ABSTRACT
Puritan religious culture came to dominate southern New England in the seventeenth century, though this is not to say that the region—or the religion—was a monolith. Not all colonists were Puritans, and not all Puritans subscribed to the exact same set of religious principles. Throughout the century, debates, always informed by developments in Atlantic Puritanism, raged over a wide range of theological issues—from the banishment of Roger Williams, to the antinomian controversy, to disputes over the “halfway” covenant. Native peoples, meanwhile, were an important force. The Indian peoples who lived in the area—Wampanoags, Pequots, Narragansetts, Mohegans, Nipmucks, Wabanakis, to name the largest groups—diverged in their strategies for dealing with the presence of newcomers, and the English in turn disagreed with one another as to the place, both real and symbolic, that Indians should occupy in their “city upon a hill.”
