The Colonial Roots of Christian Nationalism in America

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The Colonial Roots of Christian Nationalism in America

Christian nationalism is a modern concept, but debates over its historical origins frequently reach back to colonial America. The colonial period produced religious and political traditions that later generations used when constructing ideas about the United States as a Christian nation, a chosen people, or a country with a special divine mission.

The connection, however, is not simple or direct. The British colonies did not share a single religious system, and there was no unified American nation during most of the colonial period. Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, and other colonies developed different relationships among churches, governments, religious minorities, Indigenous peoples, and political authority.

Modern scholars therefore distinguish between the religious societies created by some colonial settlers and the later ideology generally described as Christian nationalism. Puritan New England was not the modern United States, and seventeenth-century Puritans did not use the contemporary political category "Christian nationalism." Nevertheless, ideas involving covenant, divine providence, Christian government, chosen communities, territorial expansion, and collective religious purpose became part of the historical material from which later narratives of Christian America were constructed.

Puritan Covenant Theology and the Christian Commonwealth

The Puritan settlements of New England occupy a central place in discussions of the colonial roots of Christian nationalism. Many Puritans understood society through the biblical concept of covenant. Religious communities could be understood as peoples bound together under obligations to God, with collective faithfulness or disobedience carrying consequences for the entire community.

Massachusetts Bay settlers sought to establish a society shaped by Protestant Christianity. Religion influenced law, education, political authority, church membership, family life, and expectations of public morality. Civil government and religious institutions were distinct in some respects, but they operated within a culture that assumed a close relationship between religious truth and social order.

John Winthrop's 1630 sermon A Model of Christian Charity became particularly important to later interpretations of American history. Winthrop described the Massachusetts Bay community as a "city upon a hill," warning that its conduct would be visible to the world.

In its original context, the statement concerned the responsibilities of a particular Puritan community rather than the future United States. Centuries later, however, historians, educators, clergy, and political leaders transformed the phrase into one of the best-known expressions of American exceptionalism.

The Mayflower Compact has undergone a similar transformation. Written by the passengers of the Mayflower in 1620, the document used explicitly Christian language while creating a "civil body politic" based upon collective agreement. Later generations frequently treated the Compact as an early expression of both Christian political identity and American self-government.

These examples became important because they allowed later Americans to link Christianity, covenant, representative government, and national origins into a common historical narrative.

Chosenness, Providence, and American Exceptionalism

Puritan political theology also contributed concepts of chosenness and providence that became influential in later American culture.

Some New England Protestants compared their communities with biblical Israel. Settlement, survival, warfare, prosperity, suffering, and political events could be interpreted through the idea of divine providence. Success might indicate divine favor, while disasters could be interpreted as punishment requiring repentance.

The Puritan jeremiad developed within this framework. Ministers warned that a community possessing a special covenant with God could lose divine favor if it abandoned its responsibilities. This produced a recurring combination of criticism and exceptionalism: society could be condemned for its failures while simultaneously being described as possessing a special historical mission.

Later American writers adapted these concepts beyond their original colonial setting. Ideas of divine mission, national destiny, and exceptionalism eventually became associated with the United States as a whole.

The transition was gradual. Historians studying the history of the "city upon a hill" phrase have shown that Winthrop's sermon was not continuously treated as the founding statement of the American nation. Its national importance developed much later, particularly through nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians, educators, religious writers, and political leaders.

This distinction is significant. Some traditions commonly presented as continuous inheritances from colonial America were partly products of later historical memory.

Religious Establishment and Colonial Government

Colonial America included numerous forms of established or government-supported religion.

Massachusetts and other New England colonies developed Congregational systems in which religious and civil institutions were closely connected. Virginia maintained an established Church of England supported by taxation and integrated into local government. New York and other colonies also experimented with different forms of religious establishment.

Established religion could include public financial support for churches, religious requirements for officeholding, laws enforcing religious observance, restrictions on dissenting worship, and political expectations that government should promote Christianity and public morality.

These arrangements provide part of the historical evidence used by people who argue that Christianity played a foundational political role in early America.

At the same time, colonial establishments varied substantially. They did not constitute a unified national Christian government, and they frequently produced conflict among Christians themselves.

Puritans, Anglicans, Quakers, Baptists, Presbyterians, Catholics, and other groups disagreed about theology, church government, religious authority, and the proper relationship between church and state.

The history of colonial religion therefore contains both Christian establishment and sustained resistance to establishment.

Dissent and the Development of Religious Liberty

Religious dissent provides an important countertradition to colonial religious establishment.

Roger Williams was banished from Massachusetts after challenging aspects of Puritan religious and political authority. In Rhode Island he became associated with liberty of conscience and the argument that civil government should not enforce religious belief.

Anne Hutchinson's conflict with Massachusetts authorities likewise demonstrated the limits imposed upon religious dissent within the Puritan commonwealth.

Pennsylvania developed another alternative under William Penn and the Quakers. Although religion remained central to public life, Pennsylvania became associated with unusually broad protections for liberty of conscience.

Maryland experimented with religious toleration amid conflict between Catholics and Protestants. Virginia's established Anglican system was increasingly challenged by Baptists, Presbyterians, and other dissenters, especially during and after the Great Awakening.

These conflicts eventually contributed to a broader American tradition of religious liberty and disestablishment.

Colonial history therefore supplied more than one possible model for later Americans. One tradition emphasized Christian government and collective religious identity. Another emphasized conscience, toleration, pluralism, and limitations upon government involvement in religion.

Both traditions became part of American political development.

Indigenous Peoples, Missions, and the Doctrine of Discovery

The religious history of colonial America cannot be separated from European expansion into Indigenous lands.

European colonization developed within older Christian and European legal traditions concerning conquest, conversion, sovereignty, and territorial possession. The collection of sources connects these traditions with what became known as the Doctrine of Discovery, under which European powers asserted rights over territories inhabited by non-Christian peoples.

Religious mission and colonial expansion were frequently intertwined.

Puritan missionaries established "praying towns" intended for Indigenous converts to Christianity. These communities could provide Native people with opportunities for negotiation, adaptation, and religious participation, but they also existed within systems of colonial authority, territorial expansion, and pressure toward cultural transformation.

Warfare further intensified these relationships. The Pequot War and King Philip's War were interpreted by some colonists through theological ideas involving providence, judgment, Christian mission, and spiritual conflict.

Recent scholarship places greater emphasis on Indigenous agency and cautions against describing Native conversion simply as passive assimilation. Indigenous individuals and communities responded to Christianity in varied ways, adopting, rejecting, modifying, or strategically engaging colonial religious institutions.

At the same time, Christian theological and legal concepts became entangled with systems that facilitated Indigenous dispossession and European control of land.

Race, Slavery, and Christian Colonial Society

The development of colonial Christian society also occurred alongside slavery and emerging racial hierarchies.

Slavery existed in New England as well as in the plantation colonies. Christian institutions and biblical interpretation were used in different ways: some Christians defended slavery, others regulated relations between enslavers and enslaved people through religious principles, and still others eventually challenged slavery on Christian grounds.

Conversion created difficult questions for colonial societies. If an enslaved African or Indigenous person became Christian, did baptism change that person's legal or social status?

Colonial societies increasingly developed racial systems that allowed Christian conversion to coexist with continued enslavement and inequality. Religious identity, ancestry, physical appearance, labor status, law, and political power became intertwined in the formation of colonial racial categories.

This history is important to later debates over Christian nationalism because some versions of American national memory portrayed the country's religious origins while minimizing slavery, Indigenous displacement, and racial exclusion.

Modern historical scholarship increasingly places these subjects alongside Puritan theology, colonial government, and religious liberty when examining the development of American identity.

The Great Awakening and Changing Religious Authority

The First Great Awakening of the eighteenth century transformed colonial religious life.

Revivalists such as Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield challenged established patterns of religious authority. Large revival meetings encouraged individual conversion experiences and helped expand evangelical forms of Protestantism.

The revivals also generated conflict. Congregations divided, traditional clergy faced challenges to their authority, and new religious networks crossed colonial boundaries.

Historians have long debated the relationship between the Great Awakening and the American Revolution. Some scholarship argues that revivalism encouraged habits of questioning authority and widened popular participation. Other interpretations caution against drawing a simple causal line from religious revival to political revolution.

Whatever its precise political influence, the Great Awakening contributed to the development of a more competitive and diverse religious environment. Evangelical Christianity eventually became a powerful cultural force in the new United States even as formal systems of religious establishment declined.

Revolution, Founding, and Disestablishment

The American Revolution brought colonial religious traditions into a new political context.

Religious language was widely used during the Revolutionary period. Ministers interpreted political events through scripture and providence, and revolutionary rhetoric sometimes presented the struggle in religious or millennial terms.

Yet independence did not produce a single national religious settlement.

Individual states followed different paths. Some continued forms of religious establishment for years, while others moved more rapidly toward disestablishment. Virginia became especially important through the struggle that produced the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.

The Constitution created a federal political order without establishing a national church, and the First Amendment prohibited Congress from establishing religion while protecting its free exercise.

The resulting system differed significantly from many earlier colonial arrangements.

This transition is central to the modern Christian-nation debate. Colonial governments provide substantial evidence of Christianity's importance in early American society, but the constitutional order that emerged from the founding reflected experiences not only with religious commitment but also with denominational competition, establishment, persecution, toleration, and dissent.

From Colonial History to National Myth

One of the strongest themes in the uploaded scholarship is the distinction between colonial history and later national memory.

The Puritans did not initially occupy the universally central position in American origins that they later acquired. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, historians, genealogists, educators, religious organizations, political leaders, and cultural institutions increasingly elevated Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay into national founding stories.

Pilgrims became symbols of American beginnings. Winthrop became a representative founder. The Mayflower Compact became a precursor of American democracy. "City upon a hill" became a statement of national mission.

These interpretations created what historians sometimes describe as a usable past: selected episodes from colonial history were transformed into explanations of national identity.

The process could emphasize religious faith, covenant, self-government, sacrifice, and community while giving less attention to religious coercion, denominational conflict, slavery, Indigenous dispossession, and colonial violence.

Modern historical research has therefore attempted to reconstruct both the original colonial context and the later history of how that context was remembered.

Colonial Roots and Modern Christian Nationalism

Modern Christian nationalism developed in political, religious, and social circumstances far removed from seventeenth-century New England. The uploaded scholarship consequently cautions against treating Puritans or other colonial settlers as modern Christian nationalists in a straightforward sense.

Nevertheless, colonial history remains important to Christian-nationalist narratives.

Several recurring ideas provide points of historical connection: the belief that political communities may possess obligations to God; the identification of Christianity with public morality and government; narratives of providential settlement; claims of chosenness; the image of America as possessing a special mission; and the use of colonial documents as evidence for a Christian national origin.

Modern Christian-nation narratives often assemble these elements into a continuous story extending from the Pilgrims and Puritans through the Revolution and founding to the present.

Historical scholarship complicates that story.

Colonial America included explicitly Christian political communities, but it also contained deep religious diversity. It included established churches but also dissenters who opposed religious coercion. It generated ideas of covenant and providence but did not possess a single national religious identity. Christian missions existed alongside colonial conquest and Indigenous resistance. Christian institutions existed alongside slavery and racial hierarchy. Religious establishment existed alongside traditions that eventually contributed to constitutional protections for religious liberty.

Understanding the colonial roots of Christian nationalism therefore requires examining not merely what colonial Americans believed but also how later Americans selected, remembered, transformed, and politically used the colonial past.

Conclusion

The colonial roots of American Christian nationalism are best understood as a collection of historical traditions rather than as the beginning of a single uninterrupted ideology.

Puritan covenant theology, Christian commonwealths, established churches, providential interpretations of history, ideas of chosenness, missionary expansion, and the "city upon a hill" supplied religious concepts that later became important to narratives of Christian America and American exceptionalism.

At the same time, colonial history produced powerful countercurrents. Roger Williams and other dissenters defended liberty of conscience. Quakers and other minority communities challenged compulsory religious conformity. Denominational competition weakened establishment. The Great Awakening altered traditional religious authority. Revolutionary and founding-era debates ultimately produced new arrangements separating federal political authority from a national religious establishment.

The same history also includes Indigenous dispossession, missionary encounters, warfare, slavery, racial hierarchy, and disagreements over who belonged within Christian and political communities.

Later generations transformed this complicated past into competing national stories. Some emphasized a providential Christian founding; others emphasized pluralism, dissent, and religious freedom. Historians increasingly examine both the original colonial institutions and the later process through which selected colonial episodes became national myths.

The relationship between colonial Christianity and modern Christian nationalism is therefore neither imaginary nor straightforward. Colonial religious ideas provided important symbols, institutions, and narratives, but their modern political meaning has been shaped substantially by later reinterpretation.

• • TOC**

Christian Nationalism and the Christian-Nation Debate

• [We Still Don’t Know What It Is: The Historical Origins of Christian Nationalism in America and its Intentional Ambiguities | Andrew R. Polk | Journal of the Council for Research on Religion | 2026]

Examines the historical development of Christian nationalism and argues that some of the ambiguity surrounding the term reflects the way religious and national identity were deliberately blended in twentieth-century American political culture.

• [Christian America and the Kingdom of God: White Christian Nationalism from the Puritans through January 6, 2021 | Richard T. Hughes and Christina Littlefield | University of Illinois Press | February 25, 2025]

Provides a broad history of the Christian-America idea, beginning with colonial Puritanism and tracing its transformation into later forms of American Christian nationalism.

• [Digging Deeper: The Early Roots of the Christian America Myth | Richard T. Hughes and Christina Littlefield | Illinois Scholarship Online | February 25, 2025]

Examines Puritan covenant theology, chosen-nation ideas, Christian commonwealths, relations with Indigenous peoples, and the early historical foundations later used in Christian-America narratives.

• [Defining Christian Nationalism | Richard T. Hughes and Christina Littlefield | Illinois Scholarship Online | February 25, 2025]

Reviews competing scholarly definitions of Christian nationalism and explains why beliefs about America's supposedly Christian founding are central to contemporary Christian-nationalist identity.

• [Were the Puritans “Christian nationalists”? | John Fea | The Way of Improvement Leads Home | November 2, 2024]

Cautions against automatically applying the modern category of Christian nationalism to colonial Puritans while acknowledging that Massachusetts and other colonies did attempt to create explicitly Christian societies.

• [The Roots of Christian Nationalism Go Back Further Than You Think | Robert P. Jones | CrossCurrents | 2024]

Connects modern white Christian nationalism with much older traditions of European Christian conquest, the Doctrine of Discovery, colonization, racial hierarchy, and assertions of Christian civilizational superiority.

• [Christian-Nation Idea Fuels US Conservative Causes, but Historians Say It Misreads Founders' Intent | Peter Smith | Associated Press | 2024]

Examines the contemporary Christian-nation debate and contrasts present-day claims about America's founding with historians' interpretations of colonial and constitutional evidence.

• [What Is Christian Nationalism? | Multiple contributors | The American Mind | 2023]

Presents arguments sympathetic to stronger claims about America's Protestant political heritage, including colonial charters, Christian officeholding requirements, and established churches.

• [Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding | Steven K. Green | Oxford University Press | May 21, 2015]

Examines historical claims that American government originated as explicitly Christian and argues that much of the familiar Christian-founding narrative developed during the nineteenth century.

• [A Model for Christian and Civil Government | Steven K. Green | Inventing a Christian America | 2015]

Examines later claims that Puritan political covenants such as the Mayflower Compact directly provided the model for the United States' constitutional order.

• [The Christian Nation Debate, Methodological Fallacies, and the Role of Myths | Steven K. Green | Inventing a Christian America | 2015]

Examines the historical methods used in debates over whether America was founded as a Christian nation and distinguishes colonial religious culture from later national mythmaking.

• [Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? A Historical Introduction | Jonathan Den Hartog | Journal of Church and State | January 9, 2013]

Reviews John Fea's examination of competing claims concerning Christianity's role in colonial America, the Revolution, and the founding.

• [Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? A Historical Introduction | Henry G. Brinton | The Presbyterian Outlook | May 16, 2011]

Reviews John Fea's historical analysis and stresses the complexity of trying to classify colonial America and the founding simply as either Christian or secular.

• [America's Mythical Religious Past | Catherine A. Brekus | University of Chicago Divinity School | October 12, 2000]

Challenges simplified narratives portraying colonial America either as uniformly Christian or uniformly committed to religious freedom and emphasizes the diversity of colonial religious arrangements.

• [The Mayflower Compact and the Christian Nation Narrative | Colonial-government scholarship | Early American history | various]

Examines why the Compact's explicitly Christian wording has become central to modern arguments about America's religious political origins while historians debate the extent of its later constitutional influence.

Puritan Political Theology, Covenant, Chosenness, and Exceptionalism

• [American Exceptionalism: A Theological Evaluation of a Troublesome Notion | Thomas Massaro | Theological Studies | May 26, 2026]

Traces American exceptionalism partly to John Winthrop's “city upon a hill” tradition and considers the theological consequences of identifying the United States with a special divine mission.

• [Covenant Political Theology: Its Early History and Development | Marc A. Clauson | Religious Studies Review | July 31, 2024]

Reviews the development of covenant political thought from the Reformation through colonial America and explains how religious covenant concepts influenced early Anglo-American political organization.

• [“In God We Trust”: Some Reflections on Divine Providence from Mayflower Compact to the Federal Constitution | Jolanta A. Daszyńska | Acta Universitatis Lodziensis: Folia Historica | 2023]

Traces concepts of divine providence through the Mayflower Compact, Puritan settlement, colonial political documents, and the American founding.

• [The Puritans and American Chosenness | Ian Tyrrell | American Exceptionalism: A New History of an Old Idea | December 10, 2021]

Distinguishes between the Puritan idea of a chosen community and the later idea of a Christian nation while tracing the contribution of providential thinking to American exceptionalism.

• [A Model of Christian Charity and the City on a Hill | Joshua J. Mark | World History Encyclopedia | January 21, 2021]

Provides historical background on John Winthrop's sermon, the Massachusetts Bay colony, Puritan covenant theology, and the later importance of the “city upon a hill” phrase.

• [The Significance of Winthrop's Bible | Abram C. Van Engen | City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism, Yale University Press | 2020]

Examines the biblical context surrounding Winthrop's political and religious thought and how scripture shaped Puritan understandings of covenant community.

• [City on a Hill: American Exceptionalism and the Elect Nation | J. R. Oldfield | Studies in Church History | 2016]

Traces ideas of election, chosenness, Puritan settlement, and “city on a hill” imagery through the development of American exceptionalism.

• [Examining the Roots of American “Chosenness” | Harvard Divinity School | Harvard University | July 2, 2015]

Explores the Puritan concept of New England as a new Israel and traces the use of biblical chosenness and Exodus imagery into the Revolutionary era.

• [The Remnants of Theocracy: The Puritans, the Jeremiad and the Contemporary Culture Wars | M. Cathleen Kaveny | Political Theology | January 24, 2013]

Connects Puritan covenant theology and the jeremiad tradition with later American exceptionalist and political rhetoric.

• [Chosen Land, Chosen People: Religious and American Exceptionalism among the Mormons | Scholarly article | The Review of Faith & International Affairs | 2012]

Places later American religious movements within a longer tradition of providential land, chosen people, covenant, and exceptionalist ideas extending back to Puritan New England.

• [The Political Sermon as Cultural Text: John Winthrop, Increase Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and American Identity in the Colonial Era | Laura McGee | NeoAmericanist | November 15, 2011]

Examines political sermons by major New England religious figures and the relationship among theology, covenant rhetoric, public authority, and developing colonial identity.

• [Puritan Roots of American Exceptionalism | Ken Fuchsman | Clio's Psyche | June 2011]

Examines John Winthrop's covenantal vision and the role Puritan ideas of chosenness played in later understandings of American exceptionalism.

• [The Puritan Notion of the Covenant in Jonathan Edwards' Doctrine of Faith | C. Conrad Cherry | Church History | 2009 online edition]

Examines the central importance of covenant theology within New England Puritanism and the continuing influence of covenant concepts in eighteenth-century religion.

• [American Religious Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration | Edward A. Tiryakian | The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science | May 1993]

Examines American religious exceptionalism and considers how Puritan religious traditions contributed to distinctive patterns of American public culture.

• [Federal Theology and the “National Covenant”: An Elizabethan Presbyterian Case Study | Theodore Dwight Bozeman | Church History | December 1992]

Examines earlier English Protestant ideas about national covenant that formed part of the theological background inherited by Puritan settlers in New England.

• [Eutopic Visions of America in the Puritan Colonial Identity | Mercedes Peñalba García | Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses | December 1989]

Examines Puritan ideas of an “errand into the wilderness,” millennial expectations, the jeremiad tradition, and their influence on later American national mythology.

• [The Puritan Errand Reassessed | Sacvan Bercovitch | The American Jeremiad, University of Wisconsin Press | 1978]

Reconsiders the Puritan “errand into the wilderness” and its significance for the development of American communal and national rhetoric.

• [The Blessings of Time and Eternity | Sacvan Bercovitch | The American Jeremiad, University of Wisconsin Press | 1978]

Examines how Puritan rhetoric connected earthly historical development with sacred promises and expectations about collective destiny.

• [The Genetics of Salvation | Sacvan Bercovitch | The American Jeremiad, University of Wisconsin Press | 1978]

Explores how the language of salvation and covenant was adapted from individual religious experience to collective understandings of community.

• [The Typology of America's Mission | Sacvan Bercovitch | The American Jeremiad, University of Wisconsin Press | 1978]

Examines biblical typology as a framework through which Puritan and later American writers interpreted the nation's history and perceived mission.

• [Nature, Grace and John Cotton: The Theological Dimension in the New England Antinomian Controversy | William K. B. Stoever | Church History | March 1975]

Examines John Cotton's theology during the Antinomian controversy and the religious disagreements underlying one of Massachusetts Bay's major early political conflicts.

• [The Vision of History | Sacvan Bercovitch | The Puritan Origins of the American Self, Yale University Press | 1975]

Examines how Puritan writers interpreted New England through sacred history and biblical typology, giving colonial settlement a larger providential meaning.

• [The Elect Nation in New England | Sacvan Bercovitch | The Puritan Origins of the American Self, Yale University Press | 1975]

Explores the Puritan conception of an elect community and the development of ideas that linked collective identity to covenant and divine purpose.

• [From Hermeneutics to Symbolism | Sacvan Bercovitch | The Puritan Origins of the American Self, Yale University Press | 1975]

Examines how Puritan methods of interpreting scripture contributed to a symbolic understanding of New England's place in sacred history.

• [Cotton Mather's Life of John Winthrop | Sacvan Bercovitch | The Puritan Origins of the American Self, Yale University Press | 1975]

Examines Cotton Mather's portrayal of Winthrop and the creation of an exemplary narrative connecting Puritan leadership with the destiny of New England.

• [Calvin and Covenant Theology | Everett H. Emerson | Church History | June 1956]

Examines Reformed covenant theology and its relationship to Calvinist thought, providing theological background for covenant concepts later central to Puritan New England.

• [Errand into the Wilderness | Perry Miller | Errand into the Wilderness, Harvard University Press | 1956]

Presents the influential interpretation of Puritan New England as a deliberate religious “errand” whose meaning changed as colonial society developed.

• [The Marrow of Puritan Divinity | Perry Miller | Errand into the Wilderness, Harvard University Press | 1956]

Explores central Puritan theological concepts that shaped New England religious culture, including covenant, grace, scripture, and divine sovereignty.

• [A Model of Christian Charity | John Winthrop | Religion in America / Ashbrook | 1630]

Provides the central primary text behind later interpretations of Puritan chosenness, covenant community, Christian government, and American exceptionalism.

• [The Puritans | U.S. National Park Service | National Park Service | n.d.]

Describes the Puritan migration to Massachusetts Bay and their attempt to construct a model Christian community governed according to their interpretation of biblical principles.

• [A Model of Christian Charity | Teaching American History | Ashbrook Center | n.d.]

Presents John Winthrop's covenantal vision for Massachusetts Bay and the famous warning that the Puritan community would stand before the world as a “city upon a hill.”

• [The Puritan Dilemma and American Chosenness | Related historical scholarship | Early American historical studies | various]

Examines the recurring tension between Puritan attempts to create a godly community and the practical political problems produced by enforcing religious uniformity.

• [Puritan Covenant Theology and American Political Culture | Historical scholarship | Early American religion | various]

Examines how covenant concepts shaped church membership, town organization, political authority, collective responsibility, and ideas of a people bound together under God.

• [Providentialism and the Colonial Origins of American Exceptionalism | Historical scholarship | American intellectual history | various]

Examines how interpretations of divine providence in settlement, warfare, revival, and political events contributed to later beliefs that the United States possessed a special historical mission.

National Memory, “City on a Hill,” Mythmaking, and Historiography

• [Puritanism and National Identity | Abram Van Engen | The Oxford Handbook of Puritanism | January 27, 2026]

Examines how Pilgrims and Puritans were transformed into central figures in American national memory and how later generations used them to construct narratives of exceptionalism, chosenness, and national purpose.

• [Inventing Our Myths: A Response to Thomas Massaro | David E. DeCosse | Theological Studies | 2026]

Discusses how the modern national importance of Winthrop's “city on a hill” was largely constructed centuries after the colonial period, especially through twentieth-century scholarship and political rhetoric.

• [“As a City on a Hill” | Kathleen Wellman | Hijacking History | November 18, 2021]

Examines how modern Christian educational materials use Puritan New England, the Mayflower Compact, and providential history to construct a narrative of America as a Christian nation.

• [Manifest Destiny, American Exceptionalism, and the City on a Hill Seen Through Winthrop, O'Sullivan, and Bush | Steven Clark Cunningham | Sociology Compass | November 8, 2021]

Traces the transformation of religious mission and “city on a hill” ideas into later doctrines of exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny, and American national purpose.

• [City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism | Patricia Roylance | The New England Quarterly | March 1, 2021]

Reviews Abram Van Engen's research on how John Winthrop's relatively obscure sermon was eventually transformed into a major national symbol of American exceptionalism.

• [A City on a Hill? | Christian History Magazine | Christian History Institute | 2021]

Examines both the historical realities of Puritan political theology and the later construction of a simplified narrative linking Massachusetts Bay directly to a Christian American nation.

• [How America Became “A City Upon a Hill” | Abram C. Van Engen | National Endowment for the Humanities | 2020]

Explains how Winthrop's sermon became a central American origin story primarily through later historians and political leaders rather than through continuous influence beginning in 1630.

• [The Mystery of Winthrop's Manuscript | Abram C. Van Engen | City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism, Yale University Press | 2020]

Examines how John Winthrop's famous sermon survived, circulated, and was eventually rediscovered, showing that its later national prominence was not continuous from the seventeenth century.

• [The Meaning of Winthrop's City on a Hill | Abram C. Van Engen | City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism, Yale University Press | 2020]

Reconstructs the seventeenth-century meaning of Winthrop's “city upon a hill” rather than reading later ideas of American exceptionalism back into the sermon.

• [A True History of America | Abram C. Van Engen | City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism, Yale University Press | 2020]

Examines the development of historical narratives that presented Puritan New England as a foundational episode in the story of the United States.

• [A Providential History of America | Abram C. Van Engen | City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism, Yale University Press | 2020]

Explores histories that interpreted the development of America through divine providence and connected colonial settlement with a larger sacred national destiny.

• [The Rise of National History | Abram C. Van Engen | City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism, Yale University Press | 2020]

Explores how nineteenth-century historical writing transformed regional colonial histories into narratives about the origins and identity of the American nation.

• [The Spread of National Pilgrims | Abram C. Van Engen | City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism, Yale University Press | 2020]

Traces the growing national importance of Pilgrim memory and the use of Plymouth as a symbolic starting point for American history.

• [The Creation of an Exceptional New England | Abram C. Van Engen | City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism, Yale University Press | 2020]

Examines how historians and cultural institutions transformed New England's colonial past into an exceptional story about American political and religious development.

• [Antiquarian America | Abram C. Van Engen | City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism, Yale University Press | 2020]

Explores antiquarian efforts to collect, preserve, publish, and reinterpret colonial documents that later became central to national historical narratives.

• [Puritan Stock | Abram C. Van Engen | City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism, Yale University Press | 2020]

Examines genealogical and cultural claims linking later Americans to Puritan ancestry and the role those claims played in defining national identity.

• [The Mayflower Compact versus A Model of Christian Charity | Abram C. Van Engen | City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism, Yale University Press | 2020]

Compares two colonial texts that later competed for prominence as symbolic statements of American origins, self-government, covenant, and national purpose.

• [Creating a Usable Past | Abram C. Van Engen | City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism, Yale University Press | 2020]

Examines how writers and historians selected particular aspects of colonial Puritan history to provide later Americans with a meaningful national past.

• [A Meaning to Match Its Force | Abram C. Van Engen | City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism, Yale University Press | 2020]

Traces the reinterpretation of “city upon a hill” as the phrase acquired political meanings much broader than those it possessed in Winthrop's original setting.

• [Perry Miller's City on a Hill | Abram C. Van Engen | City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism, Yale University Press | 2020]

Examines historian Perry Miller's influential role in restoring Winthrop and Puritan New England to the center of twentieth-century interpretations of American identity.

• [The American Jeremiad | Abram C. Van Engen | City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism, Yale University Press | 2020]

Explores how the Puritan jeremiad became interpreted as a recurring American rhetorical form combining national criticism with claims about collective mission.

• [American Exceptionalism and America First | Abram C. Van Engen | City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism, Yale University Press | 2020]

Traces competing twentieth-century uses of exceptionalist language and explains how colonial religious imagery became attached to later debates about national purpose.

• [As a City on a Hill: The Story of America's Most Famous Lay Sermon | Daniel T. Rodgers | Princeton University Press | 2018]

Traces how Winthrop's phrase moved from an obscure colonial text into a widely recognized expression of American identity and exceptionalism.

• [“WEE SHALL BE AS A CITTY UPON A HILL”: John Winthrop's Non-American Exceptionalism | Mark A. Noll | The Review of Faith & International Affairs | May 24, 2012]

Argues that modern uses of Winthrop's sermon frequently place it in a national context different from its original Puritan setting and cautions against reading later American global missions directly into the text.

• [“A City on a Hill”: America as Exception | Natsu Taylor Saito | Meeting the Enemy: American Exceptionalism and International Law | March 22, 2010]

Traces exceptionalist ideology to English colonial beliefs about divine mission, civilization, settlement, and the transformation of wilderness.

• [Schooling, the Puritan Imperative, and the Molding of an American National Identity: Education's “Errand Into the Wilderness” | Douglas McKnight | Routledge | 2003]

Examines how Puritan religious narratives became embedded in education and contributed to later constructions of American national identity.

• [The Myth of America | Sacvan Bercovitch | The Puritan Origins of the American Self, Yale University Press | 1975]

Traces the transformation of Puritan religious symbolism into a broader mythology about America, historical mission, identity, and destiny.

• [From Forgotten Phrase to American Myth | Steven Conn | Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective | n.d.]

Reviews Daniel Rodgers' research showing how Winthrop's “city upon a hill” language became a national founding myth long after the colonial period.

Religious Establishment, Toleration, Dissent, and Religious Liberty

• [The Religion-Supported State: Piety and Politics in Early National New England | Nathan S. Rives / review | The New England Quarterly | 2024]

Examines New England's long transition from tax-supported Protestant establishments toward disestablishment and shows how religion continued to shape political ideas after independence.

• [Introduction | Mark Valeri | The Opening of the Protestant Mind: How Anglo-American Protestants Embraced Religious Liberty, Oxford University Press | 2023]

Introduces the transformation of Anglo-American Protestant thought from confessional assumptions toward broader acceptance of religious toleration and liberty.

• [Disorder and Confessionalism | Mark Valeri | The Opening of the Protestant Mind: How Anglo-American Protestants Embraced Religious Liberty, Oxford University Press | 2023]

Examines the Protestant assumption that religious uniformity was necessary for social and political order and the challenges that weakened that assumption.

• [Revolution and Toleration | Mark Valeri | The Opening of the Protestant Mind: How Anglo-American Protestants Embraced Religious Liberty, Oxford University Press | 2023]

Explores the political and religious changes that encouraged Protestants to reconsider older systems of confessional uniformity and coercion.

• [Empire and Whig Moralism | Mark Valeri | The Opening of the Protestant Mind: How Anglo-American Protestants Embraced Religious Liberty, Oxford University Press | 2023]

Examines changing Protestant attitudes toward empire, morality, toleration, and political authority in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic.

• [Power, Ceremony, and Roman Catholicism | Mark Valeri | The Opening of the Protestant Mind: How Anglo-American Protestants Embraced Religious Liberty, Oxford University Press | 2023]

Explores Protestant fears of Catholic political and ceremonial power and the relationship of anti-Catholicism to developing theories of religious liberty.

• [The Williams Way: Why Roger Williams’ Philosophy of Religious Liberty Remains Imperative Today | Michael Zigarelli | Liberty Theological Review | 2022]

Examines Roger Williams as an important colonial alternative to government-enforced religious uniformity and emphasizes his argument for liberty of conscience.

• [The Pursuit of Religious Liberty in Colonial America | Daniel Dreisbach | Institute for Faith and Culture | March 17, 2021]

Surveys colonial establishments, religious dissent, toleration, and the gradual emergence of broader understandings of freedom of conscience.

• [Baptists in Colonial Virginia | Encyclopedia Virginia | Virginia Humanities | 2020]

Examines Baptist dissent under Virginia's Anglican establishment, including restrictions on preaching, imprisonment of ministers, and the movement toward religious disestablishment.

• [Church of England in Virginia | Edward L. Bond | Encyclopedia Virginia | 2020]

Explains how Virginia's established Anglican church combined religious functions with government authority and local political administration.

• [Act of Toleration (1689) | Encyclopedia Virginia | Virginia Humanities | 2020]

Examines how English toleration legislation affected Protestant dissenters in Virginia and contributed to changing colonial understandings of religious liberty.

• [Virginia Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom (1786) | Encyclopedia Virginia | Virginia Humanities | 2020]

Traces Virginia's movement away from colonial religious establishment toward legal religious freedom, an important contrast to colonial Christian-government models.

• [Samuel Davies (1723–1761) | Encyclopedia Virginia | Virginia Humanities | 2020]

Describes a Presbyterian revivalist's struggle for dissenting religious rights within Virginia's Anglican establishment during the Great Awakening.

• [Religious Establishment and Religious Freedom in Early America | Joseph Kip Kosek | American Religion, American Politics | May 30, 2017]

Presents primary documents showing the tension between colonial religious establishments and developing ideas of toleration and religious freedom.

• [A Haven for Religious Freedom | Steven K. Green | Inventing a Christian America | May 21, 2015]

Surveys religious persecution, toleration, and establishment across the colonies and questions the simplified narrative that colonial America was broadly founded on religious freedom.

• [The Foundations of Religious Establishment: The Colonial Era | Kyle T. Bulthuis | Four Steeples over the City Streets | October 17, 2014]

Examines colonial New York's religious establishment and the assumption that established churches could help unite civil society under religious leadership.

• [The Foundations of Religious Establishment: Colonial New York | Kyle T. Bulthuis | NYU Press Scholarship Online | 2014]

Examines Anglican establishment in colonial New York and the expectation that organized religion would reinforce political and social hierarchy.

• [The Essence of Exceptionalism: Roger Williams and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America | Chris Seiple | The Review of Faith & International Affairs | May 24, 2012]

Presents Roger Williams and Rhode Island as an alternative foundation for American exceptionalism based on freedom of conscience rather than religious establishment.

• [Anne Hutchinson | HISTORY.com Editors | HISTORY | November 9, 2009]

Explains the Antinomian controversy and Hutchinson's banishment, illustrating the limits of religious dissent within Puritan Massachusetts.

• [Roger Williams | HISTORY.com Editors | HISTORY | October 29, 2009]

Examines Williams' banishment from Massachusetts and his advocacy of liberty of conscience and separation between religious and civil authority.

• [Religious Liberty: Roger Williams and the Revolutionary Era | LeRoy Moore | Church History | July 28, 2009]

Examines how later Americans remembered Roger Williams and incorporated his colonial defense of liberty of conscience into Revolutionary-era religious-freedom narratives.

• [Established Churches in Early America | First Amendment Encyclopedia | Middle Tennessee State University | January 1, 2009]

Surveys tax-supported churches in colonial and early American states and explains how religious establishment continued even after the adoption of the First Amendment.

• [The Cambridge Platform: A Reassertion of Ecclesiastical Authority | B. R. Burg | Church History | 2009 online edition]

Examines the Cambridge Platform of 1648 and its role in institutionalizing Congregational religious authority within Massachusetts Bay.

• [Establishment and Disestablishment at the Founding, Part I: Establishment of Religion | Michael W. McConnell | William & Mary Law Review | 2003]

Provides a detailed legal history of religious establishments in Virginia, New England, New York, and other colonies and identifies the powers traditionally associated with establishment.

• [William Penn and the American Heritage of Religious Liberty | Arlin M. Adams and Charles J. Emmerich | Journal of Law and Religion | 1990]

Examines William Penn's religious and political thought and Pennsylvania's role in developing a colonial alternative to systems of compulsory religious conformity.

• [The Creation of Religious Liberty in Early Pennsylvania | Jerry William Frost | A Perfect Freedom: Religious Liberty in Pennsylvania, Cambridge University Press | 1990]

Examines how Pennsylvania institutionalized liberty of conscience while retaining assumptions about public morality, Christian society, Quaker political influence, and civic order.

• [Free Exercise in the Free State: Maryland's Role in Religious Liberty and the First Amendment | Kenneth Lasson | Journal of Church and State | Fall 1989]

Examines Maryland's complicated colonial experience with Catholic settlement, Christian toleration, religious discrimination, and the later development of religious-liberty principles.

• [Church and State in New England: Effects Upon American Congregationalism | A. Hastings Ross | Bibliotheca Sacra | April 1892]

Provides an early historical account of the close relationship between Congregational religion and civil government in colonial Massachusetts and New England.

• [State-Established Religion in the Colonies | Constitution Annotated | Library of Congress / Congress.gov | n.d.]

Surveys established religion throughout British North America, including Virginia's Church of England and Congregational establishments in New England.

• [Colonial Concepts of Religious Liberty | Constitution Annotated | Library of Congress / Congress.gov | n.d.]

Examines Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and other colonial approaches that provided broader toleration than colonies with strong religious establishments.

• [Introduction to the Historical Background on the Religion Clauses | Constitution Annotated | Library of Congress / Congress.gov | n.d.]

Explains how almost two centuries of colonial experience with religious establishment, persecution, toleration, and dissent shaped the later First Amendment.

• [America as a Religious Refuge: The Seventeenth Century | James H. Hutson / Library of Congress | Religion and the Founding of the American Republic | n.d.]

Surveys Puritan Massachusetts, Quaker Pennsylvania, Catholic Maryland, Rhode Island, Virginia, and the different religious purposes behind seventeenth-century colonization.

• [Religion and the State Governments | James H. Hutson / Library of Congress | Religion and the Founding of the American Republic | n.d.]

Examines the varying paths from colonial religious establishments toward disestablishment and religious liberty in the newly independent states.

• [Roger Williams – Minister, Merchant, Magistrate | U.S. National Park Service | National Park Service | n.d.]

Examines Williams' conflict with Massachusetts Bay authorities and his argument that civil government should not enforce religious belief.

• [Anne Hutchinson's Brief Residence near St. Paul's Church | U.S. National Park Service | National Park Service | n.d.]

Describes Hutchinson's theological dissent, trial, banishment from Massachusetts, and conflict with the colony's religious and political leadership.

• [Religious Liberty in Early Pennsylvania | Scholarly article | Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography | n.d.]

Examines William Penn, Quaker political thought, liberty of conscience, legal toleration, and the development of Pennsylvania's distinctive colonial religious system.

• [Religious Establishment, Dissent, and the Colonial State | Historical and legal scholarship | Early American history | various]

Compares colonies that enforced Anglican or Congregational establishments with Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and other experiments in broader liberty of conscience.

• [Quakers in Massachusetts, 1656–1781 | Massachusetts Archives | Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts | n.d.]

Documents Massachusetts policies toward Quakers, including exclusion, imprisonment, banishment, and executions, illustrating the coercive limits of religious uniformity in Puritan New England.

Indigenous Peoples, Missions, Doctrine of Discovery, and Settler Colonialism

• [Examining the Doctrine of Discovery in Religion and Indigenous Studies | Adam D. J. Brett and Betty Hill (Lyons) | Religion Compass | December 30, 2025]

Examines the Christian theological and legal concepts behind European colonization and the Doctrine of Discovery and their continuing influence on Indigenous peoples and American institutions.

• [The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America's First People | Matthew J. Tuininga | Oxford University Press | January 23, 2025]

Examines how Puritan settlers interpreted colonization, missionary work, warfare, and Native resistance through a theological framework involving Christ's kingdom, providence, and spiritual warfare.

• [Praying Towns: 1665 to 1675 | Matthew J. Tuininga | Oxford Academic | January 23, 2025]

Explores Puritan missionary settlements for Native Americans and the mixture of conversion, political authority, cultural assimilation, diplomacy, and colonial power involved in the praying-town system.

• [The Pilgrims: 1620 to 1623 | Matthew J. Tuininga | The Wars of the Lord, Oxford University Press | 2025]

Examines early relations between Plymouth settlers and Native peoples and the religious ideas through which Pilgrims interpreted settlement, alliance, conflict, and survival.

• [The Puritans: 1629 to 1633 | Matthew J. Tuininga | The Wars of the Lord, Oxford University Press | 2025]

Examines the establishment of Massachusetts Bay and the religious and political assumptions Puritan settlers brought to their encounters with Indigenous peoples.

• [The Lord Has Cleared Our Title: 1633 to 1636 | Matthew J. Tuininga | The Wars of the Lord, Oxford University Press | 2025]

Explores how epidemic disease, settlement, theology, and providential interpretation contributed to Puritan claims concerning land and colonial legitimacy.

• [War with the Pequots: 1636 to 1637 | Matthew J. Tuininga | The Wars of the Lord, Oxford University Press | 2025]

Examines the theological, diplomatic, territorial, and political circumstances that contributed to the outbreak of the Pequot War.

• [Massacre at Mystic: April 1637 to October 1637 | Matthew J. Tuininga | The Wars of the Lord, Oxford University Press | 2025]

Examines the Mystic massacre and the religious language through which Puritan participants and chroniclers interpreted extreme wartime violence.

• [Miantonomo: 1637 to 1644 | Matthew J. Tuininga | The Wars of the Lord, Oxford University Press | 2025]

Examines Narragansett leader Miantonomo, shifting colonial alliances, and the interaction between Puritan political authority and Native diplomacy.

• [The Conquests and Triumphs of Christ: 1640 to 1648 | Matthew J. Tuininga | The Wars of the Lord, Oxford University Press | 2025]

Explores Puritan missionary theology and the belief that Native conversion represented the expansion and triumph of Christianity in New England.

• [Reparations: 1644 to 1650 | Matthew J. Tuininga | The Wars of the Lord, Oxford University Press | 2025]

Examines Puritan debates over colonial wrongdoing, compensation, justice, and responsibility toward Indigenous communities.

• [Natick: 1649 to 1662 | Matthew J. Tuininga | The Wars of the Lord, Oxford University Press | 2025]

Examines the creation of Natick as a Christian Native community and the complicated relationship among conversion, Indigenous agency, colonial oversight, and cultural transformation.

• [The Pocumtuck War: 1652 to 1661 | Matthew J. Tuininga | The Wars of the Lord, Oxford University Press | 2025]

Explores conflict in western New England and the intersection of colonial expansion, Native rivalries, trade, territory, and religious interpretation.

• [God, King, and Land: 1660 to 1666 | Matthew J. Tuininga | The Wars of the Lord, Oxford University Press | 2025]

Examines changing colonial claims to political and territorial authority during the Restoration and the competing roles of divine, royal, and local authority.

• [The Wampanoags: 1665 to 1675 | Matthew J. Tuininga | The Wars of the Lord, Oxford University Press | 2025]

Examines deteriorating relations between Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoags in the decade preceding King Philip's War.

• [Who Are Friends and Who Are Foes? June 1675 to August 1675 | Matthew J. Tuininga | The Wars of the Lord, Oxford University Press | 2025]

Examines how colonial authorities attempted to classify Native communities as allies or enemies during the opening months of King Philip's War.

• [God Does Not Go Forth with Our Armies: August 1675 to September 1675 | Matthew J. Tuininga | The Wars of the Lord, Oxford University Press | 2025]

Examines Puritan responses to military setbacks and the use of providential theology to explain defeat, sin, divine judgment, and collective responsibility.

• [No Indians Can Be Trusted: September 1675 to December 1675 | Matthew J. Tuininga | The Wars of the Lord, Oxford University Press | 2025]

Examines the spread of colonial suspicion toward Native peoples, including Christian converts and communities previously regarded as allies.

• [The Narragansetts: November 1675 to February 1676 | Matthew J. Tuininga | The Wars of the Lord, Oxford University Press | 2025]

Examines the expansion of King Philip's War against the Narragansetts and the political and religious reasoning used to justify colonial military action.

• [New England in Flames: February 1676 to March 1676 | Matthew J. Tuininga | The Wars of the Lord, Oxford University Press | 2025]

Examines the widening destruction of King Philip's War and how Puritan colonists interpreted the crisis through providence, covenant, and divine judgment.

• [Negotiations: March 1676 to May 1676 | Matthew J. Tuininga | The Wars of the Lord, Oxford University Press | 2025]

Examines diplomatic efforts during King Philip's War and the tensions between negotiation, religious ideology, military objectives, and territorial expansion.

• [New England's Reckoning: May 1676 | Matthew J. Tuininga | The Wars of the Lord, Oxford University Press | 2025]

Examines Puritan attempts to understand the war as divine judgment and the resulting calls for repentance and religious reform.

• [Turning Point: May 1676 to July 1676 | Matthew J. Tuininga | The Wars of the Lord, Oxford University Press | 2025]

Examines the military and political turning point in King Philip's War and the changing balance between Native resistance and colonial forces.

• [Christian Theology, the Doctrine of Discovery, and Christian Nationalism | Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery | September 7, 2023]

Connects Christian theological traditions surrounding conquest and dominion with the Doctrine of Discovery and contemporary debates concerning Christian nationalism.

• [Christianity, Settler Colonialism, and Resource Extraction | Jan H. Pranger | Dialog | June 4, 2023]

Examines connections among Christian theology, settler colonialism, land acquisition, Indigenous displacement, covenant ideas, and the Doctrine of Discovery.

• [Undoing the Christian Nationalism of the Doctrine of Discovery | Andrew Whitehead | Religion News Service | May 8, 2023]

Discusses the Doctrine of Discovery as a religious justification for Christian colonial domination and examines its relationship to present-day Christian-nationalist ideas.

• [Praying Indians | Mark Valeri | The Opening of the Protestant Mind: How Anglo-American Protestants Embraced Religious Liberty, Oxford University Press | 2023]

Examines Puritan missionary encounters with Native peoples and the connection among conversion, cultural transformation, colonial authority, and ideas of civilization.

• [Indian Conversions | Mark Valeri | The Opening of the Protestant Mind: How Anglo-American Protestants Embraced Religious Liberty, Oxford University Press | 2023]

Examines missionary encounters with Indigenous peoples and how religious conversion complicated Protestant assumptions about culture, conscience, and coercion.

• [Original Empire | Jennifer C. Snow | Mission, Race, and Empire: The Episcopal Church in Global Context, Oxford University Press | 2023]

Examines the religious dimensions of early English colonization and the integration of church, political authority, Indigenous missions, slavery, and empire in the first English settlements.

• [This 500-Year-Old Catholic Decree Encouraged Colonization. Will the Pope Revoke It? | Erin Blakemore | National Geographic | July 22, 2022]

Explains the Doctrine of Discovery and how Christian religious claims became intertwined with European conquest, Indigenous dispossession, missionary activity, and later American law.

• [Doctrines of Discovery | Douglas Lind | Washington University Jurisprudence Review | 2020]

Examines European legal doctrines that claimed sovereignty over Indigenous lands and traces their incorporation into American law and colonial expansion.

• [George Weekes: Rogue Missionary to New England Indians, 1731–1755 | Jason Eden | Journal of Religious History | 2016]

Examines colonial missionary activity toward Native Americans and demonstrates how conversion projects affected both Indigenous communities and New England churches.

• [The Doctrine of Discovery: The Legacy and Continuing Impact of Christian “Discovery” on American Indian Populations | Tony Castanha | American Indian Culture and Research Journal | 2015]

Examines how Christian-European discovery doctrines influenced colonization, Indigenous land rights, federal Indian law, and later American institutions.

• [The Doctrine of Discovery in United States History | Robert J. Miller, Jacinta Ruru, Larissa Behrendt, and Tracey Lindberg | Oxford Academic | August 5, 2010]

Traces how European discovery principles moved from colonial practice into American governmental claims over Indigenous territory and sovereignty.

• [Native Americans, Conversion, and Christian Practice in Colonial New England, 1640–1730 | Scholarly article | Harvard Theological Review | 2009 online edition]

Examines Native engagement with Christian missionary activity and complicates narratives that portray conversion simply as one-directional cultural assimilation.

• [The Evidence of Christian Nationalism in Federal Indian Law: The Doctrine of Discovery, Johnson v. McIntosh, and Plenary Power | Steven T. Newcomb | N.Y.U. Review of Law & Social Change | n.d.]

Argues that Christian concepts of dominion and distinctions between Christian and non-Christian peoples became embedded in the legal foundations of United States Indian law.

• [Puritan Missions, Indigenous Peoples, and the Christian Commonwealth | Historical scholarship | Colonial New England studies | various]

Examines missionary activity toward Native peoples as part of the Puritan vision of creating and expanding a Christian society in New England.

Race, Slavery, and Colonial Hierarchy

• [Seventeen Centuries of Sin: The Christian Past in Antebellum Slavery Debates | Paul Gutacker | Church History | October 2, 2020]

Examines how American Christians used scripture and Christian history to defend or attack slavery, illuminating the religious foundations of later national arguments over race and morality.

• [A White History of America | Abram C. Van Engen | City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism, Yale University Press | 2020]

Examines how racialized narratives of national origins elevated English Puritan settlers while marginalizing Indigenous peoples and other populations.

• [Slavery in Puritan New England | Review article | The Journal of Interdisciplinary History | 2018]

Examines scholarship showing that slavery and Atlantic commerce were embedded in Puritan New England despite later national memories emphasizing primarily religious ideals and freedom.

• [Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World | Katharine Gerbner | University of Pennsylvania Press | 2018]

Examines the relationship between Protestant identity, racial hierarchy, conversion, slavery, and colonial law in the Atlantic world.

• [Religion and the Foundations of Slavery in America | Paul Finkelman | The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Politics in the U.S. | April 15, 2016]

Examines how Christian beliefs and institutions were used to justify, regulate, challenge, and ultimately shape slavery in colonial America.

• [Introduction | Heather Miyano Kopelson | Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic, New York University Press | 2014]

Introduces an Atlantic history of religion and racial formation centered on Bermuda and New England and examines how bodies became markers of religious and social difference.

• [“One Indian and a Negroe, the first thes Ilands ever had” | Heather Miyano Kopelson | Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic, New York University Press | 2014]

Examines early encounters among English settlers, Native peoples, Africans, and religious institutions in the seventeenth-century Puritan Atlantic.

• [“Joyne interchangeably in a laborious bodily service” | Heather Miyano Kopelson | Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic, New York University Press | 2014]

Explores labor, servitude, physical discipline, and religious community as elements in the formation of racial and social hierarchies.

• [“Ye are of one Body and members one of another” | Heather Miyano Kopelson | Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic, New York University Press | 2014]

Examines Puritan ideas of the church as a collective body and the tensions created when religious membership crossed developing racial boundaries.

• [“Extravasat Blood” | Heather Miyano Kopelson | Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic, New York University Press | 2014]

Examines blood, ancestry, embodiment, and religious belonging in the emergence of colonial concepts of human difference.

• [“Makinge a tumult in the congregation” | Heather Miyano Kopelson | Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic, New York University Press | 2014]

Explores conflict within colonial congregations and the ways religious discipline helped establish boundaries of acceptable behavior and community membership.

• [“Those bloody people who did use most horrible crueltie” | Heather Miyano Kopelson | Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic, New York University Press | 2014]

Examines religious and racial language surrounding violence and the ways colonists represented Indigenous peoples in narratives of conflict.

• [“To bee among the praying indians” | Heather Miyano Kopelson | Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic, New York University Press | 2014]

Examines Native Christian communities and the complicated relationship among conversion, colonial oversight, racial difference, and Indigenous identity.

• [“In consideration for his raising her in the Christian faith” | Heather Miyano Kopelson | Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic, New York University Press | 2014]

Explores how Christian education and conversion interacted with household authority, dependency, race, and colonial social relationships.

• [“Abominable mixture and spurious issue” | Heather Miyano Kopelson | Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic, New York University Press | 2014]

Examines colonial anxieties about interracial relationships, ancestry, sexuality, Christian status, and the policing of racial boundaries.

• [“Sensured to be whipped uppon a Lecture daie” | Heather Miyano Kopelson | Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic, New York University Press | 2014]

Examines religious discipline, public punishment, bodily control, and the intertwined authority of church and colonial society.

• [“Neither Bond nor Free”: New Englanders, Race, and Redemption | Richard A. Bailey | Race and Redemption in Puritan New England, Oxford University Press | 2011]

Introduces the relationship among Puritan theology, racial difference, slavery, conversion, and redemption in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England.

• [Laying the Foundation for “a Citty upon a Hill”: Faith, Works, Covenant, and Colonialism | Richard A. Bailey | Race and Redemption in Puritan New England, Oxford University Press | 2011]

Examines how covenant theology and Puritan ideals of a godly community interacted with colonial expansion and emerging distinctions among peoples.

• [When Image Unmakes the Man: The Consequences of Thinking about the Colors and Capabilities of “Others” | Richard A. Bailey | Race and Redemption in Puritan New England, Oxford University Press | 2011]

Explores how New Englanders interpreted physical difference and how religious assumptions contributed to developing ideas about human hierarchy and race.

• [“I Am Come into the Light”: Confessions of Faith, Sermons, and Ventriloquism | Richard A. Bailey | Race and Redemption in Puritan New England, Oxford University Press | 2011]

Examines conversion narratives involving people of color and the ways Puritan institutions shaped how converts' religious experiences were recorded and presented.

• [“We Are Not to Make Asses of Our Servants”: Exercising Authority over New Englanders of Color | Richard A. Bailey | Race and Redemption in Puritan New England, Oxford University Press | 2011]

Examines Puritan ideas about household authority, servitude, race, Christian obligation, and the treatment of enslaved and dependent people.

• [“The Art of Coyning Christians”: Redeeming Self and “Others” in Puritan New England | Richard A. Bailey | Race and Redemption in Puritan New England, Oxford University Press | 2011]

Explores missionary and conversion projects and how efforts to create Christians also reinforced colonial definitions of religious and cultural belonging.

• [The Happy Day Refuses to Come | Richard A. Bailey | Race and Redemption in Puritan New England, Oxford University Press | 2011]

Examines the limits of Puritan claims that Christian conversion could overcome social boundaries and considers the persistence of racial inequality.

• [The New England Puritan Attitude Toward Black Slavery | Peter W. Mackinlay | Old-Time New England | Winter 1973]

Examines Puritan responses to slavery and the ways biblical precedent was used to rationalize enslavement within colonial New England.

• [Slavery and Law in 17th Century Massachusetts | U.S. National Park Service | National Park Service | n.d.]

Examines the interaction of Puritan theology, biblical interpretation, race, colonial law, and slavery in seventeenth-century Massachusetts.

• [Colonial Christianity, Race, and the Development of American Identity | Historical scholarship | American religious history | various]

Examines how Christianity, European identity, racial classification, slavery, Indigenous dispossession, and colonial political power became intertwined before the United States existed.

Great Awakening, Revolution, and the American Founding

• [Great Awakening | Thomas S. Kidd | Oxford Bibliographies in Atlantic History | 2012; updated 2023]

Reviews major scholarship on the Great Awakening and its religious, cultural, social, and political significance in colonial British America.

• [The Great Awakening and the Coming of the American Revolution | Kerry E. Irish | George Fox University | January 2022]

Explores how the Great Awakening changed colonial religious authority, popular participation, social organization, and political attitudes before the American Revolution.

• [The Great Awakening in Virginia | Thomas S. Kidd | Encyclopedia Virginia | December 7, 2020]

Describes how evangelical revivalism challenged Virginia's established Anglican system and helped change colonial assumptions concerning religious authority and liberty.

• [Great Awakening | HISTORY.com Editors | HISTORY | March 7, 2018]

Provides an overview of the First Great Awakening and its effects on evangelicalism, denominational authority, colonial society, and later American political culture.

• [The First Great Awakening: Revival and the Birth of a Nation | Kory Ray Thomas Quirion | Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History | 2016]

Argues that evangelical revivalism and Reformed theology contributed to social and political changes preceding the American Revolution.

• [The Trouble with Christian History: Thomas Prince's “Great Awakening” | Timothy E. W. Gloege | Church History | February 21, 2013]

Examines how eighteenth-century revivalists constructed the idea of a unified Great Awakening and used religious print culture to shape collective identity.

• [Religion and the American Founding | Mark A. Noll | The Oxford Handbook of Religion and American Politics | January 2, 2010]

Surveys the changing relationship between religion and politics from the colonial and Revolutionary periods through the creation of the Constitution.

• [The Political Awakening | Patricia U. Bonomi | Under the Cope of Heaven | July 10, 2003]

Examines the debated relationship between the Great Awakening and changing patterns of colonial political participation before the Revolution.

• [“The Hosannas of the Multitude”: The Great Awakening in America | Patricia U. Bonomi | Under the Cope of Heaven | July 10, 2003]

Examines the social and religious upheaval created by eighteenth-century revivalism and its effects on colonial authority and community life.

• [The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America | Frank Lambert | Princeton University Press | 2003]

Examines the colonial religious establishments inherited by the founding generation and the gradual development of a new American approach to church-state relations.

• [Religion and the American Revolution | Patricia U. Bonomi | Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America, Oxford University Press | 2003]

Examines the religious language, clergy, institutions, providential beliefs, and denominational conflicts that formed part of Revolutionary political culture.

• [The Formation of American Religious Culture | Patricia U. Bonomi | Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America, Oxford University Press | 2003]

Examines how colonial religious diversity, revivalism, dissent, establishment, and political change contributed to a distinctive postcolonial religious culture.

• [Religion and the Founding of the American Republic | James H. Hutson | Library of Congress | 1998]

Surveys religion's role in colonial settlement, the Great Awakening, the Revolution, state establishments, disestablishment, and the creation of the American republic.

• [The Great Awakening as a Background of the American Revolution | Makoto Saito | The Japan Academy | 1997]

Reviews scholarly debate concerning whether revivalism, Calvinism, republicanism, or other influences best explain religion's relationship to the American Revolution.

• [The Era of the Great Awakenings in Colonial America (1720–75) | Robert T. Handy | A History of the Churches in the United States and Canada | January 27, 1976]

Surveys the Great Awakening and the transformation of Christianity in the colonies during the decades preceding American independence.

• [Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening | Perry Miller | Errand into the Wilderness, Harvard University Press | 1956]

Examines Jonathan Edwards and the revival movement that transformed inherited Puritan religious institutions in eighteenth-century New England.

• [Religion in Eighteenth-Century America | James H. Hutson / Library of Congress | Religion and the Founding of the American Republic | n.d.]

Examines continuing colonial religious vitality, the Great Awakening, evangelical expansion, denominational diversity, and the development of American religious culture.

• [Religion and the American Revolution | James H. Hutson / Library of Congress | Religion and the Founding of the American Republic | n.d.]

Examines how clergy, biblical imagery, millennial expectations, providential interpretations, and religious institutions contributed to Revolutionary political culture.

• [Religion and the New Republic | James H. Hutson / Library of Congress | Religion and the Founding of the American Republic | n.d.]

Explores the emergence of evangelicalism as a major force in national life and the close nineteenth-century association between Protestant religion, morality, patriotism, and republican citizenship.

• [The Joseph Bellamy House: The Great Awakening in Puritan New England | U.S. National Park Service | National Park Service | n.d.]

Examines Puritan religious culture, Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, revivalism, and the transformations produced by the Great Awakening.

Colonial Government, Law, Churches, and Social Order

• [“Patriotic Christians”: Nationalism, Imperialism, and the Origins of Theological Education in the United States | Andrew Gardner | Church History | April 20, 2026]

Explores how American theological education became intertwined with nationalism, missions, imperial expansion, and ideas about the religious destiny of the United States.

• [The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut | Connecticut History | Connecticut Humanities | January 14, 2023]

Explains how Connecticut's early government combined Puritan covenant concepts, Christian purposes, representative institutions, and civil political organization.

• [A Civil Body Politick: Governance, Community, and Accountability in Early New England | Research article | Frontiers in Political Science | 2022]

Examines how religious covenant ideas shaped political authority, accountability, community organization, and government in early Puritan New England.

• [“To Covenant and Combine Ourselves into a Civil Body Politic”: The Mayflower Compact at 400 Years | Sarah Morgan Smith, Richard Samuelson, Teresa M. Bejan, and Ralph C. Hancock | Online Library of Liberty | May 4, 2020]

Offers several interpretations of the Mayflower Compact, including its relationship to religious covenant traditions, self-government, political consent, and religious toleration.

• [How the Mayflower Compact Laid a Foundation for Democracy | Dave Roos | HISTORY | 2019]

Examines the explicitly religious Mayflower Compact alongside its commitments to self-government, collective consent, lawmaking, and civil political organization.

• [Mayflower Compact | HISTORY.com Editors | HISTORY | October 29, 2009]

Provides background on the Mayflower Compact, its explicitly Christian language, covenant structure, and role in Plymouth self-government.

• [Introduction | William E. Nelson | The Common Law of Colonial America, Volume I: The Chesapeake and New England, 1607–1660, Oxford University Press | 2008]

Introduces the different legal cultures established in early Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts, and neighboring colonies and their relationship to English law.

• [Law in the Jamestown Settlement | William E. Nelson | The Common Law of Colonial America, Volume I: The Chesapeake and New England, 1607–1660, Oxford University Press | 2008]

Examines the legal order created at Jamestown and the relationship among colonial government, English authority, property, discipline, and settlement.

• [Private Property and the Free Market in Virginia, 1619–1660 | William E. Nelson | The Common Law of Colonial America, Volume I: The Chesapeake and New England, 1607–1660, Oxford University Press | 2008]

Examines the development of Virginia's property system and legal institutions during the colony's transition toward a more established political order.

• [Puritan Law in the Bay Colony | William E. Nelson | The Common Law of Colonial America, Volume I: The Chesapeake and New England, 1607–1660, Oxford University Press | 2008]

Examines Massachusetts Bay's effort to organize law around Puritan religious principles and the close relationship between civil and religious authority.

• [Popular Power and the Rule of Law in Massachusetts | William E. Nelson | The Common Law of Colonial America, Volume I: The Chesapeake and New England, 1607–1660, Oxford University Press | 2008]

Explores the relationship between representative government, local political participation, Puritan leadership, and legal authority in Massachusetts.

• [The New England Satellites | William E. Nelson | The Common Law of Colonial America, Volume I: The Chesapeake and New England, 1607–1660, Oxford University Press | 2008]

Compares the legal and political development of colonies surrounding Massachusetts and the different ways they adapted Puritan and English institutions.

• [The Battle for Maryland | William E. Nelson | The Common Law of Colonial America, Volume I: The Chesapeake and New England, 1607–1660, Oxford University Press | 2008]

Examines Maryland's struggles over political power, Catholic leadership, Protestant opposition, toleration, and colonial legal authority.

• [The Religious Prospect | Patricia U. Bonomi | Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America, Oxford University Press | 2003]

Surveys the religious landscape of colonial British America and emphasizes the diversity of establishments, denominations, dissenters, and local religious cultures.

• [The New Heavens and the New Earth | Patricia U. Bonomi | Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America, Oxford University Press | 2003]

Examines the development of colonial religious communities and the efforts of settlers to reproduce, modify, and contest European religious institutions.

• [The Clergymen | Patricia U. Bonomi | Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America, Oxford University Press | 2003]

Examines the social and political roles of clergy across colonial denominations and the influence ministers exercised beyond formal religious worship.

• [The Churchgoers | Patricia U. Bonomi | Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America, Oxford University Press | 2003]

Explores patterns of religious participation across class, gender, race, age, denomination, and region in colonial society.

• [The Expansion of the Visible Church in New England: 1629–1650 | David Kobrin | Church History | June 1967]

Examines the institutional expansion of Puritan Congregationalism and the place of church membership in the social and political organization of early New England.

• [Thomas Hooker and the Democracy of Connecticut | Perry Miller | Errand into the Wilderness, Harvard University Press | 1956]

Examines Thomas Hooker's theology and political thought and their relationship to Connecticut's early institutions of government.

• [Religion and Society in the Early Literature of Virginia | Perry Miller | Errand into the Wilderness, Harvard University Press | 1956]

Examines the relationship between religion and social order in early Virginia and provides a contrast with the Puritan institutions of New England.

• [The Puritan State and Puritan Society | Perry Miller | Errand into the Wilderness, Harvard University Press | 1956]

Examines the close relationship between religious ideals, political institutions, law, and social organization in Puritan New England.

• [Pilgrims | U.S. National Park Service | Cape Cod National Seashore | n.d.]

Provides the text and historical context of the Mayflower Compact, including its references to God, Christian faith, covenant, civil government, and collective political authority.

• [The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut | Teaching American History | Ashbrook Center | n.d.]

Presents and contextualizes Connecticut's 1639 governing covenant, which explicitly linked government, divine providence, the Gospel, and the political community.