Religion In William Bradford's Northern Experiences

Sometimes in this world, when all seems black and nothing is looking up, hope is the only thing one can have in order to keep on going. In William Bradford’s Northern Experiences we see the Pilgrims, making their sacred journey across the Atlantic Ocean on the Mayflower, consistently use religion and their belief in God as a means of hope. Many people at almost all points in history have looked to their “god” when everything else seemed lost. For religion is something that pervades outside your current circumstances, and therefore is a great resource to pull from when it looks as though there is nothing left you can do to help a situation. Crossing treacherous waters on a perilous voyage filled with uncertainty, there was only so much that the future settlers of Plymouth Plantation had control over. The rest, to them, was in the hands of God. Therefore, it can be said that religion, though not …show more content…
Back then, God and Heaven were very real things to the Puritans. But today, people are just not as devoted. Therefore it can be assumed that the Pilgrims were simply making false connections concerning divine intervention and that putting your life into the hands of something that (depending on your religious standpoint) may not even be there is an incredibly foolish thing to do. After all God does exist within the realm of the “supernatural” and it would probably, in any case, be wiser to rely on reason and problem solving when faced with life threatening situations. However it’s not as if the Puritans did not do that. They really only put their complete faith in God when it counted. When a fellow passenger by the name of William Butten ended up not surviving the journey, Bradford merely remarks at how unfortunate it was, and unlike the mean crewmember, he does not attribute the youth’s death to divine