Puritan Community

"Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection."

John Winthrop, A Model of Christian Chairity

It is interesting to see that Winthrop calls his community to be like a single person. This highlight the homogenous ideal that the Puritans hoped to find in America. In the context of Winthrop's metaphor that paradox of a group that sought religious freedom, only to deny religious freedom to others makes far more sense. Winthrop's ideal is not of a group of free individuals, but rather an individual comprised of a group of people. A Puritan society that emulating an individual body would naturally be wary of  foreign ideals. If the community was one man as Winthrop hoped than that man could very well respond to foreign material much like a human body. People who actively clashed with the religious principles that bound this body together might very well be dealt with the same way our bodies deal with transplants from an incompatible downer. Winthrop's ideals of a close knit community are admirable and might be valuable in the modern world. However, they did lead to the tyrannical aspects of Puritan that muddy the modern perception of the first New Englanders.