“Our Brethren lay bleeding”: Early New England Responses to European Protestant Suffering

Reports of the suffering of Protestants in Europe came flooding into the British colonies in the mid-seventeenth century. Convinced by their reading of history and scripture that the true church is a persecuted church and that “Light” shines “most clearly in times of greatest Sufferings,” New Englanders vacillated between concern for their brethren’s welfare and concern for their own (increasingly peripheral) role in the drama. Ministers both called for support for the suffering churches abroad and struggled to respond to complaints among the laity that God was not doing “great things…for the Church, in our days, as we read of in former times.” Memories of the suffering of the founding generation became increasingly important as ministers and laity affirmed their connection to the global persecuted church. At the same time, Baptists and Quakers resoundingly proclaimed that the Congregationalist establishment, who had once been persecuted, were now persecutors. Even more distressingly, their friends in Restoration England began to express alarm that New Englanders’ harsh treatment of Baptists was increasing the suffering of nonconformists by the crown. One response to these upheavals of politics and crises of identity was increasing attention to a devotional schema in which men and women attained purity through techniques of responding to everyday afflictions, which connected them to the wider suffering church. Another response was deepening ambivalence (in spite of the Augustinian formula that the cause, not the suffering, makes a martyr) toward the economic and physical suffering of local Quakers and Baptists.