"This is a rattling good read. Stephen Tomkins conveys the sweep of Reformation history through the hair-raising, sometimes hilarious and often tragic stories of the men and women who suffered or survived it. There’s a startling sense of déjà vu as the reader is confronted with the dedication and vehemence of those who pursued their dream of a perfect church."
"The sort of book I wish I’d read fifty years ago. Stephen Tomkins provides a context for so much of Western history over the last two millennia. His book explains a lot."
"Learned, lively journalist Tomkins, who could not write a dull sentence if he tried, here capsules the global Christian story into a brilliant page-turner that keeps you reading for hours at a time. It is all brisk and clear, all well digested, all thoroughly serious, and all great fun."
“The Journey to the Mayflower is a riveting story; it is impeccably researched history but more than this, it is an account that allows us to trace the essential elements of western democracy and liberalism to the key struggle for religious freedom. Stephen Tomkins’s work reminds us that individual liberty as we understand it today would not have been possible without the experience of those who fought for their freedom to believe. Well written, engaging and entertaining, this book serves as reminder of the importance of upholding religious freedom in our current age
"As a Mayflower descendant and a religious leader committed to a fervent faith that seeks new pathways to old truths, I find this book enlightening and delightful. It tells the story of those whose courage rekindled a faith made stale by practices and doctrines more material than spiritual: a reminder that we are always reforming, always keeping pace with a Holy Spirit whose work it is to rescue the Church from its inhibiting complacency and misplaced ambition."
02/17/2020
Journalist Tomkins (A Short History of Christianity) delivers a painstakingly detailed history of the Separatist movement, from the launch of Queen Mary’s “campaign to burn Protestantism out of England” in 1555 to the pilgrims’ departure for the New World in 1620. Tracing Mary’s crusade to the decision of her father, King Henry VIII, to split from the Roman Catholic Church in order to divorce her mother, Tomkins claims she burned roughly 300 Protestants at the stake over a four-year period, inadvertently sewing the seeds for a “fanatical” religious movement. After Mary’s death, Queen Elizabeth I restored Protestantism to England, but her “idiosyncratic and unusually moderate” version of the faith disappointed puritans who “want the church more precisely to model itself on the Bible.” Tomkins wades deep into debates over sacraments, vestments, and prayer books, as well as rifts within the Separatist movement itself. Eventually, Elizabeth banned all forms of worship other than those practiced by state-appointed bishops, forcing the Separatists into exile, first in the Netherlands and then at Plymouth colony in New England. Tomkins’s exhaustive chronicle fills in the background to America’s origin story, but general readers may find themselves overwhelmed by theological minutiae. (Jan.)
Historian Stephen Tomkins, in his meticulously researched book...brings a new understanding to the 400 years of religious change and the necessity for individual religious freedom and tolerance that is still with us today.
Here is a gripping and informed account of the people and pressures that launched the Mayflower. Stephen Tomkins is a capable historian, but never dull, and a respectful yet critical friend of the early puritans. This is an important chapter in England’s Christian story, and America’s too, very well told.
"Learned, lively journalist Tomkins, who could not write a dull sentence if he tried, here capsules the global Christian story into a brilliant page-turner that keeps you reading for hours at a time. It is all brisk and clear, all well digested, all thoroughly serious, and all great fun."
2019-10-08
The Pilgrims who boarded the Mayflower were a diverse, disordered group of religious rebels.
In a richly detailed chronicle, British historian Tomkins (David Livingstone: The Unexplored Story, 2013, etc.) examines the violent religious conflicts that roiled England from Queen Mary's reign to the advent of Elizabeth I's nephew James. When Mary took the throne in 1553, she "embarked on a Catholic spring-clean" that involved defrocking, excommunication, torture and mutilation, hangings, and the public burning to death of accused heretics. "This is where the story of the Pilgrim Fathers starts," Tomkins writes, "with Mary's campaign to burn Protestantism out of England." As violently as Protestants hated Catholicism, many deeply opposed the Church of England, whose "whole shape and organisation," they believed, "were still founded on unbiblical Catholic principles," with authority vested in the monarch and a hierarchy that bowed to—and remunerated—the pope. The author examines many reformist movements, the rivalries among leaders, and the beliefs that impelled them. Presbyterianism, for example, "raised the standard of active involvement of ordinary believers in their religion," requiring discipline and "promoting the virtues that led to success in the growing arenas of industry and commerce." Puritans, frustrated in their inability to transform the church from within, split off to form radical new sects that edited the Prayer Book, chose their congregation, and elected pastors and elders; "lay members could pray in their own words, preach to one another and even create a new church through a communal act of covenant." Persecuted in England, some established themselves in the Netherlands. However, in the early 1600s, "life in Dutch cities seemed just too grim" for their church to survive, and young people, especially, were disgruntled. Longing for a brighter future, and seeing their "reflection in countless scriptural parallels, but above all in the exodus," pilgrims undertook the arduous, four-month sea journey to Cape Cod. There, they created a settlement "governed by consent"—"an idea," Tomkins notes, "with a future."
A dramatic history of religious intolerance and oppression.
