Studying religion in this fashion emphasizes relationships between and among individuals, communities, and the divine, and thus supports a parallel comparison between religions with and without extensive written theologies. The English were not the only ones in the colonies who had a sense of order inspired by belief in divine power. Africans who had been enslaved and forcibly transported across the Atlantic and by way of the Caribbean came from societies with beliefs about how humans ought to interact with one another and with the divine. Indigenous peoples had different religiously shaped visions of how social relationships should be organized, which affected how they responded to invasions of their homelands. Asking similar questions about Europeans, Africans, and indigenous peoples of the Americas makes it easier to catch the swirling currents of belief and practice among groups of people, and to see how their respective maps overlay each other.
Confessional Spatiality
The puritan Atlantic helps push our understandings of the interplay between the physical and mental worlds of Atlantic actors, between intense local knowledge and a strongly crafted perception of confessional spatiality. Seventeenth-century English Protestants understood their religious communities through the metaphor of the body of Christ, so that both visible congregations of the faithful and the invisible community of the saved throughout the world were part of a body of which Christ was the head. They described churches and groups of individuals as specific members of that body: limbs, sinew, or blood. Communities in far-flung locales considered each other to be members of the same body. This body of Christ was linked to, but not the same as, the body politic. The points of overlap and disjuncture between these two bodies reveal the contours of how people determined the boundary between themselves and others, between insider and outsider. Although generally perceived to be rigid and restrictive, the puritan body of Christ proved more permeable to racial differences than the body politic because of the emphasis on voluntary membership. Relative distances did not always match the geography of the physical world in the cognitive space of the puritan Atlantic. The conceptual space of the body of Christ changed the mental maps of those who inhabited it, even as the inhabitants’ actions created that space and changed the relationships between themselves and others. It was a way of organizing society on the local level and simultaneously a means of understanding the vast physical space of the Atlantic.
In addition to Rhode Island and Bermuda, several colonies and locales outside the New England colonies of Massachusetts, Plymouth, New Haven, and Connecticut were part of the puritan Atlantic, an idea that does not depend as heavily on self-identification as does the “Protestant International,” a confessional network that understood itself to be fighting against a worldwide Catholic threat.12 The distinctive culture influenced by “hot” Protestants existed to at least some degree in Providence Island, the Bahamas, Antigua, Barbados, and parts of the Chesapeake, Long Island, and New Jersey. That shared culture changed dissenting Protestants’ perception of space by creating intimate links between physically far-flung places, and by making geographical neighbors into strangers. These locations have separately received scholarly attention, but considering them together as part of a shared confessional spatiality allows for more attention to the fluctuations of dissenting English culture in the Atlantic world more broadly.13 Although this book is not a survey of all possible locations in the puritan Atlantic, it takes the first steps to consider how spatial connection linked a few key places.
As the puritan English in southern New England and Bermuda tried to create new societies, they brought a particular kind of order to their communities—godly order was meant to be paramount. While Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Bermuda differed from each other in significant ways, they more closely resembled each other in key aspects than they did other English colonies. As a group of dissenting colonies colonized by the “hotter” sorts of Protestants seeking reform beyond that instituted by the Church of England, they were definably separate from the British plantation colonies, whether southern mainland or Caribbean, as well as the mid-Atlantic colonies. These (loosely defined) puritans influenced social structures and cultural order in all three colonies, but did not control social institutions in all three places in equal measure.14 While these separate colonies shared a dissenting ethos, each location had a particular trajectory. For instance, puritans and Baptists visited and even preached to each other’s congregations in London during the seventeenth century, including John Bunyan, author of the allegory for Christian conversion The Pilgrim’s Progress. At the same time in Massachusetts Bay, ruling puritans persecuted Baptists as religious outlaws for their insistence on adult baptism.15 Without an established church in Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Baptists there did not face the same persecution and exclusion from town government. But they did have to contend with internal schisms.16 Conflicts over the appropriate life stage for baptism do not appear in Bermuda’s records. The public conversion narrative required in most of New England’s puritan churches relating an individual’s spiritual and physical struggles to discern the working of God’s grace upon and in them was not a common practice in English congregations, although those who had stayed in England considered themselves to be every bit as committed to purifying the Church of England, if not more so.17 A capacious definition of puritan religiosity that includes a wide spectrum of behavior encompasses such regional variations.
The puritan Atlantic becomes a less useful organizing concept after England tightened its control of its American colonies and brought them into closer order. By 1723, the law and social practice were increasingly codifying hierarchies of race and servitude, and New England merchants had sharply increased their participation in carrying the human cargo of the slave trade. New England was economically dependent on the slave trade long before New England ship captains carried enslaved Africans in large numbers. After the English Civil War cut off the flood of migrants to New England in the 1640s—and with them their money and support of the local staples market—a large portion of New England’s economy rested on the demand of British slave colonies in the Caribbean for those staples.18 Bermuda’s turn to maritime activity and shipbuilding, which began after the dissolution of the governing Somers Islands Company in 1684, was fully established by 1720, a shift whose success depended on the labor of enslaved Bermudians at sea and on shore.19 In Rhode Island, planters in the Narragansett region turned to enslaved African labor even as they institutionalized their exploitation of Narragansetts’ labor through hereditary pauperdom, in which children inherited the debt obligations and indentured servitude of their parents.20 However, economic considerations were not the only cause of change. Relations among the colonies shifted as England tried to strengthen each colony’s connection to the metropole, while changes within puritanism meant that ministers no longer dictated specific behaviors to be enforced or punished by magistrates.
England’s closer attention to its empire also meant that legal structures in the colonies moved closer to common law practices, a shift that marked more uneven power relations between men and women. While the puritan vision of godly rules meted out harsh punishments to women who stepped outside the bounds of proper behavior, it also punished men for sexual and moral lapses and reduced their power over their wives, thus coming close to a single standard for sexual and moral conduct. Between 1690 and 1723, however, most puritan ministers’ view of the proper relationship between godly order and civil authority shifted so that ministers were no longer directing the civil authorities about which behaviors