Puritan equality theology justified hierarchy toward racial strangers from the start

Evidence

William Ames, a disciple of William Perkins, who was exiled in Holland, steeled Richard Mather, John Cotton, and countless other Puritans with The Marrow of Sacred Divinity. Translated from Latin into English in 1627, the treatise described the sacred divinity of spiritual equality “between a free man and a servant”; the sacred divinity of “inferiors” owing “subjection and obedience” to their “superiors”; and the sacred divinity of “our blood kin” being “given more love than strangers.” The Marrow’s explanation became a guiding principle for Mather’s generation of Puritans settling the Massachusetts Bay area in the late 1620s and 1630s. Puritans used this doctrine when assessing Native American and African strangers, ensuring intolerance from the start in their land of tolerance. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 91

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows the conceptual framework (spiritual equality between free and servant, hierarchy superiors/inferiors, kin over strangers) that Puritans applied to racial others.
• XREF: This is a case that seems to put ideas (theology) before policy — exactly the reader’s test case for Kendi’s inversion. The doctrine precedes actual slave-trading in New England.
• QUESTION: Is this theological ‘equality-plus-hierarchy’ doctrine the intellectual seed of segregationism, or does Kendi read it as ex-post rationalization? Worth chasing.