The Puritan way of life was threatened by expansion in that the local community became weaker and weaker as people moved further from the epicenter of the settlement. People gained access to new plots of land and took their families with them and started to grow away from the original place the Puritans. As people moves away church attendance dropped and it was more difficult to influence and keep those under the influence of the teachings. According to Bradford he felt that “…this I fear will be the ruin of New England, at least of the churches of God there, and will provoke the Lord’s displeasure against them (31 Bradford). ” The spread of the Puritan peoples lead to their fall. The disunity that eventually occurred was not a welcoming for those in (old) England.
In Taylor’s section titled “Declension” the expansion of the Puritan settlement was barely a beneficial thing because the settlement was not appealing to the motherland of England and not enticing enough to get more Puritan settlers to make the trip. “New England ultimately failed as a ‘City upon a Hill’ because the intended audience, the English, failed to pay attention. To most people at home, the Puritan experiment seemed at best strange and at worst seditious (185 Taylor).” The scary uncertainty of the New World was an unattractive trait to many of the potential settlers. In hindsight this is an understandable apprehension with our understanding and modern findings of pre-colonial hardships. The Puritan population was slow to grow and not gaining membership as expected.
When reading about people’s hesitation to move from England to New England I thought of the potential Mars colony that is said to be settled in the next decade and all of the mystery and uncertainty there. How would you feel if you were to embark on a “New World” and had no idea of what was on the other side?
Yes, they failed as the “city upon a hill”–though they certain succeeded in making that phrase a cliche–but Taylor also writes about how “naturally and necessarily, the orthodox New England culture and society evolved. In many ways outsiders misunderstood the genre of the jeremiad as a motivated and exaggerated complaint. What Taylor calls the “myth of declension” masks “the prodigious and enduring Puritan legacy for English-speaking America.” In some ways, its growth and expansion beyond small church communities to broader economic engagements enabled Puritans to preoccupy our entire sense of what New England was like and what it meant.