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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.
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.
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
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 ...
By the end of the reign of King James in 1625, Puritanism had established itself in England as a revolutionary religious and political movement. The Puritans had come to influence every institution of English society and had spread as well to the continent in Holland as well as the American colonies in the Plymouth Colony.
Puritanism was not a religion of its own, but rather was a movement, started in England, to reform Protestantism. [24] However, the first Puritans in America who were called such have arrived between 1629 and 1640 and settled in New England, specifically the Massachusetts Bay area.
The Restoration in 1660 reestablished both the monarchy and the religious settlement, but the Puritans were forced out of the Church of England. Anglicans now defined their church as a via media or middle way between the religious extremes of Catholicism and Protestantism; Arminianism and Calvinism; and high church and low church.