So, to my understanding, a given group's actions are based on their philosophy as well as on the material conditions under which they exist, with the two often informing one another and the degree to which either had a predominant influence over the other varying from case to case. Sometimes, in pop history, we attribute one more to a group than the other; the Golden Age of Piracy is generally attributed to social concerns (e.g., the lack of upward mobility for poor sailors in Europe and its colonies) and economic ones (e.g., the end of the War of the Spanish Succession's impact on privateers' livelihoods), for instance, whereas the Reign of Terror is often attributed more to the radical republicanism and virtue-minded civic philosophy of the Mountain than on the myriad economic crises plaguing France at the time (even though a majority of provincial executions were predicated on things like price gouging and food hoarding).
With Thanksgiving on the horizon in the States, I'm feeling specifically curious about 17th century New England. The Puritans are (again, in pop history) presented as having their beliefs be the primary driving force in the development of their social norms and how they wrote their laws, set up their governmental institutions, and interacted with indigenous peoples. My question is: to what extent did the material experience of building a colonial society in New England compete with and/or contribute to their devout religiosity in relation to the aforementioned societal elements or any others which you think are significant? Did, for example, religious beliefs impact the way they approached agriculture or commerce, or did local economic life shape the evolution of their brand of Protestantism more than the other way around? Or how did the colonial impetus toward expansion interact with their desire to spread the Gospel to the indigenous groups around them?
I'm sorry if this is overly broad or anything!
Sacred and secular life were indistinguishable for puritans of New England. Religious concerns informed most aspect of their lives. From the covenant they signed upon arriving to their social policing in their private lives. Most historians use the declension model when speaking about puritan New England specifically, meaning that every subsequent generation believed that the first founders created a Utopian community and that they were falling away from it somehow. That being said Puritans were a bit more progressive when it came to their economic and material concerns but religion did play a big part in it. Men with large families for example would receive bigger land grants than someone with no children, the family that received the land could usually determine what to do with it, but in a utopian society, it would have behooved you to keep the community in mind. It was more social pressure than legal pressure to help build the "city on the hill".The townhall and church were usually the same building. The community was usually led by selectmen and "visible saints", meaning blameless men who were full members of the church. Historians nowadays are studying puritan New England as an anomaly as the middle colonies would be more representative of the norm of colonial American society. If you have some time read "A New England Town" by Kennth Lockridge, it traces the development of a New England town called Dedham step by step and maybe have the particulars of the answer your looking for.