Pilgrim or Puritan, or both?

I don't know about you, but over the years since my secondary schooling, I came to create a distinction between the Pilgrims and the Puritans based pretty much on one thing -- when they arrived in the New World. I knew both were involved in the quest for religious liberty but couldn't tell you much about their religious backgrounds and how much difference, if any, in their theological stances. In fact, even after pursuing a good deal of reading in the history of Christianity in seminary and after, I never paid much attention to those two groups.

I've found that many folks probably think the two are basically the same. I read in one source that Ronald Reagan (or his speechwriters) mixed them in one of his orations, calling John Winthrop a Pilgrim, though he was a Puritan leader who came to this country ten years after the Pilgrims. 

My chronological  arrangement is somewhat sound. That first group of immigrants who landed in the wrong place and stayed (they had intended to go to Virginia) is generally considered to be the Pilgrims, and everyone else goes by a different name. 

But the groups held significantly different views, delicate distinctions, according to the Rev. Richard Howland Maxwell, whose paper Pilgrim and Puritan: A Delicate Distinction, is widely quoted in any discussion of the two groups and seems to form the basis for many of the sites I looked at. You can obtain a full copy of the paper easily on the Internet, and his work will form the basis for much of this post.

Firstly, most of the Pilgrims started as part of the established Church of England. This isn't surprising because you basically became an Anglican by being born in England. You belonged to a parish by virtue of your geographical location. 

Over time, though, many came to believe that wasn't enough. You needed to have a true faith, and your guide should be the Bible, not the church hierarchy. These rebels became known as Puritans, and their central tenet was that the Church of England was too Catholic and too far removed from the truth of the Scriptures. The sought to reform, or purify, the church and return it to its proper foundation.

Not too surprisingly, the church resisted such efforts. Challenging the church meant challenging the hierarchy, especially the titular head of the church, the king. Pastors who followed a Puritan bent faced the loss of their church. One influencer of the leading Pilgrims, Richard Clyfton, refused to use the Book of Common Prayer, wear vestments, or make the sign of the cross when performing baptism. He was removed from his post for being a nonconformist and nonsubscriber. 

Like many other "radicals," -- in quotes because we'd hardly find fault with that today -- he decided to keep going. They operated outside the sphere of the established church and became known as separatists, or "Brownists," named after an early leader of the separatist movement, though somewhat ironically, he later returned to the Anglican fold. 

A bunch of these believers eventually removed themselves to the Netherlands to escape Anglican persecution, and a small group of them eventually resolved to go to America and start anew. William Bradford would refer to the group as pilgrims, borrowing Biblical imagery of believers who journey to follow God. 

The Puritans also came to America, a decade later and in much larger numbers, to practice their beliefs far from Anglican control They are the original congregationalists, abandoning Anglican structure and polity. Another decade later, and they were the dominant group in Massachusetts. Eventually the Plymouth colony would be subsumed by the Massachusetts Bay colony.

Maxwell puts the difference this way: "In other words, the Pilgrims ... were puritans seeking to reform their church, and the Puritans ... were pilgrims ... who moved to a whole new land because of their religious convictions. Now you know why I call it a 'delicate distinction'!" (The use of italics and the capitalizations are Maxwell's.)

Second, the two groups differed economically. The Pilgrims were mostly working class people, with few people of education. They had no ordained clergy when they arrived. The Puritans were better educated, by and large, and had more professional and richer members. They brought educated, ordained clergy with them. 

Because of their time in the Netherlands, and probably also the hardships and losses the Pilgrims experienced, their temporal government differed greatly from that of the Puritans. They placed a great deal of emphasis on "covenant," a binding of the group in which all were equal. Leaders were elected by the group but were also part of the group, all bound by the same covenant. 

The Puritans saw their founding in religious terms, also using the language of covenant, but believing themselves to have been ordained of God to establish a "Cittty upon a Hill," with the world waiting to judge their faithfulness. 

Their leaders, though elected, were responsible to God more than the community that elected them, which sometimes lead them to autocratic behavior. But they also proclaimed a strict separation between church and state. 

The church and clergy technically had no influence over governmental action. (In reality the clergy had much indirect influence as political leaders often sought their advice.) Laws could be passed that reflected the church's beliefs, but prosecution for violations resulted only in civil penalties, unlike England, where violations in church matters could cost you both your civil and religious rights and privileges.

The Pilgrims took separation a bit further. If the Scripture did not make a specific claim about a function, then it was a civil matter. As an example, Bradford wrote that marriage was "a civill thing, upon which many questions aboute inheritances doe depende, ... and no wher found in the gospell to be layed on the ministers as a part of their office." 

Imagine that as a part of the modern discussion on "family values" and who can marry whom.

Finally, the Puritans are regularly described as arrogant. Maxwell quotes Edmund Morgan description of their attitude as "that unabashed assumption of superiority which was to carry English rule around the world." 

Thus they came into much conflict with the native inhabitants of the land, and indeed the inhabitants of the Plymouth colony, because they believed they had the right to take anything they wanted. The Pilgrims had much better relations with the tribes because they negotiated deals for the use of the land they needed and formed relationships with them. 

Though this piece is longer than I intended, it represents a simplification of all I read. But as the two founding religious groups in New England, you can see in them the roots of many of our current debates on a wide range of issues: religious liberty, corporate responsibility, Christian nationalism, race relations and more.

Image: Standard depiction of a Pilgrim family. Possibly not accurate as we only have one painting of a Pilgrim while he was alive, and it depicts him wearing London fashion of the 1650s.