The American Puritans

            The Puritans were a group of people who once left England because of the opposition of King Charles who refused to listen to their demand and to reform the Church of England. Believing that there was no other choice but to move to America, they left with the hope of creating a new colony with a new Church purified of any liturgy, ceremony or practices that was not scripted in the Bible. (Christianity.com)The Puritans took the Bible literally and had to live every aspect of their lives according to this holy book; for them, the Bible was God's true law. (nd.edu) In The Crucible, during all the time the witch trials have lasted, the judge of the court based his final decision only upon the Bible. "The law, based upon the Bible [ ] forbid the practice of witchcraft, and described death as the penalty thereof. "(95) The judge thought this way: due to their religious beliefs, the holy book was just like our system of laws. Thus, this system was unfair and corrupted, because the Bible is not meant to be taken literally. Many lives were destroyed and many prisoners were sentenced innocently because of this ideology. .
             The goal of the Puritans was to purify their own lives and the established church, which had become too Catholic. At first, the Puritans were individualist people, but when they saw what had happened to Jamestown and how Virginia had destroyed the Englishmen, who had come only to make profit, they decided to combine in an autocracy in order to avoid living the same nightmare. They got together since they were united by the same ideology. As they immigrated and formed colonies, the number of population rose abruptly from 17.800 to 106.000 in 60 years. (nd.edu)Their determination to hold to their beliefs and their religion, which they thought was the only one, allowed them to conquer the territory they arrived in. For their own good purposes, the people of Salem developed a theocracy to keep the community unified and to prevent it from destruction by material or ideological enemies; to protect them from the threat from without.