Hot Protestants by Michael P. Winship;

Author:Michael P. Winship;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300126280
Publisher: Yale University Press

Quakers were the most aggressive outside religious threat to New England’s puritan reformation in the 1650s. But the most insidious and dangerous threat was internal: young people. New England’s English population was rapidly expanding and growing steadily younger, plunging to a point where the median age reached sixteen. In the 1650s, the Massachusetts General Court repeatedly passed laws to rein in young people’s fondness for drinking, gaming, strolling around on the Sabbath, and acting disrespectfully during the church services of very long prayers, sermons, and communal psalm singing that could last for three hours or more each Sunday morning and afternoon. The court called for the churches to pray for the young and ordered colony-wide days of fasting for them.31

This rising tide of young people made it impossible to ignore any longer what Norton and many other ministers and laypeople had already concluded was a grievous error the original settlers had built into their churches. Children’s membership, which came with their parents’ admission, was not worth very much. It brought them only one privilege, their own right to be baptized. Children could not take the Lord’s Supper, and their moral and spiritual supervision was usually handled by the parents, not the church. When they grew old enough to claim the membership privileges of the Lord’s Supper and baptism for their own children, they had to demonstrate their visible sainthood by giving a convincing conversion narrative, just like newcomers applying for membership.32

But admissions standards set in the 1630s for and by self-selected middle-aged religious zealots proved terrifyingly daunting to their offspring raised in more routine times. The children were not rising to the challenge. They were drifting out of the churches’ orbits, while the first generation of settlers was starting to die off. That steady shrinkage of the churches could not have been why God sent the settlers to New England. “The Lord hath not set up churches,” as one alarmed minister put it, “only that a few old Christians may keep one another warm while they live, and then carry away the church into the cold grave with them when they die.”33

And since the Lord could not have intended to shovel his New England churches into the cold grave, where had the New Englanders originally gone wrong in trying to understand his intentions? Since the 1640s, John Cotton, John Norton, and other prescient ministers and laity had been rethinking Christ’s intentions in order to allow the churches to hold on to their children as they became adults and started having children of their own who needed baptism. John Norton wanted that rethinking written into the Cambridge Platform of 1648, but he was vehemently opposed at the Cambridge synod by an “eminent person” who was dead set against any change. Since Congregationalists tried to work consensually as much as possible, the synod ducked the issue. Out of the same impulse for consensus, individual churches were reluctant to test the waters and expand baptism to their children’s children on their own, even though it was their Congregationalist right.

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