Almost from the beginning, John Winthrop and other leaders had difficulty enforcing their views of Puritan orthodoxy. In England, persecution as a dissenting minority had unified Puritan voices in opposition to the Church of England. In New England, the promise of a godly society and the Puritans’ emphasis on individual Bible study led toward different visions of godliness. Puritan leaders, however, interpreted dissent as an error caused either by a misguided believer or by the malevolent power of Satan. As one Puritan minister proclaimed, “The Scripture saith . . . there is no Truth but one.”

Shortly after banishing Roger Williams, Winthrop confronted another dissenter, this time a devout Puritan woman steeped in Scripture and absorbed by religious questions: Anne Hutchinson. The mother of fourteen children, Hutchinson served her neighbors as a midwife and in 1634 began to give weekly lectures on recent sermons attended by women who gathered at her home. Hutchinson lectured on the “covenant of grace”—the idea that individuals could be saved only by God’s grace in choosing them to be members of the elect. This familiar Puritan doctrine contrasted with the covenant of works, the erroneous belief that a person’s behavior—one’s works—could win God’s favor and ultimately earn a person salvation.

The meetings at Hutchinson’s house alarmed her nearest neighbor, Governor John Winthrop, who believed that she was subverting the good order of the colony. In 1637, Winthrop had formal charges brought against Hutchinson and denounced her lectures as “not tolerable nor comely in the sight of God nor fitting for your sex.” He told her, “You have stept out of your place, you have rather bine a Husband than a Wife and a preacher than a Hearer; and a Magistrate than a Subject.”

Winthrop and other Puritan elders referred to Hutchinson and her followers as antinomians, people who believed that Christians could be saved by faith alone and did not need to act in accordance with God’s law as set forth in the Bible and as interpreted by the colony’s leaders. Hutchinson nimbly defended herself against the accusation of antinomianism. Yes, she acknowledged, she believed that men and women were saved by faith alone; but no, she did not deny the need to obey God’s law. “The Lord hath let me see which was the clear ministry and which the wrong,” she said. How could she tell, Winthrop asked, which ministry was which? “By an immediate revelation,” she replied, “by the voice of [God’s] own spirit to my soul.” Winthrop seized this statement as the heresy of prophecy, the view that God revealed his will directly to a believer instead of exclusively through the Bible, as every right-minded Puritan knew.

In 1638, the Boston church formally excommunicated Hutchinson. The minister decreed, “I doe cast you out and . . . deliver you up to Satan.” Banished, Hutchinson and her family moved first to Roger Williams’s Rhode Island and then to present-day New York, where she and most of her family were killed by Indians.

The strains within Puritanism exemplified by Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams caused communities to splinter repeatedly during the seventeenth century. Thomas Hooker, a prominent minister, clashed with Winthrop and other leaders over the composition of the church. Hooker argued that men and women who lived godly lives should be admitted to church membership even if they had not experienced conversion. In 1636, Hooker led an exodus of more than eight hundred colonists from Massachusetts to the Connecticut River valley, where they founded Hartford and neighboring towns. In 1639, the towns adopted the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, a quasi-constitution that could be altered by the vote of freemen, who did not have to be church members, though nearly all of them were.

Other Puritan churches divided and subdivided throughout the seventeenth century as acrimony developed over doctrine and church government. Sometimes churches split over the appointment of a controversial minister. These schisms arose from ambiguities and tensions within Puritan belief. As the colonies matured, other tensions developed as well.