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In the 17th century, the word Puritan was a term applied not to just one group but to many. Historians still debate a precise definition of Puritanism. [6] Originally, Puritan was a pejorative term characterizing certain Protestant groups as extremist. Thomas Fuller, in his Church History, dates the first use of the word to 1564.
Collinson has discussed a moderate Puritanism, as contrasted to an extreme Puritanism that demanded presbyterianism in church polity. [11] Ferrell argues that conforming Puritanism was at the same time part of a theological consensus, and in terms of church polity a target of the sustained and divisive Jacobean polemical campaign against ...
Under Charles I, the Puritans became a political force as well as a religious tendency in the country. Opponents of the royal prerogative became allies of Puritan reformers, who saw the Church of England moving in a direction opposite to what they wanted, and objected to increased Catholic influence both at Court and (as they saw it) within the Church.
The Puritan's main purpose was to purify the Church of England and to make England a more Christian country. History of the Puritans under Elizabeth I, 1558–1603; History of the Puritans under James I, 1603–1625; History of the Puritans under Charles I, 1625–1649; History of the Puritans from 1649; History of the Puritans in North America
In the United States, the Puritan settlement of New England was a major influence on American Protestantism. With the start of the English Civil War in 1642, fewer settlers to New England were Puritans. The period of 1642 to 1659 represented a period of peaceful dominance in English life by the formerly discriminated Puritan population.
The Puritans were originally members of a group of English Protestants seeking "purity", further reforms or even separation from the established church, during the Reformation.
In the early 17th century, thousands of English Puritans settled in North America, almost all in New England.Puritans were intensely devout members of the Church of England who believed that the Church of England was insufficiently reformed, retaining too much of its Roman Catholic doctrinal roots, and who therefore opposed royal ecclesiastical policy.
The Puritans moreover wanted all the sins, rituals, and superstitions that "smacked of Roman Catholic idolatry" thoroughly abolished from the realm and from the churches, including; the mass, the surplice, kneeling at the Lord's Supper, vestments, graven images, profane and sexually immoral stage plays, and the widespread profanation of the ...