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Some strong religious beliefs common to Puritans had direct impacts on culture. Puritans believed it was the government's responsibility to enforce moral standards and ensure true religious worship was established and maintained. [98] Education was essential to every person, male and female, so that they could read the Bible for themselves.
Consequently, most felt no need to settle in the American colonies. Very few immigrants to the Colony of Virginia and other early colonies, in any case, were Puritans. Virginia was a repository for more middle class and "royalist" oriented settlers, who were leaving England following their loss of power during the English Commonwealth.
The history of the Puritans can be traced back to the first Vestments Controversy in the reign of Edward VI, the formation of an identifiable Puritan movement in the 1560s and ends in a decline in the mid-18th century.
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 King James version slowly took over the place of the Geneva Bible had among the Puritans. The KJV of the Bible translation is noted for its "majesty of style", and has been described as one of the most important books in English culture and a driving force in the shaping of the English-speaking world.
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 culture of the New England colonies of the seventeenth century was influenced by Calvinist theology, which believed in a "just, almighty God," [1] and a lifestyle of pious, consecrated actions. The Puritans participated in their own forms of recreational activity, including visual arts, literature, and music.
The English Puritan movement in the reign of Elizabeth and beyond sought to further the work of reforming the Church of England, eradicate the influence of Roman Catholicism in the land, as well as promote the national interest of the English crown and the English people under a united Protestant confession that was in strict conformity to the ...