Godly Republicanism and the Origins of the Massachusetts Polity

A New England innovation, godly republicanism was a constitutional arrangement intended to preserve the purity of the churches and the liberties of the people. Its roots lay in ecclesiastical agitation by late-16th-century puritans who brought republican assumptions about the nature and dangers of government to questions of church polity. Their ecclesiastical republicanism fed into a broader, eventually self-consciously republican civic ideology nurtured by the resistance of many of Massachusetts' founders to the fiscal innovations of Charles I. The recovery of godly republicanism opens new perspectives on the history of the political cultures of British North America, draws attention to long-standing ideological fissures in England, and shed light on neglected political aspects of puritanism itself.