts Bay Company obtained a royal charter to plant a colony in New England, Winthrop joined the company, pledging to sell his English estate and take his family to Massachusetts if the company government and charter were also transferred to America. The other members agreed to these terms and elected him governor (October 20).

As Winthrop sailed west on the Arbella the spring of 1630, he composed a lay sermon, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” in which he pictured the Massachusetts colonists in covenant with God and with each other, divinely ordained to build “a City upon a Hill” in New England.

Opposition against him built up after a few years, however, as dissidents kept challenging Winthrop’s system in the mid- and late 1630s. He was nettled when the freemen (voters) insisted in 1634 on electing a representative assembly to share in decision making. He found Roger Williams’ criticism of church–state relations intolerable, though he secretly helped Williams to flee to Rhode Island in 1636. And he took it as a personal affront when numerous colonists chose to migrate from Massachusetts to Connecticut.

The greatest outrage to Winthrop by far, however, came when Anne Hutchinson, a mere woman, gained control of his Boston church in 1636 and endeavoured to convert the whole colony to a religious position that Winthrop considered blasphemous. It was he who led the counterattack against her. His victory was complete. Hutchinson was tried before the general court—chiefly for “traducing the ministers”—and was sentenced to banishment.

By 1640 Winthrop had become the custodian of Massachusetts orthodoxy, suspicious of new ideas and influences and convinced that God favoured his community above all others. With the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642, many New Englanders returned home to fight against Charles I. Winthrop, however, stayed on in America, and he criticized the course of the Puritan Revolution. His own political philosophy was best summed up in a speech of 1645, in which he defined the magistrates’ authority very broadly and the people’s liberty very narrowly. But Winthrop was never a petty tyrant; the colonists respected and loved him to the end.

Roger Williams

Roger Williams was Chaplain to a wealthy family, and on 15 December 1629, he married Mary Barnard at the Church of High Laver, Essex, England. Even at this time, he became a controversial figure because of his ideas on freedom of worship, and separation of church and state. He did not join the first wave of Separatists in the summer of 1630, before the end of the year, he decided he could not remain in England under Archbishop William Laud's rigorous administration because he regarded the Church of England to be corrupt and false.

He preached first at Salem, then at Plymouth, then back to Salem, always at odds with the structured Puritans. The Puritans believed they were creating a new Israel, a society modeled on the Old Testament. That society demanded religious conformity. Williams argued that Jesus Christ had inaugurated a new age, a new dispensation that demanded a break with the past. It was the New Testament, not the Old, that mattered. For Williams, the commonwealth was based on a theologically faulty foundation.

Williams argued that the Puritans were hypocrites because they remained within the Church of England rather than making a clean break, as the Pilgrims had done. He went on to assert that it was dishonest and wrong to take land from the Indians without paying them for it. He was a student of Native American languages and an advocate for fair dealings with Native Americans.His best-known literary work -- Key into the Languages of America, which when published in London in 1643, made him the authority on American Indians. Finally, he insisted that civil magistrates did not have the right to enforce religious duties like making people go to church on the Sabbath.

A restless spirit, Williams moved between Boston, Salem and Plymouth Colony, winning followers, irritating opponents and provoking controversy. Finally banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635, Williams headed south and established a small settlement at the headwaters of Narragansett Bay, in present-day Rhode Island. Named "Providence," the community officially guaranteed liberty of conscience. Baptists, Quakers, Jews and other religious dissidents, including Anne Hutchinson, soon found a haven there.

Williams believed passionately in "soul liberty" or liberty of conscience. God had created human beings and endowed them with the inborn right to make choices in matters of faith. "It is the will and command of God," wrote Williams, "that a permission of the most paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or anti-Christian consciences and worships, be granted to all men in all nations and countries; and they are only to be fought against with that sword which is only (in soul matters) able to conquer, to wit, the sword of God's spirit, the Word of God."

For Williams, religion was an inherent God-given right. Belief must never be coerced. History clearly demonstrated that subjecting the conscience to "spiritual and soul rape" had caused endless bloodshed and cost countless lives. Rulers in all ages, Williams wrote, have practiced "violence to the Souls of Men."

George Whitefield

George Whitefield was an Anglican priest and powerful orator with charismatic appeal. At the age of 25, he created a sensation in England by preaching outdoors and going over the heads of other priests to reach their congregations. In 1740, he brought that same defiance of authority to America, along with a savvy sense of the media. Newspaper ads announced his sermons; messengers rode ahead to spread the news of his coming appearances.

Whitefield was a staunch Calvinist. His central theme -- what must I do to be saved? -- was not new. His preaching style was. Ministers traditionally wrote sermons in longhand and read the text out loud in a dull monotone. The effect was often soporific. Drawing on his youthful foray into drama, Whitefield memorized his sermons, spoke without notes, varied the timbre of his voice and gestured with abandon. He drew freely on his own emotions, crying out, "My Master! My Lord!" It was said that he could utter the word "Mesopotamia" so that the entire crowd wept. The effect was electric. Crowds responded with outpourings of emotion. People cried, sobbed, shrieked, swooned and fainted. All of New England, it seemed, was seized by a spiritual convulsion.

Whitefield ignited the Great Awakening, a major religious revival that became the first major mass movement in American history. At its core, the Awakening changed the way that people experienced God. Instead of receiving religious instruction from their ministers, ordinary men and women unleashed their emotions to make an immediate, intense and personal connection with the divine. From New England to Georgia, the revival was marked by a broad populist tone -- small farmers, traders, artisans, servants and laborers were especially swept up by the preaching of Whitefield and his followers.

At first, established ministers had welcomed Whitefield and his fellow revivalists. Church attendance swelled. New energy was in the air. Soon, however, the clergy realized that the revivalists were challenging their authority. Itinerant preachers like Whitefield could preach anywhere; they did not need a church. Ignoring parish boundaries, they lured crowds away from the pews and into the fields. Once the revivalist ministers stirred up the populace, they were free to move on. Their emotional style disrupted the usual social decorum.

By 1742, an acrimonious debate about the Great Awakening had split the New England clergy into rival factions. The "Old Lights" opposed preachers like Whitefield; the "New Lights" supported them. Whitefield himself appeared to have second thoughts about the religious movement that he had ignited. But it was too late. Although the energy of the First Great Awakening subsided in the late 1740s, revivals became a persistent feature of the American religious landscape.

Anne Hutchinson

Trained as a midwife and nurse, Hutchinson began to hold small meetings in her home to discuss John Cotton's sermons. Soon the meetings were attracting up to 60 people -- men and women. For a woman to engage theological discussions posed a subtle challenge to the patriarchy that governed the Bay Colony. From across the street, John Winthrop characterized Hutchinson as "a woman of haughty and fierce carriage, of a nimble wit and active spirit, and a very voluble tongue, more bold than a man."

Hutchinson gave Winthrop ample reason to worry. In the fall of 1636, she accused Puritan ministers of making salvation dependent on an individual's good works rather than on divine grace, which was contrary to Puritan teaching. The ministers denied this charge, arguing that good works are evidence of conversion and salvation, not the grounds of salvation. They argued that they were therefore not teaching a Covenant of Works.

Hutchinson persisted, arguing that assurance of salvation came from a mystical experience of grace -- "an inward conviction of the coming of the Spirit." She believed that by teaching that good works were evidence of true conversion and salvation, ministers were still preaching a Covenant of Works rather than a Covenant of Grace.

Hutchinson went further, claiming that God had communicated to her by direct revelations and declaring that she was capable of interpreting the Scriptures on her own.

Hutchinson's charges constituted a frontal attack on the spiritual authority of both the church and society. For Puritans, the ultimate source of authority was the Bible as it was interpreted by duly authorized ministers. Hutchinson's claim that she possessed the authority to interpret the Bible challenged this basic principle. Even more galling was her claim that she received immediate revelations from God. Her challenge to official doctrine threatened to tear the Massachusetts Bay Colony apart.

In November 1637, Hutchinson was brought before the General Court, the colony's principal governing body, on charges of sedition. Winthrop questioned her closely, but she eluded his grasp. The court adjourned.

The following day Hutchinson changed her position. She freely acknowledged that God spoke to her directly. This claim constituted blasphemy. Now the court had grounds to punish her. The assembly voted and handed down its judgment: banishment.

Anne and her husband, William, found refuge in Roger Williams' colony in Providence, R.I. Hutchinson's experience speaks to a persistent question: What is the source of religious authority? Is it the individual or the community? Who decides? How much dissent can a religious community tolerate? What are the limits, if any?

Jonathan Edwards

As the Great Awakening swept across Massachusetts in the 1740s, Jonathan Edwards, a minister and supporter of George Whitefield, delivered what would become one of the most famous sermons from the colonial era, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." The sermon featured a frightening central image: the hand of all-powerful God dangling a terrified believer over a fiery pit, ready on a moment's notice to drop him into the flames of eternal damnation. Edwards hoped his sermon would wake up the faithful and remind them of the terrible fate that awaited them if they failed to confess their sins and to seek God's mercy.

"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" eclipsed Edwards' more important contribution to religion in America. The son and grandson of preachers, he not only became a minister but also one of the greatest theologians in American history. His precocious intelligence and range of intellect was evident early on. He learned Latin, read Newton's Optics and wrote about rainbows and the captivating movement of spiders. Reveling in nature, he found "a divine glory, in almost everything." He described his own religious experience in almost mystical terms, as being "swallowed up by God."

A prodigious writer, Edwards produced volumes of sermons, journals and observations. His capacious mind engaged two persistent religious questions that transcend time: What is the nature of religious experience? What is the source of religious authority? The question of experience arose with urgency during the Great Awakening. Heeding the calls of Whitefield and his followers, men and women frequently engaged in flamboyant displays of emotional excess, often accompanied by extreme bodily movements. Boston minister Charles Chauncy sharply criticized this behavior, arguing that people were being tricked by their overheated imaginations into calling the result true religion. Reason, not emotion or "animal instinct," he argued, must govern religious experience.

Jonathan Edwards demurred. In his Treatise on Religious Affectations, he defended the place of emotion in religious experience not as "animal instinct," but as part of human will. At the same time, he questioned whether subjective experience alone could serve as the source of religious authority. He concluded that individuals could not rely solely on their own spiritual experience, however luminous it appeared. Satan, Edwards warned, stood ever ready to appeal to human self-centeredness.