Topic Journal: Happiness

John Calvin and Calvinism
Calvinism

Homework: Tonight, take 20-30 minutes to do the following: 

Task: Synthesize, that is, analyze and draw conclusions from, the following four passages  below which address the Puritan mindset.  

Product: Write a well-developed paragraph reflection that addresses the types of sins the Puritans might focus upon and the pressures that might exist to be "pure" in such a society. Make a claim/thesis early in your paragraph and support it with sound reasoning and textual support. Be sure to embed short quotes (less than a sentence) from at least three of the sources into the grammatical flow of your paragraphs.  Submit it directly to turnitin.com bin titled Sins and Synthesis.

Text 1) 1 Peter 5:8 (the epigraph to Understanding the Puritan Mindset/Puritan Beliefs)

Text 2) Romans xiii: 12-14 (Paragraph 3 of Understanding the Puritan Mindset/Puritan Beliefs)

The influence of American Puritanism is pervasive in the literature of the nineteenth century. The uniquely American Puritan vision of the seventeenth century arose from the English Puritanism that engendered it. Indeed many first-generation American Puritans, such as John Cotton (1584–1652) and John Winthrop (1588–1649), were emigrants from England who sought religious freedom in the New World. First-, second-, and third-generation American Puritans developed and refined a special vision of Calvinist theology that has continued to influence American self-definition into the present. When Ronald Reagan argued in his 1980 presidential campaign that the United States had lost much of its former glory and should return to its position of past leadership in the world, he quoted John Winthrop's sermon "A Model of Christian Charity" (1630), delivered 350 years earlier during the sea voyage that ended in establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony:

Text 3) 

He shall make us a praise and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations: "The Lord make it like that of New England." For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have under-taken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world: we shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God and all professors for God's sake; we shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us, till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going. (P. 23)

This declaration succinctly articulates what has come to be known as American exceptionalism. At the root of American society and culture lie a vision of uniqueness and a sense of mission. In the introduction to her American Exceptionalism, Deborah L. Madsen states,

Text 4) Exceptionalism describes the perception of Massachusetts Bay colonists that as Puritans they were charged with a special spiritual and political destiny: to create in the New World a church and a society that would provide the model for all the nations of Europe as they struggled to reform themselves (a redeemer nation). . . . Thus America and Americans are special, exceptional, because they are charged with saving the world from itself and, at the same time, America and Americans must sustain a high level of spiritual, political and moral commitment to this exceptional destiny—America must be as "a city upon a hill" exposed to the eyes of the world. (Pp. 1–2)

This Puritan notion of election, divine sanction, and high purpose has pervaded American identity, politics, and culture ever since, although it has evolved over several centuries from a specifically religious vision into a much more secular one: rather than exemplifying a pure church America's mission became exemplifying a free, egalitarian, democratic society.