Who are the Puritans?

What so staunchly separated the Puritans and the Quakers?

A lot of this can be found in the way that the Puritan belief system was founded, and the Puritan beliefs that originally spurred the move to North America. The Puritan religious ideology was heavily associated with the Church of England and the belief in the strict ties to the church institution and the scripture. The major pursuit of Puritans was to perfect the Church of England. Puritans also differed from Quakers in the fact that Quakers allowed for women to be vocal and active in the church, while Puritan structures would not allow for that.

This kind of perfection had the goal in creating as little diversity of opinions in practitioners as possible, with the common understanding that the views were uniform within the community and held the Church as the highest power. This reliance on scripture is the way that this was maintained, and how views were communicated within the congregation. There was an acknowledgement within the Puritan belief structure recognized Christ, the spiritual figure, was a separate comprehension as Jesus, the man, and that the man himself was not what they were worshipping, but instead the spiritual figure within holy texts.

Puritan beliefs were not always well-received by mainstream members of the Church of England and so they decided to travel to North America, much like the Quakers did several years later, as a way to establish a place with a church based in their ideals.

Go to the Quaker Beliefs page to find out more about what the Quakers believed.