Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial Massachusetts (Religion in America) - Hardcover

This book is a significant contribution to our thinking about Puritanism and its connection to the Revolution. (Journal of American History)

[a] carefully researched and skillfully argued book...presents a fresh reading of Colonial religion and rewards the careful attention it deserves. Recommended for upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, researchers and faculty. (Choice)

An important reconsideration of lay religious life and colonial church order. (Religious Studies Review)

A major revisionist study that makes extensive use of records from more than 100 early Massachusetts churches... covering the entire colonial period, he traces the shifting dynamics in church politics right up to the beginnings of the Revolutionary movement, (William and Mary Quarterly)

This study approaches the Puritan experience in church government from the perspective of both the pew and the pulpit. For the past ten years, James Cooper has immersed himself in local manuscript church records. These previously untapped documents provide a fascinating glimpse of lay-clerical relations in colonial Massachusetts, and reveal that ordinary churchgoers shaped the development of Congregational practices as mych as the clerical and elite personages who for so long have populated histories of the period. Cooper's new findings both challenge existing models of church hierarchy and offer a new dimension to our understanding of the origins of New England democracy.