Seventeenth-century Puritan colonizers created a parallel universe when they arrived in the Eastern Woodlands and called it New England. Within Puritan society lay another parallel universe: Congregationalism, the religion of the Puritans, which was opposed to their political and economic society. In fact, with its focus on kinship and mutual support, Congregationalism had more in common with Indigenous society than English society.
Why does this matter? In this eloquent presentation, scholar and author Lori Rogers-Stokes argues that the full extent, impact, and consequences of the parallel universes of Woodland New England represent a fundamental lost opportunity for the modern world.
If the Puritans had been able to put their communal Congregational ideal first, ahead of personal profit, and align with the Indigenous nations around them, their society might have been the start of a truly new world. The entrenched economic inequality, slavery, oppression, and environmental annihilation that characterized the colonization of the Eastern Woodlands and every period following it, from 1620 to 2022, might never have happened.
This talk is based on and illustrated by the thousands of pages of Congregational church records that Lori Rogers-Stokes has transcribed over the past 12 years as a contributing editor for New England’s Hidden Histories. Congregational church records are the most important untapped written primary source in American history. By providing information on the spiritual lives of Indigenous, Black, and English women and men, free and enslaved, without political comment or prejudice, they represent an invaluable counterweight to civil records generated by New England town meetings and judicial courts.
Lori Rogers-Stokes is an independent scholar, public historian, and contributing editor for New England’s Hidden Histories, a digital history project making thousands of pages of colonial-era Congregational church records available through digitization and transcription. She is the author of Records of Trial from Thomas Shepard’s Church in Cambridge, 1638-49: Heroic Souls (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Lori studies the history of Woodland New England, particularly the founding decades of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, during which time the Indigenous people of the Eastern Woodlands began to preserve and protect their history and identity as English Puritans created New England, and forms of church and state that would shape American history for better or worse for centuries to come.
The views expressed are the opinion of the presenter and not necessarily that of the Partnership of HIstoric Bostons.
Image: Church record from Hassanamesit/Grafton, July 13, 1740: "Elizabeth Abram Daughter of Andrew Abram Indian was Recd. into full Communion w this Chh.”