Holy...!

Doing some research today I learned something I had never quite gotten before. I had always thought the Massachusetts Bay colonists were essentially chase out of England - apparently not so. I knew they were religious (who wasn't in those days?) but I had never seen it put quite this way:

No Christian community in history identified more with the People of the Book than did the early settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who believed their own lives to be a literal reenactment of the Biblical drama of the Hebrew nation. They themselves were the children of Israel; America was their Promised Land; the Atlantic Ocean their Red Sea; the Kings of England were the Egyptian pharaohs; the American Indians the Canaanites (or the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel); the pact of the Plymouth Rock was God's holy Covenant; and the ordinances by which they lived were the Divine Law. Like the Huguenots and other Protestant victims of Old World oppression, these émigré Puritans dramatized their own situation as the righteous remnant of the Church corrupted by the "Babylonian woe," and saw themselves as instruments of Divine Providence, a people chosen to build their new commonwealth on the Covenant entered into at Mount Sinai.

Well, maybe they're exaggerating a bit? Time to go to the source, David Hackett Fischer, who is to pre-Civil War America what Roger Ebert is to cinema - the only person a layman really needs to pay attention to.

And he says, yup, that's right:

The great migration developed in this spirit - above all as a religious movement of English Christians who meant to build a new Zion in America. When most of these emigrants explained their motives for coming to the New World, religion was mentioned not merely as their leading purpose. It was their only purpose.

The Massachusetts Bay Colony, by the way, was unique among New World colonies. It was demographically balanced, consisting mainly of family groups (in the Latin American colonies men outnumbered women by 10:1 or more, and even in Virgina it was something like 4:1).

Not just anyone could come along. In some instances the Massachusetts Bay settlers rejected people who wanted to come with them, and in others insisted on letters vouching for the individual's good character...