ABSTRACT
During the 1620s, religious disagreements in England inspired quite a few radical Protestants to consider leaving the country, and those who went to Massachusetts Bay offered several views about what they wanted the relationship between the colony and the homeland to be in light of the problems they were trying to leave behind. The charter creating the Massachusetts Bay Company, issued in 1629, was straightforward. This chapter discusses the reasons for religious polity. Just as there were different ideas about whether and how much the colony should separate from England, there were a variety of theories about how the new colony should be governed. His anxieties about the situation in England shaped John Winthrop's vision of the religious polity he wanted created in the colony. Winthrop's hierarchical polity, with a divinely chosen authority at its head, was a variation on the much older tradition of the body politic.
