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by willvarfar 2414 days ago
It’s true they left England because they became outlawed. But the reason they became outlawed is because they went around being intolerant of everyone else.

https://owlcation.com/humanities/Why-Did-the-Puritans-Really... is a good intro to a very interesting subject. History is “written by the victors” and the popular US school history curriculum doesn’t seem to really question it.
1 comments
AnimalMuppet 2414 days ago
What that page actually says is:

> Things came to a head when King Charles I came to the throne in 1625. In the first few years of his reign, the Puritans in parliament strongly opposed his royal authority.

> In order to maintain his royal power base and rid himself of those he viewed as his enemies, including many Puritans, Charles I took the unprecedented step of dissolving parliament altogether. The Puritans, probably quite rightly, interpreted this as a hostile act towards themselves and their religious practices, and so many decided to leave England and settle in the Americas, where they could develop their own communities based on their own beliefs.

That is, the issue wasn't that the Puritans were religiously intolerant; they were politically opposed to the king. That article doesn't make a case for your current claim (that they left because they were [religiously] intolerant), nor your original one (that they left because England was too tolerant).

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willvarfar 2414 days ago
> Things came to a head when King Charles I came to the throne in 1625

Pop quiz: when did the mayflower sail for the new world?

So the England the pilgrim fathers were moving first to holland and then to the new world was an England where Elizabeth and then James I had first tried to compromise with them before banning them.

Normally I cynically try to work out what religious leaders gain in the real world to work out what motivates them. It’s usually greed etc. But the puritans are a special case: I don’t think you can make distinctions between religion and politics with the Puritans, as they were didn’t seem to see any distinction.

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AnimalMuppet 2413 days ago
1620.

Hey, you're the one that cited that page. Now you're saying that the page is wrong? And even if right, it didn't seem to support your position. I'm a little confused about your train of thought here.

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