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Puritanism and Mormonism: Parallel Paths Parting of Ways

James R. Christianson

Puritan Mission

Immersed in both the excesses and successes of what they saw as a faltering Reformation, Puritans were convinced that God would not permit their age to miss its destiny. In their view the elect of God, the saints of the latter days, were entering a new land of Canaan "where the world might see a specimen of what shall be over all the earth in the Glorious Times which are Expected." All the perceived shortcomings of the Reformation in the Old World would be remedied in the uncontaminated environment of New England. This inflated sense of destiny so unabashedly proclaimed by seventeenth-century Puritans reflects the conviction that it was their divine mission to fine-tune and perfect the Reformation, bringing it to its ultimate conclusion. As a matter of strategy, God reserved New England as the final battleground out of which Zion, the city of God, would emerge. If this notion of their own importance appears presumptuous, we must recall that in the Puritan view, thousands of years of history pointed unerringly to their day. For the first time since the advent of the Savior, God was establishing his covenant with a people who would "worship him in all his holy ordinances.-->

"We the people of New England," wrote Peter Bulkeley, "are as a city set upon a hill, in the open view of all the earth, the eyes of the world are upon us, because we profess ourselves to be a people in Covenant with God. Our function is to walk so that all the nations will say, 'Only this people is a wise, and holy and blessed people.' The Lord has purposely kept us few, weak, and poor, so that we may excel in grace and holiness alone." To John Cotton, the role of common consent in establishing the order of the churches and of the Commonwealth brought to mind, "the New Heaven and New Earth, wherein dwells Righteousness." Thomas Hooker, another Puritan divine, supposed the day of judgment was at hand, for in the erection of the New England way, "truth had made the last disclosure conceivable within the frame of time…. Any further discovery would surpass the possibilities of earth and commence the rein of eternity."-->

Puritan Colonization

During the great migration from 1628 to 1640, more than 50,000 English citizens came to the New World, some of them settling Massachusetts Bay. 21,000 of them were Puritans, distinguished from the Pilgrims of Plymouth (who preceded them by ten years and who were later assimilated by them) in that they were not separatists but were disposed to purify and reform the Church of England. When they left or were driven from England and went into the wilderness, it was with the firm resolve that they would one day return, bearing the kingdom on their shoulders, welcomed by those who would recognize and wish to accept the work that God had wrought. Their insistence on the further reformation of the church and the resultant fears of James I-that they were antimonarchal and that the thirty-nine Calvinist articles of the church which they supported were reactionary-led to their expulsion from high government and university positions, and with increased persecution, to their emigration to the New World.