Puritan Sources of Enlightenment Liberty

Abstract

This chapter recounts briefly the Puritan covenantal story of religious and civil liberty in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It illustrates that modern Enlightenment teachings on law, liberty, and human rights were not all invented out of whole cloth, but were often derived and abstracted from prevailing religious theories-not only Puritan and other Protestant theories, but also various Catholic and Jewish theories. The last section of the article argues further that Enlightenment libertarian postulates on religious and civil liberty and rights were not only historically dependent but are in fact perennially dependent on theological theories to give them content and coherence.

Keywords: Enlightenment, Puritan, Covenant, Liberty, John Adams, New England, Checks and Balances, Massachusetts, Constitutionalism, Human Rights