In the current history wars, New England Puritanism once again serves as the mythic origin of either the exceptional greatness of the United States or American evils such as white Christian nationalism. Whenever John Witte has treated the New England tradition, he has made a self-conscious attempt to avoid these pitfalls. Witte’s goal has never been to make out the Puritans as heroic founding fathers of modern democracy, whose understanding of rights and freedom directly corresponded or teleologically led to ours. Nor has it been his intention to exculpate the Puritans for any of their shortcomings and the wrongs they undoubtedly committed, even if measured by their own standards. At the same time, Witte has always pushed back against presentist misrepresentations and vilifications of the Puritans. In the respective chapters of The Reformation of Rights (2007) and Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment (5th ed. 2022), among other publications, he aimed to reconstruct how the “‘fundamental ideas’ of Puritan Calvinism”—of “conscience, confession, community, and commonwealth”—importantly contributed “to the genesis and genius of the American experiment” with “religious, ecclesiastical, associational, and political liberty.”1 These Puritan ideas, in turn, were informed by complex traditions of Christian, specifically Protestant Reformed, theology and jurisprudence that the first settlers brought to the New England colonies, where these ideas would subsequently mesh, but also partly clash, with new Enlightenment theories of individual liberty and natural rights.
By making this argument, Witte has been one of the leaders in a modest but significant movement to reevaluate the political thought of New England Puritan leaders that is mostly found in their religious writings. What connects
The following chapter seeks to further the conversation on Puritanism’s contribution to that tradition in two ways. First, it extends the historical scope. Witte and others have given most attention to early New England. Most recently, Adrian Weimer examined the post-Restoration period, when Puritans responded to the absolutist ambitions of Charles II by crafting what she calls a “potent regional constitutional culture,” which was “marked by wariness of metropolitan ambition, defensiveness about civil and religious liberties, and a
Second, I extend the scope of textual source material and pay special attention to biblical commentaries and writings on church history as important but often overlooked genres through which Puritan authors expressed their political thought. My case study is Cotton Mather (1663–1728), who is widely acknowledged as the leading churchman and theologian of third-generation Puritanism in Massachusetts, but has also been much misunderstood and maligned as the exemplary embodiment of all Puritan wrongs, in particular their religious bigotry and persecuting spirit.
Against such stereotypical views, I demonstrate that Mather derived from his interpretations of the Bible and history a changed view of the two covenantal associations, how they ought to relate to each other, and who can enter them and enjoy their privileges. In contrast to his forebears, Mather’s understanding implied a stricter—if by no means complete—separation of state and church. In conversation with Reformed theologians and Whig theorists, he found in the scriptures far-reaching notions of political liberty, separation of powers, and checks and balances within a mixed-government framework, as well as a divine right of resistance to tyrants. However, it should be noted upfront that Mather’s understanding of political liberties sharply diverges from that of modern liberal democracies, in that he assumed a hierarchical society with different estates and graded privileges as well as differing duties. Mather took it for granted that only freeholding white men should enjoy the full extent of the English freedoms he touted, while those of women and servants would be restricted. And although Mather criticized the transatlantic slave trade and, in some ways, resisted the ongoing racialization of Africans and Indians as naturally inferior peoples, he never challenged the institution of slavery. Instead, he tacitly accepted the growing number of bondsmen in the colonies, focusing on their religious education and emphasizing their duty to be obedient to Christian masters, rather than calling for their emancipation
Yet in other regards, Mather was willing to call into question what had been consensual in the world he grew up in, notably when it came to religious qualifications for full civic rights. He concluded that a truly biblical Christianity demanded a much more expansive understanding of religious freedom than the original architects of the Massachusetts Bay had allowed. Mather would come to promote “Liberty of Conscience” as “the Native Right of Mankind,” as he put it in his 1718 ordination sermon for the Baptist Elisha Callender,8 while advocating comprehensive and tolerant Protestant establishments for both Old and New England. A rising British Empire committed to these principles, Mather hoped, would be a champion in what he saw as the Protestant cause of liberty, locked in apocalyptic battle with the forces of Antichristian tyranny.
Cotton Mather came of age in a world dramatically changed from that of his grandfathers, John Cotton and Richard Mather, who had been among the founders of the Massachusetts Bay and principal architects of the so-called New England Way in church polity. Back in England, the Stuart Restoration of 1660 put out of reach, at least for the foreseeable future, the Puritan dream of a truly reformed national church and ushered in a most trying period for Dissenters. Post-Restoration Puritans continued to see themselves as the representatives of Protestantism in England and to strive for a renewed and comprehensive Church of England. However, under a reestablished High Church and the Clarendon Code (1661–65), nonconformist ministers were pushed to the sidelines of ecclesial and political life, and thousands lost their livelihoods and suffered imprisonment. Especially for the hotter sorts of Protestants, the “Romish” sympathies of Charles II and the openly acknowledged Catholicism of James II, along with the absolutist tendencies of the Stuarts, raised the specter of tyranny akin to Catholic France.
Across the ocean in New England, the fears of popery and arbitrary government were compounded by Stuart efforts to integrate and control the hitherto fairly independent colonies much more fully. The Puritans of Massachusetts lived in constant fear that their experiment with a Congregational church
Just as Cotton Mather turned twenty-one, New England’s worst fear became a reality when the First Charter of Massachusetts (1630) was revoked by James II in 1684. Subsequently, Massachusetts was integrated into the Dominion of New England, ruled by a royally appointed governor, Sir Edmund Andros, and his handpicked council. The Puritan panic over Andros’s autocratic regime was exacerbated by his introduction of Anglicanism, which many saw as the portent of a looming counterreformation in case of a Catholic succession to the English throne. At this critical point, or so it seemed to young Cotton Mather, the hand of providence intervened, making the English parliamentary opposition rise up in order to prevent such a succession and end Stuart absolutism. In what came to be known as the Glorious Revolution of 1688/89, William of Orange and his wife, Mary, were invited to ascend the throne, while James II was forced into exile. As news of these events reached British North America, upheavals ensued in several parts, including Massachusetts. In April 1689, Bostonians rose up and arrested without bloodshed the provincial government under Andros. Historians have reconstructed that Mather played an important part in Boston’s Glorious Revolution, and he is considered the principal author of the anonymously published pamphlet The Declaration, Of Gentlemen, Merchants, and Inhabitants of Boston (1689), which served as a semiofficial statement, articulating the main grievances of Massachusetts citizens and legitimizing their open resistance against royal authority.9 The Declaration of Gentlemen has been recognized by David Levin and Rick Kennedy as a landmark document of New England that anticipates many of the arguments held forth by the patriots during the Revolutionary crisis, including those in Thomas Jefferson’s 1776 Declaration of Independence.10
Thus, the Declaration speaks of the unlawful nullification of the Old Charter and the Body of Liberties under false pretenses, and interprets it at once as part of a “Popish Plot,” aiming at “no less than the execution of the Protestant Religion,” and as part of a larger attempt by the Stuarts to extirpate English liberty across the realm. The king had imposed an “Absolute and Arbitrary” regime on Massachusetts, with “Sr. Edmund Andros” as a provincial tyrant. Together with a council of self-serving cronies, the governor had arrogated the power “to make Laws and raise Taxes as he pleased,” raised dues, and illegally revoked land titles in a way that clearly denied the traditional “Priviledges of English men,” going back to “the Magna Charta.” Persons who “did but peacably object against the raising of Taxes without an Assembly” were fined and imprisoned without due process and in violation of “Habeas Corpus.” Given
The dark days of the Andros regime and the turmoil of the Glorious Revolution were foundational experiences for Mather that profoundly influenced his political and ecclesiological thinking. As much as he would celebrate William’s victory over Stuart tyranny and publicly defend the New Charter that his father, Increase, negotiated with the new king, Cotton Mather remained conflicted about the results of the Glorious Revolution on both sides of the Atlantic. He applauded the guarantee of a Protestant succession, the Bill of Rights (1689), and the system of “king in parliament” that evolved in England. Yet, for the rest of his life, he would remain fearful not only of Stuart plots but also of creeping tendencies toward royal absolutism among the new monarchs, especially under Mary and Anne. He was simultaneously thankful for and disappointed by the Act of Toleration (1691), which broadly guaranteed freedom of religion for all Trinitarian Protestants in England, but failed to put Dissenters on equal footing with members of the Church of England. They continued to be excluded from certain rights—including the right to hold office and enter universities—and continued to be vulnerable to further encroachments, depending on the religious tendencies of king and parliament. Although the New Charter for the reorganized Province of Massachusetts restored land titles and other basic freedoms, it severely curtailed the colony’s political autonomy and democratic rule by implementing a royal governor out of the reach of popular control. The Assistants were transformed into the Governor’s Council, to be selected by the king’s representative to serve not only as his council for advice but also as the upper house of the Massachusetts Court. The governor had to approve and could veto all laws proposed by the legislature, and he had the power to convene, prorogue, and dissolve the General Court. Most significantly, for Mather, the New Charter broke the back of Congregationalism’s political ascendancy, by removing full church membership as a qualification for the suffrage and replacing it by property ownership. Moreover, Massachusetts now had to exercise inner-Protestant toleration. Initially Cotton Mather mourned the loss of the old New England Way and, to a certain extent, would
1 Mather and Protestant Liberty
Locally, Mather attempted to make the best of the situation post-1691, seeking to work the system from within for what he perceived as the common good, while also monitoring and criticizing perceived transgressions of the powers that be. With a view to the larger Empire, Mather, in conversation with a new generation of Dissenting theologians as well as English political theorists and historians, became a strong and vocal advocate of a comprehensive understanding of Protestant liberty. He embraced a new identity as a loyal subject of the English crown and provincial citizen of the British Empire, whose identity he defined in contrast to the “popery” and political despotism of France or Spain. In line with this Whig version of imperial ideology, Mather saw the British as especially blessed by God with far-reaching political rights and religious freedoms.13 But these privileges also needed to be jealously protected against popular corruption, royal overreach, as well as a power-hungry party of High Church Anglicans determined to oppress Dissenters. Mather’s most detailed and sophisticated articulations of these idea(l)s can be found in his writings on history and church history as well as his biblical interpretations, notably his mammoth commentary on all the books of scripture, Biblia Americana (1693–1728), which he failed to publish during his lifetime, but which is now being made available in a critical edition.14
Mather saw the story of British Protestantism as part of a larger struggle between the forces of true Christian liberty and Antichristian tyranny spanning the postapostolic period to Christ’s triumphant return. Like so many other Protestant exegetes, Mather believed that the course and millennial telos of
As Mather outlined in his anonymously published Eleutheria (1698), post-Reformation England had seen a constant struggle between what he—employing biblical allusions—called the party of the Eleutherians, or friends of true Christian liberty, and their opponents, the Idumeans. The latter, in Mather’s interpretation, represented the Romanizing “Party in the Church of England which hates to be Reformed” and which, due to the nation’s sins, had,
An Eleutherian, according to Mather, was “any man who desires the Reformation of the Church, to be carried on by the Rules of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Since the days of the Elizabethan compromise, such true Protestants were mostly found among the Puritan movement and the Dissenters, but also many conformists could be counted among them. What united the Eleutherians, for all their differences, was a shared concern for the essentials of the gospel and the evangelical conviction that true faith was a gift of grace that must be voluntarily embraced. This made them convinced that forced conversions or “Persecution for Conscience sake is a very Unchristian or Antichristian Symptom.” Politically, everyone worthy of the name Eleutherian had “the heart of a true Englishman in him, for the Constitution of the State,” that guaranteed “Government without Slavery, in Spirituals or Temporals.”16 They favored a system of checks-and-balances with a strong representative legislature, so “That no illegal, despotick, and arbitrary Government may be imposed upon the brave English Nation: LIBERTY and PROPERTY is their cognizance.” Mather believed that the Nonconformists who originally fled from the persecution of the Idumeans into the “American Wilderness, now known by the Name of NEW-ENGLAND,” in order to “pursue the Designs of a Scriptural Reformation, and enjoy the Spiritual Blessings of a Reformed State,” had been the best of the “ELEUTHERIANS.”17 But since then, the colonies had also become a battlefield of the two contending parties, and during the Andros regime the cause of liberty had almost come to ruin. This view of New England history is also reflected in Mather’s famous Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), especially his biographies of the governors. For instance, he painted Simon Bradstreet and William Phips as defenders of religious and political liberty against the tyranny of the Dominion government.
More specifically, Mather argued that the form of government instituted by Moses combined in its constitution elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. It featured a separation into judicative, legislative, and executive branches, and was organized in a multitiered fashion, starting with local magistrates and judges at the village level and rising up all the way to the state level. In the beginning, Moses was the “Chief Civil Magistrate,” or head of the governing council, which judged “the most Weighty Causes” and decided “the most Important Affayrs of the Kingdome” in conjunction with the “Elders” or “Senate of Seventy.” According to Mather’s Hebraist sources, this senate (the Great
Later on, Moses’s position as “Chief Magistrate” would be filled by other tribal chiefs and judges, before God eventually appointed kings for Israel. At 1 Samuel 8:7, Mather emphasized that the demand for a king was in response to a growing corruption of the people and its representatives, who were undermining the laws of the divine covenant. Yet the introduction of a stronger executive could not stop the loss of godliness and, in the long run, even exacerbated it. “Afterwards, when Saul, and when David, came Arbitrarily to do those things, which were formerly done by the Direction of God immediately,” Mather commented, “the Loss was growing yet more Irretrievable,” especially when the monarchy became hereditary and further expanded its power at the expense of the other branches of government (BA 3:270). To Mather, the Bible did not depict monarchy as inherently problematic. However, by highlighting the grievous crimes of even the greatest kings, David and Solomon, scripture taught that no mortal and sinful man must reign absolutely, lest kingship degenerate into tyranny. Monarchical rule had to be limited by God’s laws and always needed to respect the natural rights and liberties of the people. And it must be balanced and checked by a representative body. Among the modern nations, Mather thought, the English people had been especially blessed by having a constitutional system that came closest to this divinely ordained model. However, English liberty was precarious and always under threat from the machinations of the “IDUMEANS.”
Accordingly, Mather hailed every new monarch upon their ascension to the throne, just as he would try to establish good relations with every new governor of Massachusetts in the hope that they would rule in accordance with the “Republican Strain” of the Bible and the tradition of English liberty. Yet there was a pessimistic strand in his political thinking, reminiscent of the English Commonwealth men. Like them, Mather feared that due to the sinful nature of humans there was always a tendency toward corruption, the arrogation of power, and encroachment on rights. In a series of entries on Romans 13, Mather thus reflected on the conditions of and limitations to the Pauline command, “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers.” Especially significant is a lengthy entry on this passage derived from the annotations in John
2 Mather and Religious Freedom
Cotton Mather’s interpretation of religious freedom was arguably even more daring. It fundamentally called into question any form of religious coercion—including the model of a Congregational establishment implemented by the founders of Massachusetts Bay—not simply for pragmatic reasons but on
Under the New Charter, Congregationalism remained privileged, in that each parish and township was required to maintain at least one Congregational minister for whose support the state levied a tax on every citizen. However, Massachusetts now had to allow other Protestants to establish themselves and exercise their religion freely. Furthermore, political rights were no longer tied to Congregational church membership. Mather was surprisingly quick to see God’s purpose behind these profound changes. By the early 1690s he had become a true champion of religious voluntarism. On Luke 14:23 (“compel them to come in”) Mather noted in his Biblia Americana that this part of Jesus’s parable had falsely served as a proof text to justify religious coercion. Like the Lord Jesus, the fathers of the primitive church had been convinced that “Men should not be compelled by any external Violence unto the Profession of the Faith.” Rightly understood, the compulsion spoken of in this verse noted “only a sweet Force from Heaven upon the Minds & Wills of Men, which accompanies the Perswasion of the Faithful Ministers of the Gospel” (BA 7). But when the church rose to power this understanding was distorted. In his commentary on Revelation 9, Mather minced no words when describing the imposition of conformity and persecution in the post-Constantinian church as indicative of the rise of Antichrist. In assuming “The Power of giving Law to the Consciences of Men in Disputable Matters,” he wrote, “The Christian Emperours [were] playing over again, the Game of Tyranny, that had been plaid by the Pagans, when
Mather’s engagement for that cause reflected his beliefs in the coming eschatological repristination of the primitive church, but also his concerns as he looked across the ocean. What he saw was a new wave of religious persecutions against European Protestants in Catholic territories, most dramatically in France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which to him was indicative of the last raging of Antichrist. This made him fearful that, the Act of Toleration notwithstanding, English Dissenters on both sides of the Atlantic might have to face more hardships. For instance, eligibility for public office was still dependent on adherence to the Anglican communion. Between 1689 and 1702, the requirement to take the oaths and submit to tests was extended to beneficed clergy, members of the universities, lawyers, schoolteachers, and preachers. Criticizing these and other measures, Mather began to advocate for more robust protections of the full civic rights of nonconforming Protestants across the three kingdoms—no matter whether the establishment was Anglican as in England, Presbyterian as in Scotland, or Congregationalist as in Massachusetts. A “Christian by Non-conformity to this or that Imposed Way of Worship, does not break the Terms on which he is to enjoy the Benefits of Humane Society,” he argued in a 1692 sermon before the governor and General Court, and hence has “a Right unto his Life, his Estate, his Liberty, and his Family,” and should not be limited in his “Political Capacity.”23
After the turn of the century, Mather’s pleas for religious freedom became more emphatic, as Tories and High Church Anglicans under Queen Anne worked to further reinforce uniformity, for example by a bill to outlaw Occasional Conformity (1711) and the Schism Act of 1714, which targeted dissenting academies. As the imperial system tightened, Mather, like many of his fellow New Englanders, became increasingly worried that an “Anglicization” of the colonies would also step up the pressure for conformity there. In this situation, Mather—in dialogue with similar ideas by other Dissenters but also Latitudinarian bishops in favor of a “Broad Church”—promoted a comprehensive national church for England. To further “the Common Protestant Cause, Religion, and Interest in this Nation, and consequently in all other Nations and Countries,” he wrote in Eleutheria, the Church of England was in need “of enlarging its Foundations, and consequently of taking in the Nonconformists,
The Hanoverian succession of 1714 and the Whig Party’s subsequent rise to supremacy entailed a growing influence of the Low Church faction in the Church of England that was readier to accommodate Dissenters. However, by that time the idea of a comprehensive church establishment for England was also dead. Still, Mather did not walk back any of his demands for religious liberty and also applied them to the situation in New England, past and present.
In chapter 13 of Parentator, the biography of his father published in 1724, he tells the exemplary story of how Increase Mather allegedly changed his mind on religious freedom. By means of that story, Cotton was able to at once celebrate the original Puritan project of creating a church-polity built on “The Faith and Order of the Gospel” “with all possible Purity,” and to repudiate the founders’ interpretation of the relation between church and state. Late in life, said Cotton Mather, Increase came to understand that the founders’ zeal for ecclesial purity misled them into giving too much coercive power to the magistrate in religious matters: “Toleration was decried, as a Trojan horse profanely and perilously brought into the City of GOD.” Parentator speaks of the “Unhappy Laws” against dissidents that sprang from the sometime “Bitter Spirit” of intolerance in the early days, and that produced some “Extremity” and “Unadvised and Sanguinary Things … particularly, the Rash Things done unto the Quakers.”25 Similarly, in Brethren Dwelling in Unity, Mather had expressed his regret over the persecution of Baptists in early New England.26 For the members of any established church “to Punish Men, in their Temporal Enjoyments, because in some religious Opinions they Dissent from them, … is a Robbery, whereof he could not but say, It appears to me Unreasonable.” Coercion only gave rise to sinful hypocrisy.27
With regard to the issue of enforcing religious uniformity, Mather arrived at the conclusion that under the gospel dispensation, the Jewish laws regulating uniform worship and observance had been abrogated. The founders of the New England Way had mistaken these laws as prophetic types to be literally fulfilled in the future church, functioning as models for its internal discipline and relation to temporal power. Men like John Cotton had called for the magistrate to enforce both tables of Mosaic law and thus, like the pious kings of Israel, to punish and suppress blasphemers, apostates, and false prophets, as much as adulterers, murderers, and false witnesses. Ascribing his own insight to Increase again, Cotton writes in Parentator: “He became sensible, That the Example of the Israelitish Reformers, Inflicting Penalties on False Worshippers, would not Legitimate the Proceedings among the Christian Gentiles.” The Jewish kingdom built in the promised land of Canaan had to be understood as a spiritual type. Its antitype, Christ’s kingdom, was not of this world, or at least not fully, until the Parousia. Writes Mather: “The Christian Religion brings us not into a Temporal Canaan; it knows no Designs; it has no Weapons, but what are purely Spiritual.”30 Ironically, Cotton Mather thus approached Roger Williams’s position in his famous debate with John Cotton.31
Eventually, these theological deliberations led Mather to call for a reform of church polity in Massachusetts that mirrored his plan for a comprehensive Church of England. In his handbook for candidates for the ministry, Manuductio ad Ministerium (1726), Mather proclaimed that in New England, Protestants
Mather’s definition of what counted as Protestantism became quite elastic. Mather’s exegetical work did not shake his inherited belief that Congregationalism was the most scriptural form of church organization and government. When he published his apologetic account of New England Congregationalism, Ratio Disciplinae, in 1726, he reaffirmed that conviction while, at the same time, distancing himself from what now appeared as a rather embarrassing case of provincial hubris on the part of those founders, who saw the New England Way as an immediate anticipation of Christ’s millennial church. Decades of scrutinizing the New Testament Epistles and the Book of Acts seem to have deepened Mather’s awareness of the uncertain scriptural basis of many of the finer points of ecclesial polity and liturgy that the Protestant churches had traditionally quarreled about. These debates were irresolvable by biblical or rational arguments, but ultimately the differences on which they turned did not really matter that much in Mather’s mature view.
Such differences, as he asserted in Malachi (1717), were to be counted among the “Lower and Lesser points of Religion” that did not pertain to salvation: “They are not External Rites and Forms, that will distinguish, The People of GOD. The Kingdom of GOD comes not with the Observation of such things as those. No; ‘Tis a People found in various Rites, and in various Forms,” Mather boldly proclaimed. Rather, they “are All that cordially embrace our Everlasting MAXIMS of PIETY, and Live unto GOD upon them, in whatever Subdivision of
On this side of the millennium, Protestants should love one another and work together as much as possible to advance the kingdom. They should also, as Mather emphasizes in his later works, practice pulpit exchange and table fellowship: “And let the Table of the Lord have no Rails about it, that shall hinder a Godly Independent, and Presbyterian, and Episcopalian, and Antipedobaptist, and Lutheran, from sitting down together there.”38 Mather believed that the Second Coming was not far off. In conjunction with it, he, like many Puritans and Pietists, expected an eschatological revival, which would enable the completion of the Reformation, the overcoming of remaining differences on adiaphoric matters, and the spread of evangelical liberty to the far ends of the world.
3 Conclusion
Together with other recent studies, John Witte’s works have encouraged us to appreciate anew how the “Puritan teachings on liberties of covenant and covenants of liberty were one fertile seedbed out of which later American constitutionalism grew.” Witte has pointed to the afterlife of “Puritan constitutional ideas … among various Enlightenment Liberal and Civic Republican schools of
John Witte, Jr., The Reformation of Rights: Law, Religion, and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 319. See further id., The Blessings of Liberty: Human Rights and Religious Freedom in the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), chap. 4 (“‘A Modest Mild and Equitable Establishment of Religion’: Religious Freedom in Massachusetts, 1780–1833”).
Reformation of Rights, 17.
J. S. Maloy, The Colonial American Origins of Modern Democratic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 86, 113.
David D. Hall, A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England (New York: Knopf, 2011), 4 and XI. See also Michael Winship, Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). On Congregational church polity, see J. F. Cooper, Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial Massachusetts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Reformation of Rights, 2.
Adrian C. Weimer, A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle Against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), 3.
On this, see my “The Genealogy of Races and the Problem of Slavery in Cotton Mather’s ‘Biblia Americana,’” in Cotton Mather and Biblia Americana—America’s First Bible Commentary: Essays in Reappraisal, ed. Reiner Smolinski and Jan Stievermann (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 515–76.
Mather, Brethren Dwelling Together in Unity (Boston, 1718), 37.
See Kenneth Silverman, The Life and Times of Cotton Mather (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 62–72.
David Levin, “Cotton Mather’s Declaration of Gentlemen and Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence,” New England Quarterly 50 (1977): 271–79; Rick Kennedy, “Eleutheria (1698): Cotton Mather’s History of the Idea of Liberty That Links the Reformation to the Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution,” in Revolution as Reformation: Protestant Faith in the Age of Revolution, 1688–1832, ed. Peter C. Messer and William Harrison Taylor (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2021), 28–39.
Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 51. On the intersections between Whig ideology and post-Restoration Puritanism with its continuing hopes to transform England into a truly reformed nation, see Mark Goldie, Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs: The Entring Book, 1677–1691 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2016).
The Declaration, Of the Gentlemen, Merchants, and Inhabitants of Boston, and the Countrey Adjacent. April 18th (Boston, 1689), no pag.
Owen Stanwood has argued that the Boston revolutionaries of 1689, “[r]eacting against the centralizing tendencies of the Stuart kings,” adopted a specific, religiously inflected version of English “country ideology” to their own purposes.” What made the outlook of these “American Whigs” like Mather specific is how it fused fears of arbitrary government and concerns for public virtue and local freedoms with panic over a “diabolical popish plot” and “apocalypticism.” See Stanwood, The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
See the ongoing edition: Biblia Americana: America’s First Bible Commentary: A Synoptic Commentary on the Old and New Testaments, Gen. ed. Reiner Smolinski and Jan Stievermann, 10 vols. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010–). Citations from the Biblia are cited parenthetically, using the abbreviation BA.
Eleutheria, or, An idea of the Reformation in England and a history of non-conformity in and since that Reformation (London, 1698), 76, 67, 70–71.
Eleutheria, 105, 60, 105.
Eleutheria, 59, 76.
In the following section, I build on Kennedy’s The First American Evangelical: A Short Life of Cotton Mather (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 54–58.
See Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
I here draw on Brown’s “Bible Politics and Early Evangelicalism: Scriptural Submission and Resistance in Nonconformist Commentary,” in The Bible in Early Transatlantic Pietism and Evangelicalism, ed. Ryan Hoselton et al. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022), 91–108, esp. 102–03.
John Locke, A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul, vol. 2, ed. Arthur Wainwright (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 586–87.
John Witte, Jr. and Joel A. Nichols, Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment. 5th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 27.
Mather, Optanda: Good men described, and good things propounded (Boston, 1692), 44.
Eleutheria, 117, 59. Mather’s ideas for a comprehensive national church offering inner-Protestant toleration and consisting of a federation of assemblies with large discretionary freedoms to regulate the circumstantials of governance and worship, resembles those articulated by some English Dissenters, notably Mather’s correspondent Edmund Calamy’s. See the introduction to the second part of Calamy’s Defense of Moderate Conformity (1704), part 2, 1–94. However, Mather had a much more elastic definition of the adiaphora.
Cited from Two Mather Biographies: Life and Death and Parentator, ed. William J. Scheick (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1989), 115.
Brethren Dwelling Together in Unity, 39.
Two Mather Biographies, 116.
Two Mather Biographies, 115.
See also Eleutheria, 23.
Two Mather Biographies, 116. See also Optanda, 43.
See Reiner Smolinski, ‘“The Way to Lost Zion’: The Cotton-Williams Debate on the Separation of Church and State in Millenarian Perspective,” in Millennial Thought in America: Historical and Intellectual Contexts, 1630–1860, ed. Bernd Engler, Joerg O. Fichte, and Oliver Scheiding (Trier: WVT, 2002), 61–96, esp. 72.
Eleutheria, 58. Compare, again, Calamy’s Defense of Moderate Conformity (1704), part 2, esp. 29–30, 89–94.
Two Mather Biographies, 116. See also Brethren Dwelling in Unity, 37. Here Mather also clarifies his positions on Catholics. He argues for toleration as long as there are no efforts to work against Protestantism. Such efforts ought to be checked by the magistrate: “The Papist also whose declared Principle it is, to Persecute as soon as he shall be uppermost ought certainly so far to be mortified as to be kept uncapable of exerting his own execrable principle” (37–38).
Mather, Brethren Dwelling in Unity, 37.
Mather, Manuductio ad Ministerium. Directions for a Candidate of the Ministry (Boston, 1726), 126.
See, for instance, his reflections on how the advantages of the “Church State” ought to be made available to all Protestants in Brethren Dwelling Together in Unity, 28–29.
Mather, Malachi Or, The Everlasting Gospel, preached unto the Nations (Boston, 1717), 51. On Mather’s project of uniting Protestants under his Maxims of Piety, see my “A ‘Syncretism of Piety’: Imagining Global Protestantism in Early Eighteenth-Century Boston, Tranquebar, and Halle,” Church History 89, no. 4 (Dec. 2020): 829–56.
Mather, Manuductio, 127, 115.
The Reformation of Rights, 318.