Overview: John Winthrop and The Puritan Dilemma

Overview: John Winthrop and The Puritan Dilemma

John Winthrop was a practical leader, a deeply religious person and a wise businessman.   He saw the benefits of living a life of self-discipline, hard work and self-denial.   Born outside of London into a relatively “middle class” English family in 1587, and with a strong educational background in law, Winthrop led a group of English Puritans to the New World, and helped create the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629.   The England that Winthrop knew and left was in his eyes “full of plenty and delights but under the shadow of God’s wrath.”   The London of 1625, to Winthrop, exhibited a “foulness” brought about by the corruption in government.   There were, he saw, excessive and “open breaches of God’s command.”   Winthrop and his followers resolved to leave England and avoid the problems rather than solve them for the immediate, but to “leave it with the approbation of the King and without repudiating its Churches and the Christians in them.”  

He was elected Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630.   Between 1631 and 1648 he was voted out of governorship and reelected a total of 12 times.   He was respected by many; he could be obstinate but he also was a great facilitator and organizer—as well as someone who tried to make things work and allow people the context and structure for getting along in the New World.   As Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and hence Company, he became, in effect, the leader of a new “self-governing commonwealth,” albeit with legal doctrines tied to strong religious beliefs.   There was not yet a full separation of Church and State; however, it is noteworthy that the Church leaders in this Colony and others that sprang into existence were not and never became the elected political leaders.

To Winthrop and to the Puritans in general:   “God…demanded perfect obedience, and men must never cease trying to give it.”   Government had to meet the Puritan ideal of a “covenant with God” before all...