The Persistent Effort At The Construction Of Wilderness Zion In Colonial America

Since their migration to New England,the English Puritans wished that the new Puritan State would become the Wilderness Zion of the “Chosen People”.With the royal charter of Charles I,they escaped the suppression and meddling from the King.With the transplantation of Congregationalism,a society built on the concept of the Calvinistic theories was established,where the Bible should become the standard to both Church law and civil law.Tying the Church with the State,the Puritan Fathers established a Puritan Oligarchy,“a holy city upon the hill”.However,within half a century after its founding,declension enveloped the Wilderness Zion,owing to the Trojan horse within the holy state and the change of the social environment in colonial America.The thesis attempts to conduct a comprehensive study of the evolution of the Wilderness Zion from the Puritan to the Revolutionary era,focusing primarily on how the Puritan ideal—the construction of Wilderness Zion,revived during the Great Awakening and how it withheld the crushing blow from the Enlightenment.The thesis consists of three parts.Firstly,the dissertation tries to expound how and why the Puritans migrated to the New England and experimented with their Wilderness Zion,which collapsed within half a century.Secondly,the key part of the dissertation is to first analyze the background of the Great Awakening and American Enlightenment,then clarify how a new Wilderness Zion was reconstructed through the Great Awakening,while the Enlightenment prevailed in the west.Lastly,the thesis analyzes the grand schism,from the perspective of ideal and religion,between the new Wilderness Zion and the Enlightened America after the American Revolution,as well as the historical developments of these two different ideals,one a heavenly city,and the other a great republic.