-What does it means Government as Contract? Another effect of the Great Awakening on colonial culture was the growth of the notion of the state (country) as a contract with the people. Parishioners during the revival gained an understanding of covenant/contract with their churches; they argued that each believer owed the church their obedience, and churches, in turn, owed their congregants the duty to be faithful to the Gospel. Parishioners, therefore, reserved the right to dissolve the covenant and to break ties with the church without prior permission. This notion of a covenant was a popular one in Puritan society and reflected a common/same biblical understanding of association. Present in the Mayflower Compact and later forming an ideological basis for breaking from Great Britain, the notion of covenant grew to link religion and politics in the colonies. The Ideals/beliefs of Puritanical covenant theology were manifested/showed in the “Social compact” of the Declaration of Independence . Under this belief, implicit/ hidden in the Declaration, disassociated/separation individuals in the “state of nature” agree to live and to be bound together under the same government. With the frequency by which believers
broke away from larger churches to form splinter groups, the colonists must have been accustomed to separating themselves from larger institutions/organizations such that of the king.