The Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth in 1620 were Congregationalists. So were the founders of Harvard and Yale, and the preacher of the Great Awakening. For two centuries Congregationalism was the closest thing to an established church that New England had, and its influence on American institutions is out of all proportion to its present size.
Like the Presbyterians, Congregationalists take their name from a form of government. Unlike the Presbyterians, they concluded that the governing body should be the gathered congregation itself.
Separatists in England
The movement began in Elizabethan England among people who judged that the settlement of 1559 had stopped short.
Robert Browne (c. 1550 to 1633) argued in A Treatise of Reformation without Tarrying for Any, published in 1582, that a true church consists of believers voluntarily covenanting together, and that such a church should not wait for the magistrate's permission to reform itself. That last clause was the offence. Elizabeth's government regarded a church gathered without royal sanction as sedition.
Henry Barrow and John Greenwood were executed in 1593 for their separatist writings. The penalty for persistent nonconformity under the Act of 1593 was exile.
A congregation at Scrooby in Nottinghamshire, under Richard Clyfton, John Robinson, and William Brewster, chose exile. They moved to Amsterdam in 1608 and then to Leiden. After roughly a decade, concerned that their children were being absorbed into Dutch society, a portion of the congregation sailed for America. They left Leiden in 1620, joined others at Plymouth in England, and crossed on the Mayflower.
The Mayflower Compact, signed in November 1620, is a civil document written by people accustomed to organising themselves by covenant. The habit of congregational self-government transferred directly into political self-government, and historians of American democracy have noted the connection ever since.
Puritans in Massachusetts
The larger migration was different in an important respect.
The Puritans who founded Massachusetts Bay from 1630 under John Winthrop were not separatists. They regarded the Church of England as a true church requiring purification, not abandonment. In New England, however, with no bishops present and no parish structure to inherit, they organised congregationally in practice, and within a generation the distinction between separating and non-separating had largely dissolved.
The Cambridge Platform of 1648 set out the New England order: each congregation complete in itself, governed by its own members, calling and ordaining its own minister, with neighbouring churches offering counsel but holding no authority over it. In England, the Savoy Declaration of 1658 gave the same polity a doctrinal statement, adapting the Westminster Confession to congregational government.
Congregationalism in New England was Calvinist in theology and congregational in government, and for many decades it was tax supported. A tradition founded on the principle that a church should be a voluntary society of believers became, in Massachusetts and Connecticut, the established church of the colony, and remained so until 1818 in Connecticut and 1833 in Massachusetts.
Strain and Division
Two developments strained the system.
Membership in a congregational church required a credible profession of conversion. When the children of members grew up without such an experience, their own children could not be baptised, and the churches faced a shrinking membership. The Half-Way Covenant of 1662 permitted baptism for the children of baptised but unconverted parents. It resolved a practical problem and was widely regarded as a compromise of the founding principle.
The Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s divided the churches again. Jonathan Edwards (1703 to 1758), pastor at Northampton and the most formidable theologian America has produced, defended the revival while insisting on careful examination of its excesses. His own congregation dismissed him in 1750, largely over his refusal to continue admitting the unconverted to communion.
The most serious division came later. Through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, liberal theology spread in eastern Massachusetts, and the appointment of a Unitarian to the Hollis Chair of Divinity at Harvard in 1805 crystallised the split. Roughly a quarter of Massachusetts Congregational churches, including many of the oldest, became Unitarian.
In 1957 the Congregational Christian Churches merged with the Evangelical and Reformed Church to form the United Church of Christ. Congregations declining the merger continued in smaller bodies, chiefly the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches and the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference.
What Congregationalists Actually Hold
Historically, Reformed theology of the Westminster and Savoy type, though the tradition today ranges very widely and the United Church of Christ is among the most theologically liberal American denominations.
Structurally, the local congregation is the church. It calls its own pastor, owns its property, sets its own budget, and answers to no external body. Associations exist for fellowship and counsel and hold no authority.
Membership rests on a covenant entered voluntarily rather than on residence in a parish.
What the Story Actually Shows
Three observations follow.
The first is the recurring difficulty of a gathered church. A body that admits only the converted must decide how conversion is recognised, and must decide what to do about the children of members. The Half-Way Covenant and the disputes of the Awakening are two attempts at the same problem, and the problem has not gone away for any tradition that holds the same principle.
The second is that a congregational polity offers no defence against a congregation changing its mind. Presbyterians divide over confessions because a confession can be disagreed with precisely. Congregationalists can drift without dividing at all, because there is no body positioned to notice. The Unitarian departure of the early nineteenth century happened church by church.
The third is that the tradition's influence far exceeded its numbers. Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Amherst, and Oberlin were Congregational foundations. The town meeting, the written covenant, and the habit of governing oneself in assembly all entered American public life through New England churches.
For readers tracing their own tradition, Congregationalism is the clearest case of a polity that shaped a nation and then struggled to hold itself together.
