The Pilgrims And Puritans Establish Christianity In New England

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Separatist Puritans, remembered today as the Pilgrims, landed at Plymouth in 1620 seeking freedom to worship apart from the practices of the Church of England, which their own reading of scripture had convinced them needed root and branch separation rather than reform from within. A much larger wave of non-separatist Puritans followed under a royal charter granted in 1629, establishing the Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1630 under Governor John Winthrop, who led its first arriving fleet of colonists across the Atlantic.

Both colonies built a distinctively Reformed Protestant religious culture, dense with preaching and covenant theology binding each congregation together as a self-governing body of visible believers, that shaped New England's religious life for generations afterward. Both colonies also displaced and, at points, waged open war on the region's Indigenous nations, a history bound up with their religious founding that this atlas states plainly rather than omitting.

What this changed for Christianity's spread was the planting, within a single decade, of two separate English Protestant colonies whose combined religious culture became the template for New England as a whole. Winthrop's larger, better resourced colony absorbed Plymouth by 1691, but it was the smaller Pilgrim landing of 1620 that fixed the founding date remembered ever after as New England's religious beginning.