Puritan Religious Intolerance and Conflict with Native Americans
This essay examines the religious ideology behind early Puritan settlement in New England and how that ideology shaped the colonists' increasingly hostile relationship with Native Americans. Beginning with the relatively peaceful encounters between the Pilgrims and tribes such as the Wampanoag, the paper traces how later Puritan leaders — exemplified by Reverend Nathaniel Ward's 1647 tract "Against Toleration" — actively rejected religious pluralism and used theological justification to dismiss native peoples' land claims and spiritual practices. The essay also considers John Wesley's critique of Puritan violence, noting that even his condemnation retained an ethnocentric bias. Ultimately, the paper argues that America's founding Puritan communities functioned as theocracies, and that religious certainty was a primary driver of colonial violence against indigenous peoples.
- The New Jerusalem: Puritan Origins and Mission: Puritan origins, mission, and early intolerance
- First Dealings, First Peace: Early peaceful contact and treaty with Massasoit
- Nathaniel Ward: Against Toleration: Ward's theological case against religious pluralism
- Puritan Expansion and the Pequot War: Violent conflict and Puritan divine-mandate ideology
- John Wesley: A Cry Against Unchristian Bloodshed: Wesley's ethnocentric critique of Puritan violence
- Conclusion: Theocracy and the Cost of Intolerance: Religious certainty as driver of colonial violence
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper uses primary source quotations — from Nathaniel Ward's 1647 tract and John Wesley's sermons — to ground its argument in historical evidence rather than generalization.
- It balances multiple perspectives, presenting Puritan voices, a dissenting Protestant voice (Wesley), and brief acknowledgment of the Native American viewpoint, giving the argument nuance.
- The framing device of the "New Jerusalem" recurs throughout, providing thematic coherence and a clear through-line from introduction to conclusion.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates effective use of counter-argument and qualification. By introducing Wesley's condemnation of Puritan violence and then critiquing Wesley's own ethnocentric assumptions, the essay shows that the student can engage critically with sources rather than simply accepting them as authoritative. This move — presenting a seeming counter-voice and then complicating it — elevates the analysis beyond a simple narrative of events.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with historical background on Puritan origins and their mission to build a "New Jerusalem." It then moves chronologically through early peaceful contact, the shift toward intolerance under later Puritan leadership, the theological justification for exclusion via Ward's writing, the violent culmination in the Pequot War, and finally Wesley's ambivalent critique. The conclusion synthesizes the argument by connecting Puritan theocracy to the broader pattern of colonial religious violence.
The New Jerusalem: Puritan Origins and Mission
The first settlers to arrive in New England were known as Puritans, or nonconformists in their native England. They wished to keep the Protestant English Church pure — that is, free of Catholic influences. Because of their refusal to obey what they saw as impure Anglican doctrine, they were persecuted in their homeland. The earliest Pilgrims or Puritans were also called Separatists because they held themselves apart from the Anglican Church. These early settlers sailed aboard the Mayflower in 1620 and founded Plymouth Colony near what is now Provincetown, Massachusetts. They came to America to create a New Jerusalem — a shining city upon a hill of religious truth. They did not, contrary to popular American mythology, come seeking religious toleration. This sense of specialness, separateness, and mission placed them in inexorable conflict with the native peoples of the Americas ("Religious Tolerance in Colonial America," 2008).
The early settlers could be quite intolerant of individuals who did not adhere to their doctrines. Their descendants were increasingly hostile toward Native Americans. The Puritans came not to a wild and unsettled territory — though they may have perceived it as such — but to a land already occupied by a people possessing their own unique traditions and heritage. The Puritans were intent upon creating their own community, with a distinct culture and religious climate. "They had originally left England for the religiously tolerant Netherlands, but left there for economic reasons and because their children were becoming more Dutch than English" ("Religious Tolerance in Colonial America," 2008). In America they desired an apparently culturally "free" zone in which to build a new government — a worldview that enabled them to conveniently ignore the land claims and religions of the indigenous peoples.
First Dealings, First Peace
The first encounters between the Pilgrims and the native peoples were not as hostile as those that would follow in later eras. It is true that one early author describes his first contact with the natives as coming upon a "companie of wolves, or such like wild beasts... arrowes came flying" (Atkins, 2008). Nevertheless, these very early colonists did establish somewhat peaceful relations with the natives, culminating in a treaty with Massasoit, a representative of the native people. The treaty held that:
"That neither he [Massasoit] nor any of his should injure or do hurt to any of their people. That if any of his did any hurt to any of theirs, he should send the offender, that they might punish him. That if anything were taken away from any of theirs, he should cause it to be restored; and they should do likewise to him. If any did unjustly war against him, they would aid him; if any did war against them, he should aid them. He should send to his neighbour confederates to certify them of this, that they might not wrong them, but might be likewise comprised in the conditions of peace." (Cited in Atkins, 2008)
Some of the natives spoke a measure of English, learned through trading with earlier European travelers to the New World. This made communication and relations with the Pilgrims considerably easier. Communication fostered a sense of common humanity, as did the shared need to survive a harsh winter — despite the two populations' religious differences. This early treaty, however, seems bitterly ironic in contrast to the later Puritans' willingness to encroach upon native territory.
Nathaniel Ward: Against Toleration
This initial peace proved fleeting as the character of the settler community changed. The later arrivals "had no intention of breaking with the Anglican Church. [These] Puritans were nonconformists, as were the Pilgrims, both refusing to accept an authority beyond that of the revealed word. But where with the Pilgrims this had translated into something closer to an egalitarian mode," later leaders were more often "highly trained scholars, whose education tended to translate into positions that were often authoritarian" (Atkins, 2008). Indeed, one of the earliest prominent exponents of New England Puritanism, the Reverend Nathaniel Ward, wrote a document explicitly titled "Against Toleration" of other faiths in 1647.
When some early English Puritans were attempting to allow limited toleration for differing views and even for different Protestant sects — and were speaking out against the banishments and executions carried out for heresy in New England — Nathaniel Ward, the minister at Ipswich, Massachusetts, wrote that no one "hath to do to institute Religion but God. The power of all Religion and Ordinances lies in their purity: their purity in their simplicity: then are mixtures pernicious. I lived in a City, where a Papist preached in one Church, a Lutheran in another, a Calvinist in a third — a Lutheran one part of the day, a Calvinist the other, in the same Pulpit: the Religion of that place was but motley and meagre, their affections Leopard-like" (Ward, 1647, p. 393). In short, tolerance leads to the dilution of the true faith.
Ward argued that because only God could institute religion, and because a true religion was grounded in purity and simplicity in accordance with Puritan belief, it was wrong to permit the existence of any other Protestant sect — or even more liberal Puritan views — within the community. He criticized the "Orthodox" English church for allowing forms of pluralism to flourish, seeing this as the reason that the English church had become religiously corrupt with "popish" influence. Ward wrote that the "New" English, like himself, could not take such an ecumenical stance: "That there is no Rule given by God for any State to give an affirmative Toleration to any false Religion, or Opinion whatsoever; they must connive in some Cases, but may not concede in any" (Ward, 1647, p. 396).
Conclusion: Theocracy and the Cost of Intolerance
Although the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights proclaims the separation of church and state, America was in fact founded by individuals seeking to create what we would today call a theocracy. Despite early amicable relations with the natives, conflicts over territory eventually drove the two populations into open hostility. The violence that ensued was justified by the religious rhetoric and beliefs of the Puritans as they strove to build a New Jerusalem in a land already inhabited by peoples whose civilization and faith they regarded as inferior to their own — primitive at best, and savage at worst.
Works Cited
Atkins, Scott Eric. (2008). "Pilgrims and Puritans." American Studies at the University of Virginia. Retrieved 25 Jan 2008 from
"Native Americans of North America." (2007). Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia. Retrieved 25 Jan 2008 from http://encarta.msn.com
"Religious Tolerance in Colonial America." (2008). Geocities. Retrieved 25 Jan 2008 from http://www.geocities.com/crownac/religious_tolerance.htm
Ward, Nathaniel. (1647). "Against Toleration." E-text of American History Told by Contemporaries, Vol. 1, pp. 393–96. Retrieved 25 Jan 2008 from http://personal.pitnet.net/primarysources/ward.html
Wesley, John. (1872). "A Caution Against Bigotry." In Complete Sermons, edited by Thomas Jackson. Retrieved 25 Jan 2008 from http://new.gbgm-umc.org/umhistory/wesley/sermons/38
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