Pilgrims vs Puritans

Okay, you turkey addicts. The big American face stuffing event is over. Now it's time to learn something, to wit:

There was a difference between the Puritans and the Pilgrims. Here are just a few examples:

Puritans (as we know them today) had nothing to do with the original Thanksgiving. They weren't even here yet...

Pilgrims and Puritans are not interchangeable...

Pilgrims were more egalitarian in belief and organization...

Puritans were Anglicans who wanted to change the established church. There were lots of them in England, including Oliver Cromwell, who overthrew a king and established his own Commonwealth that lasted for 20 years and whose enduring legacy was the trashing of statuary in English churches...

Pilgrims were not going to wait for the English church to reform itself to their way of thinking. Their adventure to North America was a permanent enterprise based on the belief that the English church was beyond redemption...

Pilgrims established Plymouth colony...

Puritans established the much larger Massachusetts Bay colony...

The two colonies did not merge until the 1680s, sixty years after the Pilgrims arrived and forty years after the Great Migration, when the greatest influx of Puritans into New England occured...

Puritans were more likely to be among the propertied or mercantile class in England, although there are numerous exceptions to this...

And here's the rub--both groups were Puritans, radical Protestants who believed the English church to be corrupt and its message in need of serious reform. The two groups disagreed about how to achieve their vision of a Godly commonwealth...

Does any of this matter today? That's for another post. Suffice it to say that eventually the Puritans became Separatists, and later, Congregationalists. So even though the initial band of Pilgrims was much smaller, their influence over time was much greater. And this is just what the Puritan leader, John Winthrop, feared. A very forward thinking man...

But back in the day, at the time of the first turkey feast, the two groups were very different, and one of them had not yet made the perilous journey to North America.

Nuff said.

PS--Yours truly is descended from both groups. So they did mix...