“Forced worship stinks in God’s Nostrils”

The puritans were not a homogenous group by any stretch of the imagination. While membership in the churches of New England was based on personal salvation, they were nonetheless divided on many issues. These puritans zealously guarded their independence and autonomy; it was the congregations who elected and paid the ministers. In contrast to Plymouth Bay Colony, Massachusetts was settled primarily by non-separatist Congregationalists. Roger Thompson analyzes the court records of seventeenth-century Middlesex County for sexually related crimes in his study, Sex in Middlesex: Popular Mores in a Massachusetts County, 1649–1699. In The Bloudy Tenent, Roger Williams clearly rejects the Massachusetts Bay notion of enforced orthodoxy, calling persecution for the cause of conscience a “bloody tenent,” that was “lamentably contrary to the doctrine of Christ Jesus the Prince of Peace.” He had come to believe that “Forced Worship stinks in God’s Nostrils.”