Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America

by Michael P. Winship

“The rise and fall of transatlantic puritanism is told through political, theological, and personal conflict in this exceptional history.” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) Begun in the mid-sixteenth century by Protestant nonconformists keen to reform England’s church and society while saving their own souls, the puritan movement was a major catalyst in the great cultural changes that transformed the early modern world. Providing a uniquely broad transatlantic perspective, this groundbreaking volume traces puritanism’s tumultuous history from its initial attempts to reshape the Church of England to its establishment of godly republics in both England and America and its demise at the end of the seventeenth century.   Shedding new light on puritans whose impact was far-reaching as well as on those who left only limited traces behind them, Michael Winship delineates puritanism’s triumphs and tribulations and shows how the puritan project of creating reformed churches working closely with intolerant godly governments evolved and broke down over time in response to changing geographical, political, and religious exigencies. “Among the fairest and most readable accounts of the glorious failure that was trans-Atlantic Puritanism.” --The Wall Street Journal “Exhilarating popular history . . . convincingly captures in one bold retelling decades of scholarship on Puritanism’s origins, developments and characteristics” —Times Literary Supplement “Winship has established himself as a leading authority on the history of the Puritans. While many works have focused on a specific aspect of Puritan history, . . . there are fewer works that show Puritanism as a multinational movement in Europe and the Americas. This book fills those gaps.” —Library Journal A Choice Outstanding Academic Titles

Genres: History, Religion, Nonfiction, Church History, Christianity, American History, Audiobook

379 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 26, 2019

About the author

A specialist in the history of religion in colonial America, Michael Winship is professor of history at the University of Georgia, where he holds the E. Merton Coulter Chair.

Michael Winship's most recent book is Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and Massachusetts' City on a Hill (Harvard UP, 2012), a Choice Academic Title of the Year for 2012. Previous books include Seers of God: Puritan Providentialism in the Restoration and Early Enlightenment (Johns Hopkins UP, 1996), Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636-1641 (Princeton UP, 2002), The Times and Trials of Anne Hutchinson: Puritans Divided (UP of Kansas, 2005) and, with Edward J. Larson, The Constitutional Convention: A Narrative History from the Notes of James Madison (Random House, 2005.) Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America is forthcoming with Yale University Press.

Recent articles include ''Freeborn (Puritan) Englishmen and Slavish Subjection: Popish Tyranny and Puritan Constitutionalism, c.1570-1606,'' English Historical Review 124 (2009), 1050-1074; ''Algernon Sidney's Calvinist Republicanism,'' Journal of British Studies 49 (2010), 753-773; ''Defining Puritanism in Restoration England: Richard Baxter and Others Respond to A Friendly Debate,'' Historical Journal 54 (2011), 689-715; "Straining the Bonds of Puritanism: English Presbyterians and Massachusetts Congregationalists Debate Ecclesiology, 1636–40," in Crawford Gribben, Scott Spurlock, eds. Puritans and Catholics in the Trans-Atlantic World 1600-1800 (Palgrave, 2015), pp. 89-111. A chapter on New England religion from the 1680s-1730s, "Congregationalist Hegemony in New England, from the 1680s to the 1730s," is in the Cambridge History of Religions in America, vol I (New York, 2012), and a chapter on the various early forms of English church establishments in the Americas, '' British America to 1662." is in the Oxford History of Anglicanism, vol. I (Oxford, 2017).

Reviews

[Joel Zartman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clear, engaging, makes its points. I was told by one who knows that it is the best book on Puritanism to date, which is saying a lot, including, as far as my knowledge goes, the truth.

One of the things exhibited by historians when dealing with the naivete committed believers such as the Puritans often themselves exhibit is condescension. It is a shame when a good historian looks down too much on his subject, because there is something unreal in the view. Perhaps it is a lack of perspective, of the sense of pathos and tragedy. There is a point to wondering whether the Puritans could not be over-scrupulous, the way Luther's confessor wondered about him. When dealing with the Puritans, historical perspective gives us in many aspects a clearer view of them and better way to evaluate what they did. Winship is telling the story after it ended, and in light of many dire predictions that did not play out. This is salutary. I think, however, that Winship also manages to be consistently less than sympathetic to his subjects in ways that are somewhat to be wondered at.

[Todd Stockslager · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review title: Chasing grace

The Reformation started with Martin Luther and his hammer (you know, to tack his 95 theses paper to the door of the church) but it was far from over that day. The chase for defining saving grace would play out over centuries and across the globe. Hot Protestants is really the story of that journey.

In England where Puritanism arose, the search was especially complex as the occupants of the British throne flip-flopped from Catholic to Church of England depending on the personality of the occupant and the ebbing of political tides in British relations with the Continent. Puritans (the name originally intended as a slur against the perceived holier-than-thou attitude of its followers, but accepted as a good short-hand for a whole packet of new theological approaches to salvation) saw both sides in that flip-flop as unbiblical human accretions on the New Testament church that Jesus had intended. Elaborate liturgy, expensive vestments, and extensive properties signaled a worldliness that rose to the level of heresy, which the Puritans sought to correct by reliance on moral reformation to determine the soul's predestination (the application of John Calvin's interpretation that God had fore-ordained some to heaven) and the abandonment of these outward forms of spiritual decadence.

Winship's history will be familiar at a very high level to those Americans who paid attention to their school lessons about the fall holidays: Some separatists, tired of government forcing them not just to go to the state-approved Church of England ever Sunday but to support it with taxes, emigrated first to the Netherlands in search of amenable Calvinist brothers and then to the North American wilderness when even those brothers weren't amenable enough. There, in icy New England where they landed after being blown far north of their Virginia destination, they would have been frozen or starved out of existence without the help of a decimated Native American population, which the Pilgrims attributed to God's providence for which they offered up a feast of Thanksgiving. More English arrived over the decades as they sought freedom from a Church they didn't respect while building churches and then governments based on their own beliefs. Winship covers the 150 years from about 1550 to 1700 as the Puritans waxed, waned, and changed on both sides of the Atlantic.

I became interested in this topic while reading Marilyn Robinson's What are We Doing Here? where she credits the New England Puritan governments with more discretion and mercy than we typically learned in our continuing school history lessons. I was also intrigued by Winship's scope across both sides of the Atlantic as uniquely uniting the histories that are often split by the ocean between even though there was a constant flow of people and ideas in both directions which ensured events never happened in isolation. For example, as applied in North America, Puritanism splintered further into Congregationalism where each individual church was its own authority on doctrine--including saving grace and predestination--membership, and church governance. When Congregationalism migrated back to England it faced disapproval and persecution from both the Church of England and the Puritan separatists--and a new group who would be called Quakers because of their peculiar physical quivering under the influence of spiritual light. Luther's restoration of sola fide based on sola scriptura, in conjunction with the explosion of the printing of Bibles and devotional and doctrinal literature in the vernacular language, opened the door to the continued chase to define saving grace across time and space that continues today.

The value of Winship for me was to bring this broad range of beliefs (which was accompanied by state-approved torture and violence in some cases and religious civil war in others) into focus in a period where it is easy to focus (as I previously had) on a single Catholic/Protestant war. Yes Protestants were at war, spiritually and literally, with Catholics, but also fighting brother against brother with other Protestant sects. The living history of that era was fraught with these multi-variate breakdowns that must have stressed social, economic, political, clerical, and personal relationships in ways that the written histories fail to bring to life for us today. Winship provides the raw material for a corrective for just one of those relationships. Clocking in at 340 pages including footnotes, bibliography, and glossary, Winship's history would be much larger if he drove his analysis across all of those other relationships. Winship is a University of Georgia professor whose other books are also on the topic and figure in the bibliography, so this is a learned text but accessible to most laymen.

His catchy title, by the way, is based on this quote from a 1581 contemporary of the Puritans: "The hotter sort of Protestants are called Puritans." (p. 1). It is a perfect epitaph to title the book and start the book as it draws our modern eyes and keeps them attached to these Hot Protestants chasing grace.

[josie march · Rating 2 out of 5]

more political history than I was expecting, but still good

[Gregory · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fun read. More like a novel than a history book, it traces the development of the Puritan movement on both sides of the Atlantic. No stuffy history here, but real people, brought to life by a master story-teller!

[Geertje · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thorough overview of the emergence, struggles and demise of Puritanism in both England and America. Winship has done his research (and there must have been SO MUCH of it) and explains the conflicts and in-fighting (which are at times rather complicated because they require a lot of knowledge of the nitty gritty of different strands of Christianity) very well. Not necessarily an easy read, but vital for anyone who wants to understand a turbulant period in English and American history (and a lot of what came after).

[Ethan Young · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great look into the religious history of English Protestantism. The Puritans had very many pros, and definitely their cons of religious practice. I respect many of them, and wish to learn from their faults as well.

[Darryl Burling · Rating 4 out of 5]

Generally a good intro to the Puritans. This is a rather impartial view of the period and doesn't glorify any of the individuals but paints them as humans with different beliefs and foibles. This is a work of history and doesn't really focus on theological distinctive. Nor does it really go into some of the legal implications of the puritan movement resulting in the Bill of Rights, which is what I was hoping for.

If you want an impartial view of the puritans that doesn't hold punches, this is a good book. If you're after something that focuses more on the devotion or theology of the puritans, this doesn't fit that bill.

[CJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was incredibly dense and unfortunately I'm not sure how much of the specifics are going to stick with me because it covers such a long and complicated period of time in such detail, but it was an incredibly interesting look into the oft-cited but less understood world of the Puritans. It's fascinating to think about how much of what became the United States was formed by a group that while reading struck me as more familiar to modern-day Islamists than anything else, and how much these intense debates about the role of religion in public life shaped both England and the U.S. before fading into history. Winship's discussion of Native American tribes' interactions with Puritan settlers was particularly interesting, along with his brief discussion of the Salem witch trials, which he noted happened as the original Puritan order was in the process of falling apart and a new, secular legal system was forming. A lot to think about and I would highly recommend for anyone interested in religious history or the early modern period.

[Seth Meyers · Rating 3 out of 5]

Author’s point: The Puritans from 1540-1690 were a shockingly zealous group of Christians.

My evaluation: If you already love the Puritans, Winship provides a wealth of research that instructs and inspires, but his contempt for his subject restrains me from recommending this book to those who are not already biased toward Bunyan and his peers. This book’s value depends on the presence of the right bias before starting it. It was helpful for me, but on its own, it can't get more than 3 stars. Audio.

[Philip Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good summation of the Puritan era. A bunch of stuff I knew. A bunch of stuff I didn't. Very nice.

[William Dury · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hot like enthusiastic, not hot like sexy. I’m sure Author Winship chose his title as a sly joke.

At Knox’s settlement in Frankfurt, “All members were to be godly busy-bodies, continually ‘admonishing and instructing one another.’” P 18. (Like the NYT editorial page).

“If you wanted to call down divine vengeance on your wicked enemies there were psalms for that too,” p 19 (Say, oil companies or old white people).

English history (Henry, Edward, Mary) makes wonderfully clear the connections between politics and religion. Both concern themselves with the supervision of our behavior, and in many ways there really is no difference between the two; they often work in collusion. Both demand our payment (taxes, donations) for the privilege of being supervised, and assign punishment (jail, eternal damnation) for non-compliance with, or at least-and more importantly-acquiesce to, their power.

The Puritans, like the Stoics, had indifferents. For the Stoics, indifferents were things we desire (health, wealth, eye melting sex) that, despite all outward appearance, don’t really contribute to our happiness. (See Buddhist concept of dukkha). Conversely, in the Stoic view, they don’t necessarily prevent us from being happy, either; they are indifferent to our real happiness which is the result of ethical behavior. For the Puritans indifferents were considered to be any behavior or belief not specifically forbidden by the Bible. (Examples: p. 14-15, 19-20, 61, 70). “Ceremonies had to be purely biblical, which the Church of England’s were not, and, in any case, bishops could not command obedience to ‘indifferent’ things,” p. 65.

“He explained that the Virgin Mary was conceived in sin and was a lump of sin herself…” p 28

��A woman grumbled, ‘It was a merry world before there was so much preaching,’” p 32.

The inter-Puritan and extra-Puritan disputes over God’s will become a bit tedious in the second half of the book, but overall an entertaining and engaging read.

[Adam Shields · Rating 4 out of 5]

Summary: A relevant history of a theological reform movement that became political.

Every once in a while, I come across history revealing areas where I did not realize I had a big hole, but once identified, many connections get made. I have read a number of English history books, but once I read Hot Protestants, I realized that they all seemed to stop around Elizabeth or James and not pick up again until George III. I had never read a book on the English Revolution and did not realize where that was in the timeline.

Hot Protestants is a history of Puritanism, a revival movement within the Church of England. Part of what struck me was how explicitly Puritans understood England to have a similar covenant as ancient Israel had with God and how that theological commitment led to many of their social and political commitments.

"Fasting was a public responsibility as well as a private one. It was widely accepted that a Christian country like England was a successor to ancient Israel. Just as Israel had the true church before the Jews rejected Jesus, England had God’s true church, thanks to the Reformation. Like Israel, England was in a covenant with God, and like Israel, it would be blessed or punished to the extent that it followed or defied God’s law. Therefore, when it strayed, it needed to collectively implore God’s forgiveness, just as the ancient Jews had done. The Church of England ordered public fasts when faced with signs of God’s wrath—plague, famine, war, and the like.34 Church of England fasts, however, were called too infrequently to satisfy puritans, and unless undertaken in a puritan manner, they were too formal and short to generate and express the humiliation and repentance that a jealous God expected. Puritan ministers asserted the dubiously legal right to call public fasts on their own. Zealous Protestants would travel 10 or 20 miles for a puritan fast, which could easily last an entire day between the many long prayers and sermons from the ministers present." (p35)

Part of what kept coming up in my mind as I read Hot Protestants is that current advocates of Christian Nationalism seem to have a very similar theology and practice. Puritans understood their role as not only revivalists but also social reformers. Those social reforms were not simply to improve society but to enforce social norms to fulfill the covenant with God. Magistrates had wide latitude to enforce religious laws that either had not existed or had not been legally enforced. The Church of England restricted ordination and the role of revival preaching, but those restrictions chafed against people (both men and women) who felt the call of God. England did not have legal freedom or religious consciousness as the United States does, and because of covenantal thinking, religious and civil legal violations became intertwined.

Eventually, the monarchs became wary of these Puritans because their willingness to challenge the church hierarchies also led them to start challenging the civil hierarchies. Two streams of Puritanism eventually arose. Presbyterianism maintained a type of hierarchy where elders voted in legislative sessions, which bound all Presbyterian churches to the will of the sessions. While Congregationalists took voting to the local level and understood each church to be autonomous and all (male) members in good standing were eligible to vote on religious matters within the congregation, however, those votes only applied to the local congregation, not to other congregational churches.

While Presbyterian and Congregational movements were both being persecuted, they were able to work together because they were both strongly theologically Calvinist. But once the Glorious Revolution occurred, the infighting became much stronger. Congregationalists were stronger in North America, in part because of the independence and distance between churches. The leaders of the Glorious Revolution in England attempted to change the Church of England into a formally Presbyterian ecclesiology. This tied Presbyterian to a type of anti-monarchism, and when the revolution fell apart, there was a religious backlash against Presbyterianism because of how it was connected politically to the revolution. The congregational orientation of New England ecclesiology influenced its political organization of local direct democracy that eventually influenced the development of US political systems after the US revolutions.

What is particularly helpful about Hot Protestants is that he grounds the religious history in appropriate civil and economic history to help the reader understand the social events that influenced the religious events. It was not simply that Puritans moving to North America were seeking religious freedom; they were seeking to create utopian societies to show those back in England how God's blessing would come when societies worked in harmony with their understanding of God's covenants. Those religious motivations were real, but the population of England was booming, and economically, some non-Puritans were seeking to invest in colonization projects to gain wealth as Spain was doing. Politically, many minor nobles were seeking to gain political, economic, and religious influence for themselves and saw the Puritan movement as a viable means to gain personal influence.

Part of what Winship does well is show the problems of generational transfer of ideology. Coverts who were "hot" had children and grandchildren who were themselves influenced by those original coverts but may not have had the same motivation. Children who do not have a direct memory of events their parents are responding to may either react against their parents' guardrails or harden themselves without understanding the original purpose. They may not have started as legalistic and controlling movements, but eventually, the covenantal thinking was not satisfied with personal piety and enforced their piety on others, which created a backlash and opened the Puritans up to charges of hypocrisy.

This is not at all an anti-Puritan book. In many ways, the handling of the Salem Witch Trials, I think, shows that the author respects his subject and is trying to give a broader understanding of the interaction of politics, theology, economics, and other social movements. Puritan New England, as well as Old England, had many witch trials. However, Puritans had strong guardrails on their judicial systems that had begun to be removed because the New England of the Witch Trial era had been forced to become more pluralistic because of English legal and political realities. Winship makes the case that the excesses, which were blamed on Puritanism, were actually a result of not following Puritan legal systems.

I am continually struck by how much of our current political and theological realities have echos in history. We just need to understand that history to have a level of humility about what reform movements can and cannot do in the light of human and systemic limitations.

This was originally posted to my blog at https://bookwi.se/hot-protestants/

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I listened to this book less out of interest in the Puritans themselves and more out of interest in where the historiography on them has gone lately. Michael Winship is a professor who has been widely published in Puritan history and this appears to be his attempt at a book for a wider audience, so it’s probably not the best way to get at the cutting edge of the questions involved, if there still is one. But at the same time, mid-twentieth century and earlier writers on Puritans, who I’ve read more of, directed themselves or at least tried to at a mass audience while maintaining high academic standards, getting reviews in newspapers and the like and not just academic journals. This led to such amusing remarks as a newspaper reviewer warning readers that Perry Miller’s “The New England Mind” “requires cooperation from the reader.” Indeed!

The early American Studies scholars wrote for a broad educated audience because they had what amounted to a civilizing mission in mind: show the American people the greatness of their own culture (as defined by the canonizing project the American Studies scholars themselves undertook) and simultaneously steer them away from political radicalism. Perry Miller’s Puritans were meant to be not ancestors to Americans, as earlier scholars held them -- if nothing else, in an increasingly diverse America, that wouldn’t fly -- but as progenitors of their political and social project. Scholars like Miller were too sophisticated to make this claim in any easy, straightforward way, and given to an ironic, sometimes tragic outlook on life and the achievability of great dreams, so a one-to-one Puritans-to-contemporary-Americans thing wasn’t what they went for, at least outside of what might get taught to primary school children. Even if you disagree with their take on the Puritans or others they construed as constitutive of the American cultural canon (I often do) or with their larger pedagogical project (which I’m definitely not on board with- not that any of my teachers were, either, by the time I came of age), works like “The New England Mind” endure as scholarship for a reason.

Again, “Hot Protestants” from the title on down is meant for popular consumption, in this age where scholars seem convinced that no one wants their most advanced work, unfortunately. So I don’t know what Winship’s larger project might be. In the world of “Hot Protestants,” it appears to be “humanizing” the Puritans, as well as deprovincializing them, re-rendering them into the trans-Atlantic actors they were. The narrative often moves forward through representative stories of given Puritan experiences to illustrate changes in the relationship between Puritanism and the established Church of England, in New England’s ecclesiastical governance policies, and so on. There’s less emphasis on theology here than I am used to seeing in work on Puritans, and more on what today would be called the “wedge issues” which so violently rent society in Britain in the seventeenth century: regulations on amusements, specific forms of ritual, church governance, and so on. Perhaps Winship felt that this would hold a modern reader’s attention more than the points of theology which so moved the Puritans- he is probably right, if so.

Winship is less thesis-heavy than Miller and his ilk. This is probably good as far as accurately conveying information about the Puritans goes; Winship takes a swipe at Miller specifically for blowing John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill” speech out of proportion and decontextualizing it until it became a cliche of twentieth-century American rhetoric. But it raises some questions as to what the stakes are for “Hot Protestants.” The stakes for Miller and the American Studies cohort were high- arguably as high as that of the Cold War they imagined themselves helping to fight. “Hot Protestants” is no defense of Puritanism, even if contextualizing them in any meaningful way helps show them as something other than the simple tyrannical martinets they’re often portrayed as being. Implicitly, the book might be able to sustain a reading as a warning of the dangers of ideological purity, which Puritans (both of Presbyterian and Congregationalist stripe), Anglicans, and everyone in between pursued violently and at great cost to New England and especially English society.

Still… not to harp on the comparison, but I did read Miller recently, and he made the Puritans seem both alien and kin to the society in which I live, in a number of illustrative ways. There was a power and subtlety in “The New England Mind” which “Hot Protestants” simply doesn’t have. It’s admirable to try to make the strange familiar, as Winship tries to do. I think it’s another thing entirely, an uncanny and wonderful thing, to suspend the reader between the strange and the familiar, to make the reader dig a little deeper into the structure of what they find familiar and see that it’s pretty strange, too. I guess to put it more simply, Winship familiarizes the strange but does not make strange the familiar, in this book anyway. Doing both is more interesting, to me, anyway. ***’

[Hank Pharis · Rating 3 out of 5]

(NOTE: I'm stingy with stars. For me 2 stars means a good book or a B. 3 stars means a very good book or a B+. 4 stars means an outstanding book or an A {only about 5% of the books I read merit 4 stars}. 5 stars means an all time favorite or an A+ {Only one of 400 or 500 books rates this!).

Most books on the Puritans are either 100% sympathetic or 100% negative. This is a more balanced historical account that avoids either extreme. Hall's account (see previous review) is more theological and detailed. Winship's account is easier reading.

A few quotes:

The hotter sort of Protestants are called Puritans.” (Perceval Wiburn 1581)

Anti-puritans often acted in the fervent belief that puritanism threatened the foundations of church and state and that ripping it out of the Church of England required digging an ever wider, deeper hole around it.
In their own eyes, however, puritans were exemplary Englishmen and women. They were the most faithful, most aggressively intolerant defenders of England’s fledgling Protestantism, as well as its most zealous anti-Catholics at a time when Catholic countries were bloodily contesting the boundaries of the emergent Protestant Reformation. They were the most determined seekers of salvation and the most committed activists for the moral and spiritual reformation necessary to keep God’s wrath off England for its many sins and for its failure to raise itself to the pristine standards of the Bible. When puritans feared that God’s wrath could be held off no longer, some of them crossed the Atlantic to create their own societies.
Puritans met with fierce opposition, which did not surprise them. (1-2)

No matter how much puritans had clashed with the bishops in the past, on the fundamental issue of salvation, they had been in agreement. They were all Calvinists and committed to predestination.
At the end of the sixteenth century, some Church of England ministers and university professors started questioning predestination. (73)

Puritans were horrified by the rise of these anti-Calvinists. For puritans, salvation hinged on discovering through a wrenching, protracted confrontation with your own wicked heart the central saving truth that Arminians denied: you had not the slightest power to save yourself. (73)

In 1622, James banned the preaching of predestination, and in the last years of his reign, he showed increasing favor to anti-Calvinist, ceremonial churchmen. James died in 1625. His son, Charles I, was himself an anti-Calvinist with an intense attachment to bishops and ceremonial religion, who married a Catholic French princess. (75)

Massachusetts’s churches required would-be members to demonstrate that they were “visible saints.” (88)

Cotton also approved, and possibly helped to instigate, a major step forward in the exclusivity of Massachusetts’s churches. Soon after he arrived, the judgment of charity that was used for the churches’ admissions became much less charitable. By 1636, it was not enough to act like a visible saint, you had to explain how God transformed you into one. (89)

The Salem disaster is often treated as the defining expression of American puritanism. But it was an expression of American puritanism in its fevered death throes, after it had been thrown into a disastrous, terrifying imperial war and the old brakes on witch-hunts had been removed, both by powers beyond puritanism’s control. (284)

[Ericka Hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well then.....I never saw myself sitting down and reading an entire book on the topic of "Puritanism" but here we are.

I think when most Americans think of the Puritans there are a certain set of images that are conjured in our imaginations. The Pilgrims coming over on the Mayflower. Thanksgiving. The Salem Witch Trials. Severe, joyless people in colonial garb reading the Bible that hate dancing. However, as I learned from this book, Puritanism was a radical movement that also took place in England with a tumultuous 100 years (give or take). Its main goal was to purify the Church of England as well as the country itself of Catholicism and what it saw as the heretical elements of other sects of Protestantism. The Separatists, or the ones that broke from the Church of England and sought to establish an entirely new society based in biblical law, were just one group of Puritans in a wider history.

This book does a very good job of comparing and contrasting the struggle and goals of the Puritans that established the Massachusetts Bay Colony and its form of congregationalism vs. the Puritans in England that attempted to also form their own congregations that were called "Nonconformists" in that they rejected the doctrines of the Church of England. I really enjoyed the chapters on the Praying Indians, Native Americans that adopted Christianity, since I was rarely exposed to Native American history when we studied U.S. history in school. It was interesting reading about their perceptions of the English God, their reasons for abandoning their old beliefs of natural spirits, and the prejudice they faced among the English Puritans even after their conversions (i.e. being interned during King Philip's War).

Obviously this book isn't one I would recommend to anyone - compared to other historical nonfiction I've read, I though the writing was fantastic in that it wasn't dry and stuffy, it contained lots of interesting anecdotes about the time period to accompany facts. But it's not exactly a book that you can just pull out and breeze through very quickly. However, if you're kinda nerdy like me and you enjoy reading about U.S. history or the English Civil War - this is a great book that will help disentangle the complex theological debates that led to violence and the creation of many different sects of Christianity that exist today.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent. A perfect follow up to The Blazing World. Whereas The Blazing World is more focused on the social and political elements of England in the 17th c., Hot Protestants is more focused on the religious dynamics. I was particularly struck by the diversity among delegates to the Westminster Assembly and the ways those dynamics affected the later non-conformist movement. In addition, the timeline of events juxtaposing America and England was especially useful for understanding how the Puritan "pieces" fit together.

It seems like the author's organizing motif is the Puritan's attempts to reform the church, meaning Church of England state church, and thus government and society itself. Theology obviously plays a role and, thankfully, the author doesn't distill everything down to politics. However, I wonder if the role of ideas, and the ultimate Puritan failure, is rooted less in the revocation of the Massachusetts charter, or The Glorious Revolution, and more in the rise of rationalism. Rationalism, and other Enlightenment thinking, would shape thinking around the State; but the effects would be extreme with regards to theology.

Because of this, the author ends at around 1700, which is fine—you have to stop somewhere. But there is more to the story than "the Puritan dream was dead, fin." By ending the narrative with the revocation of the Massachusetts charter, key figures in post-Reformation orthodox theology like Jonathan Edwards, John Gill, Andrew Fuller, and others are virtually excluded. One could make an argument that these figures were not Puritans, simpliciter. Fine. But the Cambridge Platform and the halfway covenant were directly responsible for the preaching of Solomon Stoddard, one of the first revivalist preachers because of the spiritual decay of New England. Stoddard's ambitions can be directly tied to the Puritan vision put forth by those before him. Stoddard's grandson, Jonathan Edwards, would do the same as he wrote extensively about revival, as he drank deeply from the wells of post-Reformation orthodox writers, including the Puritans of the 17th c.

This is a minor criticism for an otherwise excellent book. The author is to be commended for putting forth such a readable entree into the history of this tumultuous, violent, and thrilling period of religious ferment.

[Maureen · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are the people I come from (insert eye roll here). There is no way for any high school history class, even any individual collegiate history class, to really plumb the intricacies of history, but the foundations of our society now are in the structures, struggles, priorities, fears, and desires of these people who lived centuries ago. And the foundations for their realities were laid in the decades and centuries before them.

I think it's fascinating what people thought was truly important, what they were willing to fight for - and kill and die for. And it all comes down to power and control.

While parts were dry, mostly an accounting of who did what, where, and when, this information is necessary when you're talking about a century+ period of time spanning two continents. When you're tracing the origins, evolution, and endings of something like religion, there are going to be lots of names and dates. I appreciate the effort it took to condense so much information into a coherent narrative.

My only other quibble is the author's tendency to speculate on what historical figures or crowds were thinking. Often he will write "So and so might have thought..." or "It's very likely the people were feeling...". Since I listened to the audiobook, I do not know if there were references to support his statements, but I am extremely wary of putting words in dead peoples' mouths.

[Bob Rosenbaum · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've read a lot of tough slogs and Michael Winship's "Hot Protestants" is the real deal - an actual Slough of Despond (for those of you who managed to avoid it in high school, that's a reference to John Bunyan's "A Pilgrim's Progress" - which figures briefly into this history of Puritanism).
What I learned is that the term puritan started out as an insult toward England's most intolerant Protestants - those who would see a person hanged for the most minor offense; who viewed the Pope as Satan himself; and who sailed for the New World in order to practice their most dogmatic, apocalyptic version of Christianity. I also learned the rest of England, including many Protestants, were glad to see them go.
The 1600s were a time of deadly back-and-forth battles between the Church of England and Protestantism. Religious practices were deeply embedded in English law, and this period was one of constantly reversing power struggles between a young parliament's Catholic-leaning House of Lords, Protestant-leaning House of Commons and a royalty that changes sides as often as necessary to maintain its own control.
In the greatest detail, the book tackles every dispute over the course of a century (and there were many) that Puritans had with Catholics, Anglicans, Baptists, Presbyterians and a few others that I didn't manage to store in my head.
If you're well-read in history of the era, you'll pick up important connections between the Puritan movement and the many economic, political and social aspects of America's colonial era. But this book is NOT a bridge to understanding the formation of the United States, as I'd hoped. It's deeply detailed and well-researched but it's not interested in anything that came before, after or outside of its puritanically narrow scope: the interminable infighting between Evangelical Protestants and literally every other Christian sect, both in England and early Massachusetts.
The Puritans weren't all bad; they officially opposed slavery (but not enough to stop it when stolen black people started showing up in their colonies) and they were officially tolerant of other religions (so long as they were practiced somewhere over the horizon and without gaining strength).
But for the past 400 years, they also seem to have been the most rigid, sanctimonious and unneighborly people in the English-speaking world. Which is pretty much what I knew before reading it.

[Reid · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started reading this concurrently with the fiction books I was reading at the end of 2020 but I have to admit I kept stopping and resuming this book. While it’s incredibly well researched, it’s a very dense account of the history of puritanism and although I find all history interesting this particular era isn’t the MOST interesting to me. A lot of it felt really technical about infighting between different groups, and because of the fact I didn’t have a grasp of what the differences between Presbyterianism and Congregationalism and other Puritan movements it felt like reading a book where all the characters feel kind of the same. However, when I was able to tune in and focus, the book was very interesting and the puritan movement was quite wild. I thought the parts of the book that were especially interesting were the descriptions of the interactions with Native Americans in New England and how some Native Americans started Christian churches themselves and at the end of the book, the chapter on the Salem Witch Trials which was so interesting to read about. While this may not be the smoothest history book to read or necessarily my favorite book, it’s well researched, extremely detailed, and a good insight into a turbulent time in American and British history.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Winship achieves his goal by giving a nice summary of the transatlantic Puritan movement. If I had one criticism, it was just that he often skimmed over some topics. Of course, this is inevitable in a book aiming to be about 300 pages (minus the ample notes) on such a sweeping topic. While I certainly got exactly the background information I needed on movements on both sides of the Atlantic, I found myself wishing for more details on the Puritan settlements in Barbados or Providence Island, for one example. I knew little about these events, so I was glad to glean a bit of knowledge from the information provided in this book, but was definitely left wanting more.

Again, I can’t really find much fault with Winship, since his goal wasn’t to provide an exhaustive 800-page tome on every Puritan settlement. He even mentions in the Introduction that he focuses on many individuals to tell his story, beyond merely giving a broad narrative of larger events, and I appreciate that mode of historical writing as well. In short, this is a reliable, well-rounded introduction on the topic for an audience of non-specialists.

[Caleb Lawson · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Knowing his puritans well, Dod stressed that reproving sin needed to come from compassion to be effective. He warned that 'a sour look and an austere contemptuous gesture...alienates men's hearts from us.'" - Michael Winship

An informative, comprehensive, enjoyable survey of Puritanism on both continents. I've read several conservative, evangelical accounts and was helped by reading a more secular narration. Winship clearly lays out the historical events of the beginning of Puritanism in England in the mid-1500's to its fading away at the end of the 1600's. From the Presbyterians and Congregationalists, to leaders such as Owen and Baxter, Winship draws you into the overarching story of the Puritan struggle for England and America. I appreciated Winship's theological commentary at key points and was left wanting more. Great read.

[Aaron Johnston · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you want to know the history of the Puritan’s on both sides of the Atlantic, this is a must read! It is extremely well organized, has depth of research, and is balanced and engaging. Winship uses narratives of well-known and obscure Puritans in most chapters to illustrate how major events in this multi-generational movement impacted the lives of real people. I read David Hall’s Puritan’s: A Transatlantic History. While this is also well researched, it focuses more on the doctrine and practice of the Puritan movement and less on the actual events and people. In short, I don’t think there is another book that comes close to documenting the events and people of the Puritan movement like this one. The last chapter on the Salem witch trials is worth the price of the book alone.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoroughly researched and engagingly written history of Puritanism as it evolved in England and America from its early beginnings to its decline. Over the span of some 150 years Winship introduces the reader to a large cast of characters, which (though a fact of history and not the writer's fault), can make the narrative difficult to remember with precision. What Winthrop does achieve, despite this fact, is a fabulously engaging narrative of Protestant schism in the Anglosphere. I had no idea, for example, how close England was to having a Presbyterian national church or how much acrimony existed between the three dominant sects: Anglicanism, Presbyterianism and Congregationalism. A depressingly human story.

[Charles Sager · Rating 3 out of 5]

I gave this book a 3/5. It is does a good job of making dry history listenable yet the author's bias is very much exposed here. Two things that stuck out to me. I am both Reformed and a New Englander. The author shares his thoughts on John Calvin as history all the while John's letters that are public and the responses that are also public would show that saying John Calvin is a murder would not be correct. John lived in an area that put heretics to death and JC wrote to Servatus warning him to not come. Servatus came anyway and was to be put to death and JC wrote asking that he be freed or killed swiftly if not possible to let him go.

[Samuel Rood · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve been interested in the Puritan heritage and “backstory” of the American revolution in the story of the English Civil War ever since reading and listening to Marilynne Robinson speaking on the subject. This is a fantastic narrative account of the Puritans on both sides of the Atlantic. It is engaging, entertaining, and enlightening. If you are looking for a good introduction to the Puritans from a historical perspective this is your book.

[Sandrine Pal · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was really taken with this book at first, because it focuses the historical background around individual anecdotes, some centering on lesser historical figures. In the grand scheme of things, that can make it hard to keep track of the big picture, especially if, like me, you don't have the whole timeline down pat. Time permitting, I will try to read this again after I have studied the historical developments better.

[Gijs Limonard · Rating 4 out of 5]

3,5 stars; well, how to make a work on the puritans enjoyable; the author does an admirable job but fails in the 'keeping it light and funny' department; while reading/listening one is reminded constantly of what the inimitable late great Christopher Hitchens put so succinctly; organized religion has a way of realizing the worst attributes latent in all of us; the horrible trio of self-hatred, self-righteousness and self-pity.

[Russ · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very good critical, though not hostile, history of the Puritans. Winship clearly knows his subject, knows how to tell a good story, but isn't looking for a revisionist takedown. (Bonus: he provides a very good corrective to the poorly told story of the Salem Witch Trials.)

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent history of the Puritans from their European origins to their ultimate population of the new world. Nothing is left out, and I have learned things about the Puritans that I didn't realize that I needed to learn.

[Michel Sabbagh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Subject Appeal: 4/5.
Research Depth: 3/5.
Research Breadth: 4/5.
Narrative Flow: 4/5.

Verdict: 4/5. Without pulling any punches, Hot Protestants deftly portrays one of the last millennium's biggest religious schisms.