Wayward Puritans Summary

Introduction
The book Wayward Puritans, A Study in the Sociology of Deviance was an insightful read. It provided a glimpse into history’s beginning acknowledgement of social deviance. The primitive outlook on social deviance has grown vastly into a more complex discovery than what it once was. In my opinion, the theory of the New England Puritans was a bit unsettling. The Doctrine of Predestination was the belief that before birth people are predesigned to be good or bad and just one fault would be considered social deviance and punishable with no regards to human emotion or circumstance. This makes me feel relieved to live in a time where those beliefs don’t hold as much precedence as they once did. In this book review, I will discuss the three major crime waves that impacted the
It started in 1636, when the parishioner and religious follower, Anne Hutchinson and her husband, decided to follow John Cotton to the new Boston and was welcomed into the First Church. Anne was smart and articulate and soon began to recap the preaching’s from the church in her own home. As her popularity grew, her audience grew up to eighty people. The problems arose when Anne started to interpret her own version of the Holy Doctrine. The controversy centered on the idea, persuaded by Mrs. Hutchinson, that there were virtually no priests capable of judging whether a person was truly touched by grace or not (Erikson 1966). The individuality that Anne was creating for herself raised questions amongst the settlement and disrupted the conformity that the New England Puritans were trying to create. They wanted to avoid the spread of resistance and ultimately the courts barred her from the First Church and banished from the colony. I feel that Anne was a non-conventional devout and although her objective was not to dishonor the church, her logic was far clearer than the idea of