Alan Taylor draws a connection between the Puritan’s zeal for religion and the Puritan’s adept ability to produce labor and maintain a stable economic colony, in which the poorest of colonist had a “house and land of his own” (172). Taylor notes that the Puritan colonies had neither the extremely poor nor the extremely rich which contrasted England, Chesapeake and the West Indies. The Puritans mirrored their diligence to worshipping God in their diligence to completing labor. This lead to a society without poor, but their religious modesty also prevented any type of capitalist entrepreneurship. Though Taylor remarks on the use of religious ideologies in the economy he says, “Purely economic motives, however, would have dispatched few people to cold, distant, and rocky New England” (167). This means that the Puritans always held the religious sanctity of New England above the economic potentials.
Taylor takes his argument further by showing how Puritans attributed labor and poverty as signs from God. The Puritans viewed hard work as a gift from God, for those who did not work hard yet acquired wealth would become corrupt (159). The Puritans saw economic depravity as a punishment from God. Taylor writes, “They interpreted the wandering beggars, increased crime, cloth trade depression, and famines as divine afflictions meant to punish a guilty land that wallowed in sin” (161). Furthermore, New England colonies could not afford indentured servants or African slaves. This lead to a homogenous colonial population and also ensured that the colonists would have to perform their own labor. In many ways the Puritans acted as the first revolutionaries. Though they were not entirely cutting off from England, they established their own way of practicing religion as well as their own form of an economically independent society, cut off from the oppressive Laudian Church of England due to distance and the natural rocky landscape of New England.
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