Tares in the Wheat: Puritan Violence and Puritan Families in the Nineteenth-Century Liberal Imagination

The New England tradition of violence is a curiously dual one. For more than a Century after their arrival in Boston, the Puritans of New England participated in the wave of genocidal violence that helped decimate Native communities throughout the Americas. To a lesser degree, they also turned their...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Religion and American culture
Main Author: Buchanan, Daniel P. (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Cambridge University Press 1998
In: Religion and American culture
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Summary:The New England tradition of violence is a curiously dual one. For more than a Century after their arrival in Boston, the Puritans of New England participated in the wave of genocidal violence that helped decimate Native communities throughout the Americas. To a lesser degree, they also turned their violent energies against members of their own Community by banishing, torturing, and killing those Puritans who embraced the Quaker doctrine of the inner light or who were accused by their neighbors of witchcraft. Yet, rarely has a community been so self-conscious about its own violence, so determined to find ultimate meaning in the midst of atrocity. What could it mean, New Englanders persistently asked, that their “city on a hill” was enmeshed in violence? For at least two of the theological traditions that took strongest hold in New England—Puritanism and liberalism—this question was an inescapable preoccupation.
ISSN:1533-8568
Contains:Enthalten in: Religion and American culture
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1525/rac.1998.8.2.03a00030